ABSTRACT
In contemporary Western nations, however, with dispersed social spaces, multiple fields competing for any one individual's desire and attention and a certain pre-eminence bestowed upon affective recognition, domestic space reveals a rather more complex array, and play, of forces. This chapter explores this entwinement, as it manifests in the lives of Bristol families, in relation to three themes. The first two, decor and regionalisation within the home, the latter leading into a consideration of the evening meal as a particular site of intermingling social forces. The binary division between dominant and dominated class households, while useful for conveying the key oppositions structuring domestic decor, should not be overdrawn, however: all manner of variations and shades of difference appear on the basis of even just precise position and trajectory within social space. Pedagogy in these households does not start and end at the dinner table.
