Presentation of the Dossier

Abstract

Place of housing and shelter, the house, in the contemporary world, has been playing a series of new roles that transcend the private universe of individuals and groups in national and transnational scenarios of displacements. It accompanies the daily and structural transformations of social life and reinvents itself in the spirit of new material and symbolic demands. Thus, if we think of the set of studies in the Social Sciences that refer to the house, we are not dealing with an unexplored subject. In this field of production, Claude Lévi-Strauss (1957) is well known in French ethnology when analyzing the Bororo house in “Tristes tropiques”, by Marcel Griaule (1966), who studies the Dogon house in “Dieu d'eau: entretiens avec Ogotemmêli”, by Pierre Bourdieu (1980), while interpreting the Maison Kabyle in “Le sens pratique” and François Ruegg (2011), who studied peasant dwellings in “La maison paysanne: histoire d'un mythe”. In this field of knowledge, in addition to the works in the field of Anthropology, we also find in other areas of the social sciences a tendency to criticize studies that follow only an ergological perspective (those that restrict the home to aspects such as raw material, form, size, and technique of producing an artifact without analyzing its meanings and functions in the society that produced them. The search for overcoming this approach, has generated new perspectives of research in interdisciplinary scope such as the work of the philosopher Michel Serres, “Habiter”, published in (2011) and “Chez soi: un odyssée de l'espace domestique”, by the journalist Mona Chollet (2015 ) in the field of cultural studies. In this dossier, we present a set of articles that focus, from different theoretical-methodological perspectives of the Social Sciences, on housing / housing studies in different sociocultural contexts. They are significant contributions to the understanding of houses because they reveal the particularities of dwelling, highlighting the multiple configurations of the house / home / shelter / refuge in relation to the ways of living and their representations, domestic consumption, memories and trajectories of groups and individuals, to ethnic and national belonging, to those who inhabit / occupy houses, among others.