Homemaking, Homebuilding, and the Significance of Place and Kin in Rural Kyrgyzstan

ABSTRACT

In rural Kyrgyzstan, homes built by their owners house multigenerational families and are filled with objects that have been bought, made, acquired, and received. Many of them come as gifts cementing alliances with other families through marriage. This article discusses how kelin (daughters-in-law) and their families negotiate aspects of themselves and their relationships through interactions with these objects and places of domesticity. Many studies of Central Asia identify patrilineage and land as major factors in the constitution and experience of kinship and personhood. This article shows how the home provides an interesting alternative site for the examination of these. It is a perspective, moreover, that is vital when women's experience is relatively overlooked. Ethnographic fieldwork with households in Kyrgyzstan is drawn on to discuss the significance of domestic places and domestic objects for daughters-in-law. It highlights the negotiation of personhood outside the more discursively powerful locations such as lineage, place, and geographical region. It does so through focusing on ways of experiencing, envisioning and creating old and new homes, arguing that these are intimately connected to personhood. It is suggested that homebuilding can be understood as an explicit narration of self, while daily interaction with objects in the home is a more implicit form of self-expression and negotiation.

KEYWORDS:

• Kyrgyzstan
• daughters-in-law
• personhood
• objects
• domesticity