Week 4: Who holds the right to refrigerate?

Module 2 — Micropolitics: power and symbols within domestic space. The module’s objective is to treat the refrigerator as a micro-sociological laboratory, and dissect the power relations and identity performances inside family and share-house space.

Having disenchanted the appliance from the outside, we climb into it.

A shared refrigerator is a settlement. Somebody decided what to buy. Somebody’s food is at eye level; somebody’s health food is pushed to the deepest part of the bottom drawer; somebody’s leftovers are the ones that get cleared first, and everybody in the household knows whose without ever having discussed it.

The claim is that the vertical space inside the fridge maps onto the household’s power hierarchy. Eye-level shelves are prime real estate and are allocated, not occupied at random. The bottom drawer and the back of the middle shelf are where food goes to be technically present and functionally absent. The door is contested differently again. None of this is written down, and all of it is enforced.

Three distinct powers are worth separating, because they rarely sit with the same person: the power to procure (deciding what enters), the power to distribute (deciding where it goes), and the power to discard (deciding what leaves, and when). A household where one person holds all three is a different polity from one where they are split.

Inherits from week 3: the cold chain fills the box. This week is about who governs it once it is full.

Outline#

• procurement, distribution and disposal as three separable powers
• the vertical hierarchy: eye level, bottom drawer, the back, the door
• whose food is marginal, and how it got there
• the tragedy of the commons in a share-house fridge
• reading an interior as evidence: the method for the ethnography

Reading#

• Daniel Miller, Material Culture and Mass Consumption (1987) — on domestic objects and appropriation
• Elizabeth Shove, Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience (2003) — the chapter on ordinary practice

Tutorial preparation#

The tutorial is Fridge Archaeology, and needs a photograph or hand-drawn map of a real fridge interior. The Fridge Ethnography opens after this lecture and uses the same method.