Decide, control, and negotiate. Tensions and disputes in houses that are the object of policies

Abstract

In the article, I analyse how daily the houses of references of a popular neighbourhood of the city of Mar del Plata are produced through transitory mutations that vary according to the performance of political activities. I ethnographically reconstruct three cases in which a diversity of actors converges in domestic dynamics -NGOs, foundations, professionals, politicians, neighbours, militants- and in which the house is constituted as a political object and objective. The constitution of the house as a place of political productivity implies a series of spatial transformations through the movement of objects, furniture and artefacts that stage and readjust the inhabited space to become a place for neighbourhood meetings, a community dining room, a medical attention room. This intertwining and overlapping of the political with the domestic puts in tension the "government of the house", over who decides, controls and establishes the ways of its administration. At the same time, this spatial variation implies a daily redefinition of the thresholds of the house. Although the residents are the ones who make these changes, the objects are the ones that establish and announce the terms in which sociability occurs, as well as delimiting places of the private order.