Living with the past at home: The afterlife of inherited domestic objects

Abstract

This article examines people’s responses to the material objects they inherit or discover in their homes. Reflecting on interviews with inhabitants of a variety of English domestic interiors, the author explores the meanings, values and beliefs involved in choices to retrieve, retain, reposition or replace material residues from the home’s recent or distant past. Participants’ responses reveal how beliefs about the past and its objects become imbricated in homemaking practices, locating home as shared, both spatially and temporally, and enhancing or challenging senses of belonging. In particular, objects left by previous inhabitants are endowed with degrees of agency as part of the identity of home. Responses reflect a belief in the continuing presence of the past. Many objects require a form of negotiation – including rituals of appeasement or containment – expressing an entangled relationship between the heimlich and unheimlich in everyday homemaking practices.