Elinor Ochs

Jeanne E. Arnold

Anthony P. Graesch

Enzo Ragazzini

This project, which emerged from a larger interdisciplinary research endeavor by UCLA's Center on Everyday Lives of Families, studies 32 real-life, middle-class, dual-income households with school-aged children living in southern California 2001-2005. Presents a visual ethnography and ethnoarchaeology of middle-class American households, drawing on an archive of 20,000 digital images from the project and 1,500 hours of videotaped daily activities in the 32 homes, to show household material culture and how the physical household shapes behavior. Color photos demonstrate that behind the freshly painted exteriors and shady front yards of suburbia, there lies the total chaos of more possessions and less space and time.

32 Families Open Their Doors

Life at Home in the Twenty-first Century

Winner of the 2014 John Collier Jr. Award Winner of the Jo Anne Stolaroff Cotsen Prize Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century cross-cuts the ranks of important books on social history, consumerism, contemporary culture, the meaning of material culture, domestic architecture, and household ethnoarchaeology. It is a distant cousin of Material World and Hungry Planet in content and style, but represents a blend of rigorous science and photography that these books can claim. Using archaeological approaches to human material culture, this volume offers unprecedented access to the middle-class American home through the kaleidoscopic lens of no-limits photography and many kinds of never-before acquired data about how people actually live their lives at home. Based on a rigorous, nine-year project at UCLA, this book has appeal not only to scientists but also to all people who share intense curiosity about what goes on at home in their neighborhoods. Many who read the book will see their own lives mirrored in these pages and can reflect on how other people cope with their mountains of possessions and other daily challenges. Readers abroad will be equally fascinated by the contrasts between their own kinds of materialism and the typical American experience. The book will interest a range of designers, builders, and architects as well as scholars and students who research various facets of U.S. and global consumerism, cultural history, and economic history.

Anthony P. Graesch

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