Making Multitemporality with Houses

Time Trickery, Ethical Practice and Energy Demand in Postcolonial Britain

in The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology
Author:
Roxana Moroşanu Loughborough University rm848@cam.ac.uk

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DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3167/ca.2016.340111
Keywords:
energy; ethics; home; Postcolonial Britain; temporality; time
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The qualities of domestic buildings that are aimed for in the energy reduction agenda, such as efficiency and zero-carbon impacts, are often at odds with the aesthetic preferences of home-owners for keeping original features of their houses unaltered. The set of visual traits followed in the maintenance and listing of character houses in the UK, and their corresponding material affordances in relation to energy demand, can be regarded as affecting and delaying the future of carbon-emission reduction promised by the country’s own Climate Change Act. This article interrogates the temporal and ethical considerations enacted in maintaining and admiring character houses with ‘original’ features. It discusses the ways in which domestic buildings emerge as multitemporal assemblages, and the forms of time trickery these processes involve in relation to notions of history, tradition and national and cultural identity.

Contributor Notes

Roxana Moroşanu completed her PhD at Loughborough University in 2014. She is the author of An Ethnography of Household Energy Demand in the UK: Everyday Temporalities of Digital Media Usage (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming).

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Cover The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology
Article Category:
Research Article
Page Count:
12
Keywords:
energy; ethics; home; Postcolonial Britain; temporality; time
Print Publication Date:
01 Mar 2016
Online Publication Date:
01 Mar 2016
Copyright:
© The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 2016
Editorial
General Article
Special Section - Time-Tricking: Reconsidering Temporal Agency in Troubled Times
Part I. Time-Tricking in Moments of Crisis: Political and Economic Manipulations of Time
Part II. Maintaining Other Times: Technologies for Being Out-of-Time
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