Description
Book SynopsisOikos Domus Household: The Many Lives of a Common Word describes historic episodes in the lives of these words, from the Greek oikos and Roman domus to our current family and home. The episodes highlight their function as controlling metaphors used very differently from culture to culture, but often as ways to control basic issues, like the context in which women become pregnant and the control of land and its transmission to heirs. This book also describes how these words and their current equivalents, home and family, are used as metaphors to illustrate how people who count are supposed to live and also to justify disinterest in people who do not count.
One of the most important functions of the household is providing a dependable context in which pregnancy can be controlled. It describes how another key interest, continuing the male line, is embodied. Currently family is a politically useful, normative fiction. Family and home have little concrete meaning other than as
Table of ContentsContents: The Classical Background – Households in Post Roman Europe – The Rise of the Household World – The Multiple Births of the American Households.
