New media technologies in everyday life

Domestic life constitutes one of the primary concerns of the discipline of anthropology. Beginning with Lewis Henry Morgan's classic study Houses and House Life of the American Aborigines (Morgan 1966), Levi-Strauss's (1983, 1987) notion of house societies and Bourdieu's structuralist approach to understanding the symbolism of the Kabyle house, understanding domestic life emerged a way through which anthropologists began to formulate theories around kinship, lineage, social organization and reproduction (Bloch 1998; Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995). As anthropology has broadened its inquiry from small-scale societies and the focus upon traditional or non-Western lives to the urban, Western and the middle class, anthropological attention also shifted from outlining social structure to the interpretation of processes underpinning social change. Indeed, Bourdieu's formulation of the habitus and social practice in shaping taste and aesthetics in French homes (Bourdieu 1972, 1984) and Moore's (1986) analysis of the ways in which gender is structured and restructured in domestic space through practice represent seminal work on the ways which gender and other forms of difference become inscribed and reinscribed in domestic space.