Re-entering the West Room: On the Power of Domestic Spaces

Abstract

In the rural west of Ireland, Arensberg and Kimball found that every farm house was possessed of a "west room" ... Arensberg and Kimball's 'Family and community in rural Ireland' is most often remembered as a paradigmatic functionalist account of the small farmers of County Clare, in the west of Ireland. However, in a manner unusual for that genre and period, they allowed an intriguingly important role for domestic spaces. In particular, the west room in the small farmer’s cottage was not, by their account, only a backdrop, nor even simply a repository of valued objects, but a room that played a crucial role in the drama of domestic life at the moment when the household social system reproduced itself.