Substances of Relatedness and the Narrative Division of Labor in the Dacha Household

Abstract

The article discusses the discursive dimension of a modern urban household on the basis of interviews with garden plot owners in the Leningrad region. I proceed from the premise that the household is reproduced in everyday communication among its members, and consider communication as a meeting point between the fluid and unstable individual narrative universes and the more rigid material and practical reality of the household. This approach enables one to pose questions to the discursive material that go beyond the discourse: What is contemporary urban household? What processes and relations does it consist of? What is the role of economy and subsistence within it? How to define its boundaries? How to describe its temporality? How are economic and kinship relations interconnected? I argue that, at least while dachas in the households under consideration perform the recreational function rather than subsistence, dacha everyday chores are not about the necessities of subsistence, but rather create and maintain, formalize and organize relations in the family and especially between spouses. Each time talking about the dacha, relatives give new meanings to the dacha materiality of the past and present and propose and discuss reference points for the future.