Abstract

This article examines some aspects of recent studies on home cultures and summarizes the findings of a fieldwork in Tuscany. The study explores how the meanings of everyday life are produced across a range of practices and discourses, from home-making practices to values associated with objects of mass consumption. More specifically, the text briefly discusses how to use shadowing and reflexivity as qualitative methods for examining domestic spaces, lifestyles, objects of local traditions, familiar and peculiar private objects and mementoes as histories of complex and affective negotiation of self-definition.