The performance of secrecy: Domesticity and privacy in public spaces
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Michael Herzfeld
Abstract
Secrecy, paradoxically, is a social fact; as such, it must be performed in order to be realized. This article is a programmatic attempt to explore the semiotics of secrecy as revealed through the interaction of architectonics, spatiality, and social interaction. Gestural secretiveness reproduces socially sanctioned patterns of concealment also embodied in the built environment; these social dimensions also inform local interpretations of legal devices designed to guarantee privacy. On the international stage, moreover, they are transformed into devices for the concealment of potential national embarrassments. As the author demonstrates using materials from Greece, Italy, and Thailand, the practical effects of secrecy — a more flexible construct than the dichotomy of public and private — are revealingly inscribed, at various concentric levels of social identification, on the material landscape of inhabited space, and represent a necessary dimension of adapting urban structures to a human scale.
© 2009 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Introduction: Signification and space
- Towards an anthropological theory of space and place
- Spatial reification, or, collectively embodied amnesia, aphasia, and apraxia
- Spatial representation, activity, and meaning: Children's images of the contemporary city
- The performance of secrecy: Domesticity and privacy in public spaces
- The choretic work of history
- Art, land, and the gendering of Parnassus
- The semiotics of the Vitruvian city
- Space complexity and architectural conception: Revisiting Alberti's treatise
- Meaning of space and architecture of place
- Ship as a space locus, architecture as a space fabrica
- Introduction: Organizational semiotics and social simulation
- A conceptual linkage between cognitive architectures and social interaction
- The semiotic actor: From signs to socially constructed meaning
- Information systems actability: Tracing the theoretical roots
- Norms-based simulation for personalized service provision
- Universities as producers of evolutionarily stable signs of excellence for academic labor markets?
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Introduction: Signification and space
- Towards an anthropological theory of space and place
- Spatial reification, or, collectively embodied amnesia, aphasia, and apraxia
- Spatial representation, activity, and meaning: Children's images of the contemporary city
- The performance of secrecy: Domesticity and privacy in public spaces
- The choretic work of history
- Art, land, and the gendering of Parnassus
- The semiotics of the Vitruvian city
- Space complexity and architectural conception: Revisiting Alberti's treatise
- Meaning of space and architecture of place
- Ship as a space locus, architecture as a space fabrica
- Introduction: Organizational semiotics and social simulation
- A conceptual linkage between cognitive architectures and social interaction
- The semiotic actor: From signs to socially constructed meaning
- Information systems actability: Tracing the theoretical roots
- Norms-based simulation for personalized service provision
- Universities as producers of evolutionarily stable signs of excellence for academic labor markets?
