Making Things Oneself in an Age of Consumption, 1890s-1980s

In a mass consumer society, making things oneself is a very peculiar way of obtaining goods. Handmade and homemade things are easily recognized as such, and are subject to normative judgements. Depending on the context, they are regarded as being beautiful or ugly, healthy or unhealthy, modern or old-fashioned, and so on, but in any case distinct from mass produced items. Their evaluation depends on actors, circumstances, and motives for (not) engaging in do-it-yourself activities. Students, for example, are more easily forgiven for living off frozen pizza than a mother of small children. This project investigates these kinds of consumer choices and practices as expressions of preferences in the use of time, money, and material resources. Why do people choose to make things themselves when they can simply buy most goods or services? Forms of obtaining goods provide insight about peoples values, ideas of the social order, and the role expectations inherent to it. Industrialization shook previous notions and practices of production and consumption as well as traditional time regimes to the core. New modes of production, the division between wage labor and leisure time, and the ever-growing range of available goods offered alternative ways of obtaining goods, ranging from making things oneself to the purchase of ready-made items in addition to a wide variety of hybrid forms. Individuals as well as representatives of society, politics, economy, and culture had to renegotiate the meaning of different forms of production, consumption, and uses of time in terms of social relations, role obligations, bodies of knowledge, and practical skills. The project aims to contribute to a history of the social and cultural transformations in Germany as they related to the emergence of the consumer society. The study encompasses the age of high modernity which saw the emergence and breakthrough of consumer society. Ever changing political, economic, social, and cultural circumstances as well as scientific development frequently demanded the renegotiation of the interrelated fields of consumption, work, and leisure. The analytical distinction between the self-made and the not self-made cuts across traditional approaches and allows for the systematic exploration of social relations, bodies of knowledge, and practices in a consumer society. The study focuses on discourses and practices in two fields, home improvement and food preparation. It emphasizes turning points and periods of intensified debate revolving around the poles of the self-made and the not self-made in both fields. The project is located in the field of social and cultural history but also draws on theories developed in material culture studies, ethnology, sociology, and the history of the body.

Why do people choose to make things themselves when they could simply buy most goods or services? Drawing on the examples of home improvement and the preparation of food, this project investigates practices of and discourses on making things oneself in Germany from the 1890s to the 1980s. With its focus on practices of making things oneself, the project sheds light on a blind spot of modern consumer societies that has been neglected so far: a wide range of activities that transcend the established dichotomies of production/consumption and work/leisure that are used to categorize human activities in modern industrialized societies. I argue that practices of and discourses on practices of making things oneself served as powerful mechanism of regulating change in modern industrialized consumer societies. Practices of and discourses on making things oneself necessarily refer to individuals and their immediate environment. Only individuals or small groups can make something themselves one cannot, for example, build a skyscraper oneself. Practices of making things oneself therefore are predestined as regulatory mechanisms on a low level. Closely interlinked with bodies of knowledge, skills, role models, and social norms, practices of making things oneself served as a means to negotiate change in consumer and leisure behavior on an individual and social level, that is to initiate, moderate, or prevent change. In short, practices of making things oneself helped to both shape and balance the radical changes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The project therefore challenges conventional narratives of linear process in which market based transactions simply substituted practices of making things oneself from the late 19th century onwards. Rather, practices of making things oneself existed consecutively, parallel, or contrary to other forms of obtaining goods, thus serving as means to permanently renegotiate lifestyles, norms, and ideas about social order.