UNDER THE SAME ROOF: MIGRATIONS, DOMESTIC ECONOMIES, AND THE MORAL WORLDS OF THE HOUSE IN THE BALKANS

Abstract

This article examines the house as a locally embedded conceptual and social formation that mobilizes moral, economic, and religious dimensions in the Macedonian city of Prilep—an urban settlement historically shaped by tobacco cultivation and industrial labor. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, the study explores how domestic life, migration trajectories, and moral ideologies of the house intersect with and refract broader processes of post-socialist transformation.

The analysis builds on Claude Lévi-Strauss’s notion of house societies as intermediary institutions that mediate between kinship, property, and political organization. It further engages Pierre Bourdieu’s practice theory to illuminate the embodied and strategic dimensions of domestic life, Janet Carsten’s emphasis on relatedness to foreground processes of relational constitution, and Marshall Sahlins’s concept of the “mutuality of being” to account for shared substance and co-presence within household formations. In addition, the article draws on Stephen Gudeman and Alberto Rivera’s understanding of the house as a moral model of livelihood—a domain in which cooperation, reciprocity, and care are cultivated in dynamic tension with market-oriented logics.

By situating the house at the intersection of kinship, economy, and morality, the article contributes to ongoing debates on post-socialist social restructuring and the reconfiguration of domestic and economic life in Southeast Europe.