INSIDE SKOPJE: DOMESTIC SPACE AND THE MAKING OF EVERYDAY LIFE

Abstract

This article presents an ethnographic and analytical study of everyday life and domestic interiors in Skopje, grounded in long-term fieldwork. It examines apartments as material and social spaces in which broader urban, class, ethnic, and cultural dynamics of postsocialist Macedonia are refracted and negotiated. Through detailed observations, in-depth conversations, and analyses of objects, habits, rituals, and social practices, the study conceptualizes dwelling as a relational assemblage composed of human and non-human actors, infrastructures, material artifacts, and historically sedimented contexts.

The ethnographic perspective demonstrates that the home simultaneously functions as a site of intimacy, identification, and resistance, while also serving as a nexus where issues of class differentiation, taste, modernity, prestige, migration, and everyday political economy converge. Particular attention is devoted to the impact of heating systems, communal infrastructures, informal networks (“connections”), market transformations, emergent aesthetic hierarchies, and the role of social media in the standardization and homogenization of domestic interiors.

The article argues that an analysis of domestic space offers a crucial lens for understanding contemporary urban processes and the everyday strategies of survival, adaptation, and meaning-making in Skopje.