On Dutch windows

In The Netherlands, living room windows are big, left uncovered day and night, and elaborately decorated. This pattern, which is widespread in all urban and rural regions in this country, disappears abruptly as soon as the border into Germany is crossed where windows are generally smaller, consistently covered, and more sparsely decorated. Going south into Flanders, the disappearance of open and decorated windows is gradual but noticeable.The cognitive and sensory meaning of a single object in material culture, the Dutch window, is examined as a concrete articulation of the boundary between the public and private realms by thinking it with successive conceptual frames in sociology. Assuming that material objects are embodiments of ideas, the study focuses on (a) the norms for looking and for looking out of the windows, (b) the territorial boundary being established and, (c) the information game played through the windows in a context of the notion of privacy. Photographs of the cultural objects under consideration, i.e., Dutch windows, are presented throughout the text as reminders that the cultural and material realms are sensually linked. The study concludes that objects in material culture must be examined in terms of the active, purposive acts we accomplish by adapting the objects to our practical and expressive needs.The author thanks Frank Bovenkerk, Sjoerd Groenman, Jaber Gubrium, Sidney Homan, Joseph Vandiver, William and Helga Woodruff and two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper.An earlier version was presented in session a-125 of the XIth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnographical Sciences, held in Quebec in August, 1983.An important part of this research was completed while the author was Visiting Senior Lecturer at the State University at Utrecht, The Netherlands in 1978.