The air from outside: Getting to know the world through air practices

Introduction

Investigating fresh air from the outside and how we let it into our homes is quite special in at least three ways. First of all, fresh air is the very foundation of living: before even taking the first step into the world, we breathe air.

This makes air a common denominator among human beings since we share the destiny of being nurtured on air. Air teaches us in profound ways: knowing about air and wind allows us to realize that we are already immersed in something almost imperceptible and yet very real, and that this space of immersion influences the soul. Such a view makes ventilation ‘the profound secret of existence’ (Sloterdijk, 2004). Secondly, the ‘freshness’ of air may be an individually perceived phenomenon, but it is also at constant risk of being polluted and exploited, ¹ as Sloterdijk (2009) describes when talking about terror (nerve gas) from the sky. Central for our being and living, and a vital way of engaging with the environment, one might expect such a crucial, subjective, dynamic and scarce phenomenon as fresh air to be well researched by the social sciences, but – with a few exceptions (Connor, 2008, 2010; Garvey, 2005; Hsu and Low, 2007; Latour, 2006) – not much research on air has been done within these disciplines, studying it in its own right and as something more than a sense or a sign of the risk society in the form of air pollution. ² It is said about air, ‘Always there, it allows itself to be forgotten’ (Irigaray, 1999: 8), and this points to the third peculiarity of air: the challenge of how to capture it, create it as an object for social science research. It is not its dynamic, transient character alone that makes air difficult to study. ‘All that is solid melts into air’, Marx wrote in 1888 (in Berman, 1982) and, although written in another context, ³ the quote has served the social sciences well in describing an important aspect of the post-modern world: everything can be dissolved and deconstructed, making well-known scientific concepts and worldviews melt into air. Such a view turns air itself into the ultimate dissolution, an intangible phenomenon hardly fit for social analysis. Yet this article will do precisely that: treat air as a tangible object and analyse its specific significance and uses by people. ⁴

Air has been referred to as a medium that allows complete freedom of movement, a transmitter of light and sound (Ingold, 2000: 339), but in this article air is regarded as more than a phenomenon defined by its ability to allow for something else, whether freedom of movement or transmitting light and sound, important as they may be. The characteristics of air and air practices will be studied in their own right. One reason for looking into air is the fact that our conception of the world rests on our daily interrelationship with its concrete components. Studying air, then, is a way of studying our relationship with the environment: how we conceive the world and feel at home in it through air and air practices. By doing this, the article contributes to an anthropological research field in progress, a field that attempts to fill a gap within anthropological studies where dealing with the earth and sky seems to have been of less interest than contextual analysis (Ingold, 2010). This lack of attention may appear as a somewhat reductionist attitude to the anthropological practice of fieldwork. Why exclude the natural environment when we live and breathe it as well as learn from it – knowledge required in order to act upon nature in resilient ways, preserving ourselves and our loved ones, making our lives liveable whatever the current conditions? A similar question is asked by Tim Ingold (2010), suggesting that anthropologists on fieldwork include the natural environment and its significance to the people they are studying. It is my objective to attempt such an approach by investigating the phenomenon of air, analysing its status by describing how it is perceived and used by people in their everyday living practices at home and by making apparent the interrelation between people, air and knowledge of the environment.

Knowledge from air

Although some patterns relating to the use of fresh air from the outside may seem homogeneous, people are of course far from uniform and their air practices appear rather as a dynamic activity that can best be seen as an ongoing way of shaping their lives in accordance with current contexts and as one of many different ways of gaining knowledge about the environment. Seeking knowledge about the environment may, literally, take the form of a walk in the world where people negotiate and design their paths in a mixture of ‘more or less solid substances of the earth and the volatile medium of air’ (Ingold, 2010). This may well apply in general. However, knowledge about the environment gained from air experiences and activities does not quite correspond to the type of knowledge gained from the ‘improvisatory movements’ that Ingold refers to when he talks about people becoming knowledgeable in the process of their open-ended wayfaring through life. The significance of air – as it appears when studying how people use it – is, like air itself, dynamic and seems to be borne and bound by experiences and contexts: whether one has experienced a flooded home, is living in a house with an automatic air conditioning system or in an old, humid, draughty house has a huge impact on how people think of air and how they actually use air from the outside and let it into their homes. Based on a qualitative, explorative study in Denmark, ⁵ this article will describe how people think and act in relation to the use of ‘fresh air from the outside’ and into their homes. It will illustrate that knowledge may be recognised as built up from local particulars ⁶ and it thus shares Ingold’s perception of knowledge as knowledge-growing, representing a knowledge that is dynamic with and nourished from its context. This perspective of a knowledge-of-the-world that grows from and in accordance with living in the environment recognises people as individuals with mindful bodies to which earth and sky (air) are intrinsic. Entangling with the environment and moving through life makes the individual a wayfarer who constructs his or her path of life in a dynamic, reflexive way through tactical manoeuvres – but at times a route already given is chosen. This illustrates ways in which air is used and performed: sometimes use of air is all about sensory excitement and bodily needs or bodily responses, and what seems to be gained from this appears as knowledge of the present, knowledge that relates to being-in-the-world now, forcing the individual to an ‘attention à la vie’ (Schutz and Luckman, 1984). On other occasions, air is used strategically and in ways that reflect, for instance, a person’s need for control. Here, the action and knowledge relating to it seem to be directed towards the future, creating ‘knowledge of becoming’, as opposed to the previously mentioned ‘knowledge of being’. ⁷

How we conceive the world and feel at home in it through air and air practices implies a phenomenological approach, including a focus on practices. Central to the investigation about air and its use in people’s homes is what people actually do. ‘Doing’ the air, air management at home, is something we perform as a practice and usually on a daily basis. This makes practices and practice theory natural points of reference, and I now take a moment to situate my research within this field before proceeding with the analysis.

Air practices as social performances

Human lives hang together not just through social orders, but also through social practices (Schatzki, 1996, 2002; Schatzki et al., 2001), which are recognised as shaping our everyday lives and the paths we choose or negotiate. They are perceived as having sociality embedded since they form the core of our activities and influence on our interaction with others. Practices are constituents of social life: it is through them that life is constructed, enacted, lived. This makes information on people’s contextual practices useful as it helps us to understand people on their own terms. This has made the study of practices an important part of anthropology; it often forms the basis of ethnographic fieldwork, offering valuable insights into people’s lives. What constitutes a practice is defined by the philosopher Theodor Schatzki (2002: 87) as ‘a temporally evolving, open-ended set of doings and sayings linked by practical understandings, rules, teleo-affective structures, and general understandings’ and by the sociologist Andreas Reckwitz (2002: 249–250) as

a routinized type of behaviour which consists of several elements, interconnected to one another: Forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, ‘things’ & their use, a background knowledge in the form of understanding, know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge.

Common to both definitions are the dynamic, interconnected elements, implying that life is lived in an entangled doing, in the making, through activities happening, in the performing of practices, or as becoming. Describing practice as ‘open-ended’ allows for creativity in the doings and sayings involved in its performance, and the definitions specifically point to the importance of things being part of the routines. Habits have long been described as practices performed routinely (Bourdieu, 1992), but with practice theory, focus may be placed on its entangled constituents: specific competences (doings), images (sayings) and materials (havings) create the basis of a practice and are needed for people’s performance of it (Shove et al., 2012).

These characteristics of the constituents of a practice were also found in the study on the use of fresh outside air in Danish people’s everyday life: airing practices in different homes, yet in the same country with similar weather and wind conditions, appeared as an ongoing learning process based on previous and related practices and competences, as well as on daily considerations of weather, windows, draughts in the house, etc. (Hauge, 2009). The constituents of practices, viz. competences, images and materials, suggest a dynamic interrelationship between them, which was also seen in the Danish families being studied: regarding competences, people performing air practices by using fresh air from outside needed to know about wind directions as well as the peculiarities of their house if they wanted to ventilate it. They also needed to have some knowledge about air quality in the area so as to know how and when to create a through breeze of fresh air. Images reflected how the notion of ‘fresh air’ was socially and culturally constructed, how people viewed air and the need for it. An example of such an image of ‘fresh air’, still common among Danes, including all the informants in this study, is to let their babies sleep outside in their prams in the, perhaps, fresh air. So the image of air is closely related to freshness and health, despite the fact that it may in fact be polluted and unhealthy. Materials needed for performing air practices were windows, doors, cracks and gaps in the house and the overall access to fresh air, as well as the sounds and smells coming in with the air from the surrounding environment, all forming a kind of ‘havings’ required for ‘doing’ or even ‘saying’ the practice. Formal rules and building regulations were specified regarding ventilation or change of air required in the house, and many informants were also aware of some sort of ‘best practice’ on how frequently to air their houses: ‘I’ve heard somewhere that it’s recommended to air out ten minutes three times a day’ (Betty).

Air practices and their entangled relationships will be described later. However, studying practices merely as activities based on competences, images and materials seems insufficient in showing people’s being-in-the-world and feeling at home in it. This is hardly surprising, since it is not the aim of practice theories to answer questions of how people feel at home in the world or how certain phenomena obtain their status in people’s lives and physical homes. Rather, the aim of this article is to show how people live their lives in a dynamic relationship with the environment, a process where the individual creates and acquires knowledge and experience through relations with the world as may be gained by air practices. When human beings are seen as creative, knowledge-growing social individuals, life with all its practices and activities is performed and knowledge becomes more than a fixed form or a concept: it comes to be through practices. It is precisely this sense of practice and knowledge-growing that I attempt to establish here, looking at the practices relating to air as a way of performance enacted in a dynamic relationship with the environment. Far from being a simple way of integrating fresh air in our homes and for our bodily comfort, the use of air reflects emotions and values and a phenomenological way of becoming knowledgeable about our environment. Contrary to most practice studies, this article will thus place the performed practices in a phenomenological frame, paying particular attention to the emotions and types of knowledge involved.

Emotions in air performances

The dynamic relationship between how air is used in people’s homes and how this use represents emotions and is transferred into knowledge and values is deeply entangled with the significance of the home, the origin of values and the stage for our dynamic living – one of the reasons why we may think of the use of fresh air as a way of everyday life performance. Performances are complex cultural practices that imply activity and use. It is through our creative, dynamic activities regarding the use of intangible air from the outside and into our homes that we make a social, material imprint in the world. This imprint is not void of culture. Like other sensory phenomena, air, too, is imbued with cultural significance, as research in the anthropology of the senses has shown, e.g. for sight, hearing, taste and light, and their varying conceptions across cultures (see, among others, Bille and Sørensen, 2007; Classen, 1993; Howes 1991, 2006; Lundberg, 2007). I will show how the use of air represents people, emotions and things in context-specific ways, how fresh air is used to allow for engagement with the environment, and how it changes and touches us (and may thus have an agency of its own), how it signifies notions of identity and gender, how it represents culture and morality, and conceals particular aspects of social life.

One example that illustrates the latter – air management (taking care of it, so that the air in the home feels fresh) – may be associated with certain taboos, since the need for a change of air, the letting in of fresh air, often arises in rooms (bathroom, bedroom) connected with impurity, sin or shame. In these cases, smells in the air are unwanted and hidden precisely by ventilating. Thus, fresh air may be associated with things, ideas or situations that people wish to avoid, hide or get rid of.

Ordinarily, however, fresh air, like many practices at home, is rarely something we reflect upon. We just do it. This also means that ‘fresh air’ may best be grasped in its negation: when air is not fresh it is easier to talk about it and its quality, since it requires specific attention. But specific attention is not wanted at home, where people wish to dwell (Ingold, 2000). This need to dwell is central: home is what people make of their houses in order to dwell in them and for creating dwelling certain practices are important. Dwelling practices are important, not as a constituent of their own (doing the practice for the sake of the practice) but in an emotional perspective. This perspective allows for a more social view of the practices and of those processes of becoming that seem to be involved with them. Practices at home represent emotions in at least three ways: (1) by reflecting particular emotions that surround or govern the performance of the practice; (2) by performing activities at home that include ways of managing other people’s impressions of oneself and one’s home; (3) as pure enjoyment. I will illustrate this by briefly summarizing the emotions appearing in the air practices performed by the Danish families in my study:

Care, love and concern: when airing out was performed as a sign of caring about the health of the family; airing out the children’s room as a sign of concern and love or being worried about air quality in the house, caused, for instance, by humidity or radon.

Control: when people wished to mark and maintain a feeling of control over their home and its smells, thus avoiding the risk of it being thought of or referred to as a smelly place.

Enjoyment: when expressing a bodily, sensory way of feeling the world, being part of it through the breeze, enjoying the wind, the smells and sounds of nature and of the city.

Altogether the air-related practices have functional, bodily/sensory and social characteristics, each involving the above emotions as well as specific types of knowledge. The empirical data and the results of my analysis will be arranged and presented in three groups, each followed by a brief summary of the type of knowledge involved:

Naturally it is not possible to make a sharp distinction between the types of knowledge referred to. Themes may overlap and involve other practices, but the following stories of air and how air is performed illustrate how we get to know the world through air and air practices, as well as the specific knowledge that is involved when performing them. In this article, I aim to describe not only what this ‘air-related knowledge’ is or does, but also to show how it comes to be through practices.

I Air as reassurance of the routinized knowledge of everyday life

Airing out and fresh air are funny things. Nothing you talk about, you just do it. (Mariann)

It is the routine aspect of air management, the ‘you just do it’, as Mariann puts it, that structures the presentation of data in this section. I will present examples of air practices of five different women to illustrate how and when they perform their air activities, in order to show how air practices are integrated in their lives.

Mariann is in her 50s and lives with her husband in a recently rebuilt house. Her story shows that fresh air practices depend on negotiations between the inhabitants and there is much relief when the practice is agreed upon. Her practices reflect an attention to her surroundings throughout the year:

As soon as I’m up in the morning and dressed, both windows are thrown open. Fortunately, we both agree on that. I guess they’re open for 30 to 40 minutes before we leave; well, in fact, the bedroom windows are open all year round. It’s a pure reflex. The window is open while I’m in the shower too. About every third day I air out the house with a breeze. I MUST feel that I have fresh air, the air mustn’t stand still, that’s unpleasant. I also always open the window when I vacuum-clean and of course when the weather is hot. When I get home from work, I open the kitchen door and leave it open, the window too. When we’re done in the kitchen we close them. In the summer they’re open all the time, well, depending on the weather of course. Not so much in the winter.

This seasonal adjustment of practices is also performed by Margit, a woman in her 70s who lives by herself in a small townhouse. In summer she airs out during the day, with some windows open day and night, ‘just a bit, since it often rains’; in winter, airing out depends on how cold it is outside. Margit also illustrates that some practices are entirely entangled and performed simultaneously, like airing out when making the beds:

In the morning, I make the bed and open the window wide. I must let fresh air in because the bedroom has to be aired. I couldn’t dream of not turning the duvet and, at the same time, opening the window. I’ve always aired out like that … It seems the right thing to do somehow. It just comes naturally, I think, to air out when you do the beds.

Margit’s use of fresh air from outside shows that air activities may be intertwined with other activities, forming a kind of symbiotic relationship. This aspect also appears in the stories of Anne, Betty and Janne below. They show that air practices are embedded in other practices of everyday life and are adjusted to the seasons: making the bed, showering, cleaning, getting the children up in the morning, doing the laundry. Anne, a 49-year-old woman living in a wooden house with her family, describes her routinized air practices as a ‘ritual’:

I think it’s all about being part of my routines, and they change through the year. I clearly have a ritual: I air out after the shower, then I go down and wake up the boys. Magnus is mostly up by then, but I wake up Lauritz and immediately open his windows. Their bedroom doors are closed during night, so the first thing I do is to open the windows. It’s part of the waking up, part of saying good morning.

Another routine air practice is seen when drying clothes. Betty lives in the countryside with her husband and two young sons, in a house built in the 1930s. She talks about the necessity of drying clothes inside, something that requires a slight change in airing out routines:

We have to dry our clothes in the bathroom. I know it’s something we are advised NOT to do, but we don’t have a covered veranda, so I simply have to. During summer we don’t have to think much about airing out, but now in the wet season I have to think more about it.

The need to use the air for drying clothes inside implies that Betty must pay attention to the seasons and what she does with the air, throughout the year, in order to integrate air into daily routines, such as washing and drying clothes.

Using air in daily practices would normally be ‘something we just do’, but Janne explains how the mechanical ventilation system in their new, modern house has changed her practices entirely:

I’ve changed my fixed routines beyond recognition. Every single day I had to dry all the windows in all the bedrooms in our old house. The windows were almost the reason we moved. Today it’s all very different, it’s such a relief. In my old house I HAD to do something, now I almost have no fixed routines for airing out. But if the weather is good, if it gets too hot, then I open.

Janne’s story shows the flexibility in our practices and that they are performed in a dialectic relationship with the physical structures – the house and its materials.

II Air for the body, the senses and the mind: A knowledge-of-being

Fresh air is almost like an alternative to a glass of wine. I think it’s because you relate the fresh air to freedom. It’s about this feeling that the air can pervade the body. When you air out it’s like having time off. (Anne)

Airing practices are daily activities embedded in other practices and, as will be illustrated in this section, particularly relevant in transitions – after periods of absence, such as coming home from work, waking up in the morning after a night’s sleep, returning home from a holiday. As a symbol of well-being, Anne likened fresh air to ‘a glass of wine’, a sign of freedom, representing a relaxed time at home as opposed to being busy at work. The organizing principle in this section is the body, the senses and the mind, and I will show how air is used to create a dynamic relationship between the body and its surroundings.

After a night’s sleep Anne greets the morning when she airs out and enjoys listening to the sounds of nature, thus including the environment in her use of air, a way to feel alive and be attentive to the season. In this sense, air pervades not just the body, but also the mind:

Normally I air out just to get the air in the house circulating. I tell myself that the air from outside is fresher. Fresh air should almost go through your body, I think, and not stand still. It’s also to sort of get the sleep out of the house, you know, like getting the sleep out of your body. For me, airing out is something that is both mental and physical, it is part of the process of waking up, becoming clearer in the head. It’s something you feel makes you better. It’s simply in the routines. You say ‘good morning’ when you open the windows. That’s also because you can hear the wind in the trees, I mean, you get fresh air, but you get something else too. The owls and the frogs at night, what a racket they make, sometimes it’s a real concert. But that’s what’s so wonderful. There are different sounds now than in spring.

Letting air in through opened windows and doors allows people to follow nature’s particular characteristics of the seasons, staying attuned to a life in progress and looking forward to new sounds in the air as a sign of seasonal change. Jan is in his 40s and lives with his wife Ghita in the suburbs in a house that he has refurbished. He describes his view on fresh air this way:

I open the windows to sense the sky, the sounds. After the winter it’s so fantastic to hear the birds in spring. I look forward every year to hearing the birds. It makes me happy.

Ghita also speaks of the joy of the breeze:

It’s REALLY nice to let the breeze in. Of course, it’s not nice to get the insects in, I hate that. But I still remember the sounds of the city when we opened the windows in the evenings in Copenhagen. Here we have different sounds, sounds that belong to nature.

Both describe how the sounds of the surrounding environment make them feel in touch with life, creating a sense of belonging to the environment, thus also illustrating the sociality of sound.

Charlotte, a childminder in her early 40s, exclaims spontaneously after a small break in the conversation, and with a big sigh:

You can so ENJOY the air. In principle, I don’t have to air out, but I LIKE it. You can air out simply because you like it.

‘Liking the air’, however, requires sensing it as fresh. Ole and Mariann agree on how the air in a room may be perceived as unpleasant, calling for fresh air, and that it is bodily felt as ‘a sense that tells you to air out’. Ole explains:

Of course much of the need for fresh air is about smells, but airing out can also be needed in some rooms that just seem dense. The air can seem dusty, dirty. You can almost see it in the sun. You have a sense that tells you to air out. It’s a sense.

Mariann continues:

Yes, DENSE, that’s uncomfortable. Often when it’s hot too, and the dust is stirred up, I almost feel claustrophobic. The room must be aired out. Like we do when we get back from the summer cottage. If there’s anything humid or smelly you also react. You’re supposed to. I think it’s about bad smells making us think: ‘Is there enough oxygen here?’

Betty explains that fresh air symbolizes cleanliness and helps her feel awake, stressing the importance of the freshness of air and having it, even if technology suggests not to open up:

If I haven’t aired out in the morning it’s almost the same as if I haven’t cleaned. It’s something to do with being awake. I air out when I’ve dropped off the boys and before I start to work. Those low-energy houses, where it’s almost forbidden to open the windows because it ruins the central heating effect, that’s a big minus, I wouldn’t like that at all. Even if I one day get Solar Venti [solar hot air collector for ventilation], I’ll still open the windows, I mean, for all the extra things you get when airing out. I also want to be able to create a through breeze. It’s unpleasant, uncomfortable, if you can’t adjust the temperature fast. No, the wind must be allowed in.

Allowing the wind into the home is a gesture to the body and the senses, but practices that allow air into the home also reflect a person’s individual comfort zone. Likewise, people have reasons for keeping the air out of the home; if the weather is cold, people may avoid airing out to stay warm and snug.

III: Air for social reasons: A knowledge-of-becoming

I just can’t have my day care kids smelling bad. This is a small community, right, and I could just imagine that people started talking about a stench at my house. (Charlotte)

Smells are signifiers of the home and its inhabitants, underlining the importance of controlling such smells, as Charlotte suggests in her concern about becoming the talk of the town because of a smelly home. Some smells are pleasant, like the smell of a baby or of clothes dried outside, others evoke concern or taboo, but inside the safe and supposedly controllable home we expect smells that appear pleasant to us. One’s own smell and that of one’s house should reflect health, freshness and activity – as opposed to the smell of humidity or decay, representing damp and inactivity. This section deals with these aspects, using impression management (Goffman, 1959) as a major, governing principle to organize and interpret my data. I will also reflect on the subject of risk since the performance of air practices is shaped by perceived risk factors: a house smelling musty, the hazard of radon seeping in through the soil, burglars entering through open windows.

Anne describes a mechanical ventilation system in their home, installed to make sure that the wooden house is adequately aired out:

We haven’t changed our ways of airing out after renovating the house, but we thought about it when we were in the process because wood breathes in a different way than bricks. We have this technical air circulation system and it’s good, because this is a wooden house, but the system doesn’t take the smells.

Considering the specific characteristics of the house – wood or brick – was important when designing the ventilation system of the house. Anne’s considerations are based on earlier air experiences in their house and aimed at some point in the future, representing a knowledge-of-becoming. Betty also shows such knowledge:

If you don’t air out, well, then eventually you can’t smell yourself. It’s an age thing also. My dad is 90 years old, I don’t want his place to smell bad with all the domestic helpers and neighbours coming and going. It shouldn’t smell stale, but rather like the real estate agents say ‘of freshly made buns and fresh air’.

Being a childminder in a small community makes Charlotte particularly sensitive to the smells of her home and, just like Betty, she emphasizes impression management. In Charlotte’s home, the change of air is done mechanically, which makes her feel more secure in terms of living up to cultural smell expectations in her community:

I could just imagine that people started talking about a stench at my house. No, I can’t have that at all. If I’m cooking onions or leeks I air out extra as well. There MUST be a pleasant indoor climate for the little ones. Not a smell of old, oh no, it stays in the clothes, I don’t want that for the children. And if you don’t air out enough you may get diseases.

A pleasant smell in one’s home may be particularly important when the home has some sort of public function, yet elements central to ventilation, the windows, may in fact pose a risk. Anne explains how the risk of burglars shapes her airing practices, having the children sleep with closed windows:

The windows are just outside the carport and twice our car was broken into, both times during the night, so the kids have been sleeping right next to the thieves. I can’t risk that someone gets in through their windows.

Also, the quality of outdoor air may limit the airing practices. When living in London, Betty needed to address problems of smog and had different air habits from today. Now she needs to consider the risk of living in an area with radon in the ground:

In London I had to think about airing out to avoid the smog as much as possible. Here in the countryside it sometimes smells from the pig farms, that’s ok, it’s only a few days a year. But you MUST be able to open the windows. Our house is old, and radon easily gets into old houses since they are not well sealed, and even though it may not be a problem for our house, I don’t want to take that risk. And the way to get rid of radon is precisely by airing out.

Anne, too, refers to the risk of toxic air, seeing it as an issue of life quality:

It’s about life quality. I wouldn’t live in a place where I couldn’t have access to fresh air. It’s still in my nose from my childhood, I can still smell the ‘acid factory’ and the ‘soy cake’ [community nicknames for some industrial plants]. When the air was bad we were allowed to stay inside during recess and you sure didn’t open the windows. The body remembers such things. I don’t want to live next to bad smells like that, there can be risks you don’t know of, what or how much it takes, before you get ill.

Many informants also refer to problems from humidity, and their air practices are very attentive to wet weather, shaping the knowledge required for future actions. Ole explains about water damage and what he learned from it:

We had water damage some years ago and had to get the floors and all the furniture out. So we are very careful about humidity in the basement. It happened while our house was being rebuilt and our furniture stored in the basement. Well, you get wiser: NEVER again wooden floors in the basement.

Conclusion: How people feel at home in the world through air and air practices

This article has described what it is to know the world through air and air-related activities. It has shown that air practices are performed for functional, bodily/sensory and social reasons, involving a knowledge-growing among those performing the practices. Descriptions of air practices served as a platform for grasping the significance of air and the significance people ascribed to it. Yet when focusing on the knowledge involved in air practices performed in a dynamic relationship with the context, air is shown to be neither a thing, an entity of any kind or part of any networked assembly, but a dynamic, living hybrid – or, as Ingold (2010: 132) puts it, a medium that affords locomotion, respiration and perception.

The natural components or constituents of air affect the form, perception and practices of air, but the house itself and the needs of everyday life have their own ways of creating specific needs for fresh air: old furniture and old houses may require air on a regular basis due to their particular smell and the requirements of impression management. Living in an area with high emissions of radon also influences airing practices, as does the need to dry clothes inside the house or everyday activities like cleaning, cooking, making the beds, ironing, etc. Many related factors of functional, bodily and social importance are thus involved in creating air’s status and significance in our everyday life, and in the shaping, perception and use of air. Based on these interrelationships and entanglements, fresh air from outside into the home can best be grasped as a medium that people interact and move with, as shown by the informants’ desire to avoid stagnant air in their homes. Stagnant air represents decay, whereas fresh air is perceived as a reflection of life and nature and should be always in movement, dynamic. In this sense, it can be argued that air is perceived precisely through stagnation and unpleasant smells, and through absences that may contribute to such stagnation and density of the air in the house.

However, air as a medium is not so much an interactant as the very condition of people’s interaction with the environment and the house, living their lives, creating a sense of belonging and being-in-the-world, feeling at home in it, through performances of air practices. When transmitting the outside environment, air creates within the individual not just a knowledge of the world but a sense of belonging. Thus, air from the outside brings, in a literal sense, nature into the home, by providing people with pleasant or unpleasant sounds and smells from their surroundings, and shifts culture out of the home by getting rid of embarrassing smells or allowing for a transition in role or setting. In this way, air becomes a medium in our everyday lives between the nature/culture dichotomy, where human beings, ordinarily, are seen as opposed to nature. Air dissolves common categories and boundaries of inside and outside, home and nature. By mediating the environment, air enables the individual to pay specific attention to being alive, an awakening of the senses.

A final comment on the sensation of air: listening to the outside and smelling it, whether in the countryside or the city, is not just an auditory and emotional practice. It is motoric as well, kinaesthetic. The perception of air, such as listening to sounds in the air, its smells, or sensing the wind and raindrops on the skin may be compared to the perception of music. ‘We listen to music with our muscles’, Nietzsche wrote, and ‘we keep time with music, involuntarily, even if we are not consciously attending to it, and our faces and postures mirror the “narrative” of the melody, and the thoughts and beliefs it provokes’ (Sacks, 2008: xii). Like music, air from the outside represents the melody of the seasons, the rhythm of life as it passes, and with this passing the environment is transformed into knowledge of the world precisely through the use of air. So we listen to our environment through air, by using our bodies and senses and by paying social attention to it.

When transmitting the ongoing social and seasonal life outside, air enables people to feel alive by connecting them with the environment, making them feel at home in the world. Polluted air obviously does not provide people with this feeling, but rather makes them insecure or even sick. This however, precisely indicates the agency of air, whether fresh or not. Air has a dynamic force of its own and makes people part of, connect to and reflect upon the environment. We thus know the world through air, and air practices may be seen as performances not merely confirming the routine knowledge of our everyday life activities but as performances that involve a knowledge-of-being and a knowledge-of-becoming, both central to our identity and development in and with the world. In short: air practices and air make us knowledgeable about the world and about our place in it.