Professor Elizabeth Keating

Because the home, if you think of it, it's a cultural repository, isn't it?

It's where ordinary life happens.

And ordinary life is something we discount all the time.

We tend to record only the big events in someone's life.

But it's ordinary life where the richness of culture and family is located.

I believe in description, describing a way of life that our audience perhaps does not know anything about.

And it's the description itself, I think, that leads to an understanding of a certain point of view that might be very, very different.

And that's another thing about an anthropological approach is to try to stand in the other person's shoes and try to understand what it might have been like to live back then.

What might it have been like to grow up in a time where ice formed on the inside of your bedroom window and you were crushed with the weight of the wool blankets and you ran down the icy stairs to the fireplace where the fire was just starting.

And these are the details, I think, that tell you of the

tremendous challenges that the older generations had, which often go completely unspoken about.