How are the worlds in which we live shaped by the ways that households are thought and made? How does the scale of the household shape the spatial and temporal scales at which we claim belonging and responsibility? And how might other understandings of humans living and working in proximity challenge these dominant conceptions? This session of Correspondences investigates how and to what effect the scale of the household is formed through finance, law, and policy, systems that rely not only on the notion of the abstract individual but also on the nuclear family, familial obligations, and the domestic realm (Guyer 1986; Yanagisako and Delaney 1994). As contributors we unite in the diversity of our theoretical approaches, commitments, and field sites to consider the ways the household matters for anthropological investigations of obligation, solidarity, and expertise.

The notion of the household suggests and enables a legibility of relations that can be understood and acted upon; households are objects of government and market expertise. Knowledge about individual and aggregate households forms the basis for social entitlements and access to financial instruments, imposing particular understandings of family and deservingness while shaping daily life in ways that are gendered and racialized. Running a household involves increasingly forward-looking practices, demanding fluency in budgeting and long-term retirement planning, all of which act upon and recruit the household into financial markets (LiPuma and Lee 2004; Stout 2016; Zaloom 2016). The contemporary mortgage, student debt, and pension crises demand anthropological attention to the ways contemporary households are formed, known, and acted upon.

If dominant forms of knowledge about the household present the nuclear family as a center of responsibility and financial planning, anthropologists must also ask how such visions of the household exclude other forms of living in proximity, and to what effects. The sense of scale and connectivity inherent to the concept of the household also points to the grooves worked into daily life by intimate ties of many kinds (Collins 1990; Glenn 1992, 2012; Ahmad 2017), including relations of slavery and servitude. How we scale the household, then, matters deeply to our studies of how relations of solidarity and inequality are formed and maintained. Investigating how households are imbricated in legal and financial systems provides a way to think and theorize the forms of inequality and solidarity that we study and live.