Around the turn of the twenty-first century, historians and sociologists began to acknowledge the active incorporation of artifacts and systems into consumers’ and users’ lives. In this chapter, I use the phrase “We did it ourselves” as the starting point for nudging History of Technology, as a field, toward a stronger focus on repair and maintenance activities, and toward the reality of collective work. Hardware stores and tool manufacturers happily supported their endeavors.
By and large, however, these men carried out the work themselves, in their own homes. Residents certainly discussed various solutions with their neighbors, and they informed themselves by consulting manuals and hobby magazines such as Popular Mechanics. In the US suburbs, DIY was an individual practice. Footnote 5 According to Gelber’s interpretation, especially married male homeowners took pride in carrying out minor repairs and undertaking renovation work in their own houses. Gelber argues that “by the end of the 1950s the very term ‘do-it-yourself’ would become part of the definition of suburban husbanding,” especially in the United States. Although the phenomenon is as old as humanity, historian Steven M. Footnote 4 In all societies where people have not been able to find-or to afford-professional assistance, they had little choice but to solve technical problems independently. Historians of technology have investigated the DIY phenomenon in domains like home improvement, hobbyism, and computer design. In Soviet times, this was fashionable-in Russian villages, as well.” Footnote 2Īs a concept, “Do-It-Yourself,” abbreviated as DIY, is known to many readers.
If anything, the girls’ parents were even less interested than their grandfather was in investing time and money in the upkeep of the family home: “Daddy did not build anymore it was in critical condition and began to fall apart like that.” The only maintenance they did was to whitewash the brick walls occasionally and to paint some of the outside walls and parts of the interiors: “We just used light blue. Grandpa was a lawyer who paid little attention to home repair and maintenance. Dilya and Rano’s grandfather inherited the older parts of the house, and his brother’s family moved into the newer section. After the turn of the century, he added extensions. Their great-grandfather was a wealthy Tajik merchant who bought the centrally located plot of land and commissioned a house to be built on the premises. Dilya and Rano’s house is situated in the Old Town district of Samarkand the property has been in the family since the late nineteenth century.
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