Oikos--domus--Household ― The Many Lives of a Common Word

O'Rourke, an independent scholar of the cultural history of social idealism, presents a study of the word "household," its history and etymology, connotations, current equivalents (home and family), and political implications such as mediating control over women and their sexuality. The household, he argues, is an ideological project of immense proportions. To show this, he examines the words for household and cognates in their concrete and symbolic contexts, assuming little or no continuity between cultures or time periods. He goes back to the ancient Greek and Roman roots of the word in the notion of the "oikos" and "domos." He also looks at post-roman developments and the rise of what he calls the household world. The last and longest section is on households in America. Annotation c2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

David K. O’Rourke writes extensively in the area of cultural history with an emphasis on the destructive power of social idealisms. Most recently he co-wrote and produced the documentary film <Red Terror on the Amber Coast, describing the Soviet’s fifty-year occupation of the Baltic Republics after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. He is the author of Demons by Definition: Social Idealism, Religious Nationalism, and the Demonizing of Dissent (Lang, 1998) and How America’s First Settlers Invented Chattel Slavery: Dehumanizing Native Americans and Africans with Language, Laws, Guns and Religion (Lang, 2005, 2009). He also writes on current issues in re-establishing the intellectual life in post-Soviet Eastern Europe.