Home: The Foundations of Belonging

Paul O'Connor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780367332822
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351801928
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Questions of home and belonging have never been more topical. Populist politicians in both Europe and America play on anxieties over globalisation by promising to reconstitute the national home, through cutting immigration and 'taking back control'. Increasing numbers of young people are unable to afford home-ownership, a trend with implications for the future shape of families and communities. The dominant conceptualisations of home in the twentieth century – the nation-state and the suburban nuclear household – are in crisis, yet they continue to shape our personal and political aspirations. Home: The Foundations of Belonging puts these issues into context by drawing on a range of disciplines to offer a deep anthropological and historical perspective on home. Beginning with a vision of modernity as characterised by both spiralling liminality and an ongoing quest for belonging, it plumbs the archaic roots of Western civilisation and assembles a wide body of comparative anthropological evidence to illuminate the foundations of a sense of home. Home is theorised as a stable centre around which we organise both everyday routines and perspectives on reality, bringing order to a chaotic world and overcoming liminality. Constituted by a set of ongoing processes which concentrate and embody meaning in intimate relationships, everyday rituals and familiar places, a shared home becomes the foundation for community and society. The Foundations of Belonging thus elevates 'home' to the position of a foundational sociological and anthropological concept at a moment when the crisis of globalisation has opened the way to a revaluation of the local.

1
Antaeus and Hercules

Crossing the Libyan sands on his quest for the Garden of Hesperides, Hercules encountered Antaeus – earth-born, son of Gaia, a giant who dwelt in an underground cave and whose custom it was to challenge all comers to a wrestling match, the loser of which would to forfeit their life. Hercules accepted the challenge, but each time he threw Antaeus and seemed on the verge of victory, the giant would rise up with renewed vigour. For he drew endless strength from his mother, the earth, and so long as he remained in contact with her he was invincible. At last Hercules grappled Antaeus in a bear-hug and, lifting him from his feet, held him suspended. Separated from his native ground, the giant weakened, his struggles fading as Hercules crushed his ribs into his liver and drove the life from his body.

Hercules roams the world as the sun roams the heavens, while Antaeus is rooted firmly in his place. Hercules extends the frontiers of civilisation, killing monsters, wild beasts and wild men. Antaeus lives in the desert, obeying no law but his own. Hercules has the aid of Athena, the goddess of wisdom and craft, who suggested the stratagem by which his adversary was defeated. Antaeus’ advantage lies in his home ground, his stubborn resistance. Hercules overcomes him by separating him from the source of his vitality – his connection to root and rock, to unfathomed origins, to his native earth. Holding Antaeus aloft, he thrusts him into no-place. Anticipating all those bearers of global civilisation who would come after him, he severs his victim from the anchors of his identity, consigning him to a liminal space where the self dissolves amid dreams of loss. It is by forcing Antaeus out of his world, his home, that Hercules is victorious.

Yet accounts of the legend in the ancient sources are tantalisingly brief. Hercules cannot stand forever holding the corpse of Antaeus to the sky. What happens after the victor leaves? When the giant’s body is returned to his native ground, does renewed life seep into his veins? Surely it is so. For Antaeus represents something more enduring than civilisation, more elemental than the globe-trotting Hercules: a strength born from the womb of earth, the slow sediment of time, and the anchorage of home ground. We may imagine months and years of slow healing, as bones knit, sinews become taut and wasted flesh grows flush with health, until the giant rises. And Hercules – having journeyed to the limit of the world and found his hunger unappeased, and plucked the apples of immortality only for them to turn into ashes in his mouth – returning that way again, to find Antaeus waiting, in the fullness of his strength, rock-hewn, mountainous, indomitable.

The sacred centre

The myth of Antaeus and Hercules is a parable of globalisation and of that which preceded it and will survive it: rootedness, belonging, home. Precisely because it is foundational, the importance of home has tended to be overlooked in social theory. Over the past two centuries, countless words have been written on the subject of our alienation from each other and from society. But about the opposite of alienation – the experience of being at home – sociologists have written comparatively little. ‘Given the fundamental importance of “home” for human life, its almost complete absence from social and political thought is quite surprising indeed’ (Szakolczai, 2008: 61). Partly this is because it is the very essence of home to be taken for granted. Jan Duyvendak writes: ‘while everyone initially agrees that we know what it is to feel at home, the moment we have to describe what it means to us, we begin to stutter’ (2011: 27). Home embodies those relationships, values, customs, practices and ideas which give shape and order to our experience precisely because they are unquestioned. The foundations of social life lie not in rational consensus but in shared patterns of behaviour which are barely conscious and hardly articulated. We tend not to be aware of them until they are challenged or break down. By contrast, the condition of possibility of intellectual speculation is often a situation ‘in which the taken for granted order has collapsed and where individuals, especially those most sensitive intellectually and spiritually … have lost their home’ (Szakolczai, 2008: 61). Hence social theory – preoccupied by modernity and social change – has generally overlooked the importance of home. Globalisation and the world of ‘liquid’ and thin experience has been taken as the norm rather than the exception. Change has been elevated over stability, the extraordinary over the routine, novelty over continuity, liminal spaces over the places they connect.

Instead, we must begin in the middle, with a ‘search for the fundamental background practices of human culture’ (Ibid: 61). This means starting from home. Most of what has been written in the social sciences on the topic of home has focused on specifically modern forms of belonging, such as nationalism or domesticity. The argument of this book is that home relates to a more general, indeed universal, category of experience. Home, at any geographic level from the household to the nation, is a stable centre from which we integrate our experience and understand our world. This is reflected even in the hypermodern lexicon of information technology. Our ‘home page’ organises our experience of the World Wide Web, preserves the memory of our online lives in the form of records of past searches or favourite websites, and reflects our identity and preferences in its contents and recommended news stories or links. What our home page is to our virtual existence, home is to our embodied lives.

In Navajo legend, when the First People emerged from the underworld they found the earth barren and unshaped. There were neither plants nor mountains, sun, moon nor stars. Their first task was to mould the earth and make it liveable. First Man and First Woman decided they needed a home, a place in which to meet the other Holy People and plan the order of the world. So they built the first Hogan, the Navajo house. It was round like the face of the sun, and each pole was dedicated to one of the gods of the four directions. Its supports were made of precious stones and its roof-covering of sunbeams and rainbows. The floor was a rug made of jet, abalone, turquoise and white shell, and the curtain of the doorway was woven from dawn, the sky blue of midday, evening twilight and darkness. To bless their Hogan, First Woman ground the corn she had carried up from the underworld and First Man placed a pinch of it at each of the four cardinal directions (Monroe & Williamson, 1993).

The first Hogan is both a house, a dwelling place for the First People, and a cosmion, a little world which embodies the order of the cosmos in miniature. This is often the case with the houses of traditional peoples. The Ainu consider their house to be a miniature universe (Ohnuki-Tierney, 1972: 426). In the Pawnee earth lodge, ‘the floor is the plain, the wall the distant horizon, the dome the arching sky, and the central opening the zenith, the dwelling of the invisible power’ (Rapoport, 1969: 52). The house of the Ye’cuana people in Guiana is an exact replica of the universe. The ground level is equated with the sea and the earth and the conical roof with the upper and lower sky, represented by two different types of thatch. The main transverse roof beam runs north-south and corresponds to the Milky Way, and the twelve outer posts are called ‘star supports’ (Riviére, 1995: 195). Among the Tukanoans of North West Amazonia, a people whose lives are orientated by the rivers which provide their road through the jungle, the floor of the longhouse is the earth and its posts are mountains which support the sky. Down the centre runs an invisible river on whose banks and tributaries the people live (Hugh-Jones, 1995: 233–234). A traditional house in Madagascar is divided into twelve sections corresponding to the twelve lunar months (Rapoport, 1969: 55). In archaic societies a house or village was an image of the cosmos, which expressed the existential experience of being situated in an organised and meaningful world (Eliade, 1976: 25).

All of these traditions encode a deep wisdom – the recognition that home is where the world of experience takes on coherent form. To be at home is to be embedded in a dense pattern of relationships to people and place which produces an inherently meaningful experience of the world. This order is neither abstract nor imposed from without, but crystallises from the shared experience of people inhabiting a concrete location. Mircea Eliade writes that ‘every territory occupied for the purpose of being inhabited … is first of all transformed from chaos into cosmos’ (1974: 11). When Scandinavian colonists took possession of Iceland and began to cultivate it, they saw their work as a repetition of the creation: ‘By cultivating the desert soil, they in fact repeated the act of the gods, who organized chaos by giving it forms and norms’ (Ibid: 10). For the Romans the foundation of a city was a religious act which required the approval of the heavens, and the layout and orientation of their towns mirrored the order of the cosmos made visible by the daily motion of the sun (Rykwert, 1976). In each case, people saw themselves as repeating the creative work of the gods, following patterns of order inherent in reality itself.

Shared participation in this ongoing process of ‘cosmicisation’ is the bedrock of community. Home is a place where we collectively make sense of our experience, in the process forging a deep bond based on common understandings and shared lifeways. Home therefore embodies some of our most basic human longings: the desire for meaning, for experience to cohere and make sense, lending us purpose and direction; and the hunger for community, for the warmth of recognition, to feel part of something greater than ourselves. This is why a threat to home is frequently experienced as an existential threat to the self, and why people will fight and die to preserve it. Hercules can kill Antaeus a thousand times, even dismember his body and scatter the fragments to the four winds; given enough time Antaeus will reconstitute himself and live again, for home is not something constructed once-and-for-all and then irrecoverably lost, but something we make continually, over and again, through the activities of everyday life.

The work of cosmicisation requires a stable place from which to start, a centre around which to organise itself. This may be a physical place, such as a dwelling house, a townland, or the more expansive territory in which a band of nomads circulate, or a complex of emotional relationships, habitual practices and institutional settings which continue to organise a person’s universe as they migrate spatially. As O. F. Bollnow writes, lived space ‘arranges itself around a determining center, which is conditioned by … place of residence’ (1961: 32). It is for this reason that ancient civilisations situated themselves symbolically at the summit of the cosmic mountain where earth and heaven meet, the heart and centre of creation.

As a result, house, neighbourhood and city are not merely places we live in – we live through them, because they serve to embody the organising principles of our world. Home ‘is a central point of existence and individual identity from which you look out on the rest of the world’ (Relph, 1976: 83). It serves to anchor and orientate its inhabitants, thereby becoming integral to their identity (Casey, 1993: 23). By contrast, ‘To lack a primal place is to be “homeless” indeed, not only in the literal sense of having no permanently sheltering structure but also as being without any effective means of orientation in a complex and confusing world’ (Relph, 1976: xv).

More than just a fixed point in geographical space, home is therefore a centre of value. As Bachelard writes (1994: 171), ‘For the imagination … the world gravitates about a value’. In a familiar space, we do not orientate ourselves by the gridlines on the map, but according to emotional centres of attraction or repulsion. Home is usually the most potent such centre of value in our world. Bourdieu’s study of the Kabyle house shows how the spatial organisation of the home and the objects within, and the routine activities which took place there, formed part of a symbolic system which embodied the values of the entire society (Bourdieu, 1979). Modern housing, on the other hand, it has been said, is characterised by ‘the loss of a shared image of the good life and its values’ (Rapoport, 1969: 126). But surely it is just such an image, albeit heavily commoditised, which is present in the suburban ‘ideal home’ or the country retreat?

To speak of home as the centre from which we integrate our experience might seem to make of it something abstract and intangible, but home is always both concrete and particular. The ‘forms and norms’ mentioned by Eliade (1974: 10) are not experienced as abstract concepts, but embodied in the physical layout of houses and towns, in the placement of objects, in daily routines and periodic rituals. The value embodied in a house, a neighbourhood or a city is derived from concrete acts and relationships: the work we put into cultivating our homeplace, the crystallisation of lifeways and traditions, the accumulation of individual and collective memories, circles of gift-giving and recognition, and shared existential experiences such as birth and death, sex and childbirth, the nurture of children and partaking of meals. Home is woven from such threads of connection, and – crucially – it draws them tight rather than allowing value to be dissipated through decentred networks of mediated relations. Home fuses time and space in a unique chronotope – to borrow a term from Bakhtin (1988) – which combines temporal depth with the ability to ‘magnetise’ experiences and absorb them into the pattern of significance it embodies. Because of this concentration and intensification of value, home is a ‘thick’ world of meaning, in contrast to the ‘thin’ world of globalised and rationalised systems.

Because home is a concentrated centre of value, it appears more ‘real’ than other places. By contrast, a world which has not been cosmicised can seem less than real (Berger, 1984). Separated and disconnected facts or experiences, which we cannot fit into a pattern or assimilate to ourselves, have a character of unreality, whereas a world that is intimately related to ourselves and our loved ones and infused with their presence is concrete and vivid. For Mircea Eliade (1959), the sacred is that which is most intensely real. Charles Eisenstein writes of the sacred that it has two aspects: uniqueness and relatedness.

A sacred object or being is one that is special, unique, one of a kind… . It has no equivalent, and thus no finite ‘value,’ for value can only be determined by comparison… . Unique though it is, the sacred is nonetheless inseparable from all that went into making it, from its history, and from the place it occupies in the matrix of all being.

(2011: 8)

Home embodies these characteristics of the sacred, and has been regarded as such in almost every culture, with the household cult of ancestors one of the most widespread forms of religious practice. It is a sacred centre, the point of most intense reality from which we order our world.

Local contexts

Home is produced by localisation, the process by which social life anchors itself in local contexts, including physical places and intimate circles of relationship. These serve as centres around which the elements of social life crystalise, coagulate and accumulate. As relationships, practices and meanings become attached to such contexts, they are endowed with a coherence which is pre-logical and based on geographic propinquity or shared identity. Localisation therefore evolves a tight-knit matrix of relationship, practice, identity and locale: a coherent world of meaning which is experienced as home. Moreover, as new relationships are formed or novel practices develop, they can be assimilated to this matrix and stamped with its character. Home is therefore not a fixed structure, static and frozen, which shuts out the external world: it is a dynamic centre which draws in experience and gives it meaning.

We might think, for example, about the way in which an empty house is turned into a home over time. An initial cluster of relationships (say, between a couple and their infant children) is expanded to include neighbours, friends, in-laws and grandchildren. A body of everyday habits and family traditions associated with the house grows up, from gathering around the table for Sunday roast to putting out the garden furniture at the start of summer. As time goes by, memories hang thicker in every room, and the depth of meaning in the house, and in the objects, relationships and practices associated with it, accumulates. What is important to recognise is how a local context of action – the house – structures, preserves, and gives coherence to the life that unfolds within. Separated from that context, the relationships between family members would be looser, their routines less intertwined, their collective memory unanchored, their collection of shared experiences and meanings less substantial. This effect becomes stronger the longer the association between house and family endures. Consequently, the temporal continuity and stability of such local contexts of action is crucial for their ability to act as the foundations of home.

Such contexts operate most powerfully when physical propinquity and social identity overlap. In the previous example, there is a second context of action alongside the house, namely the family, which likewise structures, preserves and renders coherent the elements of social life it contains. So long as they are co terminous, house and family mutually reinforce each other and help define each other’s identity. The house, inhabited by a random group of lodgers, would lose much of its power to shape the life within; the family, void of physical propinquity, would be less able to direct the day-to-day activity of its members. It is when social identity becomes bound up with physical place and this relation persists through time that the effects of localisation are most powerful.

Localisation embraces a cluster of interrelated processes whose elucidation comprises the core of this book. These processes generate local contexts of social action by weaving together relationships, practices and meanings to create a milieu which is particular, bounded and unique. Place-making (Chapter 3) describes the way in which different elements of social life become bound up with a physical locale, generating a distinctive setting which has the ability to assimilate new elements and stamp them with its character. Collective memory (Chapter 4) is the memory of a social group, which attaches itself to places, buildings, landscapes and objects as well as being preserved in narrative and ritual. This generates a dimension of ‘primordial depth’ in which diverse elements of the past can be forged into a narrative that underpins the identity of the group and provides a specific and unique context for their collective existence. The enactment of tradition (Chapter 5) binds together traditional practices and the specific places, occasions and social groups with which they are associated to generate a localised context for social life. The inscription of symbolic boundaries (Chapter 8) creates a distinct context of action through the association of a particular locale or territory with a social group.

The remaining three processes generate local contexts in ways that rely more on face-to-face relations than on the accumulation of meaning in physical spaces or habitual practices. Commensal bonding (Chapter 6) is founded on shared participation in the processes which reproduce and sustain biological life; in contrast to contractual bonds, which operate between individuals who remain separate legal abstractions, commensal bonding involves a blending of the very substance of the self. Such bonds establish a context of biological or fictive kinship that in turn provides a framework in which the different elements of social life can anchor themselves. Gift exchange and recognition (Chapter 7) are two interlocking processes by which a similar nexus of relationships is created and sustained, providing a matrix to which other relationships, practices and meanings can be assimilated.

But what is the local? Savage et al. (2005) review and critique a variety of definitions. They note that one of the most basic ways of construing the local is as context. But, they ask, what does this mean when globalisation theory argues that social relationships are now stretched over space and organised through flows and forms of movement? I would suggest that the local is a specific form of context: one which is immediate, bounded a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Antaeus and Hercules
• 2 The web of meaning
• 3 The cultivation of place
• 4 The landscape of memory
• 5 Habits of home
• 6 A sacred economy
• 7 Gifting and recognition
• 8 The boundaries of home
• 9 Parish and province
• Conclusion: the future of home
• Bibliography
• Index