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Understanding home: a critical review of the literature

Shelley Mallett

Abstract

In recent years there has been a proliferation of writing on the meaning of home

within the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, psychology, human geography,history, architecture and philosophy. Although many researchers now understandhome as a multidimensional concept and acknowledge the presence of and needfor multidisciplinary research in the field, there has been little sustained reflectionand critique of the multidisciplinary field of home research and the diverse,even contradictory meanings of this term. This paper brings together and examinesthe dominant and recurring ideas about home represented in the relevant theoret-ical and empirical literature. It raises the question whether or not home is (a)place(s), (a) space(s), feeling(s), practices, and/or an active state of state of beingin the world? Home is variously described in the literature as conflated with orrelated to house, family, haven, self, gender, and journeying. Many authors alsoconsider notions of being-at-home, creating or making home and the ideal home.In an effort to facilitate interdisciplinary conversations about the meaning andexperience of home each of these themes are briefly considered in this critical lit-erature review.

Home

n. 1. The place or a place where one lives: have you no home to go to?2. a house or other dwelling.3. a family or other group living in a house or other place.4. a person’s country, city, esp. viewed as a birthplace, a residence during

one’s early years, or a place dear to one.5. the environment or habitat of a person or animal.6. the place where something is invented, founded or developed: the US is

the home of baseball.

7.a. a building or organization set up to care for orphans, the aged etc b. aninformal name for a mental home.

12. a home from home a place other than one’s own home where one canbe at ease.

14. at home in, on, or with. familiar or conversant with.

© The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2004. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.,9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, 02148, USA.


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25. bring home to. a. to make clear to. b. to place the blame on(Collins English Dictionary, 1979: 701)

Introduction: dream home

Sometimes when I am lying in bed at night awake and restless I play a gameto induce sleep. I imagine all the houses I have lived in since I was born.My imaginary journeys invariably begin and end with a stroll throughmy childhood home – a place that I lived in for the first 18 years of my life,a place my family left nearly 20 years ago. Starting at the front door I proceedthrough all the rooms in the house. As I walk I try to remember the housefittings and furnishings in each room. Memories of my early life, ourfamily life, flood back to me as I move through the space. These memories

show no respect for chronological time. Nor do they come with an accompa-nying autobiographical narrative. A certain equality prevails in this remem-bered world. Eventful moments in my family life hold equal sway with themundane activities of domestic life. More recently these imaginary journeyshave taken me to places beyond our house, to our street, and the park acrossthe road. Sometimes I see myself playing with friends and neighbours, goingto kindergarten, catching the train to school, and walking along the pier or onthe sand at the local beach. I observe myself in these places, but mostly theplaces and me seem as one. Are these happy memories? Perhaps they are best

described as benign. Here in this imaginary terrain painful memories areleached of their power. I feel comfortable and secure. I am at home. Sleepcomes quickly.

Wide awake, poised to write a theoretical reflection on home, it struck methat these nighttime experiences mirror many of the ways home is defined anddiscussed in the relevant literature. My journeys inflect ideas of home inte-gral to the modern Anglo-European imaginary. In this realm, at once personaland social, house and home are related but not conflated. The birth familyhouse holds symbolic power as a formative dwelling place, a place of originand return, a place from which to embark upon a journey. This house ordwelling accommodates home but home is not necessarily confined tothis place. The boundaries of home seemingly extend beyond its walls to theneighborhood, even the suburb, town or city. Home is place but it is also aspace inhabited by family, people, things and belongings – a familiar, if notcomfortable space where particular activities and relationships are lived. Inmy account home is a virtual place, a repository for memories of the livedspaces. It locates lived time and space, particularly intimate familial time andspace.

Thankfully my nighttime recollections are not burdened by the need toprovide a comprehensive account of contemporary meanings of home. Sleepwould be elusive if that were the case! Absent in my story, yet present in thediverse multi-disciplinary research literature, is the idea of home as home-

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land, the land of one’s forebears. While memories of home are often nostal-gic and sentimental, home is not simply recalled or experienced in positiveways. My reflection, however, provides no sense of home as a space of tyranny,oppression or persecution. Equally, the relationship between home, gender,ethnicity and sexuality are overlooked.

In the following paper I review and critically reflect on these and otherways home is understood and discussed in the literature. Research on themeaning and experience of home has proliferated over the past two decades,particularly within the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, psychology,human geography, history, architecture and philosophy. This expansion of thefield followed several key conferences on home and the publication of anumber of edited collections (Gurney, 1997). Many researchers now under-stand home as a multidimensional concept and acknowledge the presence of and need for multidisciplinary research in the field. However, with the excep-

tion of two exemplary articles by Després (1991) and Somerville (1997) fewhave translated this awareness into genuinely, interdisciplinary studies of themeaning of home.1 Instead researchers generally limit their analyses to par-ticular dimensions of home – typically those aspects that routinely fall withintheir own disciplinary orbit. They explore similar issues about home yet speakin their own disciplinary voice, often confining their discussion to interestedresearchers in their own discipline. Where criticism is leveled at research inthe field it generally focuses on the efficacy and political implications of par-ticular theoretical and methodological approaches used to understand the

meaning of home. This should not surprise us because as Saunders andWilliams write:

Precisely because the home touches so centrally on our personal lives, anyattempt to develop a dispassionate social scientific analysis inevitablystimulates emotional and deeply fierce argument and disagreement. Thehome is a major political background – for feminists, who see it in the cru-cible of gender domination; for liberals, who identify it with personalautonomy and a challenge to state power; for socialists, who approach it asa challenge to collective life and the ideal of a planned and egalitariansocial order. (1988: 91)

It is the task of this paper to bring together and examine the dominant andrecurring ideas about home represented in the literature. This is not a reduc-tive exercise aimed at reconciling disparate dimensions of or disciplinaryperspectives on home. Nor is it my intention to produce a definitive interdis-ciplinary approach to the study of home. My intentions are more modest. Thisproject is designed to promote conversation about home in the literature andfacilitate discussion between the disciplines that both reflects and accommo-dates people’s complex and diverse lived experience of home. Of course thereare elisions in my own analysis of the field. Most obvious among them is myregrettable lack of discussion of the cross-cultural perspectives on home, place

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and space. Although important, these perspectives fall beyond the scope of this paper.2

The question then remains, how is home understood, defined and describedacross the relevant theoretical and empirical literature? This question invokesanother that is central to, although not always explicitly stated in, discussion

and recurring debates about the meaning of home in the literature. Is home(a) place(s), (a) space(s), feeling(s), practices, and/or an active state of stateof being in the world? Home is variously described as conflated with or relatedto house, family, haven, self, gender, and journeying. Many authors also con-sider notions of being-at-home, creating or making home and the ideal home.In an effort to reflect the multi-dimensional nature of home each of thesethemes are briefly considered below.

House and home

Many researchers have examined the etymology of the word home as part of a broader agenda to examine the historical antecedents of the term. In anexpansive essay on the uses of the term in particular Western languages,Hollander (1991) notes that the Germanic words for home, Heim, ham, heem,are derived from the Indo-European kei meaning lying down and somethingdear or beloved. In other words, it means something like a place to lay one’shead. He suggests that the German word for house, thought of as a building

where people live, or a dwelling place for a family, is imbued with the senseof home (see also Rykwert, 1991).

In English, the term ‘home’ derives from the Anglo-Saxon word ham,meaning village, estate or town (Hollander, 1991). Berger (1984: 55) notesthat with the seventeenth century rise of the bourgeoisie, ‘two kinds of moral-ists’ have subsequently displaced this meaning of the term. The concept of homeland was appropriated by the ruling classes to promote a form of nation-alism and patriotism aimed at protecting and preserving their land, wealth andpower. At the same time the idea of home became the focal point for a formof ‘domestic morality’ aimed at safeguarding familial property, includingestates, women and children. Rykwert (1991: 53) notes that the associationbetween house and home was consolidated in English case law in the early17th century by the Jacobean Judge, Sir Edward Coke. The judge declared,‘The house of everyman is to him as his castle and fortresse, as well as hisdefense against injury and violence, as for his repose’ (Rykwert, 1991: 53).Later simplified in the nineteenth century to ‘The Englishmen’s house is hiscastle’ (53), this phrase was popularly appropriated to define and describehome as a haven which comprises both house and surrounding land.

Many authors assert that contemporary Anglo-European, Anglo-American or more broadly white Western conceptions of home privilege aphysical structure or dwelling, such as a house, flat, institution or caravan(Bowlby et al ., 1997: 344; Giddens, 1984). It is a place where space and time

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are controlled and ‘structured functionally, economically, aesthetically andmorally’ and where domestic ‘communitarian practices’ are realized (Rapportand Dawson, 1998: 6; Douglas, 1991). House and home are often conflated inthe popular media, typically as a means of selling real estate and promoting‘home’ ownership. While the building and real estate industries clearly gain

from a community’s valorization of home ownership, so too do governmentswith particular social agendas. In fact, as some researchers note, governmentsof advanced capitalist countries such as Britain, Australia, Canada and NewZealand have actively promoted the conflation of house, home and family aspart of a broader ideological agenda aimed at increasing economic efficiencyand growth. These governments have attempted to shift the burden of respon-sibility for citizens’ welfare away from the state and its institutions on to thehome and nuclear family (Madigan et al ., 1990; Dupuis and Thorns, 1998).Theexpansion of the middle classes that occurred during the 1950’s and 1960’s

and the global economic downturn of the late 1970’s are cited as some of thereasons for the re-structuring of economies and welfare states that hasoccurred in these countries over the past two to three decades. As a conse-quence of this restructuring in these contexts, owner occupied housing hasincreased, public housing has decreased and housing tenure has increasinglyfeatured in the meaning of home.3 As Madigan et al . (1990) indicate, the lit-erature on the significance of home ownership variously argues that it is asource of personal identity and status and/or a source of personal and famil-ial security (Dupuis and Thorns, 1996). It can also provide a sense of place

and belonging in an increasingly alienating world.In attempting to elucidate the relationship between house and home many

researchers, particularly architects and historians, have examined the waysdesign, spatial organization, and furnishings of domestic dwellings influenceand inflect concepts and/or ideologies of the home.4 Research of this kind ispremised on at least two inter-related ideas. First, most authors uncriticallyconflate house and home. Second, they assert that the spatial organization of domestic dwellings both influences and reflects forms of sociality associatedwith and/or peculiar to any given cultural and historical context. In otherwords, household designs, furnishings and technologies constrain or facilitatecultural and historical modes of relating between the people who share thesespaces.

A prominent example of this kind of research is the architect, WitoldRybczynski’s (1986) book , Home: A Short History of an Idea. Rybczynskiexamines historical and cultural ideas of home especially as they are inflectedthrough the design of American and European houses, household furnishingsand technologies since the Middle Ages and particularly from the seventeenthcentury onwards. He asserts that during the seventeenth century ideas aboutprivacy, domesticity, intimacy and comfort emerged as organizing principlesfor the design and use of domestic spaces among the bourgeoisie, particularlyin the Netherlands.5 These ideas gradually took hold in other parts of Europeand among other classes as the widespread social change heralded by the

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industrial revolution effected the constitution of households and participationin and organization of work. Of course how these ideas were manifestaesthetically varied according to social, cultural and historical contexts. Theaesthetics themselves also reflected culturally and historically specific ideasabout home. The ideas about privacy, intimacy, domesticity and comfort that

Rybczynski identifies, are also prominent and recurring themes in contempo-rary analyses of the meaning of home.

Ideal house/home

The relationship between house and home has also been examined in exten-sive research on the notion of the ideal home or house (Chapman and Hockey,1999a; Wright, 1991). Typically focusing on physical structures, this body of

work both reflects and perpetuates common ideas about the ideal home inAnglo-American and Australian contexts. Although the notion of an ‘idealhome’ is problematized in this work, the authors who address this issue con-tinue to privilege the relationship between house and home, de-emphasizingother idealised meanings of home. For example Porteous (1976) states thatindependent studies conducted in Australia, Britain and the United States onnotions of the ideal home reveal that people from diverse backgroundsexpress a consistent preference for a free-standing house with a yard andoccupied by a single family (see also Cieraad, 1999). Some of the social, his-

torical and political antecedents of this aspiration are explored in an editedcollection, Ideal homes?: Social change and domestic life (Chapman andHockey, 1999a), that reflects on past and present models of the ideal home inBritain (see also Chapman and Hockey, 1999b; Hepworth, 1999; Brindley,1999; Chapman, 1999). Reflecting on the 1995 British Ideal Home Exhibition,a version of the home shows that occur in many large Western cities, the col-lection’ s editors, Chapman and Hockey (1999b), draw attention to the manip-ulative marketing techniques employed by the exhibition designers. Showvisitors walked through sub-standard mockups of yester-year houses to finallyarrive at a fully and luxuriously furnished, brick house of the future. The ex-hibition Guide booklet emphasized the inadequate design features of thehistorical houses, drawing attention to house designs and technologies thatimpacted on people’s comfort, privacy, security and budget.The narrative alsoincluded descriptions of negative, even calamitous, social events contempo-raneous with each historical house. In contrast, descriptions of the house of tomorrow were overwhelmingly positive.

Interested in the forces that influence people’s perceptions of, and desirefor the ideal home, the authors note that ideas about home are not simplyshaped by the interests of capital and the manufacturers’ marketing depart-ments. Rather they assert that people’s personal and familial experiences aswell as significant social change, influence their perceived needs and desiresin relation to house design. Changing patterns of employment, particularly

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the organization and location of work, together with shifts in the distributionof wealth, transformations in peoples’ ideas about community, family, eventhe good life, all impact on the notion of the ideal home. Even so people havevery limited choice about the design of their houses. Whether they build a newhome or live in an established dwelling their choices are constrained by cul-

tural and economic factors as well as developers, architects, urban planners,politicians, engineers and builders, interior designers all of whom have theirown ideas about what is a desirable, appropriate and acceptable living space(Chapman and Hockey, 1999b: 5; Shove, 1999).

The association between home and the physical dwelling or house is com-monly acknowledged in the relevant interdisciplinary literature, with somesocial researchers arguing that such a conflation reductively represents homeas one-dimensional (Douglas, 1991; Rapport and Dawson, 1998; Porteous,1976). As noted earlier, researchers routinely claim that home is a multi-

dimensional concept or a multi-layered phenomenon (Bowlby et al ., 1997;Wardaugh, 1999; Somerville, 1992). As such, the physical dwelling or shelteris described as simply one aspect of home. Moreover, it is generally recog-nized that the relationships between the terms house and home must be estab-lished in varying cultural and historical contexts.

As part of a broader attempt to define home and clarify the relationshipbetween home and physical shelter, Saunders and Williams (1988), forexample, distinguish between house, home and household. Home is conceivedby these authors as a locale which, following Giddens (1984), they define as

‘simultaneously and indivisibly a spatial and a social unit of interaction’ (82).It is the physical ‘setting through which basic forms of social relations andsocial institutions are constituted and reproduced’ (82). As such home is a‘socio-spatial system’ that represents the fusion of the physical unit or houseand the social unit or household. While rejecting any form of environmentalor physical determinism the authors argue that the physical aspects of thehome, including the location, design, and size of the home, ‘both enable andconstrain’ different relationships and patterns of action’ (82).

Like Pahl (1984: 20), Saunders and Williams (1988) argue that the house-hold, rather than the individual, is the most ‘basic economic unit’ throughwhich the relationships of production and consumption can be analyzed.Although it is the ‘core domestic unit’ of society, the household should not beconflated with the family as the ‘kinship system has arguably declined in sig-nificance as a structuring principle of social life’ (82). As such they stress thatthere are many and varied household types. In this social constructionist for-mulation, the home ‘is the crucible of the social system’ (85) representing avital interface between society and the individual. It is invested with diversecultural meanings that differ within and between households and acrosscultural and social settings. Within households, gender and age are the ‘keydimensions’ that differentiate household members’ perception of the meaningof home. Geographical factors, especially residential location, together withissues such as class, ethnicity and housing tenure, explain some of the varia-

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tions in the meaning of home that exists between households (Saunders andWilliams, 1988; Saunders, 1989).

By developing a theoretical approach to the meaning of home that neitherconflates home with house or family, Saunders and Williams (1988) remind usof the need to develop a complex view of home that takes into account the

interaction between place and social relationships. However, as Somerville(1989) argues in a wide-ranging critique of their work, the proposed rela-tionship between house and household in Saunders and Williams’ formula-tion of home is highly problematic. He takes issue with both their underlyingconcept of society as an atomistic entity comprising ‘basic units’ and theirunderstanding of culture as discrete and autonomous. Somerville (1989)argues that empirical evidence suggests that it is ‘far from obvious’ that homeis ‘necessarily or always’ a fusion of house and household (114). In makingthis argument he points to the fact that there are many institutional contexts

where the term home is invoked (e.g., home for the aged) in which the notionof household simply does not apply. Moreover he asserts that even if we wereto accept that the notion of household is a useful construct in defining home(see Jones, 2000), Saunders and Williams offer no theoretical explanation of the mutually constitutive relationship between these so called physical andsocial units of interaction and their role in the reproduction of social action.This critique could be usefully extended to most of those who write on theideal home.

Between the real and the ideal, the actual and remembered home

References to the symbolic potency of the ideal or idealized home recurthroughout home literature. For example, Tucker (1994) suggests that ‘mostpeople spend their lives in search of home, at the gap between the natural home [conceived as the home environment conducive to human existence, i.e.dry land] and the particular ideal home where they would be fully fulfilled’.This may be a confused search, a sentimental and nostalgic journey for a losttime and space. It may also be a religious pilgrimage or ‘search for a PromisedLand.’ One’s ‘actual home tends to be our best approximation of our idealhome, under a given set of constraining circumstances’ (184).

Discussion of the ideal home generally focuses on nostalgic or romanticnotions of home. Critics of the ideal home reject exclusively positive descrip-tions and assessments of home as naive expressions of false consciousness thatdo not reflect people’s diverse experience and understanding of home. In sodoing they appeal to and inscribe a valorized notion of the real home. In otherwords the real and ideal home are established as oppositional terms. Thosewho promote the ideal home are thought to have a diminished grasp of realityor the real.

This approach is at odds with the views of researchers such as Somerville(1992) and Jackson (1995) and Rapport and Dawson (1998). Somerville

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(1992) argues that the concepts of home as ideal and home as reality are inte-gral to the social construction of this term. Writing from a phenomenologicalperspective Jackson (1995) writes that home ‘is always lived as a relationship,a tension. . . . [L]like any word we use to cover a particular field of experience,[home] always begets its own negation. . . . [It] may evoke security in one

context and seem confining in another’ (122–3). Although they write on homefrom quite different theoretical perspectives both authors promote a way of understanding home that holds ideas of the real and the ideal, or the real andthe imagined in tension rather than opposition. Accordingly the real and theideal are not pure and distinct concepts or domains. They are mutually defin-ing concepts and experiences.

It is an approach that resonates with Doreen Massey’s (1992, 1994) discus-sion of place, home, and memory. Massey writes that there is ‘no single simple“authenticity” – a unique eternal truth of an (actual or imagined/remembered)

place or home – to be used as a reference either now or in the past’ (1994:119). Place is constituted by the particular social relations that occur in a spe-cific location, the social effects that arise in this interaction and its ‘positiveinterrelations with elsewhere’ or outside (1992: 13). By its very nature then theidentity of a place is ‘provisional’ or in flux. The boundaries of place and/orhome are permeable and unstable. Equally, places have no fixed or essentialpast. The identity and meaning of a place must be constructed and negotiated.However this does not mean that there is no role for remembering or thatremembering will always be a counter-productive, nostalgic longing for some-

thing to be as it was in an idealized past. Rather, Massey suggests, followingHooks (1991), that remembering, even memories of the traditional can beimportant for they ‘illuminate and transform the present’ (Hooks, 1991: 147;Massey, 1992: 14). It is a point that is reinforced by Rapport and Dawson (1998:8) who argue that home encompasses ‘cultural norms and individual fantasies’.‘Home brings together memory and longing, the ideational, the affective andthe physical, the spatial and the temporal, the local and the global, the posi-tively evaluated and the negatively’ (see also Saunders, 1989).

Some who write on home and memory suggest that people’s home histo-ries, including their tenure in any given home, are crucial to their under-standing of the meaning of home (Perkins and Thorns, 2000; Giulani, 1991)and their view of the ideal home. Others suggest that the relationship betweenhome and memory is complex and fluid, and must take account of the signi-ficance of home experiences and memories at various stages of the life cycle(Csikszentmihályi and Rochberg-Halton, 1981) and in varying kinship andhousehold configurations (Armstrong, 1993; Somerville, 1997).

Home as haven

Home is often described in the literature as a haven or refuge. It is depictedas a place and/or space where people can retreat and relax (Moore, 1984).

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This understanding of home is founded on several related ideas, most obviousamong them, the distinction between public and private, and the inside andoutside world (Wardaugh, 1999; Altman and Werner, 1985). According to thisdichotomy the inside or enclosed domain of the home represents a comfort-able, secure and safe space (Dovey, 1985). It is a confined space. Some say it

is a feminine space, yet others dismiss this idea as simplistic. In contrast, theoutside is perceived as an imposing, if not threatening or dangerous space. Itis more diffuse, less defined. Different performative expectations exist forpeople in this outside space. There are different rules of engagement withpeople, places and things.

Related to this view of home, as a refuge is the idea that it is a private,often familial realm clearly differentiated from public space and removedfrom public scrutiny and surveillance. The public sphere is associated withwork and political engagements and non-kin relationships. In contrast, the

private realm of the home is typically understood as a space that offersfreedom and control (Darke, 1994), security (Dovey, 1985) and scope for cre-ativity and regeneration (Allan and Crow, 1989; Bachelard, 1969; Korosec-Serfaty, 1984; Cooper, 1976; Finighan, 1980). It is an intimate space thatprovides a context for close, caring relationships. Saunders and Williams(1988) argue that our understanding of home as a distinct private sphere isinformed by three related concepts: privacy, privatism and privatization. Inthis context privacy at home refers to freedom from surveillance and exter-nal role expectations. Privatism is the process whereby people are increasingly

withdrawing from communal life and centering or orienting their activitiesaround the home. Privatization refers to the shift away from public or stateowned housing towards owner occupied housing and privatized consumption.6

Challenges to the view that home is universally understood and/or experi-enced as a private haven abound in the research literature (Sibley, 1995;Wardaugh, 1999). Most critics take exception to and focus their arguments onone or more of the binary oppositions (inside/outside, work/home, public/private, comfortable/uncomfortable, safe/unsafe) underpinning this notion of home. All reject the idealized view of home perpetuated by such ideas.

Some argue that home as haven is an historic and culturally relative ideawhich is integrally linked to equally fluid concepts of the family. For example,Hareven (1993) states that this view of home emerged among bourgeoishouseholds in Britain and France in the mid-eighteenth century and in urbanmiddle class American families in the mid-nineteenth century as a conse-quence of industrialization, urbanization and the related transformation of family life and work. Prior to industrialization work was primarily situated inhouseholds which comprised family members and other non-kin workers andboarders. The organization of these households was predicated on sociabilityrather than privacy. As industrialization took hold, work was relocated awayfrom the home and, in time, the State assumed greater responsibility for edu-cation and health care. As a consequence, households were increasingly seenas a domestic retreat for the nuclear family. Where once all able members of

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households contributed to work or related activities, in the new era womenand children were marginalised from these activities and consigned to a trans-formed and valorized domestic realm. What began in the upper and middleclasses, had by the mid-twentieth century extended into working classfamilies.

As many historians, sociologists and human geographers attest, the divi-sion between domestic and workspaces and relations, between the private andpublic realms, was never as neat as the home as haven idea implies. Whetherengaged in paid or unpaid labor, women have always worked within the homesphere. Men too have engaged in different and varying forms of domestic,home based labor in these spheres. Also, as writers such as Hepworth (1999)and Tosh (1996) suggest, houses were never exclusively private and/orrestricted spaces. Public, social spaces such as the parlor also featured inhistorical house designs and people other than the inhabitants of the house

entered, worked or socialized in this sphere. Contemporary house designs,incorporating open plan or flexible living spaces, parents and/or children’sretreats, and studies or home offices increasingly challenge simplistic notionsof home as a private haven or refuge from work and the outside world. Theadvent of technologies such as the personal computer, the fax/phone, email,internet services and the mobile phone has made it possible for more people,particularly middle class professionals and the self-employed, to engage inpaid work from home (Duncan, 1996). The reasons for such shifts in the orga-nization of domestic life and work are obviously complex and beyond the

scope of this paper, but include transformed gender relations and the conse-quent need for more flexible child care arrangements. While some experiencethis as an intrusion, others welcome the flexibility it enables.

Other critics suggest that the characterization of home as haven is anexpression of an idealized, romanticized even nostalgic notion of home atodds with the reality of peoples’ lived experience of home (Jones, 2000;Wardaugh, 1999). They reject the view that this so-called private haven is asecure, safe, free or regenerative space (Wright, 1993), for a significant per-centage of women, children and young people who are subject to violence andsexual abuse in the home environment (Wardaugh, 1999; Jones, 1995, 2000;Goldsack, 1999). Home for these people is a site of fear and isolation, a prison,rather than a place of absolute freedom and ontological security (Giddens,1984, 1990; Dupuis and Thorns, 1998). Goldsack (1999), argues that in con-trast to men who face risks of violence in the public sphere women are ‘morelikely to be raped, assaulted and even killed at home than in any other place’(123).

Wardaugh (1999) rejects the characterization of home as haven, favoringa phenomenological understanding that ‘counterposes inside with outsidespace’ (96). Accordingly, privacy, safety, security, comfort and refuge are notnecessarily associated with the inside or home but may be found beyond itsreaches. Similarly, danger, fear and insecurity are not necessarily located inthe outside world. Like Hooks (1991) and Ahmed (1999) and Massey (1992)

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she argues that home is not some purified space of belonging, with fixed andimpermeable boundaries. Rather it is as Sibley (1995) suggests a space of unavoidable ‘tensions surrounding the use of domestic spaces’ (94). Wardaughalso argues that subscription to the home as haven idea actually contributesto the ‘creation of homelessness’. She notes that ‘those who are abused and

violated within the family are likely to feel “homeless at home” and many sub-sequently become homeless in an objective sense, in that they escape – or areejected from – their violent homes’ (96–7). Equally those who reject or areunable to conform to conventional ideas and expressions of gender, sexualityand class might be both symbolically and literally ‘excluded from and notionor semblance of home’ (97). This resonates with Sibley’s view of home as apotential space of ‘exclusion’ where a ‘fear of difference’, of ‘non-conformingpeople, activities or artifacts’ can be projected onto the ‘objects and spacescomprising the home’ (1995: 91).

Ironically many researchers who reject the idealized characterization of home continue to conflate home and dwelling and thereby preserve a cleardemarcation between inside and outside. A more radical critique of the under-standing of home as an enclosed, private space – a haven from the outsideworld is provided by some of the cross-cultural research. For example, Jackson(1995) implies that nomadic peoples, ‘for whom dwelling is not synonymouswith being housed and settled’ do not focus on ideas of home as a privateplace clearly differentiated from the outside world. He states that for theWarlpiri of the Tanami Desert in Central Australia . . . ‘home is where one

hails from . . . , but it also suggests the places one has camped, sojournedand lived during the course of one’s own lifetime’ (122). Similarly, for thepeople of Nuakata Island, Papua New Guinea, home is variously translatedas matrilineal village(s), or the island itself, and is not a private physicaldwelling that is clearly differentiated from an outside world (Mallett, 2003).Rather it equates to the lands and places where one’s matrilineal forbearsstayed or dwelled. While these spaces are not private, enclosed dwellings, theyare possessed spaces or territories with defined, though not always visible,boundaries that must be observed and respected by those who do not belongthere.

Home and family

An association between home and family has been noted by many researchers(Jones, 1995, 2000; Finch and Hayes, 1994; Bowlby et al ., 1997), however thenature and significance of this relationship for the meaning of home remainskeenly contested. So too is the meaning of family. Some authors, so-called tra-ditionalists, suggest that the link between home and family is so strong thatthe terms are almost interchangeable (Crow, 1989; Oakley, 1976; Bernardes,1987). When conceived as inter-related or overlapping terms, home typicallysymbolizes the birth family dwelling and the birth family or family of origin

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(Gilman, 1980). Home encompasses the house or dwelling that a person livedin immediately after birth and/or their childhood family house(s). It also sym-bolizes the family relationships and life courses enacted within those spaces.As such it is the place where children are nurtured and reared and finallydepart when they come of age (Bowlby et al ., 1997; Hunt, 1989; Jones, 1995,

2000). Without the family a home is ‘only a house’ (Gilman, 1980; Leonard,1980). According to Bachelard (1969) this house or dwelling is our ‘first uni-verse’. As such ‘it shelters our daydreaming, cradles our thoughts and mem-ories and provides us with a sense of stability. Throughout our lives the housein which we are born remains “physically inscribed in us”’ (Jackson, 1995: 86;see also Domosh, 1998).

Critics of this view of the relationship between home and family concedeit has currency in the Western popular imaginary, however they argue that itis ideologically laden and premised on the white, middle class, heterosexual

nuclear family (Wagner, 1993; Passaro, 1996; Wardaugh, 1999; Bowlby et al.,1997; Leonard, 1980; Hooks, 1990). Under this definition the home belongsboth materially and symbolically to the heterosexual couple who enact andpromote particular gendered roles and relationships (see Barrett andMcIntosh, 1982). Typically children only belong there when they are youngand have little power and authority although they have increasing status asevidenced by the increased space accorded them within modern house designs(Jones, 1995, 2000; Ainley, 1991; Finch and Hayes, 1994). Munro and Madigon(1999) suggest that governments and other institutions (e.g. religions, envi-

ronmental groups) promote an ideological trinity of family, home and com-munity (107). These institutions have a vested interest (material, economic,social, spiritual) in defining the types and expressions of ideal family rela-tionships (Watson and Austerbury, 1986).

Saunders and Williams (1988) argue that the nuclear family is increasinglyirrelevant in contemporary Western societies, and that other household formsmight be equally pertinent to the constitution of home.7 A vast literature oncross-cultural notions of kinship, place and belonging also suggests that thenuclear family and the nuclear family house are of limited relevance to themeaning of home and family for many people. For example, the family com-prises extended family members and home might encompass the places wherethese extended family members reside. Similarly research on migration, exileand that on home leaving suggests the significance of the relationship betweenhome and family can change over the course of an individual life or in dif-ferent spatial contexts. Hence, at some points and places in a person’s life itmay be pivotal, but at others it may be largely irrelevant.

Home and gender

Within the literature, reflections on the significance of family to the meaningof home invariably occur as part of a broader discussion of the relationship

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between gender and home. Women are often the focus of this material. Thisis not surprising given that much of the relevant research – whether it is insociology, anthropology, social psychology, human geography, architecture orhistory – is inspired and informed by feminist theory and debates. Feministtheories, particularly second wave theories have often privileged women’s

experience, effectively, if not intentionally conflating women and gender(Mallett, 2003). Analyses of the relationship between gender and the meaningof home generally focus on issues of: work or production, consumption, spacesincluding house design, and/or housing tenure and the house as an expressionof status.

Early writers on gendered perceptions of home claim that men consider itto be a signifier of status and achievement whereas women view home as ahaven (Somerville, 1997; Seeley et al ., 1956; Rainwater, 1966). Almost withoutexception, second-wave feminist writers (of the 1970’s and 1980’s), particu-

larly but not exclusively socialist feminists, identify home as a site of oppres-sion, tyranny and patriarchal domination of women. Accordingly, it is in thisprivate realm that women are consigned to a life of reproductive and domes-tic labor (Oakley, 1974; Eisenstein, 1984). While they manage household con-sumption they do not have economic control of it. Although their work increating and maintaining (a clean, comfortable, aesthetically pleasing) homeand family is, to some extent, valued, they remain socially isolated, with fewopportunities to achieve the social, economic and political status accordedtheir male partners who engage in paid work in the public domain (Madigan

et al ., 1990). Despite home being generally considered a feminine, nurturingspace created by women themselves, they often lack both authorityand a space of their own within this realm (Darke, 1994; Madigan et al ., 1990;Munro and Madigan, 1999). Their emotional and spatial needs are secondaryto those of their husband and children. In contrast, for men home is a spacein which they have ultimate authority, yet limited responsibility for the domes-tic and child-rearing duties that take place in it. Home is a haven from thepressure of the outside world, even a site of leisure and recreation. Whilehome is a source of status for men, paid work and other activities in the publicrealm provide them with alternative and highly valued identities. Related,second-wave feminist research on the interaction between gender, space andhome noted how these social and historical ideas about gender roles and rela-tionships in the home environment are inflected in housing designs, domesticinteriors and technologies (Goodall, 1990). The impact of and implications of segregated housing estates on women has also been examined. In these con-texts women are often socially isolated, have a diminished capacity forpaid employment and participation in wider communal and political spheresand often feel fearful, physically vulnerable and insecure (Madigon et al .,1990).

Over the last decade or so these feminist critiques of home have been sub- jected to increased scrutiny by a range of social researchers, including femi-nist researchers. As Gurney (1997) notes, the work of Saunders (1989, 1990a,

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1990b) on gender and the meaning of home provided impetus for some ofthis work. Convinced that socialist feminist critiques of home were skewingdebates within the social sciences, Saunders (1990a) claimed his empiricalresearch revealed that there was an enormous disparity between feminist cri-tiques of home and women’s descriptions of the meaning of home. Accord-

ingly the women in his study did not describe home as a place of oppression.While many researchers in the field of urban sociology and housing studieshave critiqued Saunders’s work on methodological and theoretical grounds,Gurney (1997) refutes his claims on the basis of his own episodic ethnogra-phies of working class owner-occupied households in East Bristol, England.Gurney found that while women initially provide emotional and positiveaccounts of home whereas as men are more likely to offer ‘negative and instru-mental meanings of home’, this situation was reversed over time, in subse-quent or later conversations (see also Richards, 1990).

More recent research on gender, work and home has challenged the some-what narrow, view of home as a private, domestic and female realm wherereproductive rather than productive work occurs. For example contemporaryresearch on both rural and urban outworkers or home workers reveals thatmany women engage in paid work such as sewing, washing ironing, cooking,clerical and administrative tasks, and child minding in their own home envi-ronments (Oberhauser, 1995, 1997). Equally, some men, particularly self-employed tradesmen and professionals, routinely engage in paid work fromhome, be it full or part-time. Many researchers have demonstrated that the

sort of paid work men and women engage in, when and in what spaces withinthe house, impacts on family members experience and their perceptions of home and familial relationships (Massey, 1996; Duncan, 1996b; Phizackleaand Wolkowitiz, 1995).

Discussion of women’s increased participation in paid employment bothwithin and beyond the home generally focuses on the double burden experi-enced by women. As such researchers claim that despite some evidence of men’s increasing participation in household labor, women continue to expe-rienced and/or describe home as a site of oppression. Women remain pri-marily responsible for domestic labor and over and above this they nowchoose or are expected to engage in either full or part-time paid employment.Despite this, however, there is a growing body of feminist literature that val-orizes women’s experience of domestic labour and mothering within homeenvironments.

Early work on gender and space argued that certain rooms or space in thefamily home were gendered (e.g. the kitchen was a female space, the shed amale one, etc.). House designs reflected stereotypical gendered relationshipspeculiar to a given social and historical period (Hunt, 1989; Lupton, 1992,1993; Sparke, 1995; Buckley, 1996). More recent discussions of gender andspace have argued for a more sophisticated analysis of the ways space is nego-tiated and lived in the family house/home. There is, for example, increasingrecognition that rooms or spaces in the family home are not effectively gen-

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dered even when they are designed to meet the requirements of a man or awoman (e.g. height of kitchen benches). Rather it is the activities that are per-formed in these spaces at given times and in given relational contexts thatreflect and/or subvert particular ideas about gender, age, and role (Munro andMadigan, 1999; Mallett, 2003; Bowlby et al ., 1997; Massey, 1996).

Despite these advances, general debate about gender and the meaningof home remains problematic, if not simplistic. For example many researchersin the field of urban sociology, and housing studies continue to conflatehouse and home and take little or no account of the widespread critiques of fixed and bounded notions of sex, gender and sexuality that have occurredwithin feminist and queer theory in the last decade or so (Butler, 1990, 1993;Gatens, 1983; Grosz, 1994; Young, 1990). Consequently many researchersunthinkingly privilege gender rather than say sexuality or a combined sex,gender and sexuality when reflecting on people’s understanding and experi-

ences of home (see Madigan et al ., 1990; Gurney, 1997; Saunders, 1989). Theintersection between gender, sexuality and ethnicity and age is also forgottenor elided in most of these analyses. There are exceptions of course but theselargely fall outside of the dedicated literature. Both Hooks (1990) and Cren-shaw (1994), for example write about the experience and meaning of homefor African-American women and women of color. Crenshaw views the homeas a site of oppression and disempowerment for women of colour rooted inthe intersecting issues of race and gender. Hooks (1990) acknowledges thathome is a potential site of patriarchal oppression for African-American

women yet she also argues that it need not be seen as a politically neutralplace. It is potentially a site for radical subversive activity for both Afro-American men and women who may feel marginalized in public spaces.Although detailed critique of the research on gender and home is beyond thescope of this paper it is clear that there is a great need for such an analysis inthe field.

Home/journeying

Cultural studies and anthropological literature detailing the experience of migrants and refugees as well as sociological and psychological empiricalresearch on family formation and home-leaving claim that ideas about staying,leaving and journeying are integrally associated with notions of home. Theseideas are in turn linked to, among other things, notions of dependency, inter-dependence and autonomy, continuity and dis/location. As such, home, be itdefined as a dwelling, a homeland, or even a constellation of relationships, isrepresented as a spatial and relational realm from which people venture intothe world and to which they generally hope to return (Case, 1996). It is a placeof origin (however recent or relative) as well as a point of destination. ForGinsburg (1999) home is less about ‘where you are from’ and ‘more aboutwhere you are going’ (35). This sentiment is also expressed by Tucker (1994),who stresses that ‘home-searching is a basic trait of human nature’, one which

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arises out of the propensity of humans to migrate as a means of ensuring theirsurvival (186).

Journeys away from home, for no matter how trivial or routine a purpose,are thought to constitute both home and traveler. Dovey (1985) claims thatthese journeys establish the thresholds and boundaries of home, particularly

boundarties associated with time and the experience of being at home. Simi-larly, people’s experience of home influences the meaning and significance of their journeys beyond it. Considered a realm where socio-cultural and his-torical ideas about family, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality and age are rein-forced, it is also a space where ideas about who may take particular journeysare enacted. For example, in Western contexts at least, it is commonlyexpected that young people will reach a point in their life when it is appro-priate for them to leave the birth family home. At this time they will ideallyestablish an independent place of their own without severing all ties to their

birth family or the family dwelling. This expectation is premised on, whatmany see as an idealized, ideological and ethnocentric view of home. Accord-ing to this construction home is thought of as a nurturing environment under-pinned by stable relationships that provide continuity of care and fosterinterdependence while also facilitating a capacity for independence. Ideasabout the age and manner in which young men or women should leave home(i.e., to get married or establish an independent household, to travel, work orgo to university) are culturally and historically contingent. Nonetheless usualand socially acceptable routes out of home remain and those young people

who take alternative pathways risk social exclusion or marginalisation. Thepathway taken out of home, whether chosen or imposed, is often crucial inhow these young people and/or their (past, present and future) homes areidentified and defined (Jones, 1995; Wardaugh, 1999).

These ideas resonate with some of the literature on migrants, refugees andpeople living in exile. Accordingly the conditions under which people leavetheir homelands, their journeys beyond and away from home and their desti-nations are all said to impact on their identity and understanding of home.Many who write about these experiences represent the relationship betweenhome and away as oppositional. As Ahmed (1999) notes, in some postcolo-nial literature home is a space of belonging and being with clearly defined,fixed boundaries in which the subject is free of desire, at rest, secure and com-fortable. In contrast, migration and nomadism are conceived as exceptionaland extraordinary encounters with strange lands and strangers that engenderhomeless states of being or identities in perpetual flux.

Ahmed (1999) like others who write on home and travel (Bammer, 1992;Olwig, 1999) rejects the idea that home and away are oppositional experiencesand concepts. She argues that home is not a pure bounded and fixed space of belonging and identity that is as familiar as the away is both strange and inhab-ited by strangers. Home encompasses both movement and strangers. Homecan be experienced as strange and/or familiar:

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It is not simply a question then of those who stay at home, and those wholeave, as if these two different trajectories simply lead people to differentplaces. Rather ‘homes’ always involve encounters between those who stay,those who arrive and those who leave . . . There is movement and disloca-tion within the very forming of homes as complex and contingent spaces

of inhabitance. (340)

In making this argument Ahmed (1999), like Massey (1992) and Hooks(1990) asserts that home is not necessarily a singular place or state of beingrather it may be one’s country, city or town, where one’s family lives or comesfrom and/or where one usually lives. It may be other places or relationships.These homes hold differing symbolic meaning and salience. It is possible tobe homeless in one, some or all of these categories at the same time. This viewresonates with Mary Douglas (1991) view of home as a ‘kind of space’ or

‘localizable idea’. ‘Home is located in space, but it is not necessarily a fixedspace . . . home starts by bringing some space under control’ (289). It cannotbe simply equated with shelter, house or household.

For Ahmed, along with Gurney, Somerville and others, home and moreparticularly being at home is a matter, at least in part, of affect or feeling- asthe presence or absence of particular feelings. It is also usefully theorized,following Brah (1996), as the lived experience of locality. Being at home in-volves the ‘immersion of a self in a locality’. The locality ‘intrudes’ upon theself through the senses, defining ‘what one smells, hears, touches, feels, remem-

bers’. Equally the self penetrates the locality. Accordingly the boundariesbetween home and self and between home and away are permeable. As suchwhen one moves away from home the movement itself occurs in relation tohome, it is part of the very ‘constitution’ of home itself.

Being at home (in the world)

Ahmed’s work is consistent with a significant stream of phenomenologicalresearch on home that describes the experience of ‘being-at-home’ in theworld. Understood in this way, home is a (stative) verb rather than a noun,a state of being which is not necessarily bounded by a physical location.Phenomenologists do not attempt to define the essence of home or circum-scribe people’s experience. Instead they focus on practice, on the diverseways people ‘do’ and feel home (Gurney, 1997; Jackson, 1995; Ingold, 1995)rather than the ways that they think about home. They are interested in thedialectical relationship between self and object in the intentional productionof home and accord ‘epistemological status to the subject’s meanings andexperience’ (Somerville, 1997: 230). As such many explore the ‘dynamicprocesses and transactions’ that transform a ‘dwelling unit . . . into a home inthe context of everyday life’ (Despres, 1991: 101; see also Dovey, 1985;Korosec-Serfaty, 1985). These temporal processes can include routinized

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activities as well as seasonal and/or cyclical events such as birthdays (Saile,1985).

Others writers, inspired by, but not wedded to, phenomenology retain theirfascination for people’s experiences of being at home in the world, withoutappealing to fixed notions of society, culture or even the person. These writers

de-emphasize without necessarily dismissing the notion of the intentionalsubject. Michael Jackson’s work, particularly his (1995) book, At Home in theWorld is a prominent example of this approach. His work on home arises forma broader intellectual project to ‘describe how in different societies, peoplework-in reality and through illusion, alone and in concert with others – toshape the course of their own lives’ (123). As such ‘[h]ome is grounded lessin a place and more in the activity that occurs in the place’ (148). Home thenis not simply a person, a thing or a place, but rather it relates to the activityperformed by, with or in person’s, things and places. Home is lived in the

tension between the given and the chosen, then and now, here and there.Jackson comments that ‘we often feel at home in the world when what we dohas some effect and what we say carries some weight’ (123). All too often thedialectical tension between shaping and being shaped by the world goes toofar in one direction, swinging between ‘world mastery’ and alienation.

Many who employ phenomenological approaches to understand themeaning of home are attuned to people’s experiences of injustice and inequal-ity in the home sphere and draw attention to this in their work. Wardaugh’s(1999) work on homeless women is a recent example. Wardaugh (1999) fol-

lowing Dovey (1985) notes that while home maybe located in space as a par-ticular place (e.g. a house, an apartment, an institution, etc), it is always morethan this. It is a physical space that is lived – a space that is an ‘expression of social meanings and identities’ (95). Wardaugh asserts that the concept of home cannot exist without the concept of homelessness. Home and home-lessness exist in a dynamic, dialectical relationship. They are not, as somesuggest, fixed oppositional terms. Rather they refer to ‘complex and shiftingexperiences and identities’ (Wardaugh, 1999: 93) that emerge and unfold inand through time.

Critiques of phenomenological or phenomenologically inspired accounts of home take one of two conventional forms. As Somerville (1997) notes, somecritics, particularly sociologists, dismiss phenomenological approaches forfailing to adequately consider or acknowledge the social and discursive fieldsthat impinge upon and frame experience. Other critics focus on the adequacy,even accuracy of the representations of people’s experiences. Prominentamong these are the feminist critiques which claim that gendered experiencesof home are often overlooked or misrepresented.

Surprisingly there has been very little sustained analysis of the method-ologies employed by phenomenologically inspired researchers, even thoughethnography, episodic ethnographies, in-depth interviewing, even quantitativesurveys have all been claimed as legitimate phenomenological methods. Theuse of quantitative and semi-structured interviews is particularly perplexing

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given that phenomenology is first and foremost a study of people’s accountsof their everyday practices and experiences.

Some researchers avoid using phenomenological and social construction-ist theories together (Jackson, 1995), claiming that the emphasis on subjectiveexperience integral to phenomenology is at odds with the focus on objective

and discrete notions of society (and person) implicit in the social construc-tionist metaphor (Somerville, 1997). However, many researchers and theoristsof home slip between and/or strategically employ the two approaches. This isperhaps best exemplified with brief reference to the work of sociologist, CraigGurney. Gurney (1997), for example, employs a range of methods includingin-depth interviews, episodic ethnographies and survey data to analyze howpeople make sense of home through lived experience. Although his interestin process and lived experience reflects his considerable debt to phenome-nology, he cannot be described as a phenomenologist. Gurney’s work is

premised on a belief that the worlds people inhabit are socially constructed.By employing the social construction metaphor he appeals to a notion of apassive, ontological social world or society upon which ideas, discourses andpractices are elaborated. People make sense of these socially constructedworlds through lived experience. Accordingly he argues that home is an ide-ological construct that emerges through and is created from people’s livedexperience. Gurney stresses the importance of emotion (love, intimacy, family,anger, depression, among others) in the discursive construction of themeaning of home, as part of a broader agenda to affirm and consolidate both

a sociology of emotions and a feminist epistemology that does not separatereason and emotion.

Somerville (1992) is perhaps typical of those theorists who claim that phe-nomenological accounts of home fail to adequately theorise the social and dis-cursive worlds that impinge on people’s notion of home. Like Gurney (1997),Somerville argues that home is an ideological construct but rejects the viewthat the meaning of home is only established experientially. He writes:

Home is not just a matter of feelings and lived experience but also of cog-nition and intellectual construction: people may have a sense of home eventhough they have no experience or memory of it. . . . We cannot know whathome ‘really’ is outside of these ideological structures. (530)

Here Somerville makes a questionable theoretical distinction between cogni-tion and experience and offers no account of how ideological forms emerge.Elaborating upon the empirical work of Watson and Austerbury (1986)Somerville postulates a provisional, conceptual construction of the meaningof home.8 He identifies six to seven key signifiers of home: ‘shelter, hearth,privacy, roots, abode and (possibly) paradise’ (332). In this construction,shelter refers to the physical structure or dwelling place that offers protec-tion. This contrasts with a very minimalist notion of home as abode – a place,however unstable, where one can stay. Where hearth refers to a welcoming,

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warm, and relaxing physical environment, heart refers to a loving, supportive,secure and stable environment that provides emotional and physical wellbeing. Home as privacy means a space where one has the capacity to estab-lish and control personal boundaries.The term roots denotes home as a sourceof identity and meaning in the world and finally paradise refers to a constel-

lation of positive idealized notions of home, evident in but not confined to theother key signifiers.

Despite his emphasis on the ideological construction of home, Somervilleconcludes that the most important thing to know is ‘what the home means todifferent people and to attempt to explain the range of different meaningsthat we find’ (115). In a later article Somerville (1997) elaborates on this view,positing a mulit-disciplinary hybrid approach that attempts to reconcile andintegrate (hetero)phenomenological theories with constructivist sociologicalanalyses of the meaning of home. He argures for a unitary social phenonom-

enology founded on a belief in the socially, historically and culturally contin-gent nature of social relations- relations that are understood to be ‘constructedby the intentional activity of free agents’ (238). However in striving for a sin-gular theory of home founded on consistent epistemologies and ontologiesSomerville’s overlooks the benefits of keeping potentially contradictory the-oretical approaches to the study of home in creative tension. There is a sensein which he believes that it is possible to achieve a definitive theory of home,one that ‘strikes at the heart of the matter’, and one that uncritically relies ona notion of the intentional subject.

Home, self, identity and being

Many authors refer to the relation between home and identity and/or theconcept of the self although few elaborate on the nature of this relationshipSome claim for example that the home, which they typically conflate withhouse, is an expression or symbol of the self. Accordingly the house itself, theinterior design of the house, and the decorations and use of space all reflectthe occupant’s sense of self (see Després, 1991). Clare Cooper’s (1976) articleentitled the House, as Symbol of the Self is a prominent example of such work.In making this tentative claim, Cooper draws on the Jungian concept ofthe collective unconscious which links people to their primitive past and isthe repository of fundamental forms of psychic energy known as archetypes.Symbols manifest these unconscious archetypes in space and time. Accord-ingly she speculates that one of the most fundamental archetypes, thefree-standing house on the ground, is a frequent symbol of the self (Horelli,1990).

Tucker also suggests that home may be an expression of a person’s sub- jectivity in the world. Alternatively he states it may simply be a space wherepeople feel at ease and are able to express and fulfill their unique selves oridentities. The home of which he speaks though is not conflated with the

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house. It may be an emotional environment, a culture, a geographical loca-tion, a political system, a historical time and place, a house etc., and a com-bination of all of the above (1994: 184).

Authors such as Havel (1992; cited by Tucker, 1994) conceive of home asan inalienable source of identity. Havel, like Hollander (1991) imagines home

in terms of concentric circles. These circles represent an aspect of existentialexperience that include, house, village or town, family, social environment,professional environment, the nation, civic society, the civilization and theworld. Each is equally important and must be given its due although somemay be more important to people at different times in their lives. Havel writes,‘All the circles of our home . . . are an inalienable part of us, and an insepa-rable element of our human identity. Deprived of all the aspects of his home,man would be deprived of himself, of his humanity’ (1992: 31; cited by Tucker,1994).

For philosophers such as Kuang-Ming Wu (1993) home refers to the inter-subjective relationships that brings a self, person or I into being or existence.Home is therefore understood as fundamental to being. It is not conceptu-alised as a place or space. Drawing on the work of Sartre and Martin Buber,Kuang-Ming Wu claims that ‘home is being-with-other(s)’ (193). This beingwith others constitutes the person. Following Buber, Kuang-Ming Wu under-stands the ‘I’ as relational. It gives expression to a relation while also gener-ating a relation. As such ‘I’ comes into being in relation to an-other and theother can become my hell and my home. Accordingly, to say that I am at home

means ‘I am at home in you (singular plural)’. When you accept me as I am,and I accept you accepting me then I am at home and ‘I am born in this rec-iprocal acceptance’ (194). ‘Home is where I both was born and am being con-tinually born, within that womb called other people, in their being not me’(195).

Another strand of research on home and person or more correctly homeand being, which has largely been inspired by Heidegger (1971), stresses theimportance of building or making to our notion of home and our very exis-tence. Heidegger claims that our building activities are integrally associatedwith and arise out of our capacity to dwell. In short the forms that we build,whether they be material or imaginary arise out of our immersion in theworld- the very homeland of our thoughts (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 24; Ingold,1995: 76). Ginsburg (1998), like Ingold argues that ‘human beings are home-makers’. He writes:

We make our homes. Not necessarily by constructing them, although somepeople do that. We build the intimate shell of our lives by the organizationand furnishing of the space in which we live. How we function as personsis linked to how we make ourselves at home. We need time to make ourdwelling into a home. . . . Our residence is where we live, but our home ishow we live. (31)

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Conclusion: it all depends. . . .

How then is home understood? How should home be understood? Or, howcould home be understood?

Clearly the term home functions as a repository for complex, inter-related

and at times contradictory socio-cultural ideas about people’s relationshipwith one another, especially family, and with places, spaces, and things. It canbe a dwelling place or a lived space of interaction between people, places,things; or perhaps both. The boundaries of home can be permeable and/orimpermeable. Home can be singular and/or plural, alienable and/or inalien-able, fixed and stable and/or mobile and changing. It can be associated withfeelings of comfort, ease intimacy, relaxation and security and/or oppression,tyranny and persecution. It can or can not be associated with family. Homecan be an expression of one’s (possibly fluid) identity and sense of self and/or

one’s body might be home to the self. It can constitute belonging and/or createa sense of marginalisation and estrangement. Home can be given and/or made,familiar and/or strange, an atmosphere and/or an activity, a relevant and/orirrelevant concept. It can be fundamental and/or extraneous to existence.Home can be an ideological construct and/or an experience of being in theworld. It can be a crucial site for examining relations of production and con-sumption, globalisation and nationalism, citizenship and human rights, and therole of government and governmentality. Equally it can provide a context foranalysing ideas and practices about intimacy, family, kinship, gender, ethnic-

ity, class, age and sexuality. Such ideas can be inflected in domestic architec-ture and interior and urban design.

Together, the three questions listed above are relevant to interdisciplinarydebates and studies of home. In responding to these questions interestedresearchers could usefully reflect on people’s diverse experience and waysof understanding home while also considering actual and potential (i.e.,how is, should and could home be understood?) theoretical and methodolog-ical approaches to the study of home. Clearly both the experience andthe study of home is value laden. As such researchers in the field need to be

clear and transparent about the motivation behind and purposes for their ownresearch. They also need to recognise and acknowledge the limitations of theirwork and the implication of these limitations for their own and others’ under-standing of this term. Hollander (1991) puts this succinctly when he arguesthat both the meaning and study of home ‘all depends’. Briefly, how home isand has been defined at any given time depends upon ‘specification of locusand extent’ and the broader historical and social context.

The University of Melbourne Received 12 December 2002

Finally accepted 28 October 2003

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their incisive critiques. Both reviewers

approached this paper with generous spirits. Their commentaries were both invaluable. This

research was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, USA Grant MH61185. I wish

to thank Jen Johnson and Alina Turner for discussing the ideas in this paper, Paul Myers forchasing references and Doreen Rosenthal for her academic support. I also wish to thank the

Project i team at the Centre for Community Health, UCLA.

Notes

1 Wardaugh (1999) and Jackson (1995) draw on a diverse range of home literature, although theydo not set out to posit an interdisciplinary approach to the study of home.

2 For a discussion of cross-cultural significance of home, place and space see for example, Low,

S. and Lawrence-Zú iga, D., (eds), (2003), Birdwell Pheasant, D. and Lawrence-Zú iga, (1999),Feld and Basso 1996; Fox; 1997; Rapoport 1981; Mallett, 2003.

3 This project on the relationship between home and homelessness is being undertaken as part

of Project i, a cross national, longitudinal study of homeless young people in Melbourne and

Los Angeles.

4 This is not to suggest that housing and land tenure did not figure in the meaning of home priorto the latter half of the 20th century. In New Zealand for example, following the 19th century

land wars the colonial governments appropriated indigenous Maori land which was them leased

or sold to European settlers to farm. Later as the urban centres developed, colonial govern-

ments extended this offer to include urban home ownership. Legislation introduced at the

beginning of the 20th century aimed at ‘extending home ownership to the working class’ led to

nearly 60% owner occupancy rates in New Zealand by 1921 (Dupuis and Thorne, 1998: 400).5 This approach has been pursued by Hepworth (1999) and Tosh (1996) in their discussion of

the design features of the ideal Victorian home. Hepworth argues that the design and organi-

zation of Victorian homes valorized notions of security, privacy and respectability, as demon-strated by an emphasis on rooms and external surrounds bounded by walls, doors, locks and

keys. The home was conceived as a fortress from the potentially deviant realms of the outside

world. As Tosh notes the bourgeois Victorian home was a gendered domain that valorized a

form of domesticity founded on the separation of home and work that occurred as a conse-

quence of industrialization. See Brindley (1999) for a discussion of the Modern house in

England.

6 Heidi la Mare takes exception to view that the Netherlands was the place where this happened

first.7 Somerville (1989) dismisses Saunders and Williams (1988) analysis of privacy claiming it is sim-

plistic and fails to grasp that the private domain is constituted by social, economic and politi-

cal relationships both within and beyond the home.

8 Somerville (1989) rejects this claim, arguing that it needs to be supported by empirical research.

9 Watson and Austerbury (1986) claim form their empirical findings of a study of homeless that

material conditions, emotional and physical well-being, loving and caring social relations,

control and privacy and living/sleeping space are the key dimensions of home identified by

their participants.

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