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- Convenors:
-
Stella Butter
(University of Koblenz-Landau)
Zuzanna Bulat Silva (University of Wrocław)
- Stream:
- Home
- Location:
- A113
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 24 June, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Zagreb
Short Abstract:
Our interdisciplinary panel combines ethnological, linguistic, literary and artistic perspectives on home. This allows capturing the multifaceted nature of scales of home. In each language, words for 'home' come with specific semantic baggage influencing how home is conceptualised.
Long Abstract:
The understanding and experience of home as an 'embryonic community' (Douglas) is a key factor in the formation of individual and collective identities. Being at home means being positioned within a socio-cultural order that one understands and/or is familiar with. It is this notion of home that is pervasive both in Western everyday discourses on home, representations of home in film or literature, and in current sociological, anthropological and ethnographic research. The meaning of home therefore cannot be reduced to a physical structure, such as a house or apartment, but includes feelings of belonging and/or familiarity, yet me must not forget that this meaning varies greatly in different languages, cultures and types of discourse. The intersection between individual and collective identity is tied to the multi-scalar character of home: home can be situated on different levels, ranging from one's body as a home, a physical structure (e.g. house, apartment, trailer), to a neighbourhood, a city or even larger-level units such as the nation. This list points to what geographers describe as the "simultaneous … relationship between scales" (Swyngedouw). These scales of home are not pre-given, but produced through "rhetorical and material practices" (Leitner). The scalar production of home is shaped by power struggles and has far-reaching socio-political consequences.
Our panel will not only look at how scales of home are produced through socio-economic practices, but also at how home/land is imagined in literature and the arts and what real-life effects these imaginaries of home have.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 24 June, 2015, -Paper short abstract:
Our paper analyses presentations of and identifications with scales of ‘home’ in European museums. It examines issues of object interpretation, the ‘exhibitionary complex’, emotional responses and dissonance, which are characterised by the challenging nature of home as both ‘everywhere and nowhere’.
Paper long abstract:
While making the concept of 'Europe' synonymous with ideas of 'home' may be seen as the utopian vision of both EU policy-makers and migrants alike, research from the project MeLa* European Museums in an Age of Migrations, indicates that identifications with these terms are significantly more nuanced, characterised by varieties of scaling, layering and oppositions.
Using 'home' primarily in the emotional sense of 'Heimat', a feeling of belonging to a place, a group of people, or a culture, rather than merely in the literal sense of a birthplace or a place of residence, this paper examines the scales of understandings of home as presented by European museums at different scales, which address issues of migration. It analyses a national museum, a regional museum and a city museum in relation to understandings of 'home' and identity in today's Europe. The paper therefore looks not only at scales of home in terms of the city/region/nation/Europe as a home, but also at questions arising from moving to a 'new home' from an 'old home', and the issue of 'lost' home(land)s. How do visitors and non-visitors of different backgrounds see their understandings of home reflected in the same museum? What objects are used to evoke or relate to ideas of home? And how are concepts of home interpreted and reflected both via individual objects, and within the 'exhibitionary complex' of the museum? What emotional responses (expected or otherwise) may be roused by these museum presentations and what dissonances are addressed or hidden in them?
Paper short abstract:
This paper represents a first investigatory exploration into the problems of everyday life faced by Western aid workers in relation to their multi-scalar homes - whether that be at destination, at point of origin, or any other real or imaginary places.
Paper long abstract:
Previously neglected, the study of aid workers has sparked a notable amount of academic interest since the beginning of the new millennium, generating a new body of work which analyses the particular problematics and practices of these transnational workers. The context within which their work takes place has been represented symbolically as "Aidland", a term coined by Raymond Apthorpe (Mosse, 2011), or as "Peaceland" (Autesserre 2014), places that are contrasted against a "Homeland", whether real or imaginary, that becomes obscured beneath practices of transnational mobility and hyper-flexibility in complex and dangerous environments. The scales of home have been studied implicitly in much research on aid workers, although the main focus has usually been on other issues.
My piece will be based primarily on a state-of-the-art overview of the topic. Secondly, I will draw on an autoethnography of my own experiences in various settings, homes, periods and roles: as a volunteer in Mexico 2007 and in Kosovo 2008, working in Gambia 2009-2010, as accompanying person in Morocco 2011 and as a researcher in Haiti 2012 and DR Congo 2014. Finally I will also draw on a number of in depth interviews of aid workers - 2014 and continuing into 2015 - which will use "life history" as a methodology aimed to uncover their life paths.
Bibliography
Autesserre, S. (2014) Peaceland. Conflict Resolution and the Everyday Politics of International Intervention. NewYork: Cambridge University Press
Mosse, D. (ed.) (2011) Adventures in Aidland: The anthropology of professionals in international development. Oxford: Berghahn
Paper short abstract:
Home in immigrants' literature refers both to the beloved left homeland as well as to the new foreign place of work and residence. The paper will focus on the various and contradictory notions of utopian homes in Greek-American literature published at the beginning of the 20th century in the US.
Paper long abstract:
Home has multifaceted representations in immigrants' literature. Home refers both to the beloved homeland of birth as well as to the new foreign place of work and residence. The perception of home in immigrant's literature shows the complicated and ambivalent relationship between immigrants and their two home(land)s. The paper will focus on various and contradictory notions of home in Greek-American literature published at the beginning of the 20th century in the United States. The array of Greek-American book production is extensive: "high" and "low" editions; books for adults as well as for children; books with a religious, social, humorous, or functional character; bilingual books or books printed in only one language, and so on. A significant number of serials and periodicals are also present in almost every community. All these publications were crucial to the cultural education and self-awareness of Greek immigrants. These heterogeneous literary genres offer various types of homes: the family circle, the village in the old country, the small community of compatriots in the new land, the new as well as the old nation, etc. The paper will question the power behind those ambivalent notions: why the publishers and authors, who targeted to educate and enlighten their fellow immigrants about their new home, offered mixed visions? Is the old homeland intentionally associated with a utopian image whereas the new homeland is presented in a more realistic but emotionally negative way?
Paper short abstract:
This paper presents how the notion of home is understood, defined and described by homeless people in Croatia and how family circumstances, socio-economic conditions and power dynamics in the present, past and future inform the ways in which people understand the concept of home.
Paper long abstract:
Research has shown that home is a complex, multidimensional and intangible concept that can refer to a place, space, feelings, relationships, identities, practices or states of being. Studies have also shown that one can learn a great deal about what home signifies by studying what this concept means for someone that has been deprived or lacks home. The aim of this paper is to present how the notion of home is understood, defined and described by homeless people in Croatia. As home operates at a variety of overlapping scales, this paper shows how family circumstances, socio-economic conditions and power dynamics in the present, past and future inform the ways in which people understand the concept of home. Special focus will be on the impacts of institutionalised/foster care as well as violence and abuse throughout their life course trajectories. Findings show that socially marginalised homeless people experience home in very different ways from how it is conventionally portrayed. Ethnographic data also reveals that homeless women and men tend to have different notions and understandings of home.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I would like to discuss the meaning of two Portuguese lexemes that correspond to the English concept of 'home': lar and casa. On the basis of lexicographical data and questionnaires held among Portuguese students, I will try to explain the meaning of lar and casa in the NSM terms.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper I want to give attention to the microscale of home, situating my research on the level of words. I will discuss the meaning of two Portuguese lexemes that correspond to the English concept of 'home': lar and casa. On the basis of lexicographical data and questionnaires held among Portuguese students of the Universidade Nova, Lisbon in 2012 and 2014, I will explain the meaning of lar and casa in terms of the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM, see Wierzbicka 1996, 2013). I will show not only how they differ both from each other and from their English counterpart home, but also how distinct their images are as given in the dictionaries, and as viewed by the young Portuguese.
References:
Wierzbicka, A. (1996) Semantics: Primes and Universals, Oxford: OUP.
Wierzbicka, A. (2013) Imprisoned in English, Oxford: OUP.
Paper short abstract:
We argue that inbuilt bomb-shelters in Israeli houses reify the home-front as military-front. This conceptual simultaneity naturalizes spatiotemporal ontology of dwelling, which we call 'routinegency'
Paper long abstract:
Since 1992 a law in Israel obliges building contractors to construct bomb-shelters in residential homes. These are popularly known by the Hebrew acronym MMD (merhav mugan dirati, pronounced 'mamad'), meaning 'apartment protected space'. Formally a marginal social domain underground used as a storage space, the bomb-shelter in Israel has thus become a space of and for mundane activity. Based on 12 months of fieldwork and 65 semi-structured interviews with Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel, in this paper we will demonstrate that mamad policy and practice effectively reifies the home-front as military-front. We argue that this conceptual overlap instantiates a new ontology of dwelling in Israel, which we call 'routinurgency': the constant emergence of security urgency as conceptually and experientially intrinsic to 'routine' life. We will analyze three ways by which routinurgency alters the relations between political subjects and governing bodies in Israel: on the ideological level it hones the local disparity between national affiliation (Jewish, Palestinian) and citizenship (Israeli); on the affective level it boosts discourse on fear and post-trauma, side-by-side with the governmentality of collective resilience; and on the spatial level it entails a thorough transformation of Israeli architectural landscape.
Paper short abstract:
Lampedusa's The Leopard presents many family abodes and spaces which together define the Salina family home. The novel, as well as author's own memoirs, lend insights to the nature of “home” and its evolving spaces, following historical, societal and personal upheavals.
Paper long abstract:
On the brink of Italy's reunification, The Leopard delineates the many abodes belonging to the family of Prince Fabrizio Salina, and all the spaces in between, which together constitute the home of the family. The palace of the Salina family seems to participate in the political and social changes that are traced throughout the novel: not only do events from the outer world infiltrate the estate on several occasions, but the physical structure of the palace itself is made to reverberate the upheavals of the time.
An interesting feature of the Salina family home is its non-contiguous character. The home is spread between a number of structures, which are reminiscent of Italy itself: a patchwork of entities which will experience upheaval, change and re-definition with the onset of a new era. Space, structure and home are thus in a process of shift and reconfiguration which reverberates in the memories of the characters and in the symbolic representations of the past and its values.
Heir to an aristocratic family, Lampedusa's own formation years were spent in a home made of several simultaneous locations, each of palatial dimensions. Tough the Lampedusa mansion was totally destroyed by Allied air raids in WWII, he regards this to have been his only home. It is particularly interesting to read his single novel with his memoirs in mind, focusing on the nature of the sensation of "home" such spaces can provide, spaces obliterated by historical and social conditions, besides more common changes one experiences growing up.
Paper short abstract:
Taking its cue from T. Conley’s Cartographic Cinema and J. Urry’s The Tourist Gaze, this paper explores the connections Wheatley’s film establishes between heritage, home and constructions of scale.
Paper long abstract:
English heritage sights are transformed into gruesome crime scenes in Ben Wheatley's black comedy Sightseers (2012) as Chris and Tina, a couple freshly in love, tour the English countryside with their mobile home. While Tina soon discovers the murderous leanings of her new boyfriend, she not only refuses to let this ruin their holiday but eventually develops a homicidal streak of her own. Their trip through England is depicted as a journey into national and individual identity. In my paper, I explore the connections Wheatley's road movie establishes between heritage, home and the construction of scale. Crucial to my argument is the aesthetic form of this film because it encourages the viewer to adopt 'a tourist gaze' (J. Urry) with regard to English heritage while simultaneously unsettling this gaze through dissonances between image and sound. Taking my cue from Tom Conley's Cartographic Cinema (2006), I will pay special attention to how the film's affective mapping of homes and homeland challenges familiar maps of Britain with their fixed scale of territorial units.