Paper short abstract:

Important places (i.e. specific points in space) matter when people experientially form their conceptions of home. Important events (specific points in time) matter, too. Home is a personal relation to both history and geography at the same time.

Paper long abstract:

The role of historical consciousness could be easily seen when people's perceptions of their home were studied in Merafong municipality in Gauteng, South Africa in 2015. The research data were created by ethnographic methods in twelve group discussions and one outdoor group walk with a total of more than one hundred informants. The project is implemented by the University of Helsinki and the South-West University, South-Africa.

The informants were heard in groups. Instead of interviews we preferred pictorial and verbal elicitations. Special interest was shown in personal memories and the descriptions of homely landscapes. The memories and landscapes revealed in the data were understood as interpretations of home. These are important places (geographical interpretation) and events (historical interpretation). A third group of interpretations was found in meta-stories that are collectively present in society and in personal experiences of people. The most striking of such meta-level factors in Merafong was the importance of mining.