Материал: Nigel Rapport, Joanna Overing, Social and Cultural Anthropology - The Key Concepts (2000)

HOME AND HOMELESSNESS

the affective and the physical; the spatial and the temporal; the local and the global; both positive evaluations and negative (cf. Wright 1991:214). As Simmel sums up, ‘home’ may be said to provide a ‘unique synthesis’: ‘an aspect of life and at the same time a special way of forming, reflecting and interrelating the totality of life’ (1984:93–4). A working definition for charting the morass of ambiguities and fluidities of contemporary identity may be of ‘home’ as ‘where one best knows oneself (Rapport and Dawson 1998)—where ‘best’ means ‘most’, even if not always ‘happiest’.

Such an understanding of home is also apposite for coming to terms with the movement inherent in social life, for charting the intrinsic migrancy of identity. Increasingly, individuals are seen as moving between homes, erstwhile to current, or as moving between multiple present homes. More precisely, the thesis of transnationalism implies a radical change in the conceptualization of relations between movement and home: not only can one be at home in movement, but that movement can be one’s very home.

This is certainly the explicit thesis of John Berger. For Berger, the realization of a world of movement gives onto radically different ideas of home—and also of homelessness. A far more mobile notion comes to the fore, ideational and behavioural: home as something to accompany people whenever they decamp. For a world of travellers—labour migrants, exiles and refugees—home comes to be located in a routine set of practices, in a repetition of habitual social interactions, in styles of dress and address, in memories and myths, in stories carried around in one’s head, in the ritual of a regularly used personal name. People are more at home nowadays, in short, in ‘words, jokes, opinions, gestures, actions, even the way one wears a hat’ (Berger 1984:64).

It might seem, as Heidegger pronounced, that ‘homelessness is coming to be the destiny of the world’, but it is rather that there is a recognition that we possess another sense of being-in-the-world (cf. Chambers 1994b:246). (It is not that there cannot be a sense of homelessness—far from it—but that a sense of home or of homelessness is not necessarily related in any simple or direct way with fixity or movement.) One dwells in a mobile habitat and not in a singular or fixed physical structure. Moreover, as home becomes seen as more mobile so it also becomes more individuated and privatized; everyone chooses their own, and one’s choice might remain invisible (and irrelevant) to others (cf. Rapport 1995). As Berger concludes, ‘no longer a dwelling’, home can be conceived of as ‘the untold story of a life being lived’ (1984:64). A sense of homelessness perhaps derives, paradoxically, from a reaction against movement, a refusing of fluid boundaries; hence

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the clamouring by the homeless for renascent ‘particularisms’: primordial places for which they are willing to kill and die (Auge 1995:35).

To traverse the globe with their informants, then, is for anthropologists to record the ‘moving’ homes of various kinds, behavioural and ideational, which individuals construct and enact. Here are routine practices and narrations which do not merely tell of home but represent it: serve, perhaps, as cognitive homes in themselves. As Gaston Bachelard puts it, the human imagination always builds ‘walls’ of impalpable shadows, comforting itself with the illusion of protection, and so carries ‘the notion of home’ into any ‘really inhabited space’, whether cognitive or physical. Thus it is that ‘we ever bring our lares with us’ (Bachelard 1994:5; also cf. Rykwert 1991:54).

Homelessness?

And yet, for Berger, there is still that sense in which many people are at home in ‘untold stories’. This is by no means the same as being ‘homeless’—as being without a moving account of one’s passage across boundaries and through life—but it is a recognition that, as individual, mobile and private, the homes of many remain invisible. Many people in movement across the globe today do not have the resources (temporal, financial) to exhibit their homes and make them formally or widely known; and even if they did their homes would remain invisible inasmuch as they would clamour for attention alongside millions of others’; while those in a position to publicize these multiple versions of home attempt deliberately to suppress them, or at least ensure that it is only their own versions which are exhibited, held up as models and recorded for posterity (cf. Berger 1975).

Superficially, this conclusion comes close to that drawn by Peter Berger and his collaborators in the premonitory text The Homeless Mind (1973). They agreed with a portrayal of modern social life as a plurality of social life-worlds between which individuals were in inexorable migration. Every day, they argued, individuals transgressed between a variety of divergent, discrepant, even contradictory, social milieux; so there was no consistency concerning what was experienced as ‘right’ or ‘true’ between different contexts and life-stages. However, rather than appreciating that individuals may be in possession of their own cognitive homes and itineraries which gave their transgressions a sense of consistency and direction, Berger et al. defined this migratory process as a ‘spreading condition of homelessness’ (1973:138).

Their ideas derive from a sense of loss: that in the modern world there has been lost a traditional home of fixity and physical centredness,

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of absolute values and a unified reality. Now uprooted from this first and ‘original’ socio-cultural milieu, no succeeding one becomes truly home. Individuals are in transit between a plurality of life-worlds but come to be at home in none. Berger et al. describe this condition as at once normative, spiritual and cognitive: the anomy of social movement correlates with a metaphysical sense of homelessness in the cosmos which correlates with personal alienation on the level of consciousness.

Moreover, the ‘homeless mind’ is hard to bear, and hence there is widespread nostalgia for a condition of being ‘at home’ in society, with oneself, and with the universe: for homes of the past which were socially homogeneous, communal, peaceful, safe and secure. ‘De-modernization’ movements of various kinds (socialism, localisms, religious cults and fundamentalisms) therefore promise new homes where individual members are reintegrated within all-embracing, meaningful structures of social, psychical and metaphysical solidarity. There are also growing attempts by those with the wherewithal to reconstruct homes in private, closed havens which shut out the present and serve as subjective refuges of the self. Nevertheless, Berger et al. conclude, before the cold winds of homelessness, nostalgia proves to be fragile defence; de-modernization schemes which are not institutionalized and society-wide are mostly precarious buffers, given the finitude and mortality of the human condition. Thus, in a modern world in which ‘everything is in constant motion’ and where ‘the life of more and more individuals [is] migratory, ever-changing, mobile’, homelessness represents a deepening global effect (1973:184).

The Homeless Mind remains a challenging thesis, but it is steeped in a communitarian ideology which would decry modern ‘ills’ (individualism and pluralization, alienation and anomy) so as to posit an idyllic past of unified tradition, certainty, stasis, and cognitive and behavioural commonality, But this latter is highly questionable; the existence of an ‘original life-world’ of traditional absoluteness and fixity (where the individual may said to be first and ‘truly’ at home) is without empirical foundation (Phillips 1993:149–56; also cf. Geertz 1995:15–16).

Furthermore, not only does the thesis of cognitive homelessness involve a mythic past, it also remains ethnographically ungrounded in the present. Even as individuals lead their lives in and through movement (cognitive and physical) and refrain from finally and essentially affixing their identities to places, the empirical evidence points to the resilience of people’s achieving of ‘homes’ (however these may come to be defined) and the inexorability of their home-making. Contra Berger et al., there is no necessary relation between fixity and physical centredness and the accruing of absolute values and a unified reality. Individuals are

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quite able to maintain the latter in continuous movement. Being ‘at home’ and being ‘homeless’, in short, are not as such matters of movement, of physical space, or of the fluidity of socio-cultural times and places. One is at home when one inhabits a cognitive environment in which one can undertake the routines of daily life and through which one finds one’s identity best mediated—and homeless when such a cognitive environment is eschewed (cf. Silverstone et al. 1994:19).

Paradoxes of home-making

Certain paradoxes surround the concept of home, however, which are not easily ignored.

First, there is the paradox, already alluded to, that an increase in movement around the world, and the freeing-up of restrictive boundaries to travel, is accompanied by an increase in renascent particularisms. In Hobsbawm‘s terms (1991), home as an essentially private and individual routine, fantasy, memory, longing or presence— Heim—is impacted upon by Heimat: an attempt publicly and collectively to impose home as a social fact and a cultural norm to which some must belong and from which others must be excluded. Hence the ‘exiles’ and ‘refugees’; and hence, too, the tramps and ‘bag-people’ expelled from the ranks of those felt deserving of combining house and home.

There is also the paradox that it is by way of transience and displacement that one achieves an ultimate sense of belonging. As Kateb puts it (1991:135), to be at home ‘in one’s own place’ it is necessary to become alienated and estranged to some degree, mentally or spiritually. Exile is a resource inasmuch as it gives onto that vantage-point from which one is best able to come to know oneself, to know oneself best. It is for this reason too that home ‘moves’ us most powerfully as absence or negation (Hobsbawm 1991:63).

Finally, there is the paradox concerning whether the movement to which home is party is linear or circular. Chambers (1994a) (à la Heraclitus) is definite that the migratory processes of the world are linear, since no returns are possible or implied. The journey of our lives is not between fixed positions and there is no itinerary affording routes back again. And yet, while it may be true that ‘the destiny of our journeys’ is not circular, still home represents both ‘the place from which we set out and to which we return, at least in spirit’ (Hobsbawm 1991:65). We engage in ongoing transgression partly out of a desire to overcome it, and find our end in our beginning.

Perhaps it is part-and-parcel of an appreciation of the way that individuals live in movement, transition and transgression, that its

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HUMAN RIGHTS

conceptualization, as ‘home’, should be similarly paradoxical and transgressive.

See also: Irony, Movement

HUMAN RIGHTS

In the past fifty years, human rights has become ‘one of the most globalised political values of our times’ (Wilson 1997:1). And yet, most anthropological literature has isolated itself from mainstream discussion of these values; it has tended to regard the legalistic language and the nation-state frameworks of much discussion as falling outside its professional scope (cf. Messer 1993), and questions of better or worse socio-cultural practice as value-judgements which go against its professional ethos (cf.Wolfram 1988).While ‘human rights’, as discourse and as international law, has enjoyed enormous growth, anthropology has therefore remained aloof, if not sceptical.

Even when they find themselves, perforce, within the human rights arena, anthropologists have been loath to pass judgement on what might be meant by such notions as the right to ‘life’, to ‘adequate-food, shelter, health care and education’, to ‘privacy and the ownership of property’, to ‘freedom from slavery and genocide’, to ‘freedom of movement’, to ‘freedom of speech, religion and assembly’. Even a practice such as ‘female circumcision’ (clitoridectomy and infibulation), anthropologists have insisted, must needs be regarded by those affected as a ‘problem’ before cultural outsiders may intervene and provide information for change. Little wonder that, as Richard Wilson puts it, anthropology is often viewed by human-rights theorists and activists as ‘the last bastion of cultural absolutism’ (1997:3); as if somehow believing that cultures contain an inherent moral rectitude, whereby one might always expect ‘underlying cultural values’ ultimately to assuage immoral political systems (American Anthropological Association 1947:543).

This stance can be seen as anachronistic if not irresponsible and reactionary. In a ‘post-cultural’ world (Wilson again), a world where ‘[t]he ‘fantasy’ that humanity is divided into [discrete groups] with clear frontiers of language and culture seems finally to be giving way to notions of disorder and openness’, anthropologists remain committed to a romantic communitarianism and relativism (Wilson 1997:10). They continue to believe that, as canonized by the 1947 statement of the American Anthropological Association executive board (penned chiefly

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