Home In Anthropology Research Paper

Anthropologically relevant references to ‘home’ initially appeared during the nineteenth century in Anglo-Saxon and German romantic and gothic styles of writing in which it denoted Ur-Heimaten or certain groups of humankind, such as the ‘Aryan’ origins in Asia or people’s origins in other ‘cradles’ (Kuper 1988). Later on the term ‘home’ acquired a more specific political meaning as in the case of the ‘homelands’ assigned by the South African apartheid regime to ethnicized groups of ‘black’ citizens, which had the purpose of containing them in reservations or similar constructions of ‘home rule.’ More recently, the term has gained some significance again in anthropological studies of migrant, diaspora, and fugitive populations (Malkki 1995, Vertovec and Cohen 1999).

The related discussions move between two poles, one pole being represented by the ‘invention of tradition’ approach (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1982), and the other pole tending towards sociobiological and ethological claims about the existence of a human instinct which orientates us towards distinct ‘environs’ or natural habitats (Wilson 1975). From an anthropological perspective, the often rather unreflected and untheorized use of the term ‘home’ in scientific texts offers a good opportunity for checking the process of translation between European and non-European cultures. For the discussion of universalistic assumptions about a human drive for being ‘at home’ involves very heterogeneous forms of belonging, alienation, or indifference towards a ‘home.’ Often the ‘drive’ to be at home seems quite easily contented with illusions of a spiritual home; yet in some cases historical processes lead to violent conflicts about presumed ‘home countries’ between certain groups.

Mary Douglas (1966) introduced anthropologists to a world of symbolic attributions, in which the body can signify everything, and everything can mean the body. The same applies to homes, when looked at as a rational construction of territorial belonging on the one hand, and as an image of embeddedness in a particular social and geographical landscape, or nostalgia about such a situation, on the other.

2. Ways Of Being ‘At Home’

Obviously, the portable shelter constructed by a group of Kung hunters and gatherers is not the same as the proverbial British or German ‘castle.’ Anthropologists observed, however, that so-called bush people in Africa, traditional Australian aborigines, as well as groups inhabiting the rainforests of South Asia and South America, have developed elaborate systems of navigation in their regions, based for example on landmarks or tactile qualities of the ground (Widlok 1997). In the nineteenth century, Australian aborigines imagined their ancestors to wander around and with their actions invent the current topographical shape of their habitat. In so doing they related to the ‘ground’ in a way not at all alien to European conceptions of identity defined by geographical, social, genealogical, and individual physical characteristics of a given group in a given area (Spencer and Gillen 1938). Attracted by some of the benefits of provincial town life or driven away by colonial powers from their places, their twentieth-century descendants may insist on returning to their promised lands, if their means of living allow such a step (Berndt 1977). Welfare programs can thus paradoxically lead to a partial return to traditional ways of living and especially of nurturing their ancestors’ grounds. However, often we are no longer able to discern whether indigenous nativists adhere to old projections of a social and spiritual life onto certain ‘hunting grounds’ and places of survival through gathering activities, or whether this just follows Western concepts of belonging, grounded and capitalizing on geographical features of a given area.

There is varied ethnographic and mythological evidence of responses to loss of old nurturing grounds, including the wish to re-enchant the relationship between humans, heaven, and nature, although so far there is not enough comparative research available on the symbolism of land and house. Yet there is some evidence that human groups that succeed in storing greater amounts of food develop more closely-knit local mythologies bound up with the topography of landmarks, human dwellings, places for growing and harvesting food, as well as holy places. Horticulturists and cattle-breeding populations living in segmentary societies or low-grade forms of centralization tend to organize the household, the surrounding area, and faraway places that are of interest to the group by socially constructing ancestors and territorial spirits or divinities (Lienhardt 1961, Levi-Strauss 1955). The ‘juridic domain’ (Fortes 1969) concerning the simple facts of life—dwelling together, dividing up food, working a territory, keeping a herd, and maintaining property rights—is thus organized by an explicit ideology of belonging, descent, holy grounds, and the profane (Kramer and Kramer-Marx 1993). A supernatural interpretation of shrines and natural features, even of artificially organized biotopes, can be the territorial expression of a temporal cult of vegetation which unites social groups in a harmonious view of the ego, the household, the family, and other related persons with its ground, including all the plants and animals living or to be raised therein (Turner 1969).

A ‘system of total exchange’ (Mauss 1960), of generalized reciprocity, seems to pervade and bind human groups and their natural surroundings together. Paradoxically, this can privilege those groups which have reasons to claim to have been the first humans in a particular region and can give them a superior status, heavily defended in conflict, or lost and exchanged with the status of a pariah. The conflict between Hutu and Tutsi in Central Africa has had such a component (Maquet 1961). In a time of international arms traffic, and armed interventions into local cultures, tensions of this kind can lead to severe cases of mass violence.

There is a definite difference between such closely knit groups or networks of groups and the nation states of world society, insofar as the ‘total social fact’ (Mauss 1960) of traditional societies is organized into a tight overlapping of the domains of landscape, social structure, cosmology, etc. (Fortes 1969). The father or uncle can be the earthmaster, celebrating a holy shrine, and the next moment he can be the leader of a group of young warriors. This does not mean, though, that the social reality of these groups is more homogeneous than ours. Whilst subscribing, like their fellows, to a certain degree to the governing harmonious ideology of space, time, and home, some outsiders, skeptics, and dissidents always disagree and hold rational or disenchanted views of their group’s attempts to maintain a homeland (Radin 1957).

By exchanging ‘stigma’ for ‘charisma,’ such outsiders can strongly affect or change their society. Thus, the classical ‘big men’ of New Guinea who constructed the ‘pig festival’ through the vegetational and reproductive cycles draw on a whole system of credits and cliental relations countering the heroic culture of the ‘great men’ who search for the spiritual gratification of the warrior (Godelier 1982). Early imperialist states seem to have been based on a similar mixture of exploiting nature, fellow, and other groups, on the one hand, and heroic fantasies about extending a holy landscape to other regions, on the other (Wolf 1999).

The study of nomadism might be particularly instructive with respect to human ideas about finding or having a home (Mauss 1960). For the layperson, nomads just seem to wander around without clearly relating to certain features of the landscapes. The experience of wandering and fugitive groups in Europe, such as the Sinti, Roma, and many others, may support this conception of a ‘wandering’ part of humanity that does not feel bound to certain cycles of exchange. Wanderers are always suspect to sedentary populations, and this resentment can remain through long periods of sedentarization, if it is supported by political powers. One of the starting points of German anthropology in the nineteenth century was a series of heated discussions about whether or not Jews felt any obligation of fairness and civil behavior towards non-Hebrew populations (Gilman 1990).

In the anthropological data, nomadic constructions of a unified horizon of landscapes abound, as does information on nomads treating their tents, carriages, or cars as ‘mobile homes’ (Rao 1987). Motifs in Oriental carpets, manufactured by nomads, often appear to carry the signum of descent and territorial rights as well as some kind of report of the group’s history and historical claims for grounds and herds (Schuster and Carpenter 1996).

Not only nomadic populations but many other groups convey an ideal of homogeneity, tradition, and mise en scene of an environment of ‘being at home’ through their material culture, such as dress and costumes. This continues right up to European medieval, Ottoman, and today’s international regulations of clothing and corporeal signs. Also the often painfully achieved imprints on the skins of members of more marginal populations seem to have the same rational and spiritual aim of demonstrating a form of belonging together (Clastres 1973). It is the invention of an ‘environment,’ in the sense that this term is used in modern art. Human environmental creativity ascribes to a certain space the property of being a home. These autopoietic processes of representing and creating an order of time, space, and body are perhaps most obvious in rural societies with their regional and class-bound costumes, their festivals, shrines, and clear-cut regional polities of power.

But even in the case of feudal societies, which often enough did not allow their underclass members to leave their ‘homes’—even in this continuum of slavery on the one hand and enthusiasm for one’s own ‘ground’ on the other—we can find distinct groups who, through historical experience or the subtleties of property rights, seem to have acquired a very distanciated attitude towards their houses, fields, and cattle (Lopreato 1967). In times of famine or collective violence, these groups were probably among the first to leave their grounds and wander to the cities or the promised lands, over the mountains and across seas, as soon as the opportunity was offered by the modernization of the world economy into the global capitalistic project.

3. Modern And Postmodern Homes

In cities and other modernized landscapes, anthropologists have observed distinct techniques deployed in designing the ‘home’ of migrated groups or former peasant inhabitants of the area (Hannerz 1980). Conscious city design, the building of ghettos for reasons of controlling the ‘bio-power,’ and the process of identity formation in subgroups of a given population all go hand in hand here. Homeland associations as well as informal networks amongst industrial workers and employees ascribe to their private and sometimes also their professional life characteristics of tribal life. The elite of industrialized areas tend to form closely-knit networks, sometimes secret, sometimes formally recognizable, which transform their actors into something reminiscent of the earthmasters and segmentary war chiefs as encountered in traditional societies.

In the third millennium, two-thirds of the world population are expected to live such a metropolitan way of life, and from what we know about the older metropolitan areas in the world, we can deduce that the postmodern metropolis will be partly made by neighborhoods defining and defending themselves like traditional ‘villages in the city,’ like those in Naples, Cairo, Rio de Janeiro, or New York. These ‘lieux’ and ‘milieux’ of trust and similarity will be defined by criteria of class and taste as well as ethnicity and religious confession. Homelessness will abound as well as those of the better off desperate to (re)create a home as an anchor to a very mobile style of life (Dehavenon 1999). The inhabitants of big cities try to overcome the anomic atmosphere of ‘non-lieux’ by staging and topographically creating city life through festivals and customs, charity and sport events, as well as a home life through decoration, invitations of friends, meals, and so on (Auge 1992, Cieraad 1999).

In addition to the withdrawals and the small refuges of identity, however, an extension of the word ‘home’ has become important. With the advent of the nation states, millions and even billions of humans can unite in very large conglomerations of landscapes, and by means of national symbolism they try to find not only a common political but also symbolic denominator. An organicist idea of the state—‘a sound family makes a sound state’ (Norman 1991)—may help to transfer feelings which were originally connected with house, family, regional polity, and local religion to the higher spheres of a fatherland united in the sign of a mother language, a home country (Gellner 1998).

This is where ethnicizing or nationalizing politics have often overlapped with anthropological science, a science often intended historically as a kind of school for learning how to invent nations. Not only under Hitler and Stalin did the ‘nations of anthropology’ (Borneman 1995) stand in close conjunction with their host nations, so did American cultural anthropology and other well-respected disciplines.

Today’s ‘United Nations’ comprise groups that are divided by very different models of inventing traditions as well as interior constructions. Some of them are founded on the basis of the one and only territory alone, others claim that a common language, cultural heritage, race, or historical traumatization provide the fundament of their existence. However, the whole system of nations nowadays demands that no single person, house, or territory can be without a host nation. This is supported by older ethnographic constructions, which always attributed a group of people to a certain territory. Today, such origins of ethnic topographies frequently turn into a topography of terror, while at the same time international movements of refugees and migration make such attributions obsolete. Another form of homebuilding, however, will apparently continue to exist even in the most technologically advanced systems on Earth. Against all the prognostics of the social sciences, the ‘home’ seems to survive even its most important carrier, the family. Statistical evidence indicates that single households abound in all metropolitan areas of the world, yet this ‘yuppie’ culture maintains that people ought to belong to some house, some household (often lovingly decorated and furnished), a certain area, a group of friends and colleagues. Big festivals like Christmas—which is, indeed, the only feast of a truly international character celebrated today, not only in the West but in most parts of the world including China and Africa—provide this ‘home’ with an anchor in time and space. Groups of families and friends reunite during these days to have traditional forms of communality, exchange, and mythopoesis about a bearded old man leaving his occult home in the last area on the world that still proves unreachable for globalization, the polar circle, carrying with him gifts and goods that will help to make people feel more at home (Miller 1993).

4. Final Thoughts

In the era of ‘moving targets’ (Marcus 1999), anthropological fieldwork has partly lost its central referent: the small group inhabiting a restricted area since immemorial times—the field. However, it seems that humans all over the world are struggling to recreate homes under the circumstances created by today’s form of globalization. The anthropological ‘field’ therefore re-emerges over and over again, sometimes ‘under fire’ (Nordstrom 1995) and sometimes in a peaceful dialogue with the anthropologist, that ‘professional stranger’ who leaves his home to study others’ homes.

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