Understanding Home PDF

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 understand
home as a multidimensional concept and acknowledge the presence of and need
for multidisciplinary research in the field, there has been little sustained reflection
and critique of the multidisciplinary field of home research and the diverse,
even contradictory meanings of this term. This paper brings together and examines
the 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 being
in the world? Home is variously described in the literature as conflated with or
related to house, family, haven, self, gender, and journeying. Many authors also
consider notions of being-at-home, creating or making home and the ideal home.
In an effort to facilitate interdisciplinary conversations about the meaning and
experience 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. an
informal name for a mental home.
12. a home from home a place other than one’s own home where one can
be 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.
Understanding home
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 game
to 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 through
my 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 proceed
through all the rooms in the house. As I walk I try to remember the house
fittings and furnishings in each room. Memories of my early life, our
family 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 the
mundane activities of domestic life. More recently these imaginary journeys
have taken me to places beyond our house, to our street, and the park across
the road. Sometimes I see myself playing with friends and neighbours, going
to kindergarten, catching the train to school, and walking along the pier or on
the sand at the local beach. I observe myself in these places, but mostly the
places and me seem as one. Are these happy memories? Perhaps they are best
described as benign. Here in this imaginary terrain painful memories are
leached of their power. I feel comfortable and secure. I am at home. Sleep
comes quickly.
Wide awake, poised to write a theoretical reflection on home, it struck me
that these nighttime experiences mirror many of the ways home is defined and
discussed in the relevant literature. My journeys inflect ideas of home inte-
gral to the modern Anglo-European imaginary. In this realm, at once personal
and social, house and home are related but not conflated. The birth family
house holds symbolic power as a formative dwelling place, a place of origin
and return, a place from which to embark upon a journey. This house or
dwelling accommodates home but home is not necessarily confined to
this place. The boundaries of home seemingly extend beyond its walls to the
neighborhood, even the suburb, town or city. Home is place but it is also a
space inhabited by family, people, things and belongings – a familiar, if not
comfortable space where particular activities and relationships are lived. In
my account home is a virtual place, a repository for memories of the lived
spaces. It locates lived time and space, particularly intimate familial time and
space.
Thankfully my nighttime recollections are not burdened by the need to
provide a comprehensive account of contemporary meanings of home. Sleep
would be elusive if that were the case! Absent in my story, yet present in the
diverse multi-disciplinary research literature, is the idea of home as home-
© The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2004 63

Shelley Mallett
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 positive
ways. 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 other
ways home is understood and discussed in the literature. Research on the
meaning 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 the
field followed several key conferences on home and the publication of a
number 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) few
have translated this awareness into genuinely, interdisciplinary studies of the
meaning of home.1 Instead researchers generally limit their analyses to par-
ticular dimensions of home – typically those aspects that routinely fall within
their own disciplinary orbit. They explore similar issues about home yet speak
in their own disciplinary voice, often confining their discussion to interested
researchers in their own discipline. Where criticism is leveled at research in
the 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 and
Williams write:
Precisely because the home touches so centrally on our personal lives, any
attempt to develop a dispassionate social scientific analysis inevitably
stimulates emotional and deeply fierce argument and disagreement. The
home is a major political background – for feminists, who see it in the cru-
cible of gender domination; for liberals, who identify it with personal
autonomy and a challenge to state power; for socialists, who approach it as
a challenge to collective life and the ideal of a planned and egalitarian
social order. (1988: 91)
It is the task of this paper to bring together and examine the dominant and
recurring ideas about home represented in the literature. This is not a reduc-
tive exercise aimed at reconciling disparate dimensions of or disciplinary
perspectives on home. Nor is it my intention to produce a definitive interdis-
ciplinary approach to the study of home. My intentions are more modest. This
project is designed to promote conversation about home in the literature and
facilitate discussion between the disciplines that both reflects and accommo-
dates people’s complex and diverse lived experience of home. Of course there
are elisions in my own analysis of the field. Most obvious among them is my
regrettable lack of discussion of the cross-cultural perspectives on home, place
64 © The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2004

Understanding home
and space. Although important, these perspectives fall beyond the scope of
this paper.2
The question then remains, how is home understood, defined and described
across the relevant theoretical and empirical literature? This question invokes
another 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 state
of being in the world? Home is variously described as conflated with or related
to 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 these
themes 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 an
expansive 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 something
dear or beloved. In other words, it means something like a place to lay one’s
head. 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 sense
of 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) notes
that 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 and
power. At the same time the idea of home became the focal point for a form
of ‘domestic morality’ aimed at safeguarding familial property, including
estates, women and children. Rykwert (1991: 53) notes that the association
between house and home was consolidated in English case law in the early
17th 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 his
defense against injury and violence, as for his repose’ (Rykwert, 1991: 53).
Later simplified in the nineteenth century to ‘The Englishmen’s house is his
castle’ (53), this phrase was popularly appropriated to define and describe
home 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 a
physical 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

Shelley Mallett
are controlled and ‘structured functionally, economically, aesthetically and

morally’ and where domestic ‘communitarian practices’ are realized (Rapport
and Dawson, 1998: 6; Douglas, 1991). House and home are often conflated in
the 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 governments
with particular social agendas. In fact, as some researchers note, governments
of advanced capitalist countries such as Britain, Australia, Canada and New
Zealand have actively promoted the conflation of house, home and family as
part of a broader ideological agenda aimed at increasing economic efficiency
and growth. These governments have attempted to shift the burden of respon-
sibility for citizens’ welfare away from the state and its institutions on to the
home and nuclear family (Madigan et al., 1990; Dupuis and Thorns, 1998). The
expansion 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 the
reasons for the re-structuring of economies and welfare states that has
occurred in these countries over the past two to three decades. As a conse-
quence of this restructuring in these contexts, owner occupied housing has
increased, public housing has decreased and housing tenure has increasingly
featured 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 a
source 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 ways
design, spatial organization, and furnishings of domestic dwellings influence
and inflect concepts and/or ideologies of the home.4 Research of this kind is
premised on at least two inter-related ideas. First, most authors uncritically
conflate house and home. Second, they assert that the spatial organization of
domestic dwellings both influences and reflects forms of sociality associated
with and/or peculiar to any given cultural and historical context. In other
words, household designs, furnishings and technologies constrain or facilitate
cultural and historical modes of relating between the people who share these
spaces.
A prominent example of this kind of research is the architect, Witold
Rybczynski’s (1986) book, Home: A Short History of an Idea. Rybczynski
examines historical and cultural ideas of home especially as they are inflected
through the design of American and European houses, household furnishings
and technologies since the Middle Ages and particularly from the seventeenth
century onwards. He asserts that during the seventeenth century ideas about
privacy, domesticity, intimacy and comfort emerged as organizing principles
for the design and use of domestic spaces among the bourgeoisie, particularly
in the Netherlands.5 These ideas gradually took hold in other parts of Europe
and among other classes as the widespread social change heralded by the

Understanding home
industrial revolution effected the constitution of households and participation

in and organization of work. Of course how these ideas were manifest
aesthetically varied according to social, cultural and historical contexts. The
aesthetics themselves also reflected culturally and historically specific ideas
about 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 in
Anglo-American and Australian contexts. Although the notion of an ‘ideal
home’ is problematized in this work, the authors who address this issue con-
tinue to privilege the relationship between house and home, de-emphasizing
other idealised meanings of home. For example Porteous (1976) states that
independent studies conducted in Australia, Britain and the United States on
notions of the ideal home reveal that people from diverse backgrounds
express a consistent preference for a free-standing house with a yard and
occupied by a single family (see also Cieraad, 1999). Some of the social, his-
torical and political antecedents of this aspiration are explored in an edited
collection, Ideal homes?: Social change and domestic life (Chapman and
Hockey, 1999a), that reflects on past and present models of the ideal home in
Britain (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. Show
visitors walked through sub-standard mockups of yester-year houses to finally
arrive at a fully and luxuriously furnished, brick house of the future. The ex-
hibition Guide booklet emphasized the inadequate design features of the
historical houses, drawing attention to house designs and technologies that
impacted on people’s comfort, privacy, security and budget. The narrative also
included 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 desire
for the ideal home, the authors note that ideas about home are not simply
shaped by the interests of capital and the manufacturers’ marketing depart-
ments. Rather they assert that people’s personal and familial experiences as
well as significant social change, influence their perceived needs and desires
in relation to house design. Changing patterns of employment, particularly

Shelley Mallett
the organization and location of work, together with shifts in the distribution
of wealth, transformations in peoples’ ideas about community, family, even
the good life, all impact on the notion of the ideal home. Even so people have
very limited choice about the design of their houses. Whether they build a new
home 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 their
own 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 some
social researchers arguing that such a conflation reductively represents home
as 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 shelter
is 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 relationship
between home and physical shelter, Saunders and Williams (1988), for
example, distinguish between house, home and household. Home is conceived
by 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 and
social institutions are constituted and reproduced’ (82). As such home is a
‘socio-spatial system’ that represents the fusion of the physical unit or house
and the social unit or household. While rejecting any form of environmental
or physical determinism the authors argue that the physical aspects of the
home, including the location, design, and size of the home, ‘both enable and
constrain’ 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’ through
which the relationships of production and consumption can be analyzed.
Although it is the ‘core domestic unit’ of society, the household should not be
conflated 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 that
there are many and varied household types. In this social constructionist for-
mulation, the home ‘is the crucible of the social system’ (85) representing a
vital interface between society and the individual. It is invested with diverse
cultural meanings that differ within and between households and across
cultural and social settings. Within households, gender and age are the ‘key
dimensions’ that differentiate household members’ perception of the meaning
of home. Geographical factors, especially residential location, together with
issues such as class, ethnicity and housing tenure, explain some of the varia-

Understanding home
tions in the meaning of home that exists between households (Saunders and
Williams, 1988; Saunders, 1989).
By developing a theoretical approach to the meaning of home that neither
conflates home with house or family, Saunders and Williams (1988) remind us
of 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 underlying
concept of society as an atomistic entity comprising ‘basic units’ and their
understanding of culture as discrete and autonomous. Somerville (1989)
argues that empirical evidence suggests that it is ‘far from obvious’ that home
is ‘necessarily or always’ a fusion of house and household (114). In making
this 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 notion
of household simply does not apply. Moreover he asserts that even if we were
to 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 and
social 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 the
ideal home.
Between the real and the ideal, the actual and remembered home
References to the symbolic potency of the ideal or idealized home recur

throughout home literature. For example, Tucker (1994) suggests that ‘most
people 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 lost
time and space. It may also be a religious pilgrimage or ‘search for a Promised
Land.’ One’s ‘actual home tends to be our best approximation of our ideal
home, under a given set of constraining circumstances’ (184).
Discussion of the ideal home generally focuses on nostalgic or romantic
notions of home. Critics of the ideal home reject exclusively positive descrip-
tions and assessments of home as naive expressions of false consciousness that
do not reflect people’s diverse experience and understanding of home. In so
doing they appeal to and inscribe a valorized notion of the real home. In other
words the real and ideal home are established as oppositional terms. Those
who promote the ideal home are thought to have a diminished grasp of reality
or 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

Shelley Mallett
(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 phenomenological
perspective 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 home
from quite different theoretical perspectives both authors promote a way of
understanding home that holds ideas of the real and the ideal, or the real and
the imagined in tension rather than opposition. Accordingly the real and the
ideal 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 ‘positive
interrelations with elsewhere’ or outside (1992: 13). By its very nature then the
identity of a place is ‘provisional’ or in flux. The boundaries of place and/or
home are permeable and unstable. Equally, places have no fixed or essential
past. 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 that
remembering will always be a counter-productive, nostalgic longing for some-
thing to be as it was in an idealized past. Rather, Massey suggests, following
Hooks (1991), that remembering, even memories of the traditional can be
important 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 and
the 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 between
home 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 and
household configurations (Armstrong, 1993; Somerville, 1997).
Home as haven
Home is often described in the literature as a haven or refuge. It is depicted

as a place and/or space where people can retreat and relax (Moore, 1984).

Understanding home
This understanding of home is founded on several related ideas, most obvious

among them, the distinction between public and private, and the inside and
outside world (Wardaugh, 1999; Altman and Werner, 1985). According to this
dichotomy 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, the
outside is perceived as an imposing, if not threatening or dangerous space. It
is more diffuse, less defined. Different performative expectations exist for
people in this outside space. There are different rules of engagement with
people, 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 removed
from public scrutiny and surveillance. The public sphere is associated with
work and political engagements and non-kin relationships. In contrast, the
private realm of the home is typically understood as a space that offers
freedom 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 that
provides a context for close, caring relationships. Saunders and Williams
(1988) argue that our understanding of home as a distinct private sphere is
informed by three related concepts: privacy, privatism and privatization. In
this 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 activities
around the home. Privatization refers to the shift away from public or state
owned 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 on
one 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 idea
which is integrally linked to equally fluid concepts of the family. For example,
Hareven (1993) states that this view of home emerged among bourgeois
households in Britain and France in the mid-eighteenth century and in urban
middle 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 in
households which comprised family members and other non-kin workers and
boarders. The organization of these households was predicated on sociability
rather than privacy. As industrialization took hold, work was relocated away
from the home and, in time, the State assumed greater responsibility for edu-
cation and health care. As a consequence, households were increasingly seen
as a domestic retreat for the nuclear family. Where once all able members of

Shelley Mallett
households contributed to work or related activities, in the new era women

and children were marginalised from these activities and consigned to a trans-
formed and valorized domestic realm. What began in the upper and middle
classes, had by the mid-twentieth century extended into working class
families.
As many historians, sociologists and human geographers attest, the divi-
sion between domestic and workspaces and relations, between the private and
public realms, was never as neat as the home as haven idea implies. Whether
engaged in paid or unpaid labor, women have always worked within the home
sphere. 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/or
restricted spaces. Public, social spaces such as the parlor also featured in
historical 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’s
retreats, and studies or home offices increasingly challenge simplistic notions
of home as a private haven or refuge from work and the outside world. The
advent 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 in
paid 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 experience
this as an intrusion, others welcome the flexibility it enables.
Other critics suggest that the characterization of home as haven is an
expression of an idealized, romanticized even nostalgic notion of home at
odds with the reality of peoples’ lived experience of home (Jones, 2000;
Wardaugh, 1999). They reject the view that this so-called private haven is a
secure, safe, free or regenerative space (Wright, 1993), for a significant per-
centage of women, children and young people who are subject to violence and
sexual 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 ‘more
likely to be raped, assaulted and even killed at home than in any other place’
(123).
Wardaugh (1999) rejects the characterization of home as haven, favoring
a phenomenological understanding that ‘counterposes inside with outside
space’ (96). Accordingly, privacy, safety, security, comfort and refuge are not
necessarily associated with the inside or home but may be found beyond its
reaches. Similarly, danger, fear and insecurity are not necessarily located in
the outside world. Like Hooks (1991) and Ahmed (1999) and Massey (1992)

Understanding home
she argues that home is not some purified space of belonging, with fixed and
impermeable boundaries. Rather it is as Sibley (1995) suggests a space of
unavoidable ‘tensions surrounding the use of domestic spaces’ (94). Wardaugh
also argues that subscription to the home as haven idea actually contributes
to 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 are
ejected from – their violent homes’ (96–7). Equally those who reject or are
unable to conform to conventional ideas and expressions of gender, sexuality
and class might be both symbolically and literally ‘excluded from and notion
or semblance of home’ (97). This resonates with Sibley’s view of home as a
potential space of ‘exclusion’ where a ‘fear of difference’, of ‘non-conforming
people, activities or artifacts’ can be projected onto the ‘objects and spaces
comprising the home’ (1995: 91).
Ironically many researchers who reject the idealized characterization of
home continue to conflate home and dwelling and thereby preserve a clear
demarcation between inside and outside. A more radical critique of the under-
standing of home as an enclosed, private space – a haven from the outside
world is provided by some of the cross-cultural research. For example, Jackson
(1995) implies that nomadic peoples, ‘for whom dwelling is not synonymous
with being housed and settled’ do not focus on ideas of home as a private
place clearly differentiated from the outside world. He states that for the
Warlpiri of the Tanami Desert in Central Australia . . . ‘home is where one
hails from . . . , but it also suggests the places one has camped, sojourned
and lived during the course of one’s own lifetime’ (122). Similarly, for the
people of Nuakata Island, Papua New Guinea, home is variously translated
as matrilineal village(s), or the island itself, and is not a private physical
dwelling that is clearly differentiated from an outside world (Mallett, 2003).
Rather it equates to the lands and places where one’s matrilineal forbears
stayed or dwelled. While these spaces are not private, enclosed dwellings, they
are possessed spaces or territories with defined, though not always visible,
boundaries that must be observed and respected by those who do not belong
there.
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 the
nature and significance of this relationship for the meaning of home remains
keenly 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 that
the terms are almost interchangeable (Crow, 1989; Oakley, 1976; Bernardes,
1987). When conceived as inter-related or overlapping terms, home typically
symbolizes the birth family dwelling and the birth family or family of origin

Shelley Mallett
(Gilman, 1980). Home encompasses the house or dwelling that a person lived
in 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 finally
depart 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 house
in 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 concede
it has currency in the Western popular imaginary, however they argue that it
is 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 belongs
both materially and symbolically to the heterosexual couple who enact and
promote particular gendered roles and relationships (see Barrett and
McIntosh, 1982). Typically children only belong there when they are young
and have little power and authority although they have increasing status as
evidenced 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 increasingly
irrelevant in contemporary Western societies, and that other household forms
might be equally pertinent to the constitution of home.7 A vast literature on
cross-cultural notions of kinship, place and belonging also suggests that the
nuclear family and the nuclear family house are of limited relevance to the
meaning of home and family for many people. For example, the family com-
prises extended family members and home might encompass the places where
these extended family members reside. Similarly research on migration, exile
and that on home leaving suggests the significance of the relationship between
home 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 it
may be pivotal, but at others it may be largely irrelevant.
Home and gender
Within the literature, reflections on the significance of family to the meaning

of home invariably occur as part of a broader discussion of the relationship

Understanding home
between gender and home. Women are often the focus of this material. This
is not surprising given that much of the relevant research – whether it is in
sociology, anthropology, social psychology, human geography, architecture or
history – is inspired and informed by feminist theory and debates. Feminist
theories, 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 meaning
of home generally focus on issues of: work or production, consumption, spaces
including house design, and/or housing tenure and the house as an expression
of status.
Early writers on gendered perceptions of home claim that men consider it
to be a signifier of status and achievement whereas women view home as a
haven (Somerville, 1997; Seeley et al., 1956; Rainwater, 1966). Almost without
exception, 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 this
private 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 in
creating and maintaining (a clean, comfortable, aesthetically pleasing) home
and family is, to some extent, valued, they remain socially isolated, with few
opportunities to achieve the social, economic and political status accorded
their male partners who engage in paid work in the public domain (Madigan
et al., 1990). Despite home being generally considered a feminine, nurturing
space created by women themselves, they often lack both authority
and a space of their own within this realm (Darke, 1994; Madigan et al., 1990;
Munro and Madigan, 1999). Their emotional and spatial needs are secondary
to those of their husband and children. In contrast, for men home is a space
in 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 the
pressure of the outside world, even a site of leisure and recreation. While
home is a source of status for men, paid work and other activities in the public
realm provide them with alternative and highly valued identities. Related,
second-wave feminist research on the interaction between gender, space and
home noted how these social and historical ideas about gender roles and rela-
tionships in the home environment are inflected in housing designs, domestic
interiors 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 for
paid employment and participation in wider communal and political spheres
and 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,

Shelley Mallett
1990b) on gender and the meaning of home provided impetus for some of
this work. Convinced that socialist feminist critiques of home were skewing
debates within the social sciences, Saunders (1990a) claimed his empirical
research 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 studies
have 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 positive
accounts 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 where
reproductive rather than productive work occurs. For example contemporary
research on both rural and urban outworkers or home workers reveals that
many 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 from
home, 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 within
the house, impacts on family members experience and their perceptions of
home and familial relationships (Massey, 1996; Duncan, 1996b; Phizacklea
and Wolkowitiz, 1995).
Discussion of women’s increased participation in paid employment both
within 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 now
choose 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 home
environments.
Early work on gender and space argued that certain rooms or space in the
family home were gendered (e.g. the kitchen was a female space, the shed a
male one, etc.). House designs reflected stereotypical gendered relationships
peculiar to a given social and historical period (Hunt, 1989; Lupton, 1992,
1993; Sparke, 1995; Buckley, 1996). More recent discussions of gender and
space 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, increasing
recognition that rooms or spaces in the family home are not effectively gen-

Understanding home
dered even when they are designed to meet the requirements of a man or a
woman (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 that
reflect and/or subvert particular ideas about gender, age, and role (Munro and
Madigan, 1999; Mallett, 2003; Bowlby et al., 1997; Massey, 1996).
Despite these advances, general debate about gender and the meaning
of home remains problematic, if not simplistic. For example many researchers
in the field of urban sociology, and housing studies continue to conflate
house and home and take little or no account of the widespread critiques of
fixed and bounded notions of sex, gender and sexuality that have occurred
within feminist and queer theory in the last decade or so (Butler, 1990, 1993;
Gatens, 1983; Grosz, 1994; Young, 1990). Consequently many researchers
unthinkingly 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). The
intersection between gender, sexuality and ethnicity and age is also forgotten
or elided in most of these analyses. There are exceptions of course but these
largely fall outside of the dedicated literature. Both Hooks (1990) and Cren-
shaw (1994), for example write about the experience and meaning of home
for African-American women and women of color. Crenshaw views the home
as a site of oppression and disempowerment for women of colour rooted in
the intersecting issues of race and gender. Hooks (1990) acknowledges that
home is a potential site of patriarchal oppression for African-American
women yet she also argues that it need not be seen as a politically neutral
place. 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 the
scope of this paper it is clear that there is a great need for such an analysis in
the field.
Home/journeying
Cultural studies and anthropological literature detailing the experience of
migrants and refugees as well as sociological and psychological empirical
research on family formation and home-leaving claim that ideas about staying,
leaving and journeying are integrally associated with notions of home. These
ideas are in turn linked to, among other things, notions of dependency, inter-
dependence and autonomy, continuity and dis/location. As such, home, be it
defined as a dwelling, a homeland, or even a constellation of relationships, is
represented as a spatial and relational realm from which people venture into
the world and to which they generally hope to return (Case, 1996). It is a place
of origin (however recent or relative) as well as a point of destination. For
Ginsburg (1999) home is less about ‘where you are from’ and ‘more about
where 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

Shelley Mallett
arises out of the propensity of humans to migrate as a means of ensuring their

survival (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 that
these 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 journeys
are enacted. For example, in Western contexts at least, it is commonly
expected 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 ideally
establish an independent place of their own without severing all ties to their
birth family or the family dwelling. This expectation is premised on, what
many 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 foster
interdependence while also facilitating a capacity for independence. Ideas
about 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 or
go to university) are culturally and historically contingent. Nonetheless usual
and socially acceptable routes out of home remain and those young people
who take alternative pathways risk social exclusion or marginalisation. The
pathway taken out of home, whether chosen or imposed, is often crucial in
how these young people and/or their (past, present and future) homes are
identified and defined (Jones, 1995; Wardaugh, 1999).
These ideas resonate with some of the literature on migrants, refugees and
people living in exile. Accordingly the conditions under which people leave
their 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 between
home 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 exceptional
and extraordinary encounters with strange lands and strangers that engender
homeless 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 experiences
and 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. Home
can be experienced as strange and/or familiar:

Understanding home
It is not simply a question then of those who stay at home, and those who
leave, as if these two different trajectories simply lead people to different
places. 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 being
rather it may be one’s country, city or town, where one’s family lives or comes
from and/or where one usually lives. It may be other places or relationships.
These homes hold differing symbolic meaning and salience. It is possible to
be homeless in one, some or all of these categories at the same time. This view
resonates 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 fixed
space . . . home starts by bringing some space under control’ (289). It cannot
be simply equated with shelter, house or household.
For Ahmed, along with Gurney, Somerville and others, home and more
particularly being at home is a matter, at least in part, of affect or feeling- as
the 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 the
self through the senses, defining ‘what one smells, hears, touches, feels, remem-
bers’. Equally the self penetrates the locality. Accordingly the boundaries
between home and self and between home and away are permeable. As such
when one moves away from home the movement itself occurs in relation to
home, 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 phenomenological
research on home that describes the experience of ‘being-at-home’ in the
world. 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 diverse
ways people ‘do’ and feel home (Gurney, 1997; Jackson, 1995; Ingold, 1995)
rather than the ways that they think about home. They are interested in the
dialectical relationship between self and object in the intentional production
of home and accord ‘epistemological status to the subject’s meanings and
experience’ (Somerville, 1997: 230). As such many explore the ‘dynamic
processes and transactions’ that transform a ‘dwelling unit . . . into a home in
the context of everyday life’ (Despres, 1991: 101; see also Dovey, 1985;
Korosec-Serfaty, 1985). These temporal processes can include routinized

Shelley Mallett
activities as well as seasonal and/or cyclical events such as birthdays (Saile,

1985).
Others writers, inspired by, but not wedded to, phenomenology retain their
fascination for people’s experiences of being at home in the world, without
appealing to fixed notions of society, culture or even the person. These writers
de-emphasize without necessarily dismissing the notion of the intentional
subject. Michael Jackson’s work, particularly his (1995) book, At Home in the
World is a prominent example of this approach. His work on home arises form
a broader intellectual project to ‘describe how in different societies, people
work-in reality and through illusion, alone and in concert with others – to
shape the course of their own lives’ (123). As such ‘[h]ome is grounded less
in a place and more in the activity that occurs in the place’ (148). Home then
is not simply a person, a thing or a place, but rather it relates to the activity
performed 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 do
has some effect and what we say carries some weight’ (123). All too often the
dialectical tension between shaping and being shaped by the world goes too
far in one direction, swinging between ‘world mastery’ and alienation.
Many who employ phenomenological approaches to understand the
meaning 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 more
than 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 some
suggest, fixed oppositional terms. Rather they refer to ‘complex and shifting
experiences and identities’ (Wardaugh, 1999: 93) that emerge and unfold in
and through time.
Critiques of phenomenological or phenomenologically inspired accounts of
home take one of two conventional forms. As Somerville (1997) notes, some
critics, particularly sociologists, dismiss phenomenological approaches for
failing to adequately consider or acknowledge the social and discursive fields
that impinge upon and frame experience. Other critics focus on the adequacy,
even accuracy of the representations of people’s experiences. Prominent
among these are the feminist critiques which claim that gendered experiences
of home are often overlooked or misrepresented.
Surprisingly there has been very little sustained analysis of the method-
ologies employed by phenomenologically inspired researchers, even though
ethnography, episodic ethnographies, in-depth interviewing, even quantitative
surveys have all been claimed as legitimate phenomenological methods. The
use of quantitative and semi-structured interviews is particularly perplexing

Understanding home
given that phenomenology is first and foremost a study of people’s accounts

of their everyday practices and experiences.
Some researchers avoid using phenomenological and social construction-
ist theories together (Jackson, 1995), claiming that the emphasis on subjective
experience 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 theorists
of home slip between and/or strategically employ the two approaches. This is
perhaps best exemplified with brief reference to the work of sociologist, Craig
Gurney. Gurney (1997), for example, employs a range of methods including
in-depth interviews, episodic ethnographies and survey data to analyze how
people make sense of home through lived experience. Although his interest
in 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 a
passive, ontological social world or society upon which ideas, discourses and
practices are elaborated. People make sense of these socially constructed
worlds through lived experience. Accordingly he argues that home is an ide-
ological construct that emerges through and is created from people’s lived
experience. Gurney stresses the importance of emotion (love, intimacy, family,
anger, depression, among others) in the discursive construction of the
meaning of home, as part of a broader agenda to affirm and consolidate both
a sociology of emotions and a feminist epistemology that does not separate
reason 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 view
that 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 even
though they have no experience or memory of it. . . . We cannot know what
home ‘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 meaning
of 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,

Shelley Mallett
warm, and relaxing physical environment, heart refers to a loving, supportive,

secure and stable environment that provides emotional and physical well
being. 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 source
of 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 the
other key signifiers.
Despite his emphasis on the ideological construction of home, Somerville
concludes that the most important thing to know is ‘what the home means to
different people and to attempt to explain the range of different meanings
that we find’ (115). In a later article Somerville (1997) elaborates on this view,
positing a mulit-disciplinary hybrid approach that attempts to reconcile and
integrate (hetero)phenomenological theories with constructivist sociological
analyses 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 ‘constructed
by the intentional activity of free agents’ (238). However in striving for a sin-
gular theory of home founded on consistent epistemologies and ontologies
Somerville’s overlooks the benefits of keeping potentially contradictory the-
oretical approaches to the study of home in creative tension. There is a sense
in 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 on
a notion of the intentional subject.
Home, self, identity and being

Many authors refer to the relation between home and identity and/or the
concept of the self although few elaborate on the nature of this relationship
Some claim for example that the home, which they typically conflate with
house, is an expression or symbol of the self. Accordingly the house itself, the
interior design of the house, and the decorations and use of space all reflect
the occupant’s sense of self (see Després, 1991). Clare Cooper’s (1976) article
entitled 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 of
the collective unconscious which links people to their primitive past and is
the 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, the
free-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 where
people feel at ease and are able to express and fulfill their unique selves or
identities. The home of which he speaks though is not conflated with the

Understanding home
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 as
an inalienable source of identity. Havel, like Hollander (1991) imagines home
in terms of concentric circles. These circles represent an aspect of existential
experience that include, house, village or town, family, social environment,
professional environment, the nation, civic society, the civilization and the
world. Each is equally important and must be given its due although some
may 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 being
with 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 the
other 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 home
and being, which has largely been inspired by Heidegger (1971), stresses the
importance of building or making to our notion of home and our very exis-
tence. Heidegger claims that our building activities are integrally associated
with 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 the
world- 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 some

people do that. We build the intimate shell of our lives by the organization
and furnishing of the space in which we live. How we function as persons
is linked to how we make ourselves at home. We need time to make our
dwelling into a home. . . . Our residence is where we live, but our home is
how we live. (31)

Shelley Mallett
Conclusion: it all depends. . . .

How then is home understood? How should home be understood? Or, how
could 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 relationship
with one another, especially family, and with places, spaces, and things. It can
be a dwelling place or a lived space of interaction between people, places,
things; or perhaps both. The boundaries of home can be permeable and/or
impermeable. Home can be singular and/or plural, alienable and/or inalien-
able, fixed and stable and/or mobile and changing. It can be associated with
feelings of comfort, ease intimacy, relaxation and security and/or oppression,
tyranny and persecution. It can or can not be associated with family. Home
can 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 create
a 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/or
irrelevant concept. It can be fundamental and/or extraneous to existence.
Home can be an ideological construct and/or an experience of being in the
world. It can be a crucial site for examining relations of production and con-
sumption, globalisation and nationalism, citizenship and human rights, and the
role of government and governmentality. Equally it can provide a context for
analysing 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 interdisciplinary
debates and studies of home. In responding to these questions interested
researchers could usefully reflect on people’s diverse experience and ways
of 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 and
the 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 own
research. They also need to recognise and acknowledge the limitations of their
work and the implication of these limitations for their own and others’ under-
standing of this term. Hollander (1991) puts this succinctly when he argues
that both the meaning and study of home ‘all depends’. Briefly, how home is
and has been defined at any given time depends upon ‘specification of locus
and extent’ and the broader historical and social context.
The University of Melbourne Received 12 December 2002

Finally accepted 28 October 2003

Understanding home
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 for
chasing 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 they
do 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-Zúňiga, D., (eds), (2003), Birdwell Pheasant, D. and Lawrence-Zúňiga, (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 prior
to 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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What are some of the ways home is defined in the literature according to the passage?

What are some of the ways home is defined in the literature according to the passage?

What themes does the author say are considered in their effort to facilitate interdisciplinary conversations about home?

What themes does the author say are considered in their effort to facilitate interdisciplinary conversations about home?

Understanding home: a critical review of

Introduction: dream home

© The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2004 63

64 © The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2004

House and home

© The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2004 65

are controlled and ‘structured functionally, economically, aesthetically and

66 © The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2004

industrial revolution effected the constitution of households and participation

© The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2004 67

68 © The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2004

References to the symbolic potency of the ideal or idealized home recur

© The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2004 69

Home is often described in the literature as a haven or refuge. It is depicted

70 © The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2004

This understanding of home is founded on several related ideas, most obvious

© The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2004 71

households contributed to work or related activities, in the new era women

72 © The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2004

Home and family

© The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2004 73

Home and gender

Within the literature, reflections on the significance of family to the meaning

74 © The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2004

© The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2004 75

76 © The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2004

© The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2004 77

arises out of the propensity of humans to migrate as a means of ensuring their

78 © The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2004

Being at home (in the world)

© The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2004 79

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

80 © The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2004

given that phenomenology is first and foremost a study of people’s accounts

Here Somerville makes a questionable theoretical distinction between cogni-

© The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2004 81

warm, and relaxing physical environment, heart refers to a loving, supportive,

Home, self, identity and being

82 © The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2004

house. It may be an emotional environment, a culture, a geographical loca-

We make our homes. Not necessarily by constructing them, although some

© The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2004 83

Conclusion: it all depends. . . .

The University of Melbourne Received 12 December 2002

84 © The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2004

© The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2004 85

86 © The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2004

© The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2004 87

88 © The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2004

© The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2004 89

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