Not only Home Sweet Home : How homes make and keep us human (Book Review)

Title: Home - A Very Short Introduction; Author: Michael Allen Fox; Publisher: Oxford University Press; Pages: 144; Price: Rs 225

How does it feel how does it feel?/To be without a home/Like a complete unknown like a rolling stone jeeringly asked Bob Dylan in the refrain of a 1965 single (a later cult classic) as he articulated one of humans deepest fears. Home is a short word but is a key concept of human civilisation and has a range of complex connotations. Repository of our first memories and earliest formative experiences a refuge or rejuvenation point from a harsh world and of nostalgia in later years the idea and feelings about home have long provided people of all cultures with a sense of a point of belonging. But do these basic notions remain as valid or even relevant in the globalised -- but not much equitable or less violent -- world with its requirement of migration and forced displacement? Does home only mean a dwelling or is it situated in a wider place? Philosopher Michael Allen Fox seeks here to investigate these issues the volumes of meanings that this apparently simple word convey like many others of its kind (say life love food and so on) and other aspects such as not having one that have come to be attached to it and what the future portends. Holding home is central life and consequently it has een much thought about treasured and longed for and abundant written works and other cultural products devoted to the subject he notes that despite all this it cannot be supposed that home is a settled concept. Home is a fundamental and universal concept yet it has multiple and associated and layered meanings for different people in a great range of circumstances... As a result home surprises us by turning out to be a restless shifting somewhat elusive notion he says. Fox an Adjunct Professor of the School of Humanities in Australia s University of New England and Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Canada s Queen s University goes on to deal with these changing paradigms. Starting with a definition of home and ascertaining why it has such a resonance for us with the example of mythical Greek hero Odysseus he then goes to fix it as a place for humans on earth; and how location -- be it spatial in our memory or imagination or in all these senses and more -- is important. In this he also seeks to expand the concept from a dwelling place as our reference point -- but not absolute -- for the world in larger frames of neigbourhood city region country and beyond. The next chapter takes up dwelling and dwellings as both activity and location and in the second case enlisting their great variety from caves to crowded tenements to tony flats seeks to identify its deep significance. He then goes on to tell us what home means to us mentally drawing in both Marcel Proust to Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung and the people objects and identities home comprises. However in home politics Fox deals with contested ideas about where the line between the private and the public is drawn gender roles of its inhabitants the case of those for whom homes mean misery and abuse and finally home s place in the larger political entity of a homeland. Here he aptly warns how a connection between the two invariably includes propaganda and fosters rise of one sided thinking -- you re either with us or against us -- to come to the fore. Stressing homeland is not bad in itself he holds that when it is used as a fictive device for manipulating the public will negative impacts are likely to rise. Fox sketches the equally important issues of homelessness and uprootedness -- due to poverty or wars and disasters before coming to the future of home in the highly technical but socially increasingly self-obsessed and indifferent world we live in. A lucid look at home s meaning significance and benefits (and some disadvantages) through the ages it is an eloquent testimony to our lack of attention to a key anchor in keeping us human especially in its collective manifestation as cities and even at its planetary level -- our much-abused and-much wounded Earth. (Vikas Datta can be contacted at vikas.d@ians.in) --IANS vd/