Home: The Foundations of Belonging 2017033829, 9781138633148, 9781315207865

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Home: The Foundations of Belonging

Questions of home and belonging have never been more topical. Populist politicians in both Europe and America play on anxieties over globalisation by promising to reconstitute the national home, through cutting immigration and ‘taking back control’. Increasing numbers of young people are unable to afford home-ownership, a trend with implications for the future shape of families and communities. The dominant conceptualisations of home in the twentieth century – the nation-state and the suburban nuclear household – are in crisis, yet they continue to shape our personal and political aspirations. Home: The Foundations of Belonging puts these issues into context by drawing on a range of disciplines to offer a deep anthropological and historical perspective on home. Beginning with a vision of modernity as characterised by both spiralling liminality and an ongoing quest for belonging, it plumbs the archaic roots of Western civilisation and assembles a wide body of comparative anthropological evidence to illuminate the foundations of a sense of home. Home is theorised as a stable centre around which we organise both everyday routines and perspectives on reality, bringing order to a chaotic world and overcoming liminality. Constituted by a set of ongoing processes which concentrate and embody meaning in intimate relationships, everyday rituals and familiar places, a shared home becomes the foundation for community and society. The Foundations of Belonging thus elevates ‘home’ to the position of a foundational sociological and anthropological concept at a moment when the crisis of globalisation has opened the way to a revaluation of the local. Paul O’Connor completed his PhD at University College Cork. He is currently assistant professor of sociology at the United Arab Emirates University, where he specialises in cultural sociology.

Contemporary Liminality Series editors: Arpad Szakolczai University College Cork, Ireland

Series advisory board: Agnes Horvath University College Cork, Ireland

Bjørn Thomassen Roskilde University, Denmark

Harald Wydra University of Cambridge, UK www.routledge.com/sociology/series/ASHSER1435 This series constitutes a forum for works that make use of concepts such as ‘imitation’, ‘trickster’ or ‘schismogenesis’, but which chiefly deploy the notion of ‘liminality’, as the basis of a new, anthropologically focused paradigm in social theory. With its versatility and range of possible uses rivalling and even going beyond mainstream concepts such as ‘system’, ‘structure’ or ‘institution’, liminality is increasingly considered a new master concept that promises to spark a renewal in social thought. In spite of the fact that charges of Eurocentrism or even ‘moderno-centrism’ are widely discussed in sociology and anthropology, it remains the case that most theoretical tools in the social sciences continue to rely on taken-for-granted approaches developed from within the modern Western intellectual tradition, whilst concepts developed on the basis of extensive anthropological evidence and which challenged commonplaces of modernist thinking have been either marginalised and ignored, or trivialised. By challenging the assumed neo-Kantian and neo-Hegelian foundations of modern social theory, and by helping to shed new light on the fundamental ideas of major figures in social theory, such as Nietzsche, Dilthey, Weber, Elias, Voegelin, Foucault and Koselleck, whilst also establishing connections between the perspectives gained through modern social and cultural anthropology and the central concerns of classical philosophical anthropology, Contemporary Liminality offers a new direction in social thought.

Titles in this series 3 Walking into the Void A Historical Sociology and Political Anthropology of Walking Agnes Horvath and Arpad Szakolczai 4 Home: The Foundations of Belonging Paul O’Connor

Home: The Foundations of Belonging

Paul O’Connor

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Paul O’Connor The right of Paul O’Connor to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: O’Connor, Paul, 1978– author. Title: Home : the foundations of belonging / Paul O’Connor. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; NewYork, NY : Routledge, 2018. | Series: Contemporary liminality | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017033829 | ISBN 9781138633148 (hbk) | ISBN 9781315207865 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Belonging (Social psychology) | Home. Classification: LCC HM1033 .O283 2018 | DDC 392.3/6–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017033829 ISBN: 978-1-138-63314-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-20786-5 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For Áine

Contents

Acknowledgements

viii

Introduction

1

1

Antaeus and Hercules

8

2

The web of meaning

24

3

The cultivation of place

51

4

The landscape of memory

69

5

Habits of home

91

6

A sacred economy

108

7

Gifting and recognition

129

8

The boundaries of home

141

9

Parish and province

160

Conclusion: the future of home

174

Bibliography Index

180 193

Acknowledgements

I would like to take this opportunity to thank those who helped and supported me in the course of writing this book, and without whose encouragement and assistance it would not have been completed. Special thanks are owed to Professor Arpad Szakolczai, who supervised the writing of my PhD thesis at University College Cork (UCC). My intellectual debt to him is clear from the following pages. His work has been a constant source of stimulation and inspiration, as well as an example of what social theory can be, but all too often is not – an effort to grapple with the fundamental issues which inspired the founders of the discipline, and to promote meaningful forms of social inquiry. His moral support throughout the lengthy process of research and thought which led to this book, as well as his forensic reading of my work, have been an immeasurable resource. My thanks are also due to Kieran Keohane, for his encouragement and support over the past seven years; to Feilm O hAdhmail, for his assistance in returning to academic life after a decade-long hiatus; to my fellow veterans of the GREP programme at UCC, for their companionship on the journey; to my colleagues in the Department of Sociology at UCC, in particular Niamh Hourigan, Ger Mullally and Jerry O’Sullivan, for their advice and support; to the editors of the journal International Political Anthropology, and the organisers of the various IPA conferences and workshops I have attended, which have been a regular source of ideas and intellectual stimulation; to my colleagues in the Cleaner Production Promotion Unit (CPPU), especially Christine Gaffney and Breffni Lennon, for their friendship over the past few years; and to Niall Dunphy, Director of the CPPU, for facilitating me in taking the time needed to complete this book. I would also like to thank the Education Committee of the Society of St. Vincent De Paul, Cork, for their generous financial support at a time during my PhD studies when I had nowhere else to turn. To my wife, Áine, my deepest gratitude is owed, and the dedication of this work can only repay a little of my debt. Her practical contribution to a project which has consumed my life for the past seven years has included reading and discussing the various drafts since the beginning, enduring regular lectures on topics from boundaries to rites of passage, and responding not with the impatience which would sometimes have been justified but with constant encouragement. Even more

Acknowledgements ix essential has been her emotional support through a period which saw multiple house moves, constant financial insecurity and the birth of our two children. It is her love, companionship and emotional intelligence which have seen our family through. Finally, I would like to thank my children, Tadhg and Meadhbh. Without you, this book would have been completed earlier, but my understanding of home would be immeasurably poorer.

I have lived in important places, times When great events were decided, who owned That half a rood of rock, a no-man’s land Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims. I heard the Duffys shouting “Damn your soul!” And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen Step the plot defying blue cast-steel “Here is the march along these iron stones.” That was the year of the Munich bother. Which Was more important? I inclined To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind. He said: I made the Iliad from such A local row. Gods make their own importance. – Patrick Kavanagh, ‘Epic’1

1 ‘Epic’ by Patrick Kavanagh is reprinted from Collected Poems, edited by Antoinette Quinn (Allen Lane, 2004), by kind permission of the Trustees of the Estate of the late Katherine B. Kavanagh, through the Jonathan Williams Literary Agency.

Introduction

Where is the centre of the world? New York? Shanghai? Silicon Valley? I’d suggest Ballyrush and Gortin, and their equivalents everywhere from Monaghan to Mongolia. This book is about how such localised worlds of meaning are created and sustained within a globalised society. It is here, amid webs of significance woven from the fabric of everyday life, that we make ourselves a home. Home, consequently, is not confined to the domestic sphere but can be found on many different scales. In terms of place, it may refer to a single building, a neighbourhood, city or country. In terms of social groups, we may feel at home with our family, neighbours and local community; a circle of friends; our workmates; or with the members of a political, religious or ethnic group to which we belong. Home, for most of us, is constituted by a number of overlapping places and social circles. It is anywhere we feel an unselfconscious sense of belonging and recognition; anywhere that provides us with a stable centre from which to integrate our experience and understand the world. Home is produced by localisation, defined in Chapter 1 as a process by which the elements of social life anchor themselves in local contexts. These contexts may be physical or social or, most frequently, a combination of both. They are created by dwelling; that is, living in a way which endows our world with meaning. More specifically, they are produced by localising processes, including the cultivation of place, the accumulation of collective memory, the crystallisation of tradition, the formation of commensal bonds, participation in circles of gift exchange and recognition, and the inscription of symbolic boundaries. These processes are interrelated and frequently operate together, and their detailed elucidation comprises the core of this book. They create local contexts of social action by weaving together relationships, practices and meanings into a distinctive and bounded whole, a localised world of meaning which is home. Such local worlds are undermined by globalisation, yet continue to reconstitute themselves even amidst the flux and fluidity of late modern society. Consequently, modernity is characterised on the one hand by the breakdown of taken-for-granted homeworlds and on the other by an ongoing quest to recreate a sense of home. This manifests itself in forms as diverse as the culture of domesticity, with its valorisation of private life, flight to suburbia and pursuits of home decoration, gardening and do-it-yourself (DIY); nationalism, covering a spectrum that ranges from

2

Introduction

bellicose imperialism to the celebration of localised ethnic and folk cultures; religious revivals, especially those in which charismatic movements or separatist cults form closed social worlds that seek to integrate experience under the rubric of a single creed; aspects of environmentalism, such as eco-villages or neo-homesteading; and many manifestations of contemporary identity politics. What all these have in common is a preference for bounded worlds of integrative meaning over the panoramas of globalisation. Where they differ is in the degree to which this meaning is immanent in the settings, relationships and practices of everyday life, or alternatively represents an attempt to rearticulate, at the level of symbolism and language, a unity of experience that has been broken. It might be asked whether, in a globalised society, such localised worlds of meaning still matter. Surely the global market, corporate power, technological advances, the changing role of the state, and the circulation of information and images in the global public arena are infinitely more important than the crystallisation of significance in households and neighbourhoods or among small social circles? Is it not at the global level that the shaping forces of our society are playing out? Yet in important ways our local worlds are the ones that matter most. Home is the place that is most real to us, the principal centre of meaning in our lives. Meaning, as will be elaborated in Chapter 2, signifies the relations of mutual implication and connection between the various aspects of experience through which it crystallises into significant patterns. The generation of meaning is the process of making sense of experience, not through abstract cognition, but as physically embodied and emotionally responsive beings, immersed in our surrounding lifeworlds with their encrustation of significance and value. Because localised contexts of action endow our experience with a pre-logical coherence and stability, meaning is in important ways a function of the settings in which we find ourselves at home. In particular, immanent meaning – the taken-for-granted structure of experience inscribed in concrete clusters of relationship, practices and place – is inseparable from localised contexts of social action. Meaning, in this sense, is what gives orientation and purpose to individual and collective life. It is the stories we tell each other which enable us to act and, above all, to act together in social networks. Consequently, shared participation in a collective home is the bedrock of community and ultimately society. We feel at one with those with whom we share a common structure of experience and meaning. Moreover, home is where society is reproduced, both physically and culturally. It is within intimate spaces of sociability, above all the family and household, that the fundamental acts of procreation and nurture take place and the foundations of individual identity and the frameworks through which we interpret the world are laid down. Hence, no matter how global society becomes, we are constantly drawn to recreate localised worlds of meaning, intimate spaces of belonging – to find the centre that is home. This book sets out to explore the nature and foundations of home, meaning and belonging and the dynamics by which localised worlds of meaning are created, destabilised and reconstituted. It does so by progressively refining a series of key

Introduction 3 concepts – many of which have been introduced above – through the prism of a broad anthropological and historical approach to its topic. The specific forms which home takes – the Victorian cult of domesticity, the longhouse of Papua New Guinea, the Greek city state, medieval guilds and confraternities, Patrick Kavanagh’s parish – may be peculiar to an individual society, but the underlying principles which generate such localised worlds of meaning are the same across time and space. The accumulation of historical and anthropological evidence and case studies has therefore been used to identify and clarify these principles, to explore what home is and how it comes into being. My work draws extensively on a tradition of writing about home which might, very broadly, be termed ‘phenomenological’ or ‘humanist’, in that it is concerned with home as a meaningful centre of human life. This takes much of its inspiration from Heidegger’s (1971 [1951]) essay ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’. Early and still relevant works in this tradition include Bollnow (1961); Vycinas (1961) and Bachelard (1994 [1958]). A related body of geographical and philosophical scholarship has focused on the theme of place (Relph, 1976; Tuan, 1971, 1979, 1991; Casey, 1993). Later discussions of home which draw on this tradition include Dovey (1985); Pallasmaa (1992); Barrie (2011) and Dekkers (2011). Roger Scruton (2012) also builds on Heidegger in his stimulating philosophical treatment of home. Two feminist scholars who have written extensively on the topic may likewise be included here. Iris Marion Young (2005) draws on Heidegger but seeks to move away from his masculinist emphasis on building to incorporate a greater concern with the everyday acts of preservation – of memories, relationships, and surroundings – which are essential to home. bell hooks (1990, 2009) weaves personal experience into essays which celebrate the capacity of home and place to offer a refuge from oppression and a site of resistance for African Americans. Szakolczai (2008) and Keohane and Kuhling (2014) can be related to this tradition in their concern with experience and cultural meaning. However, they develop these concerns in a more fundamentally sociological direction, which is also an aim of this book. My approach differs from that of many writers in the ‘phenomenological’ or ‘humanist’ tradition in a number of respects. Firstly, it adopts a more processual view of home, as the product of a series of ongoing localising processes, which exist in dynamic tension with globalising processes and liminal experience. Secondly, insofar as these are distinctly social processes, it moves away from the individualising, subjective tendencies of much of this literature. Finally, since it regards the production and dissipation of meaning as an active force constitutive of social, economic and political life, it elevates home to the position of a foundational sociological and anthropological concept. Another important body of writing on home is located in the domains of anthropology and the comparative study of religion. Mircea Eliade (1958, 1959, 1974, 1976) stresses the cosmological significance of founding a house, building or city as a re-enactment of the creation, taking place at the sacred centre of the world. Eliade’s influence is obvious in an interesting discussion of home by John Berger (1984). Numerous anthropological studies have examined how the houses of

4

Introduction

traditional peoples embody cosmological schemes or social structures; among the most important are those by Raglan (1964); Rapoport (1969) and Bourdieu (1979). Others include Richards (1950); Meggitt (1957); Ohnuki-Tierney (1972); Howe (1983); Turner (1988); Pellow (1992); Monroe and Williamson (1993) and Bryden (2004). Two edited volumes by Carsten and Hugh-Jones (1995) and Cieraad (1999) are of particular use. Trumbull (1896); Douglas (1970); Davidson (ed.) (1993) and Dohmen (2004) provide useful material on threshold customs and symbolic boundaries. Finally, anthropological field studies particularly relevant to the theme of home include Turnbull (1987, 1993) and Jackson (1995). Among historical studies of home, the most influential is surely Philippe Ariés’ (1996) classic study of the evolution of childhood, while the various edited volumes of Ariés and Duby’s (1987–91) A History of Private Life are an invaluable reference. Rybczynski (1987) is an important study, while Schama (1988, 1991); Hareven (1991); Bryson (2010) and Flanders (2014) are also useful. A limitation of most of these works, however, is that they focus almost exclusively on the development of the domestic sphere from the seventeenth or eighteenth century onwards. Of growing importance in the past couple of decades is what might be termed a ‘critical’ literature on home and place, including Somerville (1992); Ahmed (1999); Harvey (1993); Massey (1994, 1995); Massey and Jess (eds.) (1995); Rapport and Dawson (1998); Cresswell (2004, 2009); Nowicka (2007); Weir (2008); Duyvendak (2011) and Brickell (2012). A common theme of these writers is that home and its associated identities are produced and sustained through relations of power, often in ways that reinforce inequality or conflict, and are implicated in a variety of repressions based on class, race, gender and sexuality. Home is seen as a contested domain, in which different interests struggle to define a space as their own, in order to localise and cultivate their identity (Fog Olwig, 1998). Feminist scholars have pointed out that for women the home is often not a haven of rest and retreat but a place of work and sometimes violence and abuse (Duyvendak, 2011). Consequently, critical scholars set out to problematise the ‘natural’ and ‘takenfor-granted’ character of home on the basis that it reinforces structures of inclusion and exclusion, oppression and inequality. Blunt and Dowling (2006) declare their intention to ‘destabilize a sense of home as a stable origin and unsettle the fixity and singularity of a place called home’ (2006: 198). For Brickell, ‘Once cast as a uniform space of safety and familiarity, the home is now established as a far more problematic entity across the social sciences’ (Brickell, 2012: 225). These writers also tend to underline the levels of migrancy, hybridisation and mobility in the contemporary world, and privilege this as a normative condition of contemporary being, in a way that delegitimises more settled ways of living as closed, essentialist, regressive and exclusionary. For Rapport and Dawson (1998), globalisation and its accompanying processes of creolisation, space-time compression, hybridity and synchronicity have made traditional conceptions of individuals as members of fixed and separate societies and cultures redundant. There is no longer a centre we can call home; exile, emigration, banishment, labour migrancy and tourism are the dominant motifs of modern culture (Ibid: 23).

Introduction 5 It is certainly true that differences in power influence the ability of individuals and social groups to define a space as home, and that aspects of life in late modern society have fundamentally altered many people’s relationship to home and place. However, while critical scholars emphasise the restrictions which close-knit structures of meaning and belonging can impose, they ignore the ways in which home can provide both a refuge from oppression and the shared bonds which enable a group to resist it. The abuse of power does not take place only along the lines of race, gender and sexuality: the unaccountable power of multinational corporations and global financial markets is responsible for proliferating spirals of social devastation in the form of widening inequality, the degradation of work, and the erosion of democracy, as well as levels of environmental ruin which threaten the future sustainability of human civilisation. The atomisation and meaninglessness which accompany a condition of permanent liminality leave us defenceless against this power. Collective homes with shared identities, on the other hand, offer our best hope of creating societies characterised by solidarity, equity and common purpose. It is true that any collective home with a distinct identity will, to a greater or lesser degree, exclude those who do not share it. This can sometimes reinforce existing structures of inequality and power – for example, in a gated community where high house prices are used to keep out those of the ‘wrong’ background, or a nation-state defined in ethnic terms which exclude migrants. However, the localisation of identities can also provide the scope for marginalised groups and alternative ways of life to survive. When excluded from mainstream culture, gay people created their own neighbourhoods in many large cities (Duyvendak, 2011), and bell hooks (1990, 2009) writes of home as a place of refuge for African Americans. Home offers a set of social potentials which can cut both ways in relation to existing power structures. Furthermore, critical writers tend to base their arguments about the oppressive character of home on specifically modern social forms such as suburban domesticity or the nation-state, and generalise from these to the idea of home as such. This approach is problematic, since domesticity and nationalism are in large part a response to the breakdown of a wider sense of being at home in the world. The nation as ‘home’ operates on a uniquely large scale; its claims have sometimes been totalitarian; and its criteria of belonging are rationalised and bureaucratised through passports, citizenship papers and identity cards. This creates the conditions in which a particular definition of identity can lead to severe, even genocidal, oppression. However, home is usually smaller in scale; its claims on its members are less total; and belonging is more loosely defined. The scope for negotiation and ambiguity is accordingly greater. Critical writers also overstate their case in presenting contemporary reality as predominantly one of international migrancy and cultural hybridity. Many scholars, such as Harvey (1993), argue that heightened spatial mobility makes people feel even more strongly the desire for places that are secure and stable. Robertson (1995) popularised the notion of ‘glocalisation’, where globalisation leads to the reconstruction rather than abolition of locality and community. For Savage et al,

6

Introduction

despite sociologists frequently having pronounced the end of local identities, ‘attachment to place remains remarkably obdurate’ (2005: 1). As the editors of one anthology of studies of place and culture write: while anthropologists are preoccupied with de-essentializing the concept of culture and deconstructing the notion of bounded, localized cultural wholes, many of the very people we study are deeply involved in constructing cultural contexts which bear many resemblances to such cultural entities. (Fog Olwig & Hastrup, 1997) Home is not a fixed social structure with a singular essence, something which once lost can never be recovered, but is generated by a set of dynamic processes which can sustain multiple worlds of meaning. These processes can operate on the scale of a household, a country or anywhere in between. They can underpin groups with widely divergent and even conflicting values. They can provide the glue that holds together a suburban community, a liberation struggle, a religious sect, an ethnic neighbourhood, a utopian commune or a criminal gang. The content of these localised worlds of meaning can be, and is, infinitely various, although they have certain characteristics in common. Ironically, the critical scholars tend to assume that once you lose or leave your home you cannot find another, and thereby treat it as something fixed and static rather than the result of a set of dynamic processes. The members of diasporas, despite their hyphenated identities, usually do not find themselves living in some permanently liminal condition, but put down roots in their new environment. The Irish in America may have sung songs about the ‘old country’ and celebrated St Patrick’s Day, but Boston or Chicago rapidly became their world, and they did not continue indefinitely to live between two places or identities. To champion migrancy, not as a short-term necessity, an interlude between places of settlement, but a permanent condition, is to reverse the regular processes of social life and normalise a condition of atomisation and anomie. The writer Scott Russell Sanders takes issue with: the belief that movement is inherently good, staying put is bad; that uprooting brings tolerance, while rootedness breeds intolerance; that to be modern, enlightened, fully of our time is to be displaced. Wholesale displacement may be inevitable in today’s world; but we should not suppose that it occurs without disastrous consequences for the Earth and for ourselves. (1993: 107) While ostensibly radical, critical arguments often reflect a position of cosmopolitan privilege, which fails to recognise the importance of the security provided by a stable home for those outside the charmed circles where mobility is a matter of choice rather than need. The result is to effectively pathologise the desire for belonging felt by countless millions of people in different cultures around the world as nostalgic, regressive and morally suspect, while making a claim for the

Introduction 7 ethical superiority of those intellectuals who stand outside the collective identities they critique. The result is not only to reinscribe new forms of (essentially classbased) exclusion and intolerance; it is to distort sociological understanding of home and belonging. Home, as it is conceptualised here, offers a set of social potentials which are not available in the same way within more thoroughly globalised settings. These include a deep sense of belonging, ontological security, a shared identity, intimate social bonds, the infusion of the world with meaning, the grounding of individual and collective purpose, a refuge from the oppressions of the wider society, and a capacity for collective action outside the structures of the state. Certainly, home may also be experienced as restrictive, narrow, monotonous and even oppressive. However, at a time when human society is pushing up against its ecological limits, and many of the central institutions and ideologies of modernity are in crisis, this book argues that the social potentials of home are indispensable as we face an increasingly uncertain future. The societal innovations which will see humanity through the converging crisis of the next half-century will spring not just from the laboratories of Silicon Valley or the think-tanks of Washington and Beijing, but from those many and diverse spaces which enable people to act in the name of a shared home.

1

Antaeus and Hercules

Crossing the Libyan sands on his quest for the Garden of Hesperides, Hercules encountered Antaeus – earth-born, son of Gaia, a giant who dwelt in an underground cave and whose custom it was to challenge all comers to a wrestling match, the loser of which would to forfeit their life. Hercules accepted the challenge, but each time he threw Antaeus and seemed on the verge of victory, the giant would rise up with renewed vigour. For he drew endless strength from his mother, the earth, and so long as he remained in contact with her he was invincible. At last Hercules grappled Antaeus in a bear-hug and, lifting him from his feet, held him suspended. Separated from his native ground, the giant weakened, his struggles fading as Hercules crushed his ribs into his liver and drove the life from his body. Hercules roams the world as the sun roams the heavens, while Antaeus is rooted firmly in his place. Hercules extends the frontiers of civilisation, killing monsters, wild beasts and wild men. Antaeus lives in the desert, obeying no law but his own. Hercules has the aid of Athena, the goddess of wisdom and craft, who suggested the stratagem by which his adversary was defeated. Antaeus’ advantage lies in his home ground, his stubborn resistance. Hercules overcomes him by separating him from the source of his vitality – his connection to root and rock, to unfathomed origins, to his native earth. Holding Antaeus aloft, he thrusts him into no-place. Anticipating all those bearers of global civilisation who would come after him, he severs his victim from the anchors of his identity, consigning him to a liminal space where the self dissolves amid dreams of loss. It is by forcing Antaeus out of his world, his home, that Hercules is victorious. Yet accounts of the legend in the ancient sources are tantalisingly brief. Hercules cannot stand forever holding the corpse of Antaeus to the sky. What happens after the victor leaves? When the giant’s body is returned to his native ground, does renewed life seep into his veins? Surely it is so. For Antaeus represents something more enduring than civilisation, more elemental than the globe-trotting Hercules: a strength born from the womb of earth, the slow sediment of time, and the anchorage of home ground. We may imagine months and years of slow healing, as bones knit, sinews become taut and wasted flesh grows flush with health, until the giant rises. And Hercules – having journeyed to the limit of the world and found his hunger unappeased, and plucked the apples of

Antaeus and Hercules 9 immortality only for them to turn into ashes in his mouth – returning that way again, to find Antaeus waiting, in the fullness of his strength, rock-hewn, mountainous, indomitable.

The sacred centre The myth of Antaeus and Hercules is a parable of globalisation and of that which preceded it and will survive it: rootedness, belonging, home. Precisely because it is foundational, the importance of home has tended to be overlooked in social theory. Over the past two centuries, countless words have been written on the subject of our alienation from each other and from society. But about the opposite of alienation – the experience of being at home – sociologists have written comparatively little. ‘Given the fundamental importance of “home” for human life, its almost complete absence from social and political thought is quite surprising indeed’ (Szakolczai, 2008: 61). Partly this is because it is the very essence of home to be taken for granted. Jan Duyvendak writes: ‘while everyone initially agrees that we know what it is to feel at home, the moment we have to describe what it means to us, we begin to stutter’ (2011: 27). Home embodies those relationships, values, customs, practices and ideas which give shape and order to our experience precisely because they are unquestioned. The foundations of social life lie not in rational consensus but in shared patterns of behaviour which are barely conscious and hardly articulated. We tend not to be aware of them until they are challenged or break down. By contrast, the condition of possibility of intellectual speculation is often a situation ‘in which the taken for granted order has collapsed and where individuals, especially those most sensitive intellectually and spiritually . . . have lost their home’ (Szakolczai, 2008: 61). Hence social theory – preoccupied by modernity and social change – has generally overlooked the importance of home. Globalisation and the world of ‘liquid’ and thin experience has been taken as the norm rather than the exception. Change has been elevated over stability, the extraordinary over the routine, novelty over continuity, liminal spaces over the places they connect. Instead, we must begin in the middle, with a ‘search for the fundamental background practices of human culture’ (Ibid: 61). This means starting from home. Most of what has been written in the social sciences on the topic of home has focused on specifically modern forms of belonging, such as nationalism or domesticity. The argument of this book is that home relates to a more general, indeed universal, category of experience. Home, at any geographic level from the household to the nation, is a stable centre from which we integrate our experience and understand our world. This is reflected even in the hypermodern lexicon of information technology. Our ‘home page’ organises our experience of the World Wide Web, preserves the memory of our online lives in the form of records of past searches or favourite websites, and reflects our identity and preferences in its contents and recommended news stories or links. What our home page is to our virtual existence, home is to our embodied lives.

10 Antaeus and Hercules In Navajo legend, when the First People emerged from the underworld they found the earth barren and unshaped. There were neither plants nor mountains, sun, moon nor stars. Their first task was to mould the earth and make it liveable. First Man and First Woman decided they needed a home, a place in which to meet the other Holy People and plan the order of the world. So they built the first Hogan, the Navajo house. It was round like the face of the sun, and each pole was dedicated to one of the gods of the four directions. Its supports were made of precious stones and its roof-covering of sunbeams and rainbows. The floor was a rug made of jet, abalone, turquoise and white shell, and the curtain of the doorway was woven from dawn, the sky blue of midday, evening twilight and darkness. To bless their Hogan, First Woman ground the corn she had carried up from the underworld and First Man placed a pinch of it at each of the four cardinal directions (Monroe & Williamson, 1993). The first Hogan is both a house, a dwelling place for the First People, and a cosmion, a little world which embodies the order of the cosmos in miniature. This is often the case with the houses of traditional peoples. The Ainu consider their house to be a miniature universe (Ohnuki-Tierney, 1972: 426). In the Pawnee earth lodge, ‘the floor is the plain, the wall the distant horizon, the dome the arching sky, and the central opening the zenith, the dwelling of the invisible power’ (Rapoport, 1969: 52). The house of the Ye’cuana people in Guiana is an exact replica of the universe. The ground level is equated with the sea and the earth and the conical roof with the upper and lower sky, represented by two different types of thatch. The main transverse roof beam runs north-south and corresponds to the Milky Way, and the twelve outer posts are called ‘star supports’ (Riviére, 1995: 195). Among the Tukanoans of North West Amazonia, a people whose lives are orientated by the rivers which provide their road through the jungle, the floor of the longhouse is the earth and its posts are mountains which support the sky. Down the centre runs an invisible river on whose banks and tributaries the people live (Hugh-Jones, 1995: 233–234). A traditional house in Madagascar is divided into twelve sections corresponding to the twelve lunar months (Rapoport, 1969: 55). In archaic societies a house or village was an image of the cosmos, which expressed the existential experience of being situated in an organised and meaningful world (Eliade, 1976: 25). All of these traditions encode a deep wisdom – the recognition that home is where the world of experience takes on coherent form. To be at home is to be embedded in a dense pattern of relationships to people and place which produces an inherently meaningful experience of the world. This order is neither abstract nor imposed from without, but crystallises from the shared experience of people inhabiting a concrete location. Mircea Eliade writes that ‘every territory occupied for the purpose of being inhabited . . . is first of all transformed from chaos into cosmos’ (1974: 11). When Scandinavian colonists took possession of Iceland and began to cultivate it, they saw their work as a repetition of the creation: ‘By cultivating the desert soil, they in fact repeated the act of the gods, who organized chaos by giving it forms and norms’ (Ibid: 10). For the Romans the foundation of a city was a religious act which required the approval of the heavens, and the layout and

Antaeus and Hercules 11 orientation of their towns mirrored the order of the cosmos made visible by the daily motion of the sun (Rykwert, 1976). In each case, people saw themselves as repeating the creative work of the gods, following patterns of order inherent in reality itself. Shared participation in this ongoing process of ‘cosmicisation’ is the bedrock of community. Home is a place where we collectively make sense of our experience, in the process forging a deep bond based on common understandings and shared lifeways. Home therefore embodies some of our most basic human longings: the desire for meaning, for experience to cohere and make sense, lending us purpose and direction; and the hunger for community, for the warmth of recognition, to feel part of something greater than ourselves. This is why a threat to home is frequently experienced as an existential threat to the self, and why people will fight and die to preserve it. Hercules can kill Antaeus a thousand times, even dismember his body and scatter the fragments to the four winds; given enough time Antaeus will reconstitute himself and live again, for home is not something constructed once-and-for-all and then irrecoverably lost, but something we make continually, over and again, through the activities of everyday life. The work of cosmicisation requires a stable place from which to start, a centre around which to organise itself. This may be a physical place, such as a dwelling house, a townland, or the more expansive territory in which a band of nomads circulate, or a complex of emotional relationships, habitual practices and institutional settings which continue to organise a person’s universe as they migrate spatially. As O. F. Bollnow writes, lived space ‘arranges itself around a determining center, which is conditioned by . . . place of residence’ (1961: 32). It is for this reason that ancient civilisations situated themselves symbolically at the summit of the cosmic mountain where earth and heaven meet, the heart and centre of creation. As a result, house, neighbourhood and city are not merely places we live in – we live through them, because they serve to embody the organising principles of our world. Home ‘is a central point of existence and individual identity from which you look out on the rest of the world’ (Relph, 1976: 83). It serves to anchor and orientate its inhabitants, thereby becoming integral to their identity (Casey, 1993: 23). By contrast, ‘To lack a primal place is to be “homeless” indeed, not only in the literal sense of having no permanently sheltering structure but also as being without any effective means of orientation in a complex and confusing world’ (Relph, 1976: xv). More than just a fixed point in geographical space, home is therefore a centre of value. As Bachelard writes (1994: 171), ‘For the imagination . . . the world gravitates about a value’. In a familiar space, we do not orientate ourselves by the gridlines on the map, but according to emotional centres of attraction or repulsion. Home is usually the most potent such centre of value in our world. Bourdieu’s study of the Kabyle house shows how the spatial organisation of the home and the objects within, and the routine activities which took place there, formed part of a symbolic system which embodied the values of the entire society (Bourdieu, 1979). Modern housing, on the other hand, it has been said, is characterised by ‘the loss of a shared image of the good life and its values’ (Rapoport, 1969: 126).

12 Antaeus and Hercules But surely it is just such an image, albeit heavily commoditised, which is present in the suburban ‘ideal home’ or the country retreat? To speak of home as the centre from which we integrate our experience might seem to make of it something abstract and intangible, but home is always both concrete and particular. The ‘forms and norms’ mentioned by Eliade (1974: 10) are not experienced as abstract concepts, but embodied in the physical layout of houses and towns, in the placement of objects, in daily routines and periodic rituals. The value embodied in a house, a neighbourhood or a city is derived from concrete acts and relationships: the work we put into cultivating our homeplace, the crystallisation of lifeways and traditions, the accumulation of individual and collective memories, circles of gift-giving and recognition, and shared existential experiences such as birth and death, sex and childbirth, the nurture of children and partaking of meals. Home is woven from such threads of connection, and – crucially – it draws them tight rather than allowing value to be dissipated through decentred networks of mediated relations. Home fuses time and space in a unique chronotope – to borrow a term from Bakhtin (1988) – which combines temporal depth with the ability to ‘magnetise’ experiences and absorb them into the pattern of significance it embodies. Because of this concentration and intensification of value, home is a ‘thick’ world of meaning, in contrast to the ‘thin’ world of globalised and rationalised systems. Because home is a concentrated centre of value, it appears more ‘real’ than other places. By contrast, a world which has not been cosmicised can seem less than real (Berger, 1984). Separated and disconnected facts or experiences, which we cannot fit into a pattern or assimilate to ourselves, have a character of unreality, whereas a world that is intimately related to ourselves and our loved ones and infused with their presence is concrete and vivid. For Mircea Eliade (1959), the sacred is that which is most intensely real. Charles Eisenstein writes of the sacred that it has two aspects: uniqueness and relatedness. A sacred object or being is one that is special, unique, one of a kind. . . . It has no equivalent, and thus no finite ‘value,’ for value can only be determined by comparison. . . . Unique though it is, the sacred is nonetheless inseparable from all that went into making it, from its history, and from the place it occupies in the matrix of all being. (2011: 8) Home embodies these characteristics of the sacred, and has been regarded as such in almost every culture, with the household cult of ancestors one of the most widespread forms of religious practice. It is a sacred centre, the point of most intense reality from which we order our world.

Local contexts Home is produced by localisation, the process by which social life anchors itself in local contexts, including physical places and intimate circles of relationship. These serve as centres around which the elements of social life crystalise,

Antaeus and Hercules 13 coagulate and accumulate. As relationships, practices and meanings become attached to such contexts, they are endowed with a coherence which is pre-logical and based on geographic propinquity or shared identity. Localisation therefore evolves a tight-knit matrix of relationship, practice, identity and locale: a coherent world of meaning which is experienced as home. Moreover, as new relationships are formed or novel practices develop, they can be assimilated to this matrix and stamped with its character. Home is therefore not a fixed structure, static and frozen, which shuts out the external world: it is a dynamic centre which draws in experience and gives it meaning. We might think, for example, about the way in which an empty house is turned into a home over time. An initial cluster of relationships (say, between a couple and their infant children) is expanded to include neighbours, friends, in-laws and grandchildren. A body of everyday habits and family traditions associated with the house grows up, from gathering around the table for Sunday roast to putting out the garden furniture at the start of summer. As time goes by, memories hang thicker in every room, and the depth of meaning in the house, and in the objects, relationships and practices associated with it, accumulates. What is important to recognise is how a local context of action – the house – structures, preserves, and gives coherence to the life that unfolds within. Separated from that context, the relationships between family members would be looser, their routines less intertwined, their collective memory unanchored, their collection of shared experiences and meanings less substantial. This effect becomes stronger the longer the association between house and family endures. Consequently, the temporal continuity and stability of such local contexts of action is crucial for their ability to act as the foundations of home. Such contexts operate most powerfully when physical propinquity and social identity overlap. In the previous example, there is a second context of action alongside the house, namely the family, which likewise structures, preserves and renders coherent the elements of social life it contains. So long as they are coterminous, house and family mutually reinforce each other and help define each other’s identity. The house, inhabited by a random group of lodgers, would lose much of its power to shape the life within; the family, void of physical propinquity, would be less able to direct the day-to-day activity of its members. It is when social identity becomes bound up with physical place and this relation persists through time that the effects of localisation are most powerful. Localisation embraces a cluster of interrelated processes whose elucidation comprises the core of this book. These processes generate local contexts of social action by weaving together relationships, practices and meanings to create a milieu which is particular, bounded and unique. Place-making (Chapter 3) describes the way in which different elements of social life become bound up with a physical locale, generating a distinctive setting which has the ability to assimilate new elements and stamp them with its character. Collective memory (Chapter 4) is the memory of a social group, which attaches itself to places, buildings, landscapes and objects as well as being preserved in narrative and ritual. This generates a dimension of ‘primordial depth’ in which diverse elements of the past can be

14 Antaeus and Hercules forged into a narrative that underpins the identity of the group and provides a specific and unique context for their collective existence. The enactment of tradition (Chapter 5) binds together traditional practices and the specific places, occasions and social groups with which they are associated to generate a localised context for social life. The inscription of symbolic boundaries (Chapter 8) creates a distinct context of action through the association of a particular locale or territory with a social group. The remaining three processes generate local contexts in ways that rely more on face-to-face relations than on the accumulation of meaning in physical spaces or habitual practices. Commensal bonding (Chapter 6) is founded on shared participation in the processes which reproduce and sustain biological life; in contrast to contractual bonds, which operate between individuals who remain separate legal abstractions, commensal bonding involves a blending of the very substance of the self. Such bonds establish a context of biological or fictive kinship that in turn provides a framework in which the different elements of social life can anchor themselves. Gift exchange and recognition (Chapter 7) are two interlocking processes by which a similar nexus of relationships is created and sustained, providing a matrix to which other relationships, practices and meanings can be assimilated. But what is the local? Savage et al. (2005) review and critique a variety of definitions. They note that one of the most basic ways of construing the local is as context. But, they ask, what does this mean when globalisation theory argues that social relationships are now stretched over space and organised through flows and forms of movement? I would suggest that the local is a specific form of context: one which is immediate, bounded and particular. Immediate, in the sense of physically tangible and confined within a fairly narrow spatial range; bounded, in the sense of having clear and well-known limits; particular, meaning inseparable from a specific locus in space and time. Local contexts are also characterised by participation (Lévy-Bruhl, 1975). According to Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, moderns view reality through the medium of concepts which are relatively fixed and well-defined, and so can be made the object of logical operations and used to adduce inviolable laws. The concepts of ‘primitive’ peoples, on the other hand, are more like generic images (Ibid: 37), fluid and subject to transformation under the impact of emotion and ‘mystical’ experience. Consequently, the elements of their experience are less separable and less subject to watertight division into logical categories. The same individual can be a man and a leopard; a dead man can be present both as a corpse and a ghost; piercing the footprint of an enemy with a spear has the power to injure the person who made it. Above all, the individual is apprehended as consubstantial with the group, its mythical ancestors, and the sacred sites which preserve their memory (Ibid: 193). According to Lévy-Bruhl, this so-called primitive mentality comprises universal features present in every human mind, but that are more marked and easily observable among traditional peoples. The experience of home obeys a similar logic of participation. We are never wholly separable from our family and intimate

Antaeus and Hercules 15 relations, our dwelling and possessions, or the places where our most precious memories are preserved. They are inscribed in our identity, and a part of us always goes with them. Like the traditional tribespeople studied by Lévy-Bruhl, we are what we are by virtue of this participation (Ibid: 18). Participation – the way in which something of our own substance is merged with a social group or a physical place – sharply distinguishes local contexts of action from those which are global in character. Local contexts of action possess these characteristics of immediacy, boundedness, particularity and participation because they remain close to the existential frames of human life: physical place, cumulative time, face-to-face relations, biological and biophysical cycles. Globalised contexts of action, on the other hand, are predicated on separation from these frames. Anthony Giddens (1991) writes about the ‘sequestration of experience’ in modern society. Human intervention in the natural world has become so profound that it has lost its character as an extrinsic source of reference; the individual lifespan is separated from the cycle of the generations, place and kinship relations; and sexuality and death, illness and madness no longer provide us with points of reference outside of the self-referential systems of modernity.1 Yet there are limits to the extent to which experiences originating outside modern social systems can be permanently sequestered from view – and these systems themselves are more fragile than we assume. Human beings, and therefore human social life, are inevitably both embodied and emplaced. Globalisation, like a modern Hercules, works to sever us from our grounding in ‘original nature’ and the existential frameworks within which human life traditionally unfolded. Yet social life exhibits an ineradicable counter-tendency to re-embed itself. Despite globalisation and information technology, we do not inhabit a disembodied space of global flows, but a physical world where social life thickens, coagulates, finds anchorage and accumulates around places and face-toface relationships as centres of value and sources of meaning. Localising processes are therefore universal social potentials; rather than belonging in the past and being irreversibly eroded by modernity, they are a crucial part of both our present and our future. Home therefore derives its solidity from being anchored in realities outside the globalised world of synchronicity and displacement: the temporal depth of the accumulated past, the physical contours of the landscape, the immediacy of face-to-face relations, and the existential ground of biological cycles. These are vital to the coherent ordering of experience because they stand outside the realm of contingency and choice and provide a foundation of continuity and repetition on which the echoic structure of meaning can be built up. Localising processes rely on our ability to encode associations, recollections, values and narratives in objects and buildings, landscapes and streetscapes, physical appearance and habitual practice, and for these to accumulate through time. As Bourdieu argues, people’s habitual dispositions are embodied and territorially located. He writes that in a pre-literate society ‘inhabited space – and above all the house – is the principal locus for the objectification of the generative

16 Antaeus and Hercules schemes’ (1977: 89) of habitus. But this remains true in our own societies, most particularly for those dispositions which shape our everyday lives, ground our identity and encode our deepest values. In consequence, localising processes are inherently particularising; they create forms of social life pervaded by the influence of a concrete location, a unique history, a specific social circle. This remains the case even when many of the contents of that life come from places beyond the boundaries of the local. The processes involved in localisation can appear so everyday that they are easily taken for granted. Certainly, they have been the object of little attention by social theorists compared to such seemingly grander constructs as ‘globalisation’ or ‘modernisation’, but in their very ordinariness lies their importance; they form the bedrock of social life. The influence of the local may have been weakened or diluted by globalisation, but it can never be eradicated. Like Antaeus, the local maintains its grasp no matter how often it seems to have been overthrown.2

Global networks The counterpoint to this tendency of social life to anchor itself in local contexts manifests in the form of globalising processes. Globalisation is not a purely modern phenomenon; while its contemporary scale may be unprecedented, its logic is as old as civilisation. The antecedents of today’s global world can be traced in the ecumenic empires of antiquity, which strove for world dominion (Szakolczai, 2003). Globalisation proceeds by transforming qualitative differences into quantitative deviations on a single scale, breaking down the distinctions between localised social worlds and unleashing processes of expansion and growth, which reject any limits (Szakolczai, 2016). Relationships, practices and meanings are disembedded from local contexts and stretched out across the surface of the globe (Giddens, 1990). Globalisation therefore breaks down the integrity of pre-existing relationships, whether in the fields of economic exchange, political allegiance or cultural production, substituting synthetic and mediated forms of relationship in which spatial extension replaces temporal depth. Local subsistence economies are replaced by commodity production for the global market; personalised allegiances by centralised states and bureaucratic administration; the sharing of songs and stories around the hearth with a global system of cultural production. In a globalised society the importance of local contexts is reduced by the spread of communications and trade networks, which foster relations with ‘absent others’ (Giddens, 1990: 18). Local contexts are destabilised, and the temporal continuity which is central to their operation is eroded. The family changes from a multigenerational unit capable of carrying strong traditions and reliably framing the lives of its members to one which may be formed and reformed several times within a single lifespan. Frequent changes of residence and employment reduce our commitment to local places, whose physical fabric is itself constantly being reconstructed. The elements of social life are consequently distributed, first across

Antaeus and Hercules 17 multiple local contexts of action, then increasingly within the institutions and infrastructures which connect them – the virtual worlds of modern communications systems, the ‘non-places’ of commerce and transport (Augé, 1995), the anonymity of government and corporate bureaucracies, and the labyrinthine networks of global finance and trade. Consequently, the role of physical places and small-scale social groups as frameworks of social life is increasingly taken over by macro-structures such as the global market, the public sphere and the bureaucratic state. However, in comparison to local contexts of action, these macro-structures are intangible, unbounded, abstract and offer little sense of belonging.3 Just as Hercules not only separates Antaeus from his native earth, but also holds him suspended in a liminal space between earth and sky, global systems are not content simply to detach us from some particular home; they hold in abeyance all those processes by which we make a home in the world. Globalisation involves the elimination of all limits, the suspension of stable structures and the destruction of the taken-for-granted background practices that give meaning to human experience (Szakolczai, 2003: 241). So long as the elements of social life are embedded in local contexts of action, these hold them together and give them coherence. Severed from those contexts, with the boundaries which had contained them dissolved, they become liquid and free-floating, protean and restlessly mobile (Bauman, 2000). The result is a qualitative change in the character of the life-world – a dissipation and relativisation of value. The elements of social life no longer cohere. They become unbundled from each other as well as from local contexts and face-to-face interactions. Relationships no longer overlap to form the nexus of a community. Practices constantly change and are no longer exclusively associated with a particular place or social group. Social meanings, rather than being anchored in concrete locales and the networks of relationships and traditions associated with them, become free-floating, projected onto the shifting signifiers of commodity or celebrity. The tendency of social life to solidify and accumulate is thwarted. Instead, it is liquefied, its elements held in suspension, the connections which constitute them rendered temporary and fleeting. The result is the dissolution of a coherent world of experience and meaning, with the individual life-trajectory left as the sole fragile thread on which to string experiences together (Giddens, 1991). Globalising processes generate a condition of ‘permanent liminality’ (Szakolczai, 2000).

Liminality Liminality offers something like an anthropologically based counterpart to the central concepts of this book, involving as it does the dissolution of the taken-forgranted structures of everyday life (Van Gennep, 1992; Turner, 1964, 1985, 1986, 1990; Szakolczai, 2009; Thomassen, 2014). Consequently, we need to consider the wider relationship between liminality, globalisation and home.

18 Antaeus and Hercules In a healthy state of society, home and the liminal zone beyond its boundaries exist in fruitful tension. From the pre-existing coherence of experience embodied in home, we venture out into the world, encounter the liminal, the fluid and the different, and return to incorporate this knowledge into the structures of everyday life, which themselves evolve in the process. As anthropologist Michael D. Jackson writes, one of the most basic themes of myth and folktale is that of the questing hero who leaves home and hazards his life in order to gain some magical object which will grant him fortune, immortality or great power. Such stories encapsulate the existential theme that everyone must sooner or later leave the secure confines of their home and strike out into the world. Only when one has proven oneself can one return home and be reintegrated into society with a new identity (Jackson, 1995). This pattern of ‘going out’ and ‘return’, this passage from the homely to the liminal and back, is the systole and diastole of human life – reflected in the sequential order of a rite of passage (Turner, 1986; Szakolczai, 2009). In the rites of passage studied by Van Gennep (1992) and Turner (1990), the liminal phase is a temporary one; initiands go out into the forest or the bush and are systematically separated from the norms of everyday life only in order that they may return, transformed, to be reintegrated into the community in their new capacity as adult members of society. This kind of liminal passage is an essential part of social life and cultural creativity: the temporary escape from reality of a holiday, the writer’s solitary retreat, or the prophet’s withdrawal into the desert are all examples of how escape from the everyday may be both necessary and creative. But this is so only because the solid background of everyday experience remains essentially intact. What happens if the ‘home base’ is eroded or disintegrates? If we reach a point where there is no longer a stable place to which we can return? In the absence of such a continuing bedrock of taken-for-granted existence, the character of social reality itself changes. The elements of that reality are no longer compacted together in a stable configuration but float unanchored. In a traditional society destabilised by some catastrophe, these elements would gradually cohere into a new configuration as a result of localising processes. However, globalisation causes them to be held in permanent suspension within abstract systems of relations, such as bureaucracy, the market or the public sphere. Social reality becomes progressively more contingent. The contents of experience can be taken apart and put together almost at will. The emergence of globalising processes therefore introduces a split in social reality. While everyday life retains aspects of stability embodied in local places, collective traditions and intimate social circles, these are now dominated and overlaid by a new kind of ‘out of ordinary’, liminal, globalised reality. Many people continue to live the most important parts of their lives in a world of concrete and taken-for-granted relationships to neighbourhood, family and friends; but over and above this world, and increasingly reshaping it, there develops a ‘thin’ world of contingent and mediated relationships, rationalised structures and mimetic spirals of imitative consumption. At the furthest extreme, we become trapped in a world of ‘permanent liminality’, where identities dissolve, moral certainties disappear,

Antaeus and Hercules 19 meaning becomes impossible to attain, community disintegrates, and collective action becomes increasingly difficult. But social groups also demonstrate an opposite tendency towards settlement, the creation of enduring relationships, the evolution of habitual lifeways, the localisation of value in concrete places, and its accumulation in a centre we call home. Social life has an inherent propensity to crystallise into stable figurations. Although unchecked globalisation ultimately leads to disintegration and chaos, everyday human dwelling works to reconstitute our surroundings as a meaningful cosmos. It is here – and not in the mechanical interdependence which Durkheim (1984) misnamed ‘organic’ solidarity – that we find the basis of social cohesion. Far from being merely a privatised retreat, home is the foundation of both culture and society.

Intersecting spirals Thus we find two sets of intertwined processes at work in human societies – those which anchor social relationships and practices within local contexts to produce thick worlds of concentrated meaning and those which break down the taken-forgranted relationships of the homeplace and reconstitute them within a thin world of globalised networks. These can be related to other, more familiar pairs of concepts: Durkheim’s mechanical and organic solidarity; Tonnies’ gemeinschaft and gesellschaft; Maine’s status society and contract society; Cooley’s primary and secondary social groups; Sorokin’s familistic and contractual relations. In each case, we find a distinction between taken-for-granted patterns of relationship embedded within the existential frames of human life, and the rationalised and contingent structures of relationship which are characteristic of globalised networks. ‘Localisation’ and ‘globalisation’ differ from these other pairs of concepts in that each expresses a process rather than a structure, and seeks to capture not just the character of social relations, but the overall shape of experience within a particular social context. In particular, they aim to elucidate how experience either takes on a collective meaning or alternatively comes to be void of shared significance. Meaning refers to our ability to articulate our experiences as part of a larger whole; how the different elements of life hang together – or do not (Dilthey, 1976). Social reality is not simply a block of facts, or an interconnected system, but a meaningful unity consisting of layers of experience accumulated over time (Szakolczai, 2014). Localisation creates a home; a centre of integrative meaning, embodied in the daily routines, intimate relationships, accumulated memories, and physical objects and buildings of which it is composed. Crucially, this is not a conceptual order, a discursive structure which must continually justify itself and which discourse can readily dissolve. Rather, it is an order of experience which is embodied, concrete, participatory and immediate. It is this which gives home its solidity and its quality of being taken for granted. Moreover, localisation and globalisation cannot be mapped onto a simplistic division between traditional and modern society, with its accompanying

20 Antaeus and Hercules implication that ‘progress’ from one to the other is irreversible and inevitable. Instead, they interrelate and co-exist within all societies. Everywhere there are expansive drives towards trade, conquest, discovery and exchange – ‘intercourse in every direction’ (Marx, 1996). But equally, even in the most globalised societies, there is a hunger for the stable and familiar, a desire for roots and belonging, an instinct to anchor social life in concrete places and intimate social circles. Only the balance between them changes over time. Hercules and Antaeus wrestle each other eternally. Like Yeats’ gyres, localisation and globalisation can be imagined as a pair of intersecting spirals which revolve in opposite directions. At any given time a society may be positioned towards the wide end of one and the narrow end of the other, but it will always feel the influence of both. While home is the foundation of any society, globalising processes are never entirely absent. And while today globalising process are more powerful than ever before, localising processes continue to operate. Even in the most anonymous suburban housing estate, people cultivate place, accumulate memories, develop family or community traditions, share in collective meals, the nurture of children and the care of the elderly, generate circles of gift exchange and recognition, and establish boundaries around their world. The social worlds created by such processes are often smaller, less stable, and more fragile than in the past, yet they remain the locus of personal identity and emotional life.

The quest for home In previous civilisations globalising processes only advanced so far before they collapsed due to outside invasion, the exhaustion of resources, or the decay of the elite (Toynbee, 1987). In industrial societies they have become ‘supercharged’ by a combination of advanced technology and cheap and abundant energy from fossil fuels. In the nineteenth century, in the midst of a wave of globalisation hitherto unprecedented in its scale and intensity, ‘thin’ characteristics began for the first time to predominate in the social reality of large sectors of society, and the qualities of home retreated into the domestic sphere and became increasingly feminised. Hence was forged the idea of ‘home’ as an emotional retreat, a place of intimate comfort dedicated to leisure and family life, in contrast to the hard and masculine world of work, business and public affairs (Flanders, 2014; Hareven, 1991; Rybczynski, 1987). This remained dominant in the twentieth century and was institutionalised and commoditised in post-war suburbia. Hence, despite our association of ‘home’ with the individual household inhabited by a nuclear family, the domestic ideal is in reality a product of the breakdown of a wider sense of being at home in the world. So long as nearly all those encountered in one’s daily life were kin, clan, neighbours or fellow townspeople, there was no need to privilege the domestic as the exclusive domain of home. It is only as a reaction to, and a defence against, the rise of a market economy and a neutral public sphere that the domestic ideal appears in the seventeenth-century Netherlands, in eighteenth-century England, and in nineteenth-century Europe. This period saw,

Antaeus and Hercules 21 not the invention of home, but its defensive retrenchment within the walls of the bourgeois residence, as the world outside became increasingly alienating. Ultimately the domestic sphere, a specifically ‘private’ space seen as marginal to the ‘real’ business of commercial and public intercourse, was substituted for collectively shared religious ritual as the principal centre around which meaning crystallised in everyday life. At the same time, in the course of the nineteenth century, religious expression itself was increasingly domesticated (McDannell, 1992). The cult of domesticity consecrated home as a privatised retreat from a desacralised world and a depersonalised society. Yet the rise of domesticity also testifies to how modernity, even as it undermines older ways of being at home in the world, is characterised by an ongoing quest for home, since the dissolution of older forms of meaning and belonging does not eradicate the human need for both. One thread of this quest is constituted by the history of domesticity itself, from the Victorian idyll celebrated by writers like Charles Dickens and Coventry Patmore, through the suburbs and ‘ideal homes’ of the twentieth century, to today’s ‘new domesticity’ (Matchar, 2013) embodied in such phenomena as the revival of knitting, home-brewing and growing your own food. Another is the history of nationalism, as the attempted reconstitution of a community of belonging coterminous with the modern state: one sufficiently large to have some prospect of autonomous existence in a globalised society, while still – even if in some respects ‘imagined’ – being rooted in concrete places and bearing a freight of collective memory and historical tradition carried over from older social forms. Yet another thread is constituted by the repeated religious revivals within modernity, whether in the form of fundamentalisms which seek to restore the sense of a cosmos pervaded by the unity of the sacred on a global scale, or sects which attempt to establish the coherence of a sacred world for the few by shutting themselves off from the wider society. Various forms of localism, antiquarianism, ‘ecological’ lifestyles, celebrations of ethnic and folk culture, and aspects of contemporary identity politics are likewise part of this quest for home, with its desire for a more coherent and ‘authentic’ order of experience which is closer to the existential frames of human life. Implicit in the notion of a quest, however, is the idea that home is to be sought in the future, rather than in the sedimented accumulation of past experience. This reflects the conception of time characteristic of modernity, which is no longer cyclical, thick, and cumulative, but time opening out into the future – something expressed by Koselleck (1985) in his contrast between the space of experience and the horizon of expectations. This latter sense of time is in turn indebted to eschatological time, and reflects the heritage of Christianity (Eliade, 1974). In both modern and Christian culture, therefore, the integrative aspect of home is frequently bound up with transcendence rather than immanence. This pattern is evident in the various utopian ideologies, including communism, fascism, socialism, and progressivist liberalism, which dominated the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Each constructed an integral order of meaning which sustained a community of activists and believers; yet the ultimate consummation, the transformation of the world into an earthly paradise for the elect, continually recedes into the future,

22 Antaeus and Hercules is perpetually postponed, and never actually attained. Even in the more mundane sphere of the property market, the ‘ideal home’ is usually conceived of as a ‘dream house’ to be purchased in the future, once a particular level of income and career success are achieved, rather than something which evolves through dwelling in a place and making it our own. Yet despite this modern tendency to locate home in the future, whether in the utopian promises of political ideologies or the glossy images of estate agents’ catalogues, people continue to create it in the here and now, through localising processes which retain their power to turn a dwelling into a centre of meaning and belonging. Moreover, the quest for home can also be a quest to return to origins, recover roots, and journey back to the source. These roots may be religious, as in those revivals which seek to restore the ‘fundamentals’ of a faith; cultural, as in the various national or ethnic movements which have sought to reclaim indigenous traditions fragmented by colonialism, conquest and dispersion; or personal, as when people seek out their true parentage or engage in the painstaking excavation of childhood memories. It is the argument of this book that the most fruitful direction in which to search for home involves not a quest for some transcendental consummation but a renewed attention to those underlying processes which create meaning and belonging, through an excavation of the existential frames of human life and the subterranean strata of human culture. It involves turning from the global panoramas, the endless questing, the restless toil of Hercules, and descending into the cave of Antaeus, cradled amid the bones of the earth, where time lies thicker than the shadows and each step causes some half-forgotten memory to stir. Nor should we fear to awaken the giant who dwells within its womb; for we are all children of Gaia, and Antaeus is our brother.

Notes 1 It is significant that, as reported in The Guardian on 13 January 2015, the latest version of the Oxford Junior Dictionary has eliminated a slew of words related to the landscape and nature, including acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pasture and willow. The words taking their places include attachment, blockgraph, blog, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity, chatroom, committee, cut-and-paste, MP3 player and voice-mail. 2 The term ‘localisation’ has previously been used by theorists of cultural globalisation to refer to the highly diverse ways in which people interpret globalised goods, ideas and institutions and integrate them into their lives. ‘Globalisation and localization are . . . one process. The local is increasingly a spin-off and part of the global’ (Breidenbach & Zukrigl, 1999). Roland Robertson (1995: 40) writes that he has ‘tried to transcend the tendency to cast the idea of globalisation as inevitably in tension with the idea of localization’, arguing that local units are to a large degree constructed by processes and actions external to themselves, in terms of an increasingly global dynamics. The problem with such theories is that they leave the local with no positive content of its own, only that adopted from the cultural menu offered by globalisation. This is because they view the local from the perspective of a global culture. Looked at another way, local contexts, with their unique qualities of history and embodiment, provide the enduring substrate

Antaeus and Hercules 23 without which the elements of global culture could not be absorbed and rendered meaningful. 3 A partial exception is the state, insofar as it can claim to be coterminous with a particular nation, the servant of national interests and the bearer of national identity. Hence the enduring power of nationalism in a globalised world: it is the medium through which the ghosts of older, communal and place-based loyalties are carried forward into late modernity, thereby legitimising the territorial nation-state, which remains the indispensable building block of a global order which has expanded beyond its control.

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The web of meaning

A flag is a piece of coloured cloth, and a symbol for which people will fight and die. Wrapped in its folds are multiple clusters of association and significance, from the intensely personal to the more distant and abstract. A flag symbolises not only a nation but also the intimate relations of home and family through which national identity is mediated for the individual. It symbolises a history, not only as it was lived but also as it is imagined: a story of endurance and endeavour, triumph and achievement, shared suffering and tribulation overcome. It symbolises a territory and a landscape: the familiar contours of neighbourhood and homeplace, as well as cities, mountains and seas known only as a picture or a name. It symbolises a culture: language, crafts, music, the legacy of great artists and writers, and the little things that give everyday life its character. To the soldiers who have fought beneath it, it symbolises their brotherhood in arms. A flag is a piece of coloured cloth, yet it appears transfigured by a haze of emotion. To burn it or drag it in the dirt can inspire fury, because it is to attack those precious or sacred things of which it is the symbol. Its area may be two feet square, yet its contents are infinite, for within that space it unites an immeasurable wealth of experience and emotion, shaping them into a symbol which, shared with others, becomes the basis of collective identity and common action. A flag is full of meaning, and this meaning constitutes its own reality, infinitely more powerful than the fabric from which it is woven. John Berger writes: ‘Events are always to hand. But the coherence of these events – which is what one means by reality – is an imaginative construction’ (1984: 73). It is our ability to give our experience coherence which renders it at once meaningful and real. Meaning depends on the relationships of mutual implication and connection between the various aspects of experience through which it crystallises into significant patterns. The result is summarised in Carol Lee Flinders’ description of a ‘culture of belonging’ as a way of being where values form a dynamic whole: ‘Within that whole, each value reinforces and all but implies the others, and the source of their power as a constellation is the synergy between them’ (quoted in hooks, 2009: 217). Experience is transfigured through being absorbed into such a constellation of values, taking on new significance and heightened emotional power, in the same way as the piece of cloth becomes a symbol of national identity.

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Meaning requires our active participation in its creation and in its externalisation in symbols, rituals, places and practices. The density of meaning varies among social contexts, as do the media in which it is embodied. Experience can ‘hang together’, with all its aspects relating to each other in a way that is readily comprehensible, or it can be fragmentary and chaotic. Experience and its significance can be shared with others and form the basis of a community, or it can be something which separates us from others and leaves us feeling alienated and alone. Meaning is not a given, but emerges from our collective encounter with the world within the frameworks provided by our society. Neither is meaning something cut and dried and finally achieved. Meaning-making is a processual endeavour, in which experience is woven together and pulls apart only to be woven together again – an ongoing dynamic in which we are constantly immersed. The elaboration of meaning is a collective, social process, and its embodiment and articulation is a creative social force which profoundly affects every aspect of society. As Yuval Harari writes, it is the myths we share which enable our species to cooperate flexibly in large numbers (2011: 27). Meaning is as fundamental to social life as economic exchange or institutional power, and is essential to both. After all, goods are frequently bought for their meaning rather than for their use, and power is inseparable from legitimating narratives and personal and institutional charisma. The aim of this chapter is to provide a sociological account of how meaning is elaborated and how social circumstances can cause it to be transformed or even eroded.

Experience To begin with, we need a social ontology which respects the inherently meaningful character of social life, while accounting for the fact that not all social life is equally meaningful. This is something which neither positivism nor social constructivism fully achieves. The first relegates meaning to a secondary phenomenon; the second tends to divorce it from concrete experience. Drawing on the writings of Arpad Szakolczai (1998, 2004, 2014); Victor Turner (1986) and Wilhelm Dilthey (1976), this section outlines a conception of reality which rejects both positivism and constructivism, one which views social reality as a concrete presence, a meaningful unity consisting of layers of experience accumulated over time. For positivists, social reality is an external and objective body of facts. For constructivists, it is a construct of human thought and language. Each of these perspectives is predicated on a prior distancing from the world, a separation between human thought and experience which goes back to Descartes and was reinforced by Kant. They differ only in which side of the divide they give precedence. Whereas positivism demotes the world of human thought, values and meaning to the status of second-order phenomena subordinate to material causes, constructivism severs the relationship between the two, leaving the social world floating unanchored in a sea of discourse. Each therefore offers only a partial and distorted version of reality.

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Both Cartesianism and Kantianism ‘problematise’ our relationship to reality by positing a separation between human beings and experience and therefore stress epistemology. But why should our relationship with the world we inhabit be construed as a ‘problem’ in the first place? In practically all societies and civilisations before the early modern period, participation in the world on the part of the individual who wanted to gain knowledge ‘was considered not as a deficiency with respect to the ideal of the complete separation of the observer and the observed thing, but as the starting point, and in many ways an asset’ (Szakolczai, 1998: 11). The achievement of understanding was underpinned by a fundamental sense of commonality with all members of a human group, or even with all living beings. By contrast, an attitude of pervasive distrust and suspicion is possible only insofar as the taken-for-granted qualities of the world and life have broken down. This condition needs to be recognised as an ‘out-of-ordinary’, problematic and potentially pathological state, rather than reified as the methodological basis for an accurate knowledge of social reality. We need to move beyond Cartesian dualism and Kantian transcendentalism to an understanding of social reality as a concrete presence, a unity which is inherently meaningful precisely because we are immersed in it as participants. Social reality as we encounter it consists of layers of experience accumulated over time (Szakolczai, 2014: 157). Connectedness, history and context are therefore inseparable aspects of any social phenomenon. We cannot detach either empirical ‘facts’ or ‘discourses’ from the concrete settings and sedimented layers of past experience which give them their character. Moreover, certain qualities or values are integral to any portion of social reality; it is useful or fine, threatening or dangerous, beautiful or loved (Ibid ). These qualities cannot be bracketed to uncover some underlying ‘objective’ reality, because they are an integral part of that reality. At the same time, social phenomena are irreducible to discourse, because they are encountered and reproduced by embodied beings. Consequently, social meanings are inextricably enmeshed with physical objects, buildings, landscapes and places, and with human bodies and activities. Reality as we experience it therefore encompasses a network of interconnections and a set of qualities which make it meaningful – and any method which starts by decomposing these connections falsifies it. Knowledge ‘primarily consists of an immersion in the manifold layers of this reality’ (Szakolczai, 2014: 159). Consequently, we should take as our starting point neither empirical ‘facts’ nor ‘social constructs’, but experience itself. In the words of Arpad Szakolczai (2004: 60): ‘Sociology should neither be the science of facts, nor of concepts, but of experiences.’ The first theorist to propose ‘experience’ as the basis for the human sciences was the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey. What he advocated was not a narrow empiricism but a method of enquiry based on the whole of experience as mediated through individual consciousness. The empiricism of Dilthey is therefore very different from that of both the British empiricists and Immanuel Kant. As he writes, epistemology has, up till now, explained experience and cognition merely from the facts of apprehension. No real blood flows in the veins of the

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knowing subject constructed by Locke, Hume, and Kant; it is merely the diluted juice of reason, a mere process of thought. (Dilthey, 1976: 162) Dilthey’s concept of ‘lived experience’ (Erlebnis), on the other hand, sought to take account of ‘the whole of human nature in which willing, feeling and thinking are only different aspects of the real process of life’ (Ibid). What Dilthey outlines is an inclusive empiricism which seeks to capture the lived reality of life as it presents itself to our consciousness. We know the world through our feelings and strivings as well as through our sense impressions and thinking, and we know it from within a particular individual, social and historical context. ‘The real cognitive subject is the whole human being, conditioned by the functioning of his body and by social and historical conditions, who not only perceives objects but knows and evaluates them in terms of the concepts he has learned and the way they aid or obstruct his activities’ (Rickman, 1976: 15). Knowledge of the human world develops through our everyday life and our involvement with our environment, and is inseparable from this context. ‘We do not just see a brick wall but something which obstructs our view or protects our property; we see not only a tall, fat man but a friend or rival’ (Ibid: 168). Experience is not, as it was for British empiricism, the imprint of the external world on a passive mind; it is equally the product of the mind’s activity which shapes and structures the data it receives. Dilthey’s inclusive empiricism embraces the fact that meaning and interpretation are intertwined with every phenomenon which presents itself to our consciousness. Yet it avoids the opposite error, that of seeing experience as a formless substrate which passively submits to the shaping influence of mind, language or discourse. Dilthey’s philosophy was partly a response to Kant, for whom experiences are unstructured, chaotic and incomprehensible without the categories of the transcendental mind. ‘Dilthey’s entire work was based on the opposite hypothesis: human experiences do have a structure of their own. The task of the interpreter is not to impose an external order on experiences, rather to elucidate their internal, real, existing structure’ (Szakolczai, 2004: 64). It was to indicate this fundamental difference that Dilthey came up with the concept of ‘lived experience’. This concept allows us to bridge the chasm, apparent alike in Cartesian and Kantian thought, between ‘experience’ and human reflection on that experience, between the worlds of sensation and thought. It captures the manner in which experience is formative and transformative. Etymologically, the word ‘experience’ derives from the IndoEuropean base *per-, signifying ‘to attempt, venture, risk’ (Turner, 1986: 35). An experience such as falling in love, starting your first job or being caught up in a political crisis or revolution has an inherent structure, an initiation and a consummation, which mirrors that of a rite of passage (Ibid ). This transitionary nature of certain critical experiences enables them to reshape identity and perception. In the same way as a rite of passage transforms the individual who undergoes it, experiences go beyond the dualism of subject and object by questioning the fixity and identity of the subject of knowledge and creating

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links between external conditions and the subjects who are shaped by them (Szakolczai, 1998: 23). Such experiences ‘stamp’ the character of both individuals and societies (Weber, 1968). However, human beings do not passively submit to such transformations, since experience is inseparable from its articulation in language and symbols. Thought is inseparable from experience, as people inevitably reflect on what is happening to them and struggle to interpret their situation. ‘Due to this very characteristic, emphasis on the reality of experiences (in opposition to merely talking about the reality of external structures) paradoxically reasserts a certain formative power of discourse and thought’ (Szakolczai, 2004: 82). Rather than being conceptually separate, ‘experience and thought are profoundly and inseparably intertwined, founding and forming reality’ (Ibid: 84). By contrast with the sciences, in the human studies we have direct access to our subject matter, human experience, and so we can see at first-hand those mental connections and operations which constitute meaning. While the physical sciences attempt to grasp the connections within nature by means of inferences and hypotheses, ‘the human sciences are based on directly given mental connections. We explain nature but we understand mental life’ (Dilthey, 1976: 89). Reality is not something to be extracted, by theoretical reasoning or experiment, from underneath the fog of experience; it is inherent in experience itself. Cultural productions are symbolisations of real human experiences, and rather than secondorder reflections of ‘reality’ are themselves part of the historical process (Thomassen, 2014: 94). Lived experience is never solipsistic. Experiences are individual and social at the same time (Szakolczai, 2004). While they are undergone by the concrete individual self, that self is enmeshed in the webs of connection and context which comprise social reality. ‘The self is always embedded in transpersonal relations with objects and other subjects. Dilthey would always insist on the concreteness of these relations’ (Thomassen, 2014: 228). Moreover, experience is inseparable from reflection, and the language, concepts and narratives we utilise in the course of reflecting on our experiences are given to us by society. Immediate experience is also enriched by awareness of the past and anticipation of the future. For Dilthey, every moment of life has a distinctive meaning according to its place in the temporal sequence (1976: 208–212). A second love affair can never be quite like the first. This connection between the temporal structure of experience and the ways in which we understand it makes us inescapably historical beings. Finally, experience transcends the distinction between culture and nature, or social and biological life. The human subject who has experiences is an embodied subject, one whose physical interactions with the world and other people are important and meaningful, in contrast to the discursive subject of social constructivism. Not only does experience fall into meaningful patterns; some of these reflect the larger inbuilt rhythms of existence. Consequently, human culture is powerfully shaped by existential, grounding experiences such as birth and death, sexual love and the passage into adulthood, sickness and aging, the necessity for physical labour, the rhythms of day and night, and the cycle of the seasons. In traditional societies nearly all these experiences were marked by rites of passage,

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famously studied by Arnold van Gennep (1992). Such passages between social groups and across human life ‘imitate and reflect the great cosmic rhythms of existence’ (Szakolczai, 2013b). The concept of ‘lived experience’ (Erlebnis) is important because it recognises both our collective participation in the world, which endows it with significance, and the concrete reality of the frameworks within which this participation unfolds. To neglect one or the other is to risk falling into positivism or a kind of solipsism, conceiving reality either as a body of ‘social facts’ distinct from the meanings and values we ascribe to them or as a series of language games divorced from the existential grounds of human existence. We can understand the dimension of meaning in social life only if we recognise that any aspect of social reality is a concrete presence, inseparable from the multiple dimensions of context and relationship in which it is immersed, including our own lived experience of the world. This requires an inclusive empiricism which validates concrete experience while recognising that reflection and meaning are integral to, indeed constitutive of, that experience. This approach, by sensitising us to the fact that there is an integral order to experience, encompassing a network of interconnections and a set of qualities which make it meaningful, can help us grasp the complex dynamics of meaning in social life.

Meaning Experience is therefore invariably connected, contextual and historical. Understanding this dimension of social life requires us to accept a different logic to that of conceptual thought, which – founded on separation from the world and suspicion and distrust of experience – divides reality into mutually exclusive categories among which it distributes empirical ‘facts’. By contrast, the logic of experience is inclusive, cumulative, agglutinative. Whereas conceptual thought splits the world into categories, experience generates constellations of association and connection. Meaning relates to precisely this quality of experience; its tendency to develop layered accumulations of significance and crystallise into repeated patterns which integrate the different aspects of individual and collective life. For Dilthey, meaning is the most important way in which we achieve understanding of experience, ‘the comprehensive category through which life can be understood’ (Dilthey, 1976: 235). It is the operation of seeing connections between the different parts of our lives as we review them in memory. Life, from the point of view of value . . . appears as an infinite multiplicity of positive and negative existential values. It is like a chaos of chords and discords. . . . Only the category of meaning overcomes mere co-existence by the subordinating of the parts of life to each other. (Ibid: 216) Meaning alone can make connections among the different elements of experience as they present themselves to consciousness. It gives our experience a coherence,

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which lies not in some focal point outside it, but inheres in the relations between its constituents (Ibid: 239). Meaning, therefore, refers to the way in which experience is orchestrated into a coherent structure, which emerges from within rather than being imposed on it from without. Whereas a concept can be substituted for the body of empirical data it represents, meaning is inseparable from the concrete experiences from which it is derived. When it comes to meaning, ‘the whole is only there for us when it becomes comprehensible through its parts’ (Ibid: 236). The meaning of our experience does not reside in any one facet of it but is a presence pervading the whole. The relationship involved is not one of causation but of mutual relation and implication. Meaning in this sense is not something we can impose on experience, but emerges from those dimensions of history, context and connection which are integral to it. Consequently, the elaboration of meaning requires participation (LévyBruhl, 1975) – a relation to the world which does not divide it rigidly into conceptual categories, but allows the elements of experience to blend and merge, flow into one another and generate new combinations. Participation is not a neutral operation of cognition, but a motion of the entire self, involving our emotions and volition as well as our understanding. Meaningful experience is the opposite of an alienated consciousness, for it sees the distance between ourselves and the world, between the Cartesian ‘subject’ and ‘object’, diminish to a vanishing point. However, the result is neither solipsism nor a purely discursive reality, for we participate in the world not as disembodied egos but as embodied beings, our engagement structured by biology and the constraints of our physical surroundings. Meaning is always concrete: abstract concepts are what remains when it has been distilled to a vapour, dissipated in the ether of intellection. To survive and be socially effective, meaning needs to be embodied – in objects (such as religious icons), places (such as sacred sites), occasions (such as festivals), sequences of actions (rituals), people (charismatic leaders) or representational signs (symbols). One of the most important ways in which we participate in the ongoing generation and reproduction of meaning is through its externalisation in objects or practices. As Durkheim wrote, ‘in order to express our ideas to ourselves we need to anchor them in material things that symbolise them’ (2001: 173). Clifford Geertz likewise asserts that meanings ‘can only be “stored” in symbols: a cross, a crescent, or a feathered serpent’ (1973: 127). Such symbols sum up both the nature of reality for a community and the quality of the emotional life it supports. Yet meaning can only temporarily be fixed: its essence is dynamic. Because it is not imposed a priori on experience but arises organically out of it, meaning is never something cut-and-dried and finally achieved, but a living, ongoing process. Both individual and collective life develop through the constant absorption of new experiences, which are interpreted on the basis of older ones (Dilthey, 1976: 244). If meaning is ‘the relationship, inherent in life, of parts of a life to the whole’ (Ibid: 235), then this relationship is never quite complete. As Dilthey writes: One would have to wait for the end of a life, for only at the hour of death could one survey the whole from which the relationship between the parts could be

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ascertained. One would have to wait for the end of history to have all the material necessary to determine its meaning. (Ibid: 236) Meaning, therefore, is a factor of experiential coherence; it describes how the elements of experience relate to each other and to the experiencing subject. Individual meanings, on the other hand, are those structures of significance (myths, stories, rituals, traditions) which help hold experience together. But for experience to have coherence, it needs some kind of framework or container. Otherwise, it would be reduced to a sequence of disconnected events, its meaning dissipated and diffused. Localised contexts of social action, such as physical places or face-to-face social groups, set boundaries around experience and thereby endow it with unity and congruence. They also act as a stabilising and conserving factor in social life, linking clusters of experience across time. By stabilising and containing experience, they enable it to take on form and therefore meaning. This form then becomes self-perpetuating, as established structures of meaning shape patterns of everyday life and frame new experiences, while continuing to evolve under their impact. The result is a home, a centre where meaning is concentrated and preserved in our physical surroundings, patterns of relationship and routine behaviours. Home is where the constellations of experience in which meaning is embedded are densest, and the layers composing social reality most thickly compacted, so that everyday life is pervaded by an immanent and significant order. When our experience is excavated from local contexts of action and distributed across global networks, its meaning becomes problematic. The unity and stability of experience are eroded, and its structure dissipates and turns fluid. Globalising processes erode meaning by weakening the connection among physical place, social relationships, and everyday practices, which is central to home, fragmenting the individual lifespan and multiplying the social settings in which it is played out. The firmness and taken-for-granted quality of the patterns of significance we perceive in the world weakens, as does the emotional solace we find in them. Ultimately, experience may come to seem alien, dissociated and unreal. Globalisation as ‘permanent liminality’, which keeps the elements of social life in a state of perpetual flux, is therefore deeply inimical to the achievement of meaning. Undoubtedly, liminal situations can also be the site of transformative experiences out of which new meanings evolve, just as new forms of social identity and collective symbolisation emerge from the condition of ‘collective effervescence’ theorised by Durkheim (2001). But this is so only when they are succeeded by a post-liminal stage of reintegration (Van Gennep, 1992) in which the elements of social life once more solidify, coagulate and cohere. If liminal conditions are indefinitely prolonged, it becomes more and more difficult to achieve meaning. Viktor Frankl describes how the cessation of normal life in the ‘provisional existence’ of the concentration camps left their inmates trapped in an endless present, which robbed them of purpose and left many of them feeling their life was meaningless,

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resulting in personal and moral collapse (Frankl, 2004: 79). Meaningful life, on the other hand, is intimately bound up with the experience of being at home in the world.

Immanent meaning Home is a centre of immanent meaning, that is, meaning which is rooted in everyday life and its dimensions of context, connectedness and history. Immanent meaning tends to be inscribed in concrete clusters of relationships, practices and place rather than actively verbalised. It is produced through the process of dwelling, which in the phenomenological tradition represented by thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Gaston Bachelard and Otto Friedrich Bollnow signifies to live so that our surroundings become infused with value (Dekkers, 2011: 297). All of these thinkers reflect the influence of Edmund Husserl, whose philosophy is summed up by Roger Scruton as follows: Human beings live in the world of nature, and seek to explain it through scientific categories and causal laws. But they also live in the ‘natural world’ to which their primary attitude is not one of explaining, but of belonging. (2012: 228) Another way of putting this is to say that human beings live in a world not just of functions but of values. We experience our surroundings as beautiful or ugly, hostile or welcoming, alienating or familiar. And the more intensely we inhabit a particular place or setting, the more it becomes penetrated through and through with value. Our experience is meaningful when these different values fit together in a way that is relatively coherent, framing an ordered and comprehensible world. To dwell is to commit ourselves to a place, a relationship or an activity in such a way that experience is able to accumulate and imbue the locus of dwelling with ever-deepening layers of value. To dwell is to exercise patience-of-place; it requires willingness to cultivate, often seemingly endlessly, the inhabitational possibilities of a particular residence. Such willingness shows that we care about how we live in that residence and that we care about it as a place for living well, not merely as a ‘machine for living’ (in Le Corbusier’s revealing phrase). (Casey, 1993: 174) Heidegger (1971) suggests two ways in which humans manifest their dwelling: construction and cultivation. To dwell is to build; it is also ‘to cherish and protect, to preserve and care for . . . to till the soil, to cultivate the vine’ (Ibid: 147). But cultivation can be interpreted more widely, as any expenditure of energy and labour that draws out the potential of our relationships and our surroundings, including their social or cultural potential. Take the case of a family which has just moved into a standard suburban home, identical to those

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of their neighbours. They cultivate their dwelling when they turn the empty plot outside their door into a garden with shrubs and flowers; when they paint and furnish each room; when they fill it with articles that have personal and family significance; and when they care for it and keep it clean and wellmaintained on a daily basis. As Bachelard realised, even ordinary housework can imbue a place with value: ‘we experience a sort of consciousness of constructing the house, in the very pains we take to keep it alive. . . . A house that shines from the care it receives appears to have been rebuilt from the inside’ (Bachelard, 1994: 68). Beyond the doors of the house, this family might cultivate the wider dwelling of their neighbourhood by joining the residents’ association and helping organise a sports day in their estate. They might help out with the Tidy Towns or get involved with the local church or join the parentteacher association and raise funds for a new computer lab in the local school. The energy they put into these activities and the relationships that result will deepen the value which the neighbourhood has for them and enrich its meaning in their lives. Yet, not every environment is equally amenable to being infused with significance. The human instinct to dwell and create meaning can be frustrated, either by natural disasters or social arrangements. For example, the French anthropologist Marc Augé’s (1995) concept of ‘non-places’ refers to a category of locations, such as airports, motorways and bus stations, where it is difficult if not impossible to dwell. For Heidegger, construction and cultivation must be carried out in a particular manner to qualify as dwelling, one which involves ‘sparing’ our surroundings (1971: 148–149). Heidegger argues that modern man bases the meaning of things in himself as subject, seizing them under concepts he has created and forcing them into his systems of classification, rather than respecting their intrinsic nature as manifestations of being (Vycinas, 1961). In the process we shut ourselves off from the truth of being as it is disclosed through everyday life. Sparing signifies the opposite of this. ‘Sparing indicates having an eye for the thing the way it “essentiates” in the world, instead of blindly subjugating it to one’s subjective aims’ (Heidegger, quoted Ibid: 18). In practical terms, sparing means we should respect the distinctive qualities of our surroundings, whether physical or social. Rather than imposing our ideas as on a tabula rasa, we should engage in a dialogue with our environment and culture. This does not mean preserving them unchanged, but respecting those dimensions of context, connectedness and history we have referred to already. Dwelling in this sense – a commitment to relationships and places, their patient cultivation, and the sparing of both existential realities and the cultural heritage of the past – leads to the concentration of value and its crystallisation in the world of meaning that is home. When we dwell, our everyday living generates constellations of association and connection which integrate the elements of experience into localised worlds of meaning, through such processes as the cultivation of place, the accumulation of collective memory, the crystalisation of tradition, the formation of commensal bonds, the exchange of gifts, the reciprocal constitution of social identities, or the ritual inscription of symbolic boundaries. These processes

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create and sustain local contexts of social action which stabilise the elements of our experience and afford them unity and congruence, thereby underpinning a sense of meaning. Five dimensions of context and connection are particularly important for the creation of meaning, because they connect us to fundamental and enduring aspects of reality which structure human experience. These are our physical surroundings, natural biophysical cycles, the accumulated experience of the past, intimate circles of social relations, and our innermost self and identity. First is the physical context of place. It has been noted already that meaning is concrete, and is most powerful and enduring when embodied in objects, places, occasions or traditions. We constantly externalise meaning in the form of material objects or practices. This renders the spatial relations of those objects and practices significant. Meaning comes to be anchored in specific locations and the relationships, traditions and collective memories associated with them. It is enriched by these contexts and impoverished by separation from them. A cross is a more powerful symbol when hung above the altar of a church than when leaning in the corner of an antique shop. A memento of a loved one is most potent in a house or room which we associate with our life together. Place supports meaning because it draws objects, relationships, collective memory and social practices together in a single constellation. It provides a local context which unifies and stabilises our associations and values and orchestrates them into a meaningful whole. But if meaning is embodied and emplaced, made concrete in physical objects and locations, including our own persons and actions, it follows that it is inextricably bound up with the biological and biophysical cycles of existence. These include universal processes of growth and decay, human biological cycles, and the seasonal patterns of nature; existential realities which lie at least partly outside the social realm of contingency and choice (Giddens, 1991; O’Connor, 2014). Consequently, despite talk of the ‘end of nature’ (McKibben, 1989) or even reality itself (Baudrillard, 1988), we remain immersed simultaneously in both natural and cultural, biological and social realities. Of course there is a vast difference between an existence lived in close proximity to ‘original nature’ (Giddens, 1991) and the kind of globalised and mediated spaces in which we spend much of our lives today. This is why Heidegger’s concept of ‘sparing’, which suggests that we live meaningfully when we let reality be the way it is, respecting the order already inherent in the world, is so relevant. ‘In the nearness to the ultimate realities . . . “homeness” is grounded’ (Vycinas, 1961: 300). It is as an example of a building which spares existential realities that Heidegger offers his famous description of a peasant cottage in the Black Forest. This is a building in which the fundamental realities which frame human life and give it significance are made manifest: Here the self-sufficiency of the power to let earth and heaven, divinities and mortals enter in simple oneness into things, ordered the house. It placed the farm on the wind-sheltered mountain slope looking south, among the meadows close to the spring. It gave it the wide overhanging shingle roof whose

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proper slope bears up under the burden of snow, and which, reaching deep down, shields the chambers against the storms of the long winter nights. It did not forget the altar corner behind the community table; it made room in its chamber for the hallowed places of childbed and the ‘tree of the dead’ – for that is what they call a coffin there – and in this way it designed for the different generations under one roof the character of their journey through time. (Heidegger, 1971: 160) When we ‘spare’ our surroundings, we open ourselves to those existential realities which Heidegger expressed as ‘the fourfold’ (Vycinas, 1961). Because of their universality and permanence, these framing realities accumulate value. They have been experienced by countless generations before us, who have left a deep repository of story and song, ritual and tradition, which records and interprets that experience. The significance of a pair of sports shoes is based on little more than the company’s marketing; instead of accumulating over time, it starts to fade almost from the moment of purchase, as newer and more fashionable models appear on the market. An occasion such as the birth of a child, on the other hand, connects us to the immemorial rhythms of human existence, and our own experience is enriched and deepened by those of countless others – especially if it is brought into relation with them by marking the birth according to rituals which are communally shared. Nor does the significance of the occasion fade with time; on the contrary, it only deepens with memory and experience. The permanence and universality of biological processes and natural cycles therefore provides an anchorage which makes experience cumulative and transpersonal. Aspects of life such as childbirth, sexuality, sickness, old age, death, the changes of the seasons, or the contrast of night and day create significant areas of commonality across space and time, irrespective of cultural differences, and have provided material for a body of enduring symbolism in mythology, religion, literature and art. Despite the social and cultural changes introduced by modernity, we can still appreciate the maternal tenderness evoked by the image of the Madonna and Child, or the agony of death on the cross; we comprehend the imagery of darkness and chaos which surrounds Shakespeare’s witches in Macbeth, or the pathos of an Elizabethean love poem. Closeness to existential realities contributes to the stability, coherence and congruence of experience, and thereby the generation of meaning. In its absence, the significance of experiences becomes ever more contingent, individualised and discontinuous. Experience which is cumulative in this way is also inherently historical, enriched by the memory of the past and the anticipation of the future (Dilthey, 1976). This temporal aspect of experience affords it depth and allows us to make connections across its accumulated layers as they are present in memory. Present experience is meaningful because we can connect it with similar or contrasting experiences in the past. ‘It is only when we bring into relation with the preoccupying present experience the cumulative results of similar or at least relevant, if not dissimilar, past experiences of similar potency, that the kind of relational structure we call “meaning” emerges’ (Turner, 1986: 36). This applies to the arena of collective

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culture and history as well as individual lives. ‘Meaning arises when we try to put what culture and language have crystallized from the past together with what we feel, wish, and think about our present point in life’ (Ibid: 33). Meaning is therefore inseparable from the temporal context of experience. Neither is meaning something woven in the cradle of the solitary mind; it is both animated and preserved by sociability. Meaning emerges from, and constitutes, shared communities of value, and it is through their relation to such communities that the symbols and narratives in which it expresses itself gain much of their emotional charge. This was recognised by Emile Durkheim, when he argued that religion originates in moments of collective effervescence when a social group becomes conscious of itself as a unity and simultaneously perceives the universe as a spiritualised extension of that unity (Cladis, 2001: xx). For Durkheim, the profane is associated with everyday, individualised, utilitarian life; the sacred, with those exceptional occasions on which a group comes together, leaves the concerns of everyday life behind, and generates an effervescence of collective life, a synthesis of individual consciousnesses, which transmutes their perceptions and leads to the superimposition of an ideal world upon mundane reality. Durkheim based his ideas on anthropological studies of Australian aborigines, but it is easy to find examples of the process he describes in the contemporary world: the crowd at an all-Ireland hurling final, attendees at a music festival, revolutionary crowds on Tahrir Square. Out of this effervescence emerge symbols – such as a totem or a flag – which express the common life of the group, while also serving to interpret reality for its members. Through such symbols, we carry the influence of moments of collective effervescence back into the circumstances of profane existence. For Durkheim, ‘Social life . . . is possible only thanks to a vast body of symbolism’ (Durkheim, 2001: 176). But it is also the case that ‘beliefs work only when they are shared’ (Ibid: 320). For although a community has its basis in shared patterns of meaning, its collective adhesion to those patterns is simultaneously their strongest reinforcement. Finally, meaning requires participation: an apprehension of reality which is affective and volitional as well as cognitive. While the patterns of signification which constitute meaning are shaped collectively, they are vitalised by the individual. We do not receive the connections out of which meaning is constituted passively, as an imprint on our consciousness; we awaken to them as living presences energised by feeling – often in liminal interludes, rites of passage, and transformative experiences which stamp our character and shape our future perceptions. In such contexts, the boundaries between the concepts we use to organise and classify our world dissolve, and experience takes on an almost ‘mystic’ quality (Lévy-Bruhl, 1975). Hard and fast distinctions between categories soften; the distance between ourselves and the world, and between the diverse elements of that world, shrinks to a vanishing point; and new patterns of connection, new constellations of meaning emerge. When we find something meaningful, we are not regarding it from a critical distance, but feelingly – and this emotion fuels the making of connections with other experiences based on analogy, association or contrast. This is expressed in Coleridge’s

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definition of imagination as a faculty which ‘dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealise and unify’ (1983: 58): a faculty which bridges the divide between subject and object, self and world. Dilthey’s concept of meaning is in fact close to what Coleridge (Ibid : 86) characterised as the ‘esemplastic’ power of imagination, its capacity to shape into one the diverse elements of experience. To illustrate the role of these five dimensions of context and connection in the generation of meaning, let’s talk about an occasion which is deeply significant for most of us – Christmas. What is it that makes Christmas meaningful? In the first place, it is infused with a sense of connection to the past, a connection expressed and continually renewed through a rich body of tradition and observance. For most people, Christmas is freighted with memories of childhood; recollections of Santa Claus, family dinners, or putting up the Christmas tree. But this memory is not a passive thing; from a sociological point of view, what is significant is how ritual observances are deliberately deployed at Christmas to wake the echoes of the past within the present and ensure continuity across time, thereby reinforcing both individual and familial identities. The same dishes may be prepared for Christmas dinner every year, the tree placed in an identical corner, certain decorations preserved almost as family heirlooms, while relatives or friends visit annually on the same day. Moreover, such Christmas observances tend to be associated with specific physical contexts, above all the family home, which is the centre of the contemporary, secular Christmas. Concentrated within four walls, the rituals of decorating the tree or preparing the Christmas dinner take on a heightened significance, awakening memories of Christmases past and underpinning a sense of closeness and belonging among the participants. Christmas also connects us to underlying existential realities, such as the changes of the seasons, the cycle of birth, death and regeneration, the succession of light and dark, cold and warmth, scarcity and plenty. Even in our societies, sealed as we are in a technological and informational bubble, the iconography of Christmas still foregrounds these aspects of the festival. The Christmas tree is usually seen as part of the Victorian ‘invention’ of Christmas, a custom imported from Germany by Victoria’s husband Prince Albert and copied by the English middle classes (Pimlott, 1978). However, it retains the symbolism of the German tradition, bringing an evergreen tree, representing the endurance of life and the promise of its renewal, into the home at midwinter when the days are at their shortest and coldest. Holly and ivy, likewise, are ancient symbols of the persistence of life through its season of dormancy, while the eating and drinking so central to Christmas are reminiscences of a time when the festival was a brief period of feasting and plenty amid the scarcity of winter. Christmas is also, of course, a time of diffuse sociability and festive cheer. The sharing of food and drink, the exchange of greetings and presents, all reinforce existing relationships or create new ones. Above all, it is a time when the family gathers together. Christmas observances repeated year after year help provide it with a collective memory, shared traditions, and a common identity.

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Finally, the ‘meaning’ of Christmas is also deeply participatory. Every family draws from the common fund of iconography and practice to create their own, constantly evolving, Christmas traditions. Each has its own particular way of decorating the Christmas tree, exchanging gifts, preparing food, or serving Christmas dinner. Christmas is therefore a powerful locus of meaning: a time which, while it can be lonely or stressful for some, is for most of us an island of warmth and festivity at the heart of winter, an occasion which brings a touch of magic to relieve the banality of the daily grind. At the same time, the domestication of Christmas and the occlusion of its religious and existential significance by consumerism exemplifies the shift in the locus of meaning from integrative religious symbols to the domestic sphere within modern societies. Rather than being the centre of a system of religious symbols which enable us to connect the different aspects of our experience, Christmas is today a ‘holiday’ (rather than a holyday) when we are temporarily allowed to drop our work persona and unleash our inner child. Unlike the pagan mid-winter festival which marked a critical point in the life of an agricultural society, or the Christian feast which celebrates the birth of the world’s saviour, Christmas no longer connects our individual lives to the order of the universe. Instead, it offers a chain of memory and custom onto which the lifespan of the individual can be threaded, and gathers in a circle of mutual recognition the members of the most emotionally significant (if increasingly fragile) social unit within which that lifespan unfolds and individual identity is defined: the nuclear family. Hence the contemporary Christmas is above all a festival of domesticity, its meanings centred and contained within the four walls of the family home. By way of contrast, take the case of someone who says ‘My job is meaningless’. They no doubt have a perfectly good understanding of their job description and what it entails. What they are expressing is a sense of the absence of those dimensions of context and connection in which meaning inheres. Their work serves no purpose beyond earning a living; it does not form part of their identity, which is itself the sum of those significant experiences in their life which they are able to draw together as a coherent whole. Meaningful work, on the other hand, is work which connects us to other people, to fundamental human needs and life cycles, to the natural world and the physical products of our labour, to bodies of professional or craft tradition, and to our personal past, and allows us to integrate all of these into a coherent identity. Immanent meaning therefore inheres in constellations of association and interconnection among experience which emerge from the process of dwelling, that is, living so our surroundings become infused with value. This in turn is dependent on our relation to five dimensions of context and connection: the physical context of emplacement, the existential context of natural and biological cycles, the temporal context of accumulated experience, the social context of shared symbolisation, and the affective context of participation. These overlap and reinforce each other, providing the foundation for the local contexts of physical place or face-to-face social circles within which home, as a centre of meaning, evolves. When social

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life is disembedded from such contexts, as it is by globalisation, the connections belonging to them are dissipated, and our experience of meaning is impoverished.

Transcendent meaning When immanent meaning breaks down or is brought into question, whether as the result of a sudden catastrophe or rapid social change, people tend to reach for transcendent meanings. In such circumstances reality is no longer all of a piece; it is problematised as a result either of undeserved suffering or its own relativisation and fragmentation. Transcendent meaning is an attempt to rearticulate, at the level of symbolism and language, a unity of experience which has been broken – whether by war and enslavement or societal development toward an increased division of labour, greater mediation of experience, and the globalisation of communications and exchange. While immanent meaning is generated by the compaction of experience in localised contexts, transcendent meaning is frequently a response to the liquefaction of experience by globalising processes. Instead of crystallising from the circumstances of everyday life, transcendent meaning is ascribed to experience through a process of rationalisation which seeks to bring it into relation with some ultimate religious, political or intellectual value. Transcendent meanings are therefore verbalised to a much greater degree, articulated through formal rituals, and deliberately inscribed in symbolic forms. The centre from which transcendent meaning emanates is no longer the relationships, practices and places of everyday life, but some ‘beyond’ in terms of which these are now to be understood (God, the liberation of the working class, national freedom, the progress of humanity). Transcendent meaning is therefore dependent on literary and symbolic resources in a way that immanent meaning is not, and often relies on a literate caste (priests, party apparatchiks, journalists, academics) as its custodians, interpreters and elaborators. Whereas immanent meaning is particular and localised, transcendent meaning tends to be universal in its aspirations, frequently generating an all-embracing creed which tolerates no heresy. Whereas immanent meaning congeals out of the locales and practices of everyday life and is only ever partially verbalised, transcendent meaning relies on what Geertz terms the ‘conceptual structures individuals use to construe experience’ (1973: 313). These are embedded in systems of signification, which include language, but also other systems of signs such as dress, ritual, artistic motifs and architectural codes. But while formal systems of signification open up new dimensions of meaning, it can never be confined within a conceptual structure. The meaning of even abstract concepts such as ‘the nation’, ‘the working class’, ‘women’s liberation’ or ‘environmental consciousness’, if it is a vital factor in the life of an individual or collective, is assimilated to the circumstances of their everyday dwelling, becoming inscribed in the minutiae of social relationships, social practices and significant places and transformed in the process. Thus even the transcendent meanings of theological or ideological speculation tend to be absorbed back

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into the everyday world through localising processes and embedded in the concrete fabric of practice and place. Christianity is a universal religion, yet few sites are more evocative of place, collective memory and tradition than an old church, while Christian congregations have often been centres of an intimate sociability defined by commensality (including the ritual sharing of the Eucharist), gift exchange and mutual recognition. Indeed, the more successful a system of transcendental meaning is in integrating people’s experience and orientating their lives, the more profoundly it will be assimilated to local contexts of action. Language and other systems of signs are therefore not the closed and autoreferential systems, spinning meaning from their own bowels, which the structuralists and post-structuralists imagine. If they do much to shape our perception of the world, their elements are also constantly reabsorbed into the circumstances and relationships of everyday life, where they take on new and unanticipated significance. We fail to come to grips with meaning if we think of it only in conceptual terms, and give primacy to the denotative aspect of signs. Concepts are like chunks of pack ice floating in the ocean of experience; sooner or later they will dissolve back into the sea, out of which others will in turn congeal. Saussure’s massively influential theory of language is deeply marred by its rationalist and essentially neo-Kantian premises. For Saussure (1974) language is a system of signs, each comprising a signifier (a sound) arbitrarily linked to a signified (a concept). For his followers, structuralists and post-structuralists alike, signification and meaning are only understandable in terms of how particular words or ‘signs’ are interrelated. Meaning is not inherent in individual signs but is a property of the overall system, the language as a whole. It is created through difference; through what something is not, rather than what it is. The signified ‘man’ takes on meaning through being opposed to the signified ‘woman’; the signified ‘black’ takes on meaning through being opposed to ‘white’, ‘red’, ‘yellow’ and all other signifieds relating to colour. Signs do not draw their meaning from reference to the world, but slice up reality through the arbitrary marriage of sounds and concepts, which in turn become the instruments by which we interpret experience (Ibid ). This is the basis of the assault by post-structuralist thinkers such as Derrida on the ‘tyranny’ of meaning, the ‘logocentric’ tradition of Western thought. But their critiques rest on a deeply flawed, purely linguistic model of meaning, and one which misses its essence. Far from being a self-contained system of concepts defined by their mutual repulsion, a tightly knit structure of oppositions, language is an ongoing series of negotiations about the relations perceived among people and things by different social groups, and factions of social groups, throughout history. Whatever concepts we may distil from this process are at best fuzzy and blurred around the edges. Indeed, Saussure was only able to construct his theory of linguistics by bracketing spoken language (parole) from language as a system of concepts (langue), and excluding the former from his new ‘science’ (Ibid ) – a truly extraordinary proceeding, and one akin to draining a lake and then attempting to make sense of its contents (birds, fish, amphibians, plants, stones, and assorted detritus) as elements of some kind of ‘system’ while studiously ignoring the water which is their common habitat.

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The logic of meaning is the opposite of the logic of signification as conceived by Saussure and his successors. It is agglutinative, cumulative, echoic, weaving patterns of association around words and images (as well as people, places and practices) in order to bind together the different elements of individual and collective experience across time and space. The linguistic counterpart of everyday practices of meaning-making is connotation, which outside of certain professional and technical discourses is at least as fundamental to language as denotation. To nobody except a botanist does ‘rose’ mean primarily a woody perennial flowering plant of the genus Rosa. Instead, the bunch of roses which a lover hands his beloved conjures a blur of associations taken from romantic films, half-remembered slips of poetry, advertising billboards, and shops full of Valentine’s cards – in addition to the significance it draws from their own relationship and the context in which the gift is offered. It is when a bunch of roses is passed from hand to hand in such a concrete exchange between two human beings, signifying love, desire, care, commitment, or a request for forgiveness, that it truly takes on meaning. Meaning crystallises around objects and people we can see and touch, or forms a connotative penumbra around linguistic and other symbols that encapsulate significant aspects of our experience. By contrast, Saussure’s system of language is a collection of husks from which all meaning has been pressed out. Hence, although meaning builds itself up on the scaffold provided by the various signifying systems which human cultures have created – predominantly language – it is not their product. It is enabled by them, but it does not inhere in them. Instead, meaning emerges in concrete contexts of social action. Geertz talks of ‘structures of meaning in terms of which people do such things as signal conspiracies and join them or perceive insults and answer them’ (1973: 12), but it is relationships among actual people, localised in a specific place and informed by the collective memory of the group, which give the conspiratorial gesture or the insulting words their significance. Out of the mass of signs generated by human cultures, some take on particular potency, are charged with association and affect, and become epitomes of collective experience. These are symbols or archetypes. On the basis of symbolism, language reaches levels inaccessible to everyday experience: these symbols can also, however, be brought back and become objective realities in everyday life (Berger & Luckmann, 1991: 55). Symbols embody in a preeminent degree the ability of language to transcend the ‘here and now’, bridging different zones of reality and integrating them into a meaningful whole. ‘The transcendences have spatial, temporal and social dimensions . . . through language an entire world can be actualized at any moment’ (Ibid: 54). The symbolic resources of a culture act as carriers of meaning to the degree that they are able to integrate widely different aspects of experience, while retaining their immediacy. A statue of the Buddha, a copy of the US constitution, or Michelangelo’s David are more or less meaningful insofar as each is – in a given situation – the centre or focal point of a constellation of experience and significance, and insofar as these connections are a living presence to those who perceive them, integral to their identity.

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Such symbols and archetypes are the raw materials of narrative, and mythic narrative in particular. The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argues that narrative is the primary way in which we come to an understanding of human society and our place in it. Thus we understand the actions of others by ‘placing a particular episode in the context of a set of narrative histories, histories both of the individuals concerned and of the setting in which they act and suffer’ (1981: 197). Moreover, we comprehend our own lives in terms of a narrative or set of narratives which we live out. The most powerful narratives not only deploy existing symbols and archetypes, but interweave characters and events in such a way as to generate new constellations of meaning and new symbolic or archetypal figures. According to Jean-Francois Lyotard, narrative knowledge ‘certifies itself in the pragmatics of its own transmission without having recourse to argumentation and proof’ (Lyotard, 1984: 27). In other words, the very fact of casting events into narrative form has a self-legitimating effect: we might say that narrative validates itself by the cohesion it gives to experience, the meaning it extracts from it. Narrative plays a central role in those rationalised systems of thought in which the world or society as a whole is encountered as a problem and an attempt is made to endow it with meaning. Geertz (1973: 104) refers to what Weber called the ‘problem of meaning’, which first became acute during the axial age when traditional patterns of life were dislocated by the emergence of large-scale empires and exploitative economic systems. The rationalised religions which arose at this time sought to resolve this problem by providing a way in which suffering and injustice could be related to the order of the cosmos and the ultimate explicability of the universe sustained (Ibid: 105). It is the ability of religion to place immediate experience in an ultimate context which makes it so powerful, imposing a new framework of meaning over against the commonplace world (Ibid: 122). Likewise, for Geertz, political ideologies grow out of a secularised version of Weber’s problem of meaning and attempt ‘to render otherwise incomprehensible social situations meaningful, to so construe them as to make it possible to act purposefully within them’ (Ibid: 220). In either case the elaboration of meaning is stimulated by a ‘problematisation’ of the world, which can frequently be related to an increase in the complexity of the institutional sphere of society. This leaves people with the challenge of drawing the representations of reality generated by the different institutional domains together in a cohesive whole (Berger & Luckmann, 1991: 94). This work of symbolically representing the entire institutional order has usually been undertaken in the religious or political spheres. The resulting systems of meaning are termed by Berger and Luckman ‘symbolic universes’ (Ibid: 113). They are ‘bodies of theoretical tradition that integrate different provinces of meaning and encompass the institutional order in a symbolic totality’ (Ibid). All human experience can be conceived as taking place within the symbolic universe which results; consequently, all experience can be given meaning. The result is that ‘even the most trivial transactions of everyday life may come to be imbued with profound significance’ (Ibid: 117). Such systems generate concepts or symbols which ‘construe’ experience at a higher level than simple signification. The symbol of the cross, for example, can

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encapsulate an entire cosmic narrative of fall and redemption, an acknowledgement of the reality of suffering and the promise of its overcoming, and the believer’s personal relationship with Jesus. The Marxist conception of the proletariat likewise encapsulates a sweeping narrative of the ‘fall’ from primitive communism into class society and the prospect of redemption in a utopian future, an acknowledgement of the suffering of labour and the promise of its overcoming, and the solace of solidarity between workers. To non-believers in Christianity or Marxism, such symbols and concepts may be meaningless, but to the believer, who is able to integrate them into their own lives, they become charged with significance and emotional power and serve to integrate the diverse sectors of their experience and render it comprehensible. As we move from the level of the simple sign to more complex narratives, and finally to rationalised systems of meaning or ‘grand narratives’ (Lyotard, 1984), meaning serves to integrate more and more aspects of a universe of experience which is simultaneously growing in complexity. Correspondingly, the risk increases of a fall into abstraction and a divorce from lived experience, resulting in the loss of meaning. Rationalised systems of meaning produce master concepts such as ‘the Fall’, ‘salvation’, ‘capitalism’, or ‘class’, which can potentially be used to integrate an incredible range of experience. But these are meaningful only in circumstances where they can be assimilated to the everyday life of individuals and collectives – in which case they become not just intellectual concepts but living symbols, which give shape to experience and are at the same time brought alive by their contact with it, so they glow with an affective charge. For meaning is not primarily conceptual, but the experience of the world as imbued with an order and purpose to which we can relate ourselves and our actions. Even transcendent meanings are lived, not just thought or construed.

The transformations of meaning Not all meaning is equal. Geertz wrote that ‘man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun’ (1973: 5). But are these webs one or many? How tightly woven is their fabric? How closely do they cling around the being who is suspended within them? Are they concrete or abstract, woven out of the fabric of everyday life or from signs alone? To what degree are they personal to ourselves or shared with others? Meaning inheres in constellations of experience whose density and shape differ between times, places and societies. The objects, occasions, practices, people, places and signs which embody meaning do so in widely differing degrees. Social circumstances and historical change affect not just the ‘content’ of meaning but also its conditions of possibility. As Turner writes: In most pre-industrial societies this strain after meaning was reinforced powerfully by corporate cultural values which offered our cognitive faculties some ancestral support, the weight of an ethical, or at any rate consensually legitimate, past. Today, unfortunately, culture insists that we must assume the

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The web of meaning post-Renaissance burden of working each meaning out for ourselves, one by one, unassisted, unless we choose the system woven by another individual no more corporately legitimate than we, as individuals are. (1986: 36)

However, the historical transformation of the ways in which we create meaning involves more than a simple dichotomy between pre-industrial and modern societies. It is possible to identify at least four distinct patterns of meaning-making – mythological, theological, ideological and anomic – associated with different epochs of social development. This is not to posit an evolutionary scheme, for all of these patterns can co-exist within a particular society. Moreover, they are far from being invariably hostile to one another: for instance, rationalised theology has provided intellectual justification and support for older bodies of religious myth, which it has helped survive into the present day. However, in general a mythological structure of meaning characterises traditional, small-scale and preliterate societies; a theological structure the imperial states of the axial age and their successors up to the industrial revolution; an ideological structure Westernised societies from the industrial revolution onwards; while an anomic structure of meaning characterises late modern societies distinguished by the predominance of globalisation and mediated experience. In traditional societies, religious myth provides an over-arching system of integrative symbols. As Geertz notes, these synthesise the ethos of a community (the moral character and aesthetic quality of their lives) and their worldview (their ideas about the order of the cosmos) in such a way that each reinforces the other (Geertz, 1973: 89). Moral and aesthetic preferences are sanctioned as expressing the order of the cosmos, and in turn become evidence for that order, so that questioning it appears to threaten the ethos of the community. In such a society, whatever the differences between various sectors of social life, these ‘hang together’ in an order of integrative meaning that includes them all (Berger, Berger & Kellner, 1974: 63). For the individual, this means ‘the same integrative symbols permeated the various sectors of his everyday life. Whether with his family or at work or engaged in political processes or participating in festivity and ceremonial, the individual was always in the same world’ (Ibid). Meaning in such a society hardly needs to be verbalised, being immanent in the locations, practices and relationships of everyday life. The mythological outlook thereby affords significance to the whole world and everything within it. Everything is a sign, and all objects and occasions may speak to us if we only have the means to decipher them. Such an outlook depends on an underlying congruence between the individual and society, and society and the world, which is weakened in more large-scale societies, especially as globalising processes take hold. As the institutional order of society develops and the various social roles and bodies of knowledge associated with it grow in complexity, the integration of different aspects of experience increasingly presents itself as a problem (Berger & Luckmann, 1991). A solution might be found by a religious genius who offers a comprehensive theory showing how all these different institutional arenas and their accompanying bodies of

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knowledge hang together (Ibid). Such a system provides an overall context for the individual’s fragmented social experience and knowledge, thereby rendering it meaningful. This is in fact what happened during the ‘axial age’ in which most of the world’s great religious and spiritual traditions were founded. While mythology offers a conception of reality in which everyday life remains penetrated by sacred forces and there is continuity between the social and cosmic order (Ibid, 1991: 128), rationalised theology arose when the original continuity between these two worlds had been broken. This was partly due to the growing complexity of society in the axial age, partly a result of the misery and disruption caused by the military conquests and economic exploitation of the early empires. Rationalised religion (or theology) attempts to mediate between a social order perceived as profane and imperfect, and the cosmic order from which it has become disjointed, through concepts such as ‘the Fall’ and ‘redemption’. Moreover, it makes sense of a world of experience whose primordial unity has been broken by bringing its different aspects into relation with an overarching, transcendent reality. In doing so, it drew on the tools made available by the emergence of literacy and philosophic methods of thought. Theology proved an incredibly effective way of giving cohesion to experience and rendering it transparent and meaningful. Through the major world religions its influence spread about the globe, and continues to the present day. However, from the seventeenth century onwards theology was increasingly challenged by science. Science completes the removal of the sacred from the world, and divorces knowledge about the order of the universe from knowledge of everyday life. What science accomplishes at the level of theory, the increasingly self-reflexive organisation of modern society achieves in practice. As Giddens argues, ‘the social systems of modernity . . . become largely autonomous and determined by their own constitutive influences’ (Giddens, 1991). Modern institutions create settings for social action which are ordered in terms of modernity’s own dynamics and severed from factors external to them, such as original nature, madness, sickness, death and eroticism (Ibid: 8). Consequently, in modern society ‘there is a tendency to problematize, to hide away or even to repress the central human life experiences such as birth, death, illness or sexuality’ (Szakolczai, 2004: 65). The result is a transformation in the character of experience, with individuals deprived of those external reference points which were taken for granted in previous societies. As the individual lifespan is increasingly separated from those recurrent events and stable contexts, such as the cycle of the generations, contours of place, and networks of kin, which had previously helped structure it and establish its significance, people are forced to seek the meaning of their life within its own limits. This split between the social and cosmic orders is taken for granted in those ideologies which provided the ‘secular religions’ of the industrial age. Like religion, these ideologies aim to integrate the various dimensions of social life in a comprehensible whole, thereby providing their devotees with both an interpretation of reality and a guide to conduct. Unlike religion, however, they no longer attempt to ground themselves in a sacred order. Instead, they picture a world

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shaped by human volition and social forces. While rationalised theology sought to bridge the gap between human society and the cosmos, ideology tries to bridge the gap opening up between the modern individual and society. It does so by providing ‘master concepts’, such as class, nation, or social progress, which suggest an underlying unity between divergent aspects of social life and individual experience. These are used to generate narratives which render the course of history coherent and point towards its ultimate consummation. Such ideologies connect the individual lifespan to a purpose beyond the self (the nation, the revolution, the emancipation of humanity) – a purpose which will endure when that lifespan is over, making possible that ‘self-transcendence of human existence’ (Frankl, 2004: 115) which is central to meaning. However, the more complex and differentiated society becomes, the more difficult such integrative meaning is to achieve, even in purely secular terms. As everyday life is increasingly penetrated and framed by the liminal spaces of the global market and public arena, ideologies which emerged within an experiential context of national or ethnic homogeneity, or class solidarity built around large concentrations of heavy industry, struggle to integrate and make sense of more diverse and fragmented settings of social action. A central characteristic of late modern society is the plurality of lifeworlds which an individual typically inhabits (Berger, Berger & Kellner, 1974; Giddens, 1991). Not only is experience fragmented horizontally between different spheres of life, but it is also fragmented vertically over the course of a person’s biography, as they pass through different social and institutional worlds. Embedded in multiple milieux of action, an individual’s lifestyle choices and activities tend to become segmental, so that modes of action followed in one context ‘may be more or less substantially at variance with those adopted in others’ (Giddens, 1991: 83). As a result, our relation to the social contexts of action changes, becoming looser and infused with critical distance. The experience of a plurality of social worlds relativises each one of them. ‘Consequently the institutional order undergoes a certain loss of reality’ (Berger, Berger & Kellner, 1974: 74). Undoubtedly, this pluralisation and fragmentation of lifeworlds has contributed to the weakening of the ideological ‘grand narratives’ which legitimised knowledge and politics in the earlier part of the industrial age (Lyotard, 1984). The ubiquity of mediated experience in late modernity, in the form of the mass media, online communications, video games and advertising, reinforces these tendencies. According to Baudrillard (2007), the saturation of information in our communicational world leads to the implosion and destruction of meaning. Signs and commodities no longer bear any relation to a reality outside of the systems of signification and commodity exchange. Meaning – which for Baudrillard refers to an effort to evoke a fundamental signified, a foundational truth, as instanced by the great modern ideologies – is therefore impossible. The very institutions of capital and the state, which produced the rational social sphere and its meaningful discourses, now work to destroy them (Ibid: 79). ‘We are in a universe where there is more and more information and less and less meaning’ (Ibid: 99). The increased mediation of experience also operates to reinforce the plurality and fragmentation

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of lifeworlds. To the proliferating social contexts of action, there are added an almost infinite number of virtual realities in which people spend an ever more substantial portion of their lives. Increasingly, even when we share physical spaces, we inhabit different worlds. The type of meaning-making associated with these fragmented and unstable lifeworlds, saturated by mediated experience, may be termed anomic, because it generates isolated nodes of significance which are difficult to shape into a coherent whole. Significance accumulates within individual institutions, social contexts, spaces and consumer products, but is left behind when we vacate them or discarded once they are used. A workplace, for example, may have its own values, language, agreed goals and hierarchy. These structure social interaction and render activity purposeful and even meaningful within its confines. Beyond those confines, however, this constellation of significance will not translate. Try to explain the importance of the report you are working on at the family dinner table or among a circle of friends in the pub, and their eyes will glaze over in boredom. Moreover, since most people regularly change jobs, the structures of meaning generated in a particular workplace are no longer sufficient to organise the course of an individual’s life. A similar logic operates in the world of branding and consumption. The golden arches of McDonald’s are the centre of a constellation of significance which connects experiences across space and time: you can order a Big Mac almost anywhere in the world, and continue doing so from childhood through to old age. But what they integrate is primarily our experience of the brand; even among regular customers, this is not woven into the wider fabric of their lives. The meaning of both the workplace and the fast-food restaurant is in this sense anomic: it does not extend beyond their particular contexts or accumulate deeply through time, and consequently it does not draw together the elements of either individual experience or collective life. This is because the settings in which anomic meaning develops float free of anchorage in any wider framework of context and connection, whether that of physical place, accumulated time, biological and biophysical cycles, individual participation or the collective symbolisations of face-to-face communities. Eating at McDonald’s involves minimal connection to the staff with whom you barely interact, or the space whose significance you have no role in shaping, or the other customers hurriedly bolting down their meals. The food itself, homogenised and intensively processed, has been severed from any relationship to the land and its natural cycles or the people who produced it. Separated from the existential frames of human life and subject to continual, self-refl exive revision and development, the institutional settings of modernity and their products allow little scope for collective participation in the creation of meaning or for its accumulation through time. Consequently, in contrast to previous structures of meaning, anomic meaning provides little basis for either communal solidary or transcendence of the social world. We can therefore trace a development from mythological through theological to ideological structures of meaning, driven largely by growing social complexity: a

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development which involves a shift in focus from immanent to transcendent meaning, from meanings implicit in the relationships and practices of everyday life to those elaborated and mediated through increasingly abstract systems of signification. This culminates in a breakdown in the capacity of socially accepted ‘grand narratives’ to unify the diverse contexts of experience, as social complexity, the mediation of experience and institutionalised liminality overwhelm structures of meaning. Mythology embodied an integration of self and society, society and cosmos, which was largely unselfconscious and reflected in the practices and relationships of everyday life. Rationalised theology sought more self-consciously to integrate society with the cosmos in a world marred by the Fall. The great political ideologies aimed to integrate the individual with society by providing master concepts and grand narratives which explained the origins and course of the social order and the individual’s place within it. In late modern society, finally, meaning becomes fragmented along with the social and institutional worlds through which the individual moves. Its structure is anomic and self-referential; constellations of significance reside within individual institutions, contexts, products and spaces, but without reference to anything outside them, and can be experienced as meaningful only so long as we are immersed in a particular, fragmentary context of action. The shift from mythological to theological and eventually anomic patterns of meaning-making can be seen as reflecting a larger development, whereby the integration of a society of largely self-sufficient smallholdings, villages or clans through religious symbols is replaced by the integration of industrial society through the global division of labour and bureaucratic governance. Pitirim Sorokin (quoted in Geertz, 1973: 145) distinguished between two forms of integration, logico-meaningful and causal-functional. Logico-meaningful integration is ‘the sort of integration one finds in a Bach fugue, in Catholic dogma, or in the general theory of relativity; it is a unity of style, of logical implication, of meaning and value’ (Ibid: 145). On the other hand, causalfunctional integration is characteristic of a social system where the various parts are united in a single causal web. We might map this distinction onto the historical trajectory of modern society, and suggest that it involves a recession of logico-meaningful integration at the same time as intensifying causal-functional integration grasps individuals and communities ever tighter in the straightjacket of the global market and the state. Somewhat similarly, Baudrillard asserts that in industrial societies symbolic integration, which is a lived, bilateral and immediately actualised mode of relation, is progressively replaced by functional integration (2007: 85). Although localising processes continue to generate worlds of particularised meaning, whether from the relationships and practices of everyday life or by assimilating the symbolic materials of a globalised culture to local contexts, the overall tendency of globalised modernity is to erode those structures of integrative meaning which underpin social belonging. Berger, Berger and Kellner (1974) write that the essential ordeal of modernisation is the collective and

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individual loss of integrative meanings, as a result of which, ‘Modern man has suffered from a deepening condition of homelessness’ (Ibid: 77). Therefore, modern societies are characterised by a powerful yearning for reintegration (Ibid: 142). Geertz, following Weber, believes ‘the imposition of meaning on life is the major end and primary condition of human existence’ (1973: 434). For Victor Frankl, ‘this striving to find a meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force in man’ (Frankl, 2004: 104). Meaning gives direction to people’s lives, underpins individual and collective identity and action, enables us to act purposefully, and helps us discover moral strength, motivation and resilience (Geertz, 1973: 220). Consequently, even as the technological, bureaucratic and market-based systems of late modern society increasingly rely on causal-functional integration, both theological and ideological patterns of meaning-making persist and undergo periodic resurgences. This can lead to a retreat into socially segmented worlds of meaning (Berger & Luckmann, 1991: 102) on the part of the members of political movements, religious confessions or ethnic groups. Alternatively, people may seek in the realm of private life those integrative and sustaining meanings which are no longer available in society at large. ‘A flight into intimacy is an attempt to secure a meaningful life in familiar environments that have not been incorporated into . . . larger systems’ (Giddens, 1991: 94). However, this enterprise is inherently precarious, since the domestic realm has become thoroughly penetrated by mediated experience, weakening the integrity and plausibility of the ‘home world’ (Berger, Berger & Kellner, 1974: 65). Meanwhile, the instability of work, impermanency of residence, and fissuring of family ties undermine the ability of the domestic sphere to act as a refuge from the complexities of the wider world. Yet it is worth asking ourselves whether individuals or societies can survive indefinitely without large-scale structures of integrative meaning. Causal-functional integration relies on the pragmatics of bureaucracy, technology and the market to coordinate interactions among people who may otherwise have little in common. This is sufficient so long as these systems are operating effectively.1 However, to either challenge these systems or implement fundamental reforms requires collective agreement based on shared values and common understandings, and this is impossible without logico-meaningful integration. One possible result of the ongoing crisis of global institutions is the reorientation of social life towards more localised contexts where such consensus is easier to achieve, combined with a reduction in economic complexity to a level that is ecologically sustainable. In the process, it is possible that many of the social worlds in which people currently find meaning – including families, intimate social circles, online communities and neotribes (Maffesoli, 1996) – will be reconnected with the existential frameworks of physical place, accumulated time, biological and biophysical cycles, and face-toface interaction. The result would be an at least partial solidification of the liquid world of late modernity, accompanied by a resurgence of logico-meaningful integration.

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Note 1 Although it is worth noting that the operation of these systems relies at least partly on values like trust, solidarity, patriotism, respect for authority and altruism, which are generated by social groups extrinsic to them. Moreover, even causal-functional systems of social integration preserve, in fossilised form, the ideologies and structures of meaning which originally legitimised them and stimulated their creation.

3

The cultivation of place

I am standing on Main Street, Carrigaline, the small town in south Cork where I grew up. It’s a summer afternoon, and sunlight flashes off the windows and bonnets of the long line of rush-hour traffic crawling through. A row of parked cars lines each kerb, as people stop to grab a ready-to-eat meal, order a pizza or take cash out of an ATM. Among the shops are international franchises – Domino’s, Subway, Lidl, Boots – which could belong in any other town in Ireland or abroad. A girl cycles past, hooked up to a headset, talking into thin air. A teenager follows, headphones burrowed into his ears, his head bopping to a tune I can’t hear. At the bus stop a group of Spanish exchange students gesture excitedly; a Nigerian woman and her children wait beside them. Overhead a plane leaves its contrail hanging in the cloudless sky, descending toward Cork airport a few miles away. A dormer suburb of Cork since the 1970s, a boom town in the 1990s, at first sight this is one more non-place of modernity: globalised, cosmopolitan and connected. Standing here on Main Street, it is easy to pick up threads leading outward into global networks of communications and exchange. Only a few miles away is Ringskiddy, with its deep-water port for container ships and its industrial estates housing Ireland’s largest concentration of chemical industries – multinational corporations like Pfizer, which are some of Carrigaline’s largest employers. Driving west it is less than ten minutes to the airport. Without the global supply lines these represent, the shops – stocked with flowers from Kenya, apples from South Africa, sweatshirts made in China and mobile phones whose parts have been assembled from a dozen countries – would rapidly empty. Other types of connectivity are less visible: through iPhones and tablets the people around me are immersed in a ceaseless flow of data transmitted through the satellites and cables which are the nervous system of the networked society. Focus on the threads connecting the town to the global economy and its web of communications, and there is abundant evidence of liquefaction, transience, fluidity, impermanence and solids melting into air. But this is not the full story. For the globalised and the new takes its place in a matrix shaped both by the accumulated layers of the past and the ongoing dwelling of the townspeople. The character of the town is formed by the circuit of hills which enclose it and which give it, though only a few miles from Cork City, a

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distinct identity, its own topographical space, as well as by the river Owenabue, which flows through it and whose final crossing-point before broadening into an estuary determined the town’s location. Main Street follows the line of the single street of the historic village; houses dating from the nineteenth century now contain retail units; and the mills which used the water of the river to grind corn have been redeveloped to house shops and apartments. Barry Collins’ supermarket is celebrating its 150th anniversary; once a corner shop, it has expanded with the town, staying in the ownership of the same family throughout. Across the road Cogan’s Bar preserves an even older name, for there have been Cogans in Carrigaline ever since the Norman knight Milo built a castle here in the 1180s. At the crossroads the Tidy Towns committee are painting a wall and picking up rubbish. A large board on the bridge advertises local Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) fixtures and fundraising events. Beyond Main Street, in any estate more than a decade old, rows of houses originally identical have taken on a more individual character, as garages have been converted into extra rooms or had extensions built over them, and gardens have become surrounded by hedges and sprouted shrubbery and flowers. Neighbours have got to know each other, friendships have grown up, relationships have been forged. Children have been conceived in what were once empty shells thrown up by some speculative builder, and they have grown up to call them home. Places that had no significance beyond the marketing jargon in the estate agents’ brochures have taken on value for their inhabitants – a value distilled from their role as the settings of everyday life. Place-making describes the way in which relationships, practices and meanings become bound up with a physical locale. As in the case of Carrigaline, the contours of the landscape and the accumulated inheritance of time establish a localised context of action within which social practices and relationships become embedded. These in turn continually remake and renew the place. Place provides a substrate in which our dwelling can be embodied and preserved, whether in the landscape and buildings or the social practices of which it is the locus. It thereby becomes a centre around which relationships and identities crystallise. Experience gains stability and coherence through its attachment to a particular place. Relationships, practices and meanings are tinctured with a common identity and preserved for memory through their imbrication in their physical setting. They merge into the matrix of place, and whatever is absorbed into this matrix takes on a fresh significance and particularity. Even the most ubiquitous fast-food chain, once it becomes part of a place, is to some degree particularised, as it becomes woven into the fabric of people’s lives and absorbed into the individual streetscape of a town. This chapter will explore how places come into being and maintain their identity through successive waves of change, and how they help generate the coherent world of meaning which is home. The philosopher Edward Casey writes that the cultivation of places ‘localizes caring. What is for Heidegger a global feature of existent human being – namely “care” (Sorge) – is here given a local habitation and not just a name’ (1993: 175). The fabric of place is woven out of the value

The cultivation of place 53 generated by our acts of caring, but localisation in a particular place ensures this value is concentrated rather than dispersed, cumulative rather than discontinuous, and shared rather than purely individual. This is why, as Mary Douglas writes, home ‘is always a localizable idea’ and starts by bringing some space under control (Douglas, 1991: 289). Without place, we would struggle to centre our experience or give it coherence and stability.

Place as chronotope While space is indifferent extension, place is a concrete location which has become a centre of value for an individual or group; one which, through social and cultural processes, has taken on history and meaning (Tuan, 1979; Altman & Low, 1992; Beatley, 2004; Cresswell, 2004). Place embodies a particular conjuncture of space and time which, following Bakhtin (1988), we might term a chronotope. The concept of the chronotope was used by Bakhtin in his studies of the novel to capture how different configurations of time and space fuse together to create the distinctive worlds in which narrative unfolds. In the chronotope, ‘spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history’ (Bakhtin, 1988: 84). In the chronotope of place, time and space become fused at a central point. Time clings to space, becomes thick and opaque, and is at once preserved and localised. Space in turn, permeated by value, becomes qualitatively differentiated between centre and periphery, inside and outside, home and abroad. The result is a configuration of significance capable of magnetising future experience and charging it with its own polarity. In place, the physical frame comprised by the contours of topography and the built environment fuses with the legacy of accumulated time to form a specific, localised context of social action. Place, therefore, is always already inscribed with social meaning, and this constantly evolves and is transformed, while maintaining strong elements of continuity across time. This meaning is woven from the social practices, relationships and discourses of which it is the locus. These carry an intrinsic load of value which is transferred, as if by osmosis, to the place where they occur. A single life-changing event can charge a location with more significance – for good or ill – than years of mundane activity. But even the simplest activities, when they become a habitual part of our lives, give rise to a feeling of attachment for the places with which they are associated. The carrying out of habitual practices is ‘one of the fundamental means of the construction of places’ (Curry, 2002: 508). To adopt Heideggerean terminology, it is through those activities of cultivation and construction by which we express our dwelling that places come into being and evolve. Likewise, the denser the network of relationships we have in a place, the more significance it holds. ‘Local social involvements – particularly those with friends, but also those involving kin, organizational memberships, and local shopping – prove to be the most consistent and significant source of sentimental ties to local

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places’ (Hummon, 1992: 257). Kunstler (1993) suggests that a sense of place is facilitated by the mixture rather than separation of functions and social groups, and by dense rather than dispersed settlement. When activities such as shopping, work and leisure are concentrated close beside each other and people’s places of residence, the occupants are more likely to develop interpersonal ties and an emotional attachment to the place (Seamon, 1979: 95). Where these activities are segregated and dispersed, levels of social interaction and therefore place attachment are weaker. Places are woven not just from relationships and practices but from shared sets of symbols and meanings (Relph, 1976; Altman & Low, 1992: 165). ‘Like other organisms human beings define and defend territories, but there is this fundamental difference: the ties that bind us to a particular place are built of symbols, and they are things of our own making’ (Turner, 1988: 421). But these symbols are not freefloating constructs detached from the physical environment and the concrete activities of everyday life. People’s experience of a place is distilled into the landscape and streetscape, buildings and objects. It is the very physicality of place which underlies its unique capacity as a container and focus of value. In the chronotope of place, therefore, space and time are fused to create a local context to which social practices and relationships can adhere, accumulating a significance which only deepens and becomes more resonant with the passage of time. Consider one place powerfully charged with meaning: the Athenian Acropolis. The ancient Athenians believed they were sprung from the soil of Attica, ‘like the wheat and the barley’ in the words of the Archarnes Stele (quoted in Holland, 2005: 100), and had always lived there. This may reflect a historical reality; Attica appears to have suffered less than other regions from the population displacements which followed the Mycenaean collapse. From the earliest times, geography and history conspired to make the Acropolis central to Athenian identity. It was both the geographic focus of ancient Attica and the site of a Bronze Age settlement whose cyclopean masonry could still be seen in the classical era (Ibid: 102). Erechtheus, the mythical ancestor of the Athenians, was believed to be buried there, and the citizens offered an annual sacrifice at his tomb. Here grew the primal olive tree, the gift of Athena and as old as the city, while in the temple of Athena Polias stood a statue of the goddess carved in olive wood, which was believed to have fallen from the sky and to have been fashioned by Athena herself. Prominent families erected statues and built temples on the Acropolis to proclaim their status, and their members served in them as priests. The significance of the site was continually renewed through rituals such as the annual festival of the Panathenaea, when a great procession would climb the Acropolis and present the statue of Athena with a robe beautifully embroidered by the noblest maidens of the city (Ibid: 116). Here we see dramatised that fusing of time and space which constitutes the chronotope of place, wherein time thickens and becomes visible while space becomes qualitatively differentiated as it is charged with memory. We can also see how the symbolic meaning of place, continually renewed through practices such as civic rituals and competitive temple-building, was distilled into the physical substrate of the site, so that the

The cultivation of place 55 Acropolis crystallised the evolving identity and political relationships of the Athenian people. The result was an intense concentration of significance which made Athens the centre of the world for its inhabitants and helped give order and coherence to their universe.

A container of value Relationships, practices and discourses unfold within the context of place and are shaped by that context even as they shape it. What place provides is a centre around which they can crystallise, a physical substrate in which they can become embodied, and a context which gives them coherence and stability through time. Place acts as a container which fixes and concentrates the activity of dwelling. In the process, place itself becomes a profound centre of value, a vital aspect of that world of integrative meaning which is home. As Thomas Gieryn writes (2000), place ‘embodies and secures otherwise intangible cultural norms, identities, memories and values’. Places give physical form to dwelling, situate the everyday activities of our lives, and proffer a physical medium for cultivation and construction. In the process, the values inherent in our activities achieve physical embodiment in landscapes, monuments, houses and streetscapes. ‘Places embody values; better yet, they situate them’ and thereby make them concrete and unique (Casey, 1993: 265). When values are embodied, they take on definition and clarity; they become more potent and enduring. This is why, for example, religious beliefs, whose referents are transcendent and immaterial, tend to express themselves in churches, altars, statues, icons and mandalas, which give concrete definition to the idea of the divine and provide a focus for worship. Likewise, the architecture and street frontage of a holiday resort, full of bright colours, flashing lights, bold signs, frivolous or exotic buildings and plentiful street furniture, embody the ideas of leisure and an escape from the mundane. As a result, places become centres of value, around which new kinds of social relationship crystallise – and these in turn deepen and reinforce the significance of the place. Simmel describes how the ‘spatial immovability of an object of interest creates certain forms of relationship that group around it’ (1997: 146). Likewise, for the geographer Edward Relph, places can be understood as centres of intention and purpose (1976: 22). As such, they provide a focus for interests and identities which were already latent in the surrounding society. Simmel gives the example of a religious denomination which builds a church in a region where it had previously had only scattered adherents. The result of this physical embodiment of a spiritual idea is to produce an intensification of religious feeling and create a religious congregation where there had been only individual believers. Hence places – whether individual buildings or entire landscapes or settlements – not only embody value, but in the process become centres around which social practices and relationships crystallise. Through the embodiment of value, place assists in its preservation and thereby renders it cumulative. This may be deliberate, as in the case of streets and squares

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named after famous victories and the generals who presided over them or public buildings commemorating the benefactors who funded their construction. But usually it is simply the case that landscapes, streets and buildings become a kind of mnemonic, reminding us of the events which occurred in or around them and the values these embody. The General Post Office (GPO) on Dublin’s O’Connell Street was constructed as an administrative centre for the Irish postal service, but as the headquarters of the 1916 Rising it has become a potent symbol of Irish nationalism. Likewise, so long as our family home stands, we feel a living link to the childhood for which it provided the setting, even if we have long moved away – and if it were demolished we would feel that a tangible connection to our past had been severed. But place does more than preserve memories by association: it provides the cue for particular practices or types of social interaction. Hence a social practice or a constellation of relationships can be preserved through being rooted in a place. The acquisition of dedicated facilities by the members of a sporting club substantially increases the chances of that sport being played in the locality in the future. Likewise, when a new political party opens an office, this gives it a centre for its activities, which solidifies the commitment of its members. A monument or cenotaph can ensure the regular commemoration of those it memorialises, which would not take place without the focal point and material reminder it provides. An important characteristic of place is its uniqueness. To quote Simmel once again, ‘every portion of space possesses a kind of uniqueness, for which there is almost no analogy. To conceive of a definitely localized portion of space in the plural is a complete absurdity’ (1997: 138). In consequence, place can provide a group of people or a social practice with a unique identity, simply by virtue of their localisation in space. This effect is reinforced – and complicated – by the capacity of place to preserve collective memories, associations and traditions. Among aborigines, the stories of the Dreaming, which track mythical figures across the landscape, form a crucial part of people’s identity. As anthropologist Michael Jackson writes of one of his informants, ‘in telling me his jukurrpa, his Dreaming, Pincher had told me who he was’ (Jackson, 1995: 35). Nationalism relies on the sense of connection and identity produced by people’s sharing the same territory. Place therefore helps shared experience crystallise into a common identity, by providing it with a centre around which to cohere and a principle of continuity, and fixes this identity within boundaries. ‘We always conceive of the space which a social group fills up in some sense as a unit that expresses and supports the unity of that group, just as much as it is carried and supported by it’ (Simmel, 1997: 141). The correlation of this unity is separation from others who do not share the same place. In all these ways, the physical context of place acts as a container, within which the layered elements of social life can anchor themselves, in the process taking on coherence and definition, stability and particularity, and forming centres around which social relationships and identities can crystallise. However, not all locations fulfil these functions equally. For one thing, the physical

The cultivation of place 57 scale of a place will influence both the scope of the activities which occur there and the intimacy of the connections between those who inhabit it. The most significant places are those which are large enough to contain a range of activities and relationships but small enough for us to appropriate them and make our own: the street, the parish, the neighbourhood, the city. The character of the built environment is also important. As Timothy Beatley writes (2004: 28–40), places need to be legible in order to be meaningful. A walkable town centre that encourages face-to-face interaction and buildings which relate to each other organically and are built on a human scale facilitate the development of a sense of place (Kunstler, 1993). Such a design, typical of most historic cities and small towns, allows people to orientate themselves in their surroundings. Their ability to interact with the place and their perception of it as a meaningful unity enhance its capacity as a container of value. By contrast the sheer scale of contemporary cities and their lack of organising principles – a clear centre, a periphery and recognisable elements such as walkable streets or public squares – limits their capacity to operate as meaningful environments and storehouses of memory (Connerton, 2009). Much recent scholarship has sought to decouple a sense of home or belonging from place (Rapport & Dawson, 1998; Beck, 2000; Nowicka, 2007; Duyvendak, 2011). However, while relationships and habitual practices are a crucial part of what it is to be at home, and can provide a sense of belonging to those whose lives are highly mobile, there is no substitute for the ability of place to localise clusters of relationships, practices and meanings and endow them with coherence and stability. As Thomas Gieryn (2000: 467) writes, ‘Place mediates social life; it is something more than just another independent variable.’ Separate the family from the parental household with its contents familiar from childhood, the neighbours from the intimate geography of a well-known knot of streets, the ‘nation’ from the ancestral soil of its patria, and their power to bind is that much frailer, their ability to orientate us in a confusing world enfeebled. Certainly, diasporic communities can maintain strong mutual ties despite geographical displacement, but where this is the case, it will invariably be found that the community involved retains in their collective memory a powerful image of their homeland.1

Place as figuration The significance attached to a place is intensified by continuity through time. Yi-fu Tuan writes: ‘if we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place’ (1979: 6). Community attachment studies show that long-term residence substantially increases people’s sense of emotional connection to a locale (Hummon, 1992; Cross, 2001). Just as important as the duration of dwelling is its cumulative character. The character of a place will be eroded unless its landscape and built heritage are spared and its traditions preserved. Just as our individual memories of a place can be evoked by mementos and

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photo albums, collective memory is solidified in physical monuments and social rituals. The built environment can create a sense of continuity with the past not just through formal monuments and historical sites, but more fundamentally through the sedimentation of time, which is experienced when buildings of many different ages are juxtaposed, and older buildings are renovated, reconstructed and adapted to different uses rather than being demolished. The past is also kept alive in place names, reminiscences, topological myth and historical narrative, and enacted in traditions, festivities, commemorations, pilgrimages and rituals, which preserve and reconstruct the collective memory associated with a place. Since temporal continuity is central to the constitution of place, it can sometimes appear that the identity of places is fixed and unchanging. Yi-fu Tuan writes, ‘Place is an organized world of meaning. It is essentially a static concept’ (1979: 179). But in reality the identity of any place is constantly being recreated. According to James Turner, ‘Since meanings accrue and change over time, “placeness” is always a process of becoming’ (1988: 421). Tim Cresswell argues that places ‘are never finished but produced through the reiteration of practices – the repetition of seemingly mundane activities on a daily basis’ (2004: 82). In consequence the identity of a place is not something fixed in stone, but is constantly open to reinterpretation and reinvention. Even somewhere whose significance is as powerfully shaped by tradition as Jerusalem has had a radically different meaning for people of different generations, as Maurice Halbwachs argued in his study of the legendary topography of the Holy Land (1992). However, some writers have gone beyond this and denied that place has any essential identity (Gupta & Ferguson, 1992; Cresswell, 2004). Central to the antiessentialist position is a downgrading of the temporal dimension of place. Doreen Massey (1995) critiques the tendency to see places in terms of their connection to the past. To do so, she claims, results in a deeply essentialist and internalist way of thinking about a place and its character. This Isle of Dogs is essentially white working class; this land is uniquely Serbian. . . . What such constructions fail to realise, or to admit, is that places are always already hybrid. (Massey, 1995: 183) The local character of London’s docklands, for example, is a product of the nineteenth-century international division of labour and patterns of trade and all the influences which these brought. Massey writes, ‘the local is always already a product in part of ‘global’ forces . . . the world beyond the place itself’ (Ibid: 183). This refusal to allow places to be defined by their past is paralleled by a stress on the porosity of boundaries and an insistence on the extent to which all places are at least partly constituted by their relationships to locations outside them. Gupta and Ferguson argue that ‘spaces have always been hierarchically interconnected, instead of naturally disconnected’ and that the apparently unique characteristics of a culture or place are in fact produced through such

The cultivation of place 59 interconnections (1992: 8). Even the most seemingly ‘primeval’ and ‘untouched’ society, such as that of the San Bushmen, turns out to be shaped by relationships to the world beyond, relationships which may be quite recent in date. The Anglican church in a rural English village connects it to a religion which had its birth in the Middle East (Massey & Jess, 1995: 64). The result is a concept of place as ‘the location of intersections of particular bundles . . . of connections and interrelations, of influences and movements’ (Ibid: 59). These wider connections are not something ‘external’ but are integral to the character of the place; for example, the security and prosperity of the English home counties in the Victorian period owed much to income from investments in Britain’s colonies (Ibid: 62). Many of these themes are encapsulated in Massey’s (1994) article ‘A Progressive Sense of Place’. Massey begins by attacking what she characterises as a ‘reactionary’ sense of place. This is any view which sees places as having a single, essential identity, constructed out of an ‘inward-looking history’ and facilitating the drawing of boundaries which distinguish between inside and outside, us and them (Massey, 1994: 5). By contrast, she seeks to outline what she calls a ‘progressive sense of place’, giving as an example the London neighbourhood of Kilburn. Kilburn is a place with a distinctive character, but not a unitary one, for it includes the contributions of Irish, Indian and Muslim immigrants. Furthermore, its identity is not static, but constantly changing, and is constructed through the connections with the outside world which these migrant communities embody, as well as people’s individual passages through the area which reveal different facets of its character (Ibid: 6). Her conclusion is that ‘what gives a place its specificity is not some long internalized history but the fact that it is constructed out of a particular constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at a particular locus’ (Ibid: 7). Places are momentary intersections in a global network of social relations. That the identity of places is diverse, constantly evolving and partially constructed through influences from outside is not in doubt, although the intensity of these interconnections and the pace of change display huge variations both geographically and historically. The problem with Massey’s account is that her ‘progressive’ sense of place is described in almost wholly negative terms: it is not static, it is not singular, it is not based on a long historical memory and it is not bounded. The question we are left with – as Cresswell (2004) notes – is whether such a place amounts to more than the accidental coming together of a variety of flows in a single location. Moreover, Massey seems to deny place any capacity for autonomous development; the stimulus for change, in her account, appears always to arrive from outside. Likewise, Gupta and Ferguson (1992), by suggesting that even what is most different and distinctive in a culture is the result of its incorporation in a global structure of interconnections, depict place as a passive medium on which outside influences impinge. This is to overlook the fact that the various constituents of a locality, irrespective of their origins, are held together by the frame of physical propinquity, underpinning a local context whose elements evolve and change together in response to

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the particular constellation of influences which make up that place. In other words, while any place is shaped by influences from outside, places also stamp these outside influences with their own character, and do so all the more strongly with the passage of time. What Massey and others seem to overlook is the physicality of place, and its consequences for the way in which meaning is embodied in topography, buildings, street plans, objects and social practices. These in turn provide centres around which social relations crystallise and enable the preservation and accumulation of memory, generating a matrix which is more than the sum of its parts, and which particularises each new element it absorbs. But to overlook its physicality is to ignore the most important characteristic of place. Despite globalisation and the rise of information technology, we do not inhabit a disembodied space of global flows, but a physical world where social life thickens, coagulates, anchors itself and accumulates around places as centres of value and meaning. Social life is adhesive, and place is one of the principal substrates to which it adheres. It is because she overlooks the physicality of place that Massey is able to deny its temporality, but the temporal dimension ensures that the diverse elements which make up a place do not passively accumulate side by side, or interact without changing their character, but evolve together, generating a common identity and becoming imbricated in a shared system of meaning.2 If place is an intersection of outside influences, much the same could be said for a plant, a human being or any living organism. It is often claimed that every cell in a human body will have replaced itself after seven years, but this could hardly be used to argue that human bodies do not have an essential identity or the capacity to distinguish ‘inside’ from ‘outside’. This is because they are able to organise flows of energy and information into a dynamic unity. A similar capacity is inherent in place. What allows the human body to do this is DNA; the topological equivalent is the chronotope of place, the intersection between a physical locale and the collective memory and social practices which have accumulated there over time. Consequently, when global influences are absorbed into a place they are fundamentally transformed. Localising processes mean that concrete places and their embodied human relationships are the creative centres of social and cultural life. Writers like Gupta and Ferguson essentially argue that places and cultures have no ‘inside’, because they are structured from the very beginning by outside influences. But if they have no ‘inside’ there can be no ‘outside’ either, for where do these outside influences come from except other places? However, if we accept the autonomy of place, which is in turn based on its physicality and its endurance through time, then we can see places as creative centres of value which produce their own distinctive identities at the same time as being open to outside influences and constantly evolving throughout their history. This way of looking at place can be captured by thinking of it as a figuration, in the sense used by Norbert Elias (1978: 262). Elias likens a figuration to a complex dance such as a mazurka or minuet. Like a dance, a place is a constellation of reciprocally orientated and mutually inter-dependent elements – except

The cultivation of place 61 that in this case it includes the landscape and built environment as well as people. This is crucial, because the physicality of place embodies and fixes the result of past dwelling, acting as a centripetal force which holds together the human participants and helps give coherence to their motions. A dance is a process, and the figuration composed by the bodies of the dancers changes moment by moment; so does a place. Moreover, some people may leave the dance and others may join, but a dance is more than an accidental coming together of bodies; there is a certain figuration which, once it has been established, structures the actions of both the dancers already on the floor and those who may join later. Likewise with place; its elements crystallise into a particular pattern, and whilst this is constantly changing and evolving, so long as the place maintains its integrity it will exercise a shaping influence on the novel elements which are introduced. Hence a place can continue to absorb new influences while maintaining its distinctive character. However, if change is too rapid or violent the dance is broken up, the figuration dispersed and resolved into its individual elements. When this happens a place loses its identity, although there is always the possibility that it will be reconstructed in the future. The concept of place as a figuration allows us to understand how it can both maintain historical continuity and incorporate change, remain bounded while regularly absorbing newcomers, and form a unity which displays multiple, even seemingly contradictory, facets.

The appropriation of place For a place to become home we must appropriate it as our own, infusing it with value through the processes of inhabitation, cultivation and the accumulation of memory. To call a place home means that it is no longer separate from us, but knitted to the fabric of our being. Home, in other words, involves our participation in place. The word appropriation comes from the Latin appropriare – ‘to make one’s own’ (Dovey, 1985: 11). For Heidegger, ‘appropriation is a dialectic process through which we take aspects of our world into our being and are in turn taken by our world’ (Dovey, 1985: 11). Appropriation in this sense is very different from establishing a commercial or legal claim on a property, for we belong to the place in which we dwell quite as much as it belongs to us. The appropriation of place begins with dwelling, in the sense outlined in Chapter 2: a commitment to the locus of inhabitation which gives scope for experience to accumulate and endow it with value. When we settle in a place and make it the setting of our everyday lives, we gradually establish a claim to it. The more durable the settlement, and the greater the concentration of interest and activity, the more potent the resulting claim. This is recognised in the concept of squatters’ rights – the idea that habitation gives a person certain rights to an otherwise unused property, even where somebody else has legal title. Dwelling, as Heidegger makes clear, is expressed through the activities of construction and cultivation. A principal means by which we appropriate place is through the transformation of our surroundings by physical work. According to

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Roger Scruton, construction and cultivation are ‘ways in which we human beings fix ourselves in the world and make it our own’ (Scruton, 2012: 232). Robinson Crusoe lays claim to the island on which he is marooned by working to tame it and render it productive. He fences off portions of the land, grows barley and rice, raises goats and learns how to make pottery. He frequently refers to himself as ‘king’ of the island and is described as its ‘governor’ by the sea-captain who eventually rescues him (Defoe, 2007). Crusoe may have been used in nineteenthcentury political economy as a prototype of ‘economic man’, but in reality our relationship to the product of our hands is never purely instrumental and goes deeper than any legal title. In John B. Keane’s play The Field, the land which the peasant farmer Bull McCabe has been renting all his life is put up for sale. Aiming to purchase it at what he considers a fair price, he tries to intimidate other potential buyers. When reproved for his actions by the parish priest, who argues that the widow who owns the land has the right to sell it for whatever price she can get, McCabe answers that the field is rightfully his because of the labour he and his father have invested in it: ‘It’s my field. It’s my child. I nursed it. I nourished it. I saw to its every want. I dug the rocks out of it with my bare hands and I made a living thing of it!’ (Keane, 1991). McCabe’s relationship to the field is driven by more than economics, and he would not be compensated by an offer of equivalent acreage elsewhere. It is an elemental bond forged by the energy he has poured into cultivating and nurturing the land, so that it seems like his own flesh and blood; his ‘child’.3 Naming is another ancient method of appropriation. ‘Space is claimed for man by naming it’ (Relph, 1976: 16). Indeed, place names are among the things that link people most intimately with territory. When the Masai of Kenya were forced to relocate, they gave the names of familiar hills, rivers and plains to those of their new lands (Ibid: 17). In archaic thought to name something is to give it identity and being, to lift it out of the realm of chaos and endow it with form. In the Book of Invasions, the poet Amergin lays claim to the island of Ireland on behalf of the Milesians by naming it after the goddesses Eriu, Fodla and Banba. In Genesis, Adam claims the rights given him by God over the beasts of the field by assigning them their names. During the age of discovery European adventurers expressed their claim to the new lands of the Americas by naming them after their monarchs or the familiar towns and cities of their homelands. Naming is only one way in which we can appropriate a territory by assimilating it to a particular conceptual order. In the settling of North America and Australia by Europeans, long before axes fell on trees to prepare the making of farms, extensive stretches of land were already appropriated through the familiarizing rites of the survey, the naming of natural features, the drawing of maps, and the writing of epics of exploration. Without these steps that symbolically transform space into home or world, material changes can hardly proceed other than haphazardly and at small scale. (Tuan, 1991: 102)

The cultivation of place 63 The world needs to be appropriated mentally before we can begin the physical labour of turning it into a home. Mircea Eliade writes that in archaic cultures ‘a territorial conquest does not become real until after – more precisely, through – the ritual of taking possession, which is only a copy of the primordial act of the Creation of the World’ (1974: 10). Colonists would appropriate a region by consecrating it to their gods. In Vedic India the erection of an altar dedicated to Agni constituted the legal appropriation of a territory. The Spanish and Portuguese conquistadores took possession of the lands they had discovered in the name of Jesus Christ, and consecrated them by setting up the cross (Ibid: 11). To fence in a piece of ground is likewise to transform chaos into cosmos in a repetition of the original creation. Often such boundaries have been marked by the proprietor’s own body, through the physical process of walking around the land or across it. Examples include the English custom of ‘beating the bounds’ of a parish, and the ploughing of the pomerium at the foundation of a Roman colony. In Scandinavian folklore, rival landowners who wished to settle a boundary dispute would agree to leave their houses at the same time and, walking towards each other, lay the boundary at the point where they met. People measured their property with their own walking; and often, when the dispute flared into violence, the frontier ended by being marked with their graves (Kvideland, 1993). Feasting can also be a way of asserting ownership over a territory by laying claim to the right to invite or refuse guests and to appropriate and distribute the fruits of the land. This may be one reason why Anglo-Saxon kings were judged by the hospitality of their halls, and nineteenthcentury landlords in England feasted their tenants at the birth and coming-ofage of an heir. These customs find an echo today in the practice of holding a housewarming party on moving into a new home. The transfer of something with which our identity is closely bound up to a new environment is another means of appropriating a place and making it one’s home. Sophie Chevalier describes how working-class residents of the suburb of Nanterre in Paris appropriate their flats by renewing the carpet and wallpaper when they move in and bringing their own furniture and decorative objects. ‘In this process of appropriation the flat is transformed into a home’ (Chevalier, 1999: 86). More generally, somebody moving into rented accommodation will often begin to experience it as more ‘homelike’ when their familiar belongings, furnishings, books and personal possessions have been disposed around it. Settlement, cultivation, naming, fencing, feasting, the transfer of belongings – each involves mixing something of our own identity with a place, which is thereby identified with the family, community or tribe which dwells there. These, and multifarious other actions of everyday life, are ways of infusing our surroundings with value and turning them into a home. Appropriation in this sense does not produce ‘private property’ as we currently conceive it. Because it derives from prolonged dwelling, rather than legal title, it cannot be exchanged in the marketplace. While the market economy is founded on the conceptualisation of all labour and property as infinitely alienable, a place which has been appropriated as our own approximates to a pre-capitalist idea of property as a right over things attached

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to certain persons through custom and use. This is because the creation and appropriation of place, like all localising processes, requires participation (Lévy-Bruhl, 1975). Such participation – the merging of our own substance with the social and physical contexts which we inhabit – is one of the characteristics which distinguishes local contexts and processes from global ones. The ‘property’ which results is literally a part of ourselves, wedded to our identity, and is by its very nature inalienable. If exchanged, it can only be as a gift, which is never truly separated from the personality of the giver (Mauss, 1990). Numerous instances of this kind of inalienable property are given by Marcel Mauss. A contemporary example is the custom of French urbanites who retain their ancestral house in the country as a second home which is never, or only under very special circumstances, sold. Such a home ‘functions much as do the sacred Maori bones and stones that are believed to “anchor” a lineage in a particular locality, physically securing the descendants’ ancestral rights’ (Chevalier, 1999: 93). A place which we have appropriated as our own, precisely because it is inalienable, provides a focal centre around which to order the world. By contrast, the transformation of housing, and even the idea of ‘home’ itself, into a commodity by the contemporary real estate market operates to actively destroy the possibility of people having a home, because it alienates the locus of dwelling from the personality of the occupants (Keohane & Kuhling, 2014).

The persistence of place Many writers have lamented the erosion of place in contemporary society (Relph, 1976; Tuan, 1979; Augé, 1995). As Edward Casey puts it, the world of late modernity has ‘become increasingly placeless, a matter of mere sites instead of lived places, of sudden displacements rather than of perduring implacements’ (1993: xv). The responsibility for this erosion of place lies above all with our growing absorption in globalised systems, which create a synthetic reality divorced from the existential grounds of social life. The globalised economy and its technological infrastructure have made us increasingly independent of our physical surroundings and limited our interaction with landscapes and their history. As David Harvey writes: ‘Only as modern industrialization separates us from the process of production and we encounter the environment as a finished commodity’ does the problem of authenticity in our relationship to place emerge (1993: 12). If physical place provides a context for social action which is immediate, bounded, particular and participatory, globalisation tends to absorb social life into contexts which are distanced, open, generic and resist our efforts to reshape them or make them our own. Our contemporary relationship to place is therefore fundamentally different from that of previous generations, but this has not prevented people from continuing to seek, and find, meaning in particular locales. One response is to focus on the elements of place that remain in the contemporary world. Between absolute placelessness and the strongest forms of emplacement there stretches a wide

The cultivation of place 65 continuum. Even where the transformations of modernity have left little connection to the past, whenever the pace of development slows, localised relationships and traditions frequently re-establish themselves. Even as some places are being eroded, others are always being created. As Edward Relph writes, ‘What appears from the outside to be homogenous and placeless, is from within closely differentiated into places by the personalisation of property, by association with local events and the development of local myths and by being lived in’ (1976: 71). Studies by Mary P. Corcoran (2010) suggest that new suburban communities in Ireland which grew rapidly during the 1990s are characterised by variable but generally strong feelings of place attachment, especially where physical markers of place like older village centres remain and provide a sense of connection to the past. Although potentially under threat from overdevelopment, this sense of place is vital enough to cement social embeddedness and act as a bulwark against isolation and alienation. In the case of Rathoath, a village in Meath which was extensively suburbanised in the 1990s, a 2002 survey found that far from the community being anomic, residents demonstrated an attachment to the locality, and possessed relatively strong local networks of social support (Peillon et al., 2006). One in five residents was found to be actively involved in voluntary associations (Ibid). Another response to globalisation is the cultivation of a self-conscious sense of place. People may seek to reclaim the heritage of their area, researching local history or commemorating half-forgotten events from the local past. In Carrigaline the long-discontinued tradition of ‘wren boys’ dressing up and calling door-to-door on St Stephens Day has recently been at least partially revived, in the form of a Stephens Day Festival on Main Street. However, the sense of place expressed in such activities is fundamentally different from that possessed by someone who has unselfconsciously inhabited a place for their whole life and cannot imagine living anywhere else. Being rooted in a place is a different kind of experience from having and cultivating a ‘sense of place’. A truly rooted community may have shrines and monuments, but it is unlikely to have museums and societies for the preservation of the past. (Tuan, 1979: 198) A similar distinction is made by Hummon (1992), who identifies two forms of rootedness: everyday rootedness and ideological rootedness. The first involves a taken-for-granted attitude to place, the other a self-conscious identification with a community (Ibid: 263). Insofar as people in the developed world today display a sense of rootedness, it is increasingly likely to be of the ideological variant. Mike Savage and his collaborators, in a large-scale survey of residents in the greater Manchester area, found that among middle-class residents in particular, people’s sense of being at home ‘is related to reflexive processes in which they

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can satisfactorily account to themselves how they came to live where they do’ (Savage et al., 2005: 29). The authors posit a notion of ‘elective belonging’ as characteristic of the relationship to place of large numbers of people today. This means that belonging is not to a fixed community in which one is ‘born and bred’, but to places where one has chosen to live and which provide sites for the performance of identities (Ibid: 29). People who move to a place tell stories about their arrival and subsequent settlement, which show how it is the right place for them in terms of their own life history. Attachment to place is detached from the possession of historical or communal roots in that place, as well as from local involvement and any deep engagement with neighbours (Ibid: 52–80). Yet such elective belonging still involves people becoming highly invested in their place of residence. In this context the image of places has become increasingly important. We ‘are increasingly moving away from an experience of (unselfconscious) “rootedness” and towards an (image conscious) “sense of place”’ (Easthope, 2004: 136). Developers and urban authorities have turned place into a commodity. For Harvey (1993), globalisation puts a premium on the value of place. The marketing of cities and towns as locations with a unique character which are attractive to visit or do business in has become a crucial part of their development strategies, while billions have been invested in the construction of tourist quarters or retirement communities. Sharon Zukin (1995) describes how Disney World provided the model for a kind of sanitized, corporatized simulacrum of place which has been adopted by local governments and real estate developers across America. However, one result of these kinds of developments is that ‘places that seek to differentiate themselves end up creating a kind of serial replication of homogeneity’ (Harvey, 1993: 8). Instead of authenticity, what is on offer is a pre-packaged, ersatz sense of place aimed at middle-class gentrifiers and the global elite. The relationship such people have to places is profoundly different from those whose connection to place is taken for granted. A later study by Mike Savage and his collaborators which was less focused on middle-class respondents found many people whose sense of place was not based on ‘elective belonging’ (Savage et al., 2010). ‘These . . . are people living in the midst of a location in which they were born and bred, and who are strongly vested in their current location in which they are irredeemably thrown’ (Ibid: 130). Place was seen by such people primarily as a container for personal relationships and a site of memories (Ibid). Their accounts emphasised the given-ness of place, and the way in which it defined the contours of one’s life (Ibid: 131). On the other hand, commodified relationships to place are based on choice, ‘the ability to choose a place with the best possible combination of desirable features’, and ‘have little or nothing to do with personal history’ (Cross, 2001: 7). One result is that authentic places which house dense networks of social relations and have a rich history are being replaced by simulacrums of place to which access is stratified by class and race. Many of these themes are illustrated in a classic study of the London neighbourhood of Stoke-Newington (May, 1996). The population of the area includes longterm working-class residents, middle-class gentrifiers attracted by its sense of

The cultivation of place 67 history and ‘Englishness’, and non-European migrants. The working-class residents display a strong but unselfconscious sense of place, which is the product of generations of residence in the area and strong community ties. The new middleclass residents, on the other hand, have what might be called a ‘postmodern’ sense of place: May describes them as contemporary flaneurs, individuals without roots in the community who are attracted by the picturesque qualities of Newington’s English heritage and the ‘exoticism’ of its immigrant street markets. Because they are generally not working in the area or connected to it by family or friendship, their perspective is an external one, in contrast to the insider perspective of the older residents. Clearly, the ways in which people relate to place have been transformed in late modernity, principally because more people have more choice about where to settle and where to belong. Concomitantly, the role of place as a shaping factor in people’s lives may have weakened – yet rumours of its demise prove to be greatly exaggerated. Gentrifiers, middle-class suburbanites and urban planners may be more self-conscious and self-reflexive in their relation to place, but the underlying mechanisms of place-making and appropriation have not fundamentally changed. Consequently, rather than locating an authentic sense of place in the past and depicting its progressive erosion by modernity, we should pay more attention to the way in which places are continually created, evolve and are transformed and even destroyed, while new places emerge. Nor should we imagine that individuals and groups, once uprooted, are destined to forever remain rootless and nomadic. On the contrary, human societies resemble comfrey, a fragment of whose root is sufficient to give rise to new growth wherever it is scattered or transplanted. Globalisation has made our experience of place more precarious, but place will continue to play a vital role in social life in the future, while the prospects for a continued intensification of globalisation are currently somewhat less certain. Place offers a set of social potentials which globalised contexts of action provide, if at all, to a far lesser degree. Place fixes and stabilises social relations, underpins collective memory and tradition, grounds individual and collective identities, and helps us achieve a sense of belonging and integrative meaning. Consequently, not only will people continue to create and appropriate place in the future, but as the crisis of globalisation intensifies, place-based forms of social organisation will become increasingly important as alternatives and sites of resistance.

Notes 1 Consider the following example from a newspaper report on the commemoration of the Armenian genocide: ‘In Nerkin Sasnashen, a village of simple stone houses, unpaved roads and a ruined 7th-century monastery, locals talk animatedly about their roots in Sasun, a mountainous region of what is now Turkey’s Batman province and a stronghold of Armenian resistance to Turks and Kurds – who carried out a notorious massacre in 1894. The second word of the village’s name means “built by people from Sasun”. Handfuls of earth from Sasun are thrown into graves and at one recent baptism the proud parents gave the priest consecrated oil brought from there’ (Black, 2015).

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2 This remains the case even when those who inhabit a place are bitterly divided. Unionists and Nationalists in the North of Ireland share a common frame of reference which appears alien to most people in Britain or even elsewhere on the island of Ireland. 3 The persistence of this feeling even in a market economy is testified by the intuitive appeal of the labour theory of value espoused by Karl Marx, and his suggestion that the value extracted by the capitalist from his workers represents a form of illegitimate gain (Marx, 1996). This perception only wanes when ‘labour’, involving the physical transformation of raw materials into finished products, is replaced by ‘employment’ involving the processing of information or the provision of personal services.

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The landscape of memory

One of the best-known memoirs of the Irish War of Independence is Dan Breen’s My Fight for Irish Freedom. It describes how at crucial points in the conflict Breen and his comrades turned for inspiration to the collective memory embedded in the landscape of Tipperary and Limerick. This is how he leads up to his account of the ambush at Soloheadbeg, seen later as the beginning of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) campaign: Soloheadbeg is a small townland about two and a half miles from Tipperary Town. . . . In this plain, dominated by the Galteemore mountain, Brian Boru1 and his brother Mahon fought their first great battle with the Danes in 968; their gallant army, composed of men from Tipperary and Clare, routed the invaders. . . . Their right wing swept across the hills as the Danes fled to their stronghold. (Breen, 1964: 32) After the ambush, Breen and his companions went on the run, and one of them, Sean Hogan, was soon captured. On receiving information that Hogan was to be transferred by train from Thurles to Cork, they decided to stage a rescue at the village of Knocklong. On the way they passed through Ballyneety, where one of them recalled an incident from local history: We made a detour . . . past the ruins of the old castle, on the very same road by which Patrick Sarsfield2 rode on that moonlit night two hundred and thirty years before, when his sabre brought terror to Dutch William’s troops. It was a strange coincidence that we, who now rode on a similar errand of death or glory, were Tipperary outlaws just like Galloping Hogan who on that night made Sarsfield’s exploit possible. We, too, were on our way to rescue another Tipperary outlaw of the same name and clan. (Breen, 1964: 57) Up until this time, in early 1919, the Irish Volunteers had largely confined themselves to drilling and training. Breen and his companions faced widespread condemnation for their efforts to ignite a full-scale conflict with the British. In these

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circumstances they turned to the past for legitimisation, seeing themselves as part of an age-old struggle by the native Irish against successive invaders – and did so by drawing on specific memories inscribed in the landscape of Tipperary and East Limerick. Identification with their native countryside allowed Breen and his companions to lay claim to the exploits of Brian Boru and Patrick Sarsfield as part of an ongoing history of resistance to foreign rule, which they saw themselves as carrying forward in their own time. The hill country of mid-Tipperary not only offered physical refuge to the IRA guerrillas; it also gave them a sense of continuity with the past, an imaginative terrain from whose fastnesses they could bid defiance to the shifting currents of public opinion or the seeming hopelessness of their cause. Collective memory is the memory of a social group. When it attaches itself to the physical substrate of place, the result is an ongoing participation in the past, which generates a localised context of social action and a site integrative meaning. While social groups provide the frames within which the events of the past are remembered and interpreted (Halbwachs, 1992), specific places offer points of anchorage around which such memories, and the identities, practices and traditions associated with them, can crystallise. A landscape which has been the site of continuous and prolonged dwelling thereby becomes a multi-layered palimpsest, inscribed with the traces of many hands. Not alone are such places rich in memories, but by virtue of being embedded in the same location these memories gain coherence and become woven into a communal narrative. Such shared memories anchor the identity of collectives and underpin their sense of belonging. They compose a matrix which can incorporate new elements and assimilate them to itself. The accumulation of memory therefore generates a localised context of social action which is at once physical, because anchored in place, and cultural, because it is the narratives within which they are embedded which endow memories with meaning. Consequently, the collective memory of a group can be carried far from the places with which it is associated, and still offer the group’s members a sense of meaning and belonging – just as the Jewish people, long after the destruction of the temple and their dispersal from Israel, continued to commemorate the Passover with the words, ‘next year in Jerusalem, the rebuilt’.

History and memory To begin with, it is important to distinguish between the preservation and interrogation of the historical record and socially effective memory. The work of archivists and professional historians can influence how a society recollects the past but is distinct from collective memory. The latter is based on a creative process of remembering, which involves selecting from the fragments of the past which lie ready-to-hand those which seem most pertinent to our concerns, and constructing a usable history which makes sense of where we stand in the present. Nineteenth-century radicals with their myth of a free England before the

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‘Norman yoke’, Russian socialists who convinced themselves the rural mir was a relic of primitive communism, or Christian apologists reinterpreting the Old Testament as a series of prophecies about the coming of Christ – all were engaged in the same process of connecting past, present and a wished-for future in a way that made their proposed reformations seem only the restoration of a natural and original order, or the fulfilment of a destiny long foretold. Such formulations are of course never neutral but profoundly value-laden: they embody the collective ethos or moral imaginary of a religious sect, a political party, an ethnic community or a social movement. From the perspective of the professional historian, this makes these accounts of the past profoundly suspect, but in social life it is precisely what gives them their power. Memory becomes socially effective when it is forged into such narratives – as when Dan Breen and his comrades saw their conflict with England as one more round in a centuries-old struggle. Collective memory works by ‘knitting together today and yesterday, integrating the new events and relationships into the narrative of a life, the biography of a person, a family, a people’ (Young, 2005: 43). This distinction between historical scholarship and socially effective memory parallels that made by the historian Pierre Nora (1989) between history and memory. Memory, which Nora associates with pre-modern societies, involves the persistence of the past within the present in the form of tradition and custom. History, on the other hand, is characterised by its mediated character and self-conscious distance from the past. Memory is integrated, unselfconscious and spontaneous; history is ‘nothing more in fact than sifted and sorted historical traces’ (Nora, 1989: 8). Memory ‘remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived’ (Ibid: 8). History, on the other hand, ‘is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer’ (Ibid). Memory is always the memory of a particular group; history belongs to everyone and to no-one. Memory mythologises the world; history seeks to deconstruct the narratives that memory creates. Nora claims memory is almost entirely displaced by history in modern societies. However, any social group – any individual – needs some kind of integrative narrative of their past if they are to maintain their identity. It is through such narratives that memory becomes socially effective, enters the present and shapes it. This is not to say that we can create any version of the past that suits us. We are constrained by the resources available to us in memory and by the weight of traditional interpretation. That a myth need not coincide at all points with objective reality does not make it indistinguishable from fantasy: a historical myth is a meaningful arrangement of memory and experience which resonates with our hopes, fears and desires, and it could not function if it did not reflect what is generally remembered about the past. But we are likely to pass over much that has been preserved or recorded of previous epochs if it does not speak to where we currently stand. Many works of classical antiquity survived in monastic

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libraries or Byzantine folios throughout the Middle Ages, but they were only remembered in the Renaissance, when artists and scholars found in them the inspiration for new ways of thinking that were already starting to emerge. At this point the texts became a social force. While history is textual and archival, memory is inscribed in concrete locations and social practices (Nora, 1989: 9). History underlines our distance from the past; the carefully guarded preserve of the professional scholar, it tends towards generalisation and critical abstraction. Memory is immediate and particular, the property of a concrete social group, and invites us to participate in collective acts of remembering and commemoration. In large part this is because collective memory is intimately bound up with place.

Topography and memory ‘That memory is dependent on topography is an ancient insight’ (Connerton, 2009: 4). According to Maurice Halbwachs, every collective memory unfolds within a spatial framework, for space is a reality that endures: since our impressions rush by, one after another, and leave nothing behind in the mind, we can understand how we recapture the past only by understanding how it is, in effect, preserved by our physical surroundings. (1950: 12–13) Because buildings and landscapes, or the street plans and monuments of towns, can endure for many times the length of a human life, they are peculiarly suited to become carriers of collective memory. Hence ‘most groups . . . engrave their form in some way upon the soil and retrieve their collective remembrances within the spatial framework thus defined’ (Ibid: 28). Yi-fu Tuan writes of ‘place as time made visible, or place as memorial to times past’ (1979: 179). For Gaston Bachelard, it is through place that memories are preserved and we are able to retrieve and relive them; otherwise they are vaporous and without substance. The past only becomes real when it is embodied in space: ‘all we know is a sequence of fixations in the spaces of the being’s stability. . . . In its countless alveoli space contains compressed time’ (Bachelard, 1994: 8). Paul Connerton suggests that ‘no collective memory can exist without reference to a socially specific spatial framework . . . our images of social spaces, because of their relative stability, give us the illusion of not changing and of rediscovering the past in the present’ (1989: 37). Traditional peoples exemplify the manner in which a landscape becomes a mnemonic, whose contours remind its occupants of episodes from history and legend, the deeds of gods and heroes. For the Navajo, ‘closeness to the land and to their place on the land is their way of being grounded in tradition, in the traditional ground of their tribal ancestors. Their sense of history and even their sense of time itself are dependent on this closeness to their land . . . culture is

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almost literally in the land ’ (Casey, 1993: 36; italics in original). For the aborigines, ‘Space is full with significance, and the landscape, rather than being comprised of physical and geological features, is a record of mythical history in which the rocks and trees . . . are experienced as ancestors and spirits’ (Relph, 1976: 15). A similar relationship between landscape and tradition is exemplified in the early Irish texts known as the Dinnseanchas. This is an ancient corpus of poems and prose tales which relate how rivers, lakes, mountains, fords, islands, ridges, provinces and royal seats across Ireland got their names. The stories were written down at various times between the tenth and twelfth centuries, but much of their content dates from an earlier period – in some cases as far back as the Iron Age or even earlier – and originally belonged to an oral culture (Caviness, 2001). For the authors of the Dinnseanchas, the mythical history of gods and men was inscribed in the land itself. The poetry is highly allusive, embodying a range of mythological and genealogical information. A poem from the metrical Dinnseanchas, which explains the origin of the name of Temair (Tara), from the burial there of the goddess Tea, opens with a recapitulation of the legendary seven invasions of Ireland (CELT, 2014). Another poem, which tells how the province of Meath got its name, begins with a long list of kings said to have possessed the territory (Ibid). In total 770 places are mentioned in the surviving Dinnseanchas (Caviness, 2001); when we consider the density of their allusions, and how many legends relating to place were either never recorded or have subsequently been lost, we gain some idea of the symbolic richness of the landscape in Gaelic Ireland. The Dinnseanchas tradition in Irish literature is not confined to the corpus of writing which carries its name. In Gaelic tradition, story and place are inextricably linked. . . . Throughout the literature important events such as the death of gods, goddesses, people and animals, combats and battles are commemorated in the landscape. It was seen as a living thing with a name for every feature. (Ní Bhrolcháin, 2009: 7) All the main cycles of Irish storytelling include significant passages detailing how particular places or features of the landscape got their names. The prose epic Táin Bó Cuailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley) ends with a battle between two bulls. Place names are derived from the fragments of the defeated animal’s body, which were scattered over the countryside: Sliab nAdarca, the Mountain of the Horn; Áth Luain, the Ford of the Loins; Druim Tairb, the Ridge of the Bull (Kinsella, 1969). Likewise, in one of the principal tales of the Fenian Cycle, Acallam na Senórach (The Colloquy of the Old Men), Oisin and Caílte travel the country with St Patrick offering information on the landscape and place names; his scribe, Brocan, writes it all down (Ní Bhrolcháin, 2009). ‘When the Fianna tell tales, they always include information on the landscape that revives a memory that had been forgotten’ (Ibid: 66).

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This perception of landscape as the repository of memory, and therefore intimately bound up with the life of the community, persisted until the end of the Gaelic order in the seventeenth century. Lamenting the exile of the Gaelic Lords after the battle of the Boyne, the poet Aeogán O’Rathaille visualised the rivers of Ireland mourning the departed chiefs: The Sionainn, the Life, the musical Laoi, are muffled And the Biorra Dubh river, the Bruice, the Bríd, the Bóinn. Reddened are Loch Dearg’s narrows and the Wave of Tóim Since the Knave has skinned the crowned King in the game. (Kinsella & Ó’Tuama, 1981) Séathrún Céitinn laments the dispossession of the Gaelic chieftains from their lands using an allusive idiom which would have been recognised by the creators of the Dinnseanchas: There’s a new sort growing in the plain of Lugh the lithe Who are base by right, though they flourish their ‘rolls’ on high – Eoghan’s seed exhausted, Tál’s blood troubled and broken, And the youth of Bántsrath scattered in foreign lands. (Kinsella & Ó’Tuama, 1981) Ireland is ‘the plain of Lugh’, named after a god of the Tuath De Danann. The Gaelic clans of Munster are identified as ‘Eoghan’s seed’ – descendants of the semi-legendary Eoghan Mór, who was said to have ruled the southern part of Ireland in the second or third century AD and who gave his name to the Eóganachta dynasty of Munster kings. Contemporary events and characters are seen through a mythological and genealogical prism which connects them to the distant past and roots them in a particular place. As late as the 1970s, when the anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes arrived in the isolated village of Ballybran in West Kerry, she encountered a mentality which retained remarkable similarities to that of the authors of the Dinnseanchas. The inhabitants, she wrote, ‘view their terrain as a holy geography, their past as a religious history, and their language as a sacred tongue’ (2001: 79). In the highly personalized world of the villager every field and pasture, every spring and well, every rock, hill, and resting place is endowed with a name, a personality, a story, and a lesson. On Mount Brandon alone can be found Macha an Mhil (the Beast’s Pasture), Faill na nDeamhan (the Demon’s Cliff), Com na Cailighe (the Hag’s Recess), Loch na Mná (the Woman’s Lake), and Cnoc an Tairbh (the Bull’s Head) – names suggestive of myths and legends that recur as well in other parts of Ireland. (Scheper-Hughes, 2001: 80)

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Local traditions viewed the history of the parish as beginning with the landing of Noah’s granddaughter, accompanied by fifty virgins and three young men, at Dún na mBarc on the Dingle Peninsula, seeking refuge from the Great Flood. The collective memory embedded in such landscapes, where every feature has a name and a story, is richer and fuller than anything we would today count as ‘history’. It embraces myth, genealogy and folklore, collective traditions and customary observances, the burial sites of ancestors and the dwelling places of spirits. The relation of this material to the present is also fundamentally different. History is a body of knowledge about the past which may reveal some causative connections with the way we live now (as, for example, that our political systems are fundamentally shaped by the legacy of the French revolution), but makes no pretence to offering normative guidelines for how we should conduct ourselves in the present. Collective memory, on the other hand, is bound up with the very life of the community. It is the foundation of its values, ethos, identity and customs. Its absorption is necessary for a full initiation into social life. But it is not only among traditional peoples that place becomes a repository of memory and memory, in turn, the source of collective identities and values. In contemporary societies, an important centre of memory is the house, and in particular our childhood home. Thanks to the house, a great many of our memories are housed, and if the house is a bit elaborate, if it has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated. (Bachelard, 1994: 8) Consequently, a house can integrate different aspects of experience and in the process become a profound centre of meaning: ‘the house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories, and dreams of mankind . . . its councils of continuity are unceasing. Without it, man would be a dispersed being’ (Ibid: 6–7). Psychologist Claire Cooper Marcus writes of our tendency to get in touch with childhood memories through recollections of the places we inhabited (2006: 18). Nor is it the building alone which becomes the locus of memory. The contents of a dwelling are a digest of the life of an individual or family, which recall ‘significant people, places, phases, experiences and values in our lives’ (Ibid.: 72). They provide a ballast that reminds us of who we are and what we value, while maintaining continuity with our past. This is no doubt why Grant McCracken identified ‘the mnemonic property’ as one of the symbolic qualities of a ‘homey’ interior (McCracken, 1989). Such an interior is replete with trophies, gifts, family photos, craft work and souvenirs, which preserve memories of family and friends, as well as the most important landmarks of a person’s life. These memories are more fragile and individualised than those of a collective such as a nation or tribe. Nonetheless, they provide a frame of reference for individual experience and an anchor for the identity of a family and its members.

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The primordial depth of place Why is it that the collective memory of a group is preserved more effectively in a landscape or building than in an archive? As we noted in the previous chapter, place has a unique power to render abstract values concrete and tangible. The legacy of the past is embodied, rather than merely encoded, in places. Buildings, streets, place names, monuments and landscape features can connect us to people or events with an immediacy which a written record does not possess. The site of the World Trade Centre in New York, the Colosseum in Rome, or the battlefields of the Somme and the Marne are all iconic for this reason. In each case the written or oral transmission of information about the past is required to ‘activate’ the memories associated with a place. Ground Zero would mean nothing to somebody who had never heard of 9/11. But inscription in the landscape gives these memories vividness and immediacy. Embodiment allows us to grasp the past. Place not only makes the memory of the past more vivid – it also stabilises and preserves it. This goes beyond the survival of physical remains. Because it fixes and preserves value, place can transmit something of the cultural perspectives of the past, like a dream somehow set in stone. From where I write this in Tipperary, I can look out the window at the Rock of Cashel fifteen miles away across the Golden Vale. The rock and the dramatic ruins with which it is crowned dominate the landscape, making it natural for people in the vicinity to preserve a recollection of its history. The site also embodies the values of early medieval Ireland. The importance of defence is reflected in the choice of location, its royal past as the capital of the Eóganacht kings of Munster in its domineering presence. But above all, the religious faith of the age still finds an echo in the cluster of ecclesiastical buildings – round tower, cathedral and churches – that give the rock its distinctive silhouette. Thus embodied, these values live on into the present; they still have power to seize the imagination. When we walk through the streets of a city rich with the inherited legacy of the past, we are literarily inside that heritage, surrounded by it on all sides, in a way that we are not when we gaze on a relic or an antique. This encompassing quality of place means we can inhabit the scenes of past events and feel them resonate in our everyday lives. In any old town or city, the streets through which we move, the houses we live in, have witnessed innumerable previous lives played out. And so our inhabitation raises echoes in the landscape of memory. The charisma of an institution such as Oxford or Cambridge derives in part from the opportunity to work or study in the same place as generations of scholars. Irish republicans marching to the grave of a dead martyr know that they participate in a commemoration which is annually renewed, and return with their commitment to the cause reinvigorated. A farmer tilling the fields that have been in their family for generations feels a particular connection to those who have tended the land before them. In each case the present act echoes a long succession of similar activities in the same setting, and produces a felt connection to the past. Hence the associations called to mind by some street corner where a

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heroic or tragic event unfolded may be infinitely more powerful in shaping a community’s consciousness than libraries of learned volumes which sift the fragments of the past with scientific precision. In order for it to be a living presence, collective memory requires our ongoing participation in acts of remembrance and commemoration. Consequently the encompassing quality of place, which allows us to literally inhabit the realms of memory associated with it, offers memory a powerful reinforcement. The importance of continued inhabitation and use, if the sites of memory are to remain vital, can be seen in the distinction Paul Connerton makes between place as memorial and place as locus (2009: 10). Memorials commemorate the past explicitly and formally; the memory which they preserve is set and frozen. Examples include war memorials, or the Scandinavian names of many English villages – a legacy of the Danish conquest of large parts of England in the ninth century. On the other hand, a house long inhabited is for Connerton a locus of memory which draws the past into the present (Ibid: 21). It carries a less explicit and more informal body of recollection than the memorial. Because of this more fluid, taken-for-granted character, ‘the locus is more important than the memorial – whose construction is so often motivated by the conscious wish to commemorate or the unavowed fear of forgetting – as a carrier of place memory’ (Ibid: 34–35). Because the locus is a place with which people are intimate in everyday life, constantly reshaping it and adding to its freight of memory through their activity, the recollections it carries are more deeply interwoven with localised identity and more likely to support a living tradition. Finally, place endows memory with a certain coherence, even if the recollections associated with it have little else in common. It facilitates the distillation of a narrative from seemingly disparate episodes of the past. A locus of memory is multi-layered and can connect us to more than one historical figure or event. Edward Casey writes that time infuses place ‘not in the form of a line but as something distinctively multidimensional’ (1993: 33). The same spot can be associated with an almost limitless assortment of remembrances and associations. Thus Henry James wrote of Rome as ‘an infinite superposition of history’ (cited in Connerton, 2009: 16). Wherever we dwell, memories accumulate in layers like archaeological strata. These layers are richer in proportion not just to the length of time we inhabit a place but also to the intensity of our experience. ‘Many years in one place may leave few memory traces that we can or would wish to recall; and intense experience of short duration . . . can alter our lives’ (Tuan, 1979: 185). A location which has been dwelt in continuously by a social group thereby becomes imbued with a wealth of association and symbolic value. The result is a particular dimension of meaning attached to places which have been the site of prolonged dwelling and where continuity with the past has not been destroyed. Merleau-Ponty speaks of ‘primordial depth’, which is not reducible to the three dimensions of mathematical space or indeed to that of time: Primal depth, according to Merleau-Ponty, is ‘the dimension in which things or elements of things envelop each other, whereas breadth and height are the

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For the philosopher Edward Casey, such primordial depth is ‘the matter of place’ (Ibid: 67). The memories, associations, customs and traditions inscribed in a location interpenetrate and entwine to endow it with its unique character. Through primordial depth, our physical surroundings, the stories we tell about them and the rituals we enact there become deep repositories of meaning and value. A place becomes a sacred landscape. The Dinnseanchas tradition exemplifies the dimension of primordial depth; as the history and mythology of its people were inscribed in the landscape, the land of Ireland became a holy ground infused with the legendary past. A testimony to the enduring power of this tradition is the continued ability of sacred sites like Croagh Patrick or Lough Derg to draw tens of thousands of pilgrims each year, or the iconic presence of such ancient ritual centres as Cashel and Tara. This dimension of primordial depth profoundly influences the nature of collective memory. Embedded in a historic landscape, the past is approached not in the form of a linear timeline or a collection of disconnected facts, but as a body of interpenetrating traditions. Memories, exemplars, stories and customs mutually envelop and reshape each other. The same themes echo from era to era. Aspects of many different pasts can thereby be assimilated into a coherent narrative, irrespective of chronology or causal connection. In contrast to history, memory stresses resemblance and continuity over change; it strives to knit the ravelled skeins of time into a well-fitting garment, one which proclaims the identity and values of its wearer. Unlike textual or digital records, whose narratives of the past are fixed and linear, it is multi-dimensional and fluid, allowing the continuous reimagining of the past while maintaining, through physical endurance, the appearance of continuity. As Jan Assmann writes (Assmann & Czaplicka, 1995), memory is not simply the storage of past facts but the ongoing work of reconstructive imagination; the past is not just recalled but mediated through the semantic frames and present needs of a given society. ‘History turns into myth as soon as it is remembered’ (Assmann, 2011: 210). Thus, for Dan Breen the memory of Brian Boru’s battle against the Vikings and the exploits of Patrick Sarsfield – entirely unconnected as they appear to the academic historian – echo each other and prefigure his own struggle against British rule, giving it a historical resonance which is all the stronger for being anchored in a particular landscape. By the same token, the ways of understanding the present which are available to a group are greatly enriched, and at least partially determined, by what it remembers of the past. The collective memory of successive struggles between the Irish

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and various invaders on which Dan Breen drew enabled him to make sense of his own time and empowered him and his comrades to take revolutionary action. Collective memory, then, is a powerful societal resource. Moreover, its narratives are cultural frames which exert a magnetic influence on new experience. Even in the face of profound changes, different traditions can be reconciled and the narratives of newcomers combined with those of autochthons. In Ireland, centres such as Newgrange and Tara enjoyed continuity in sacred status over a period of more than three thousand years from the Neolithic to the Iron Age, despite successive waves of migration and invasion (Ó hÓgáin, 1999). Newcomers could preserve the sacred traditions of the past while adopting these sites to their own use because multiple layers of significance were juxtaposed and given coherence within the primordial depth of place. The consequence is that while place helps preserve collective memory and identity, it does so in a manner which leaves them open to constant reinvention, while maintaining the appearance of continuity. The present is interpreted in light of the past, the past recreated in light of the present, generating a hermeneutic circle which binds past and present inseparably together. In contrast to history, collective memory cannot exist without our participation in the process of remembering. According to Edward Casey (2000), all remembering has a commemorative component, and the essence of commemoration is participation in the commemorated object, person or event. ‘For a Western philosophical mind, the single most striking aspect of participation is its freedom from the constraints of contradiction. Thanks to participation, things can be simultaneously themselves and not themselves, here and also there, past as well as present’ (2000: 248). In fact, commemoration succeeds to the extent that it refuses ‘to succumb to the sheer pastness of the past’ and carries ‘the past forward through the present so as to perdure in the future’ (2000: 256). Through this constant process of interweaving past and present, collective memory acts as one of the most powerful generators of meaning.

Collective memory and social ethos For Maurice Halbwachs collective memory is what holds communities together during the intervals between moments of collective effervescence. It is ‘what binds people together in periods of calm, when routine behaviour is the order of the day’ (Coser, 1992: 25). For Jan Assmann likewise, collective memory ‘preserves the store of knowledge from which a group derives an awareness of its unity and peculiarity’ (Assmann & Czaplicka, 1995: 130). In other words, it is a primary source of the ethos of a social group. The ethos of a society encompasses its values, customs, moral laws and traditions of conduct (Sumner, 1906: 37). It includes not just those rules of behaviour which are explicitly articulated but a whole body of taken-for-granted assumptions without which social action would be impossible. Our word ethics is derived from the Greek ‘ethos’: for the Greeks ethics ‘were things which pertained to the ethos and therefore the things which were the standard of right’ (Ibid: 37).

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The ethos of a group can be more or less powerful. That of a religious community tends to be particularly strong and all-pervasive, lending it a unique stability and cohesion – this is one reason why the overwhelming majority of intentional communities which have survived more than a few years have been religious in inspiration (Kanter, 1972). On the other hand, the ethos of a workplace or a centre of casual sociability like a pub is more fragile, and its power to stamp individual identities and meld them into an enduring social group is less. A crucial factor explaining this divergence is the strength of collective memory and its localisation in place. As Halbwachs says, ‘social thought is essentially a memory and . . . its entire content consists of collective recollections or remembrances’ (1992: 189). A workplace can usually draw on fewer resources of collective memory, and is less able to localise them in an enduring centre, than a religious community whose memory goes back hundreds or even thousands of years and is localised in sacred monuments and houses of worship. At the end of the fifth book of Livy’s history, he recounts how after the sack of Rome by the Gauls in 386 BC there were many who argued that the population should move to the neighbouring city of Veii. However, their leader Camillus persuaded them to remain and rebuild the city. How much Livy’s reconstruction of Camillus’ speech is his own invention, we cannot know, but it provides an insight into the way in which the collective memory inscribed in the city of Rome was intertwined with and supported the ethos of the Roman state. The heart of Camillus’ argument is that the identity of the Romans is so intimately bound up with the site of Rome, with its sacred rituals and historic memories, that to move elsewhere would mean to cease being Roman. The sense of the city as a sacred place permeates Camillus’ speech and forms his most powerful argument against the move to Veii: as he says, ‘not a stone of her streets but is permeated by our sense of the divine’ (Livy, V, 51). To abandon Rome would be to abandon the gods who inhabited the city, and with them the fortune of the Roman people. Moreover, the rituals of Roman religion were inseparable from the locations where they were traditionally carried out, as were public functions, such as elections or decisions on matters of war and peace. ‘The Meeting of the Curies, to deal with questions of war, the Meeting of the Centuries for the election of consuls or military tribunes – where with the proper rites can these be held but in the places tradition has made sacred?’ (Livy, V, 52). Like the Gaelic poets of seventeenth-century Ireland, Camillus views the events of his own time through the prism of the legendary past. If the shepherds and herdsmen who Romulus gathered to found Rome could build a city out of forest and swamp, their descendants should be able to restore it while its temples and citadel remained standing. And ‘even if it were impossible to build here anything better or bigger than Romulus’ Hut, surely it would be nobler to live like country shepherds amongst everything we hold sacred than to go into universal exile, deserting the gods of our hearths and homes’ (V, 53). Camillus calls the earth of Rome ‘our mother’ (V, 54), and draws on legend to argue that this particular spot was divinely chosen to be the seat of empire: Should you go, I grant you may take your brave hearts with you, but never the Luck of Rome. Here is the Capitol, where, in the days of old, the human head

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was found and men were told that on that spot would be the world’s head and the seat of empire; here, when the Capitol was to be cleared of other shrines for the sake of Jupiter’s temple, the two deities Juventas and Terminus refused, to the great joy of the men of those days, to be moved; here are the fires of Vesta, the sacred shields which fell from heaven, and all our gods who, if you stay, will assuredly bless your staying. (Livy, V, 54) Rome is portrayed as a hallowed ground with which the fate of its inhabitants is inextricably intertwined. The historian H. L. Havell (1996) suggested that of all ancient peoples the Romans possessed the most intense feeling for home, and this was one of the foundations of that social cohesion and military discipline which helped them become the dominant power in the Mediterranean world. Georges Dumézil likewise writes that ‘the Romans were more closely attached to their corner of the earth than any people of those other Indo-European regions who share so many conceptions and practices with them’ (Dumézil, 1970: 116). Livy’s reconstruction of Camillus’ speech suggests how the collective memory embedded in the landscape and buildings of Rome underpinned a social ethos which helped Rome rise to predominance first in Italy and then in the Mediterranean world. Today there are still communities for whom the landscape they inhabit is so imbued with history and memory that it is a sacred place, an anchor for their identity and the foundation of their culture. In 2016 protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, which is planned to pass under part of Lake Oahe near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation, began to make headlines around the world. The Standing Rock tribe objected to the pipeline on the grounds that it threatened to pollute their water supply and damage ancient burial grounds. In April 2016 a protest camp was established by LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, a Sioux elder who is also Standing Rock’s Historic Preservation Officer. In the following months the camp grew to number thousands of people. Writing about the motivation for the protest, Allard describes how her life and that of her people is intertwined with the landscape. The efforts of state and national authorities to enforce construction of the pipeline are interpreted as the continuation of an assault on Sioux culture which included the Inyan Ska (Whitestone) Massacre of 1863, in which Allard’s great-great-grandmother was wounded, and the building of the Oahe dam by the US Army Corps of Engineers in the 1950s, which destroyed a portion of the sacred Inyan Wakangapi Wakpa (Cannonball River). She writes of the graves of her father and son situated on a hilltop overlooking the land, and the twenty-six archeological sites, including burial grounds, old Sundance grounds and village sites, which the pipeline would destroy. Such a destruction of tribal history is equated with genocide: The U.S. government is wiping out our most important cultural and spiritual areas. And as it erases our footprint from the world, it erases us as a people. These sites must be protected, or our world will end, it is that simple. Our young people have a right to know who they are. They have a right to

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For Allard, the identity and ethos of the Standing Rock Sioux are inseparable from the collective memory embedded in the surrounding landscape. Destroy that landscape, and their world – the unique cultural reality which they have created over generations – will quite literally end. What is fascinating about Standing Rock is how, in the age of the internet, the sacred landscape and cultural memory of the Standing Rock Sioux has been adopted as their own by indigenous people (and others) from around the world, who see the struggle against the Dakota Access Pipeline as echoing their own experience. By September 2016 over 300 federally recognised Native American tribes were represented at the protest camp, as well as other indigenous peoples from across the world. Whether in Standing Rock or ancient Rome, place provides a substrate to which the collective memory of a social group can adhere, underpinning its identity and ethos. Edward Relph writes: ‘the landscape . . . is a medium of communication in which all the elements may have messages – buildings, streets, parades, village soccer teams, all serve not only to unite communities but also to make them explicit’ (1976: 34). This is why, as Halbwachs suggested, people are often more exercised by a particular street being torn up, or a building or home demolished, than by seemingly more significant national or political events (1950: 4). It is also why a place which embodies the collective memory of a social group frequently becomes the focus of pilgrimage, ritual and commemoration. Mecca unites the world community of Muslims, even those who have never taken part in the hajj, and the memory of the temple preserved in the stones of the Wailing Wall gives Judaism its centre. ‘Remembered places have often served as symbolic anchors of community for dispersed people’ (Gupta & Ferguson, 1992: 11). By the same token, the destruction of significant places has frequently been used as a deliberate tactic to break the cohesion of a social group and eradicate its traditions. This was the logic behind Hadrian’s decision to replace Jerusalem with the Roman colony of Aelia Capitolina. Likewise, during the Nine Years’ War between the English crown and the coalition of Gaelic chiefs led by Hugh O’Neill, the English lord deputy marched into O’Neill’s heartland and deliberately smashed the inauguration stone at Tullahogue on which the O’Neills had been crowned since the eleventh century (O’Faolain, 1997). By destroying Leac na Rí, ‘the flagstone of the kings’, he aimed to symbolically destroy O’Neill’s sovereignty and weaken his hold over the Gaelic clans. When the American military buried the body of Osama bin Laden at sea, they were also acknowledging the power of place: they feared bin Laden’s grave would become a shrine for future generations of Islamic militants.

Collective memory in a global age Modernity alters our relationship to collective memory; a sharp separation from the past and a sense of difference from our ancestors is one of its hallmarks (Olick et al., 2011: 7). This is exacerbated in late modern society, as social life is prised

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out of the frameworks of physical place and accumulated time, natural cycles and face-to-face relations, migrating to globalised contexts and institutional spaces dominated by the logics of functionalism and mediation. As globalisation proceeds, time speeds up, experience becomes ever more temporally fragmented, and the traces of continuity with the past grow fewer. Paradoxically, in these circumstances the importance of place as a carrier of collective memory is greater than ever before. In his writings on collective memory, Halbwachs distinguished between functional and social life. He argued that in modern society the role of preserving social memory is taken on by those groups, such as the family and the social circles of everyday life, which are not confined to professional functions (Halbwachs, 1992: 139). This social sphere is concerned with the qualities of actions and persons, their location within a system of societal values, rather than their purely functional characteristics. Without such animating values, Halbwachs argues, even the technical sides of life cannot function properly. A legislator must possess a sense of equity, a feeling for the ideas of justice that pervade the society of their time – and this cannot be acquired from a written manual or a course of instruction but only through social intercourse. Likewise, a lawyer in presenting a case and a judge in deciding it rely on their familiarity with a body of tradition and moral feeling which goes beyond the letter of the law. However, Halbwachs argued that modernity was characterised by the growing predominance of the functional sphere over other domains of life. This has implications for the role of collective memory. Professional technique does not accumulate significance by repetition. If a mechanic carries out a sequence of actions designed to fix a leaky radiator in a car, their only significance is whether they achieve their end; otherwise, it is irrelevant how often the mechanic has carried them out before. But family attachment or patriotic feeling, a set of ethical precepts or the shared commitment of a party, cannot exist without consciousness of the temporal dimension of experience. As Halbwachs writes, ‘whenever a function requires, in addition to technical competence, the exercise of a reflective mind, it is not the function itself that can provide this’ (Ibid: 131), but only immersion in the traditions and values of the wider society which are preserved in its collective memory. In terms of Weber’s classic distinction, we might say that means-end rationality is oblivious to history, while value-rationality draws its very substance from collective memory (Weber, 1968). Consequently, the increasing dominance of means-end rationality in modern societies tends to progressively narrow the domain of collective memory, so that it is gradually excluded from the institutional centres of society. This division between functional life, where requires at most a value-neutral form of memory, and social life, where collective memory along with its accompanying freight of value, identity and meaning maintains its hold, is paralleled in the distinction between globalised spaces and physical place. Globalising processes operate by disembedding social life from local contexts of action and reorganising social relations across broad time-space bands (Giddens, 1991, 1994). Alongside the development of abstract tokens – coinage, standardised measures of space and time – and expert systems which decontextualise knowledge

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(Giddens, 1991), this is enabled by the development of certain kinds of spaces, which Marc Augé (1995) has termed ‘non-places’. These are characterised by the elision of the existential frames of physical place, cumulative time, face-to-face relations, natural cycles, and intimate participation in which meaning inheres, in order to create wholly functional and institutional spaces which act as the nodal points of global networks. For Augé, non-places include transit centres and temporary abodes such as bus stations, airports, hotel chains, refugee camps, cars and trains; the sites of abstract, mediated commerce like supermarkets, slot machines and ATMs; and virtual spaces of communication including cable and wireless networks – to which we might add the internet. The term ‘non-place’ is used by Augé to designate both particular categories of spaces – primarily those shaped by the purposes of transport, commerce and leisure – and the relations that individuals have with these spaces (Ibid: 94). Those relations, in contrast to the dense sociality associated with place, are based on ‘solitary contractuality’ (Ibid ). Our only relationship to an airline is the contract we sign when we buy our ticket; our only relationship to a hotel chain is the agreement to pay a certain sum of money for a night’s use of a room. The result is ‘a world . . . surrendered to solitary individuality, to the fleeting, the temporary and ephemeral’ (Ibid: 78). Non-places are characterised by only the slightest of social contacts – the few necessary words spoken to the cashier in a shop, a sentence or two exchanged with a fellow passenger on an aircraft – out of which only the most tenuous sense of shared identity can emerge. Instead of interacting with individuals, we find ourselves interacting with institutions through the medium of texts. These texts include road signs, maps, tourist guides, notices, electronic signboards, screens, posters and price lists. The result is that the usual processes of mutual social recognition to which we owe our identity (Pizzorno, 2008) are suspended: ‘a person entering the space of non-place is relieved of his usual determinants. He becomes no more than what he does or experiences in the role of passenger, customer or driver’ (Augé, 1995: 103). These sites are characterised by the absence of memory. In Augé’s words, there is ‘no room . . . for history unless it has been transformed into an element of spectacle’ (Ibid: 103). Collective memory is defined by participation; it is always the story of us. But in non-places characterised by ‘solitary contractuality’, there is no ‘us’ whose story can be told; we create no enduring relationships, nor do we change these sites in passing through them. These are spaces where we cannot leave our mark, which we cannot appropriate, since the only relationship we have with them is governed by contract and mediated by words and signs. Our connection to them is entirely superficial. It is as though memory will not adhere to their polished surfaces, which resist time as they proclaim their perpetual contemporaneity. Consequently, despite the fact that many of us spend a considerable portion of our lives in these environments, the experience is not cumulative. Tim Cresswell’s argument that ‘Even airports have their inhabitants, people who work there, the homeless or frequent fliers who see the

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same people, at the same time, every workday’ (2009: 6) is therefore misconceived. Even if somebody passes through the same airport every month, the superficiality of their relationship to it eliminates the possibility of an accumulation of association and meaning. Every journey is a repetition of the first; temporal depth gives way to an eternal present. When our relationship to our surroundings is so distant, they can afford us no embodiment or fixing of value, no preservation of the past, no matter how frequently we pass through. We can never find here the layered sediment of time, the dimension of primordial depth, which is characteristic of collective memory. In part this is because non-places systematically elide the existential frameworks of human life. In addition to replacing human relations with institutional codes mediated by text, they separate themselves from geographic locations and natural cycles, including the passage of time. Frequently windowless, their interiors possess their own micro-climates regulated by air conditioning, while artificial lighting replaces the changing patterns of sunlight that would remind us of the time of day. Any sign of decay which could testify to the passage of time is suppressed; these environments aspire to be permanently glossy and up-to-date. Ritzer (2001) and Goss (1993) describe how shopping centres and casinos play with time and space to create a virtual environment freed from the constraints of everyday reality, in which shoppers and gamblers may engage in unchecked consumption, while Jameson (1991) characterises postmodern architecture as aspiring to create a selfenclosed hyperspace which transcends the capacity of the human body to orientate itself perceptually in its surroundings. The usual architectural style of such locations is resolutely international, refusing any connection to the surrounding locality or its historic traditions. Global crossroads and cathedrals of consumption, these are both ‘non-places’ and utopian ‘no-places’, cut out of the fabric of everyday space and time. Consequently, non-places represent the institutionalisation of a state of ‘permanent liminality’ (Szakolczai, 2000) – locations in which the taken-for-granted structures of everyday life and their accompanying identities are suspended indefinitely. Their systematic separation from the existential frameworks within which meaning adheres means that experience cannot find in them an anchorage around which to accumulate or a container to grant it coherence. This in turn is due to their being governed by the functional logic of globalised networks, rather than the animating values of everyday social circles. In non-places, localising processes are indefinitely suspended. These are locations which disperse value rather than gather it, public spaces which are at the same time solvents of community and social relationships. Alongside the physical non-places of shopping centres and transit points, the virtual universe of digital communications and the media represents another type of globalised space. The increasing mediation of experience in contemporary society has implications for the functioning of collective memory. On the one hand, we possess unprecedented capacities for recording and disseminating data. ‘No society has ever produced archives as deliberately as our own, not

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only by volume . . . but also by its superstitious esteem, by its veneration of the trace’ (Nora, 1989: 13). The internet makes this information more widely accessible than ever before. But as we have already noted, there is a difference between a record of the past and socially effective memory. If the essence of collective memory rests in a combination of the semantic framework provided by a social group and a physical place which acts to stimulate the recollection of the past and grant it coherence, the growth in mediation dissolves both sides of that relation. On the one hand, it separates the records of events from the locations within which they unfolded; simultaneously, it tends to dissolve the ‘social frameworks of memory’ (Halbwachs, 1992) within which those events are interpreted, by individualising our relation to them and making them universally accessible. The result is that while modernity tends to preserve, in an unprecedented degree, even the most seemingly trivial records of people and events, we increasingly lack the frameworks that would make them meaningful. As Pierre Nora argued (1989), the proliferation of history tends to swallow up memory. It is from this perspective that we should understand Paul Connerton’s (2009) account of the evolution of communications technology from the newspaper to television and the internet. He argues that the newspaper began the erosion of older forms of narration, since the idea of the simultaneous was built into its conventions from the beginning. The typical broadsheet juxtaposes five or more otherwise unrelated stories on its front page (Ibid: 81). The tendency toward the breakdown of experience into an evanescent collection of images or pieces of information related only by their temporal juxtaposition is exacerbated by television and the internet (Ibid). The effect is to ‘isolate what is reported to have happened from the sphere in which it could deeply enter into the affective experience, and so the affective time, of readers’ (Ibid: 82). Mediation divorces experience from the social frameworks and physical contexts within which it becomes meaningful, replacing the primordial depth of collective memory with the temporal shallowness of a 24-hour news cycle turbocharged by the echo chamber of social media. The omnipresence and immediacy of contemporary communications media prevents events being brought into context, so that social memory becomes a matter of isolated recollections and scraps of information rather than a coherent narrative. ‘The overabundance of information available at any moment tends to obliterate a meaningful continuity that would make such information intelligible’ (Hervieu-Léger, 2011: 386). Memory is dissolved into data. Our recollection of the past is therefore becoming progressively ‘unanchored’ from concrete places and social contexts, due to the ubiquity of mediated experience and the functional logic of globalised systems. Ulrich Beck writes that with globalisation ‘loosening and transforming the ties of culture to place . . . collective memory is losing its unity and integrity’ (Beck, 2000: 31). Collective memory is most powerful when it is embedded in physical places and in the stories and traditions, rituals and practices of the social groups which inhabit them. This anchorage gives it both an intense presence and narrative coherence. With globalisation and

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the increasing mediation of experience, memory is detached from these contexts and transmuted first into history and increasingly into mere information. The past becomes ever more fragmented, and our engagement with it is increasingly sporadic and touristic, with little relation to the contexts of our everyday lives. We can no longer access the primordial depth of meaning inscribed in the landscape, the mythic narratives that connect contemporary concerns to the dreamtime of the ancestors, the echoes passed back and forth between different epochs to knit them together. In their place we have a body of disconnected facts, bracketed as ‘history’ and therefore having little relevance to the present. The power of collective memory to shape identity and communal ethos, to let us know who we are and where we belong, is gradually eroded. But can there be a collective memory without place? A global collective memory for a global age? Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider (2006) argue in the affirmative. They suggest that as people cease to identify primarily with their nationality or ethnicity, memory structures are no longer synonymous with geographical proximity or tight social and political groups. Politics and culture are becoming deterritorialised, and issues of global concern are increasingly ‘part and parcel of everyday local experiences and moral life worlds’ (Ibid: 2). New memoryscapes are developing, as global communications networks facilitate the emergence of a shared consciousness and cosmopolitan memories which transcend linguistic and territorial boundaries. The result is a transition from national to cosmopolitan memory cultures, in which ‘global concerns provide a political and moral frame of reference for local experiences’ (Ibid: 3). This cosmopolitan memory is formulated not on the basis of shared belonging in a continuing community of fate but through a reflexive choice to incorporate the suffering of the ‘Other’, of victims like the Jews murdered in the Holocaust (2002: 103). At the same time, the authors suggest, ‘Global culture does not wipe out local memories; instead, it mixes with them’ (2006: 15). The type-case offered by Levy and Sznaider for this process of cosmopolitan memory formation is the Holocaust, shared memories of which, they argue, transcend ethnic and national boundaries, and have become the cultural foundation for a global human-rights politics. ‘The Holocaust is now a concept that has been dislocated from space and time’ (Ibid: 5). Nonetheless, meanings of the Holocaust differ from society to society and emerge through encounters between the global and the local (Ibid: 8). Levy and Sznaider acknowledge that such de-territorialised memories, separated from localised social environments, can be seen as inauthentic, rootless and superficial substitutes for collective memories. However, ‘there is a fallacy in thinking that impersonal representations are somehow fake and not connected to our real emotions and real identities’ (2002: 90). During the period of the formation of nation-states, for example, representations mediated through newspapers did not stand in the way of strong identification; they fostered it. Something similar is now happening at a global level (2002: 90). Since all communities are essentially imagined, mediated representations play a central role in generating a sense of identity and belonging. In this regard the authors refer back to a crucial distinction

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made by both Jan Assman and Maurice Halbwachs. Jan Assmann (Assmann & Czaplicka, 1995) distinguished between communicative memory, which is carried by a social group, and cultural memory, which is institutionally shaped and sustained. Halbwachs likewise distinguished between social memory, which is constituted by the experiences of a social group, and historical memory, which is mediated by representation. Cosmopolitan memory is institutionally shaped and mediated, rather than being the property of a collective, but it is no less authentic for that. We might note, however, the impulse to concretise and embody the memory of the Holocaust in specific places – museums and memorials – which Levy and Sznaider document, but fail to comment on. Nonetheless their central claim, that a global memory empowered by modern communications technology increasingly provides a moral and political frame for national concerns, undoubtedly bears some truth. For instance, political debates and social struggles everywhere are frequently couched in a universalist discourse of human rights which draws its moral authority from the experience of events such as the Holocaust. The critical question, however, concerns the impact of such universalist frames of reference, and whether they truly constitute a global collective memory comparable to that of more localised social groups. Here the comparison with the kinds of collective memory mobilised in the creation of the modern nation-state (Levy & Sznaider, 2002) is instructive. These memories, as the authors note, were both mediated and institutionalised. But they differed in at least three important ways from the kind of cosmopolitan memory theorised by Levy and Sznaider. In the first place, they were the property of a specific social group, the nation, in a way that cosmopolitan memory is not. Second, they were localised within a specific territory. Third, while national memory was mediated, institutionalised and to some degree ‘invented’ (Hobsbawm & Ranger, 1992), it drew on a rich body of custom, language, folklore, legend and historical memory belonging to those localised communities which eventually made up the nation. Moreover, national memory was subsequently re-appropriated by members of these communities and incorporated into their personal and collective identities and frameworks of meaning. This took place through countless localised commemorations, memorials, historical associations and political campaigns, as well as practices such as the singing of patriotic songs and observance of national holidays. National memories are thus multi-layered, concrete and participatory in a way that cosmopolitan memories are not. These latter provide only a weak medium for the formation of collective identities or the integration of different aspects of experience in comparison to the collective memory of social groups inscribed in place.

Conclusion Collective memory underwrites individual and group identities, sustains the distinct ethos of a community, and provides an integrative framework which renders experience meaningful. ‘Memory provides individuals and collectives with a

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cognitive map, helping orient who they are, why they are here and where they are going’ (Eyerman, 2011: 305). Globalisation erodes collective memory by prising social life loose from the frameworks of physical place and accumulated time, natural cycles and face-to-face relations in which it adheres, and by generating institutionalised and mediated contexts of social action which speed up rather than sediment time and fluidify rather than concentrate experience. Yet it provides no substitute for the social potentials inherent in the union of memory, community and place, ‘the cultic powers of the past to underwrite solidarity and motivate action’ (Olick et al., 2011: 3). The erosion of collective memory dissolves social bonds and communal solidarities. It also deprives us of an imaginative hinterland from which we can gain perspective on the present and envision alternatives to the political and economic order. We began this chapter by looking at how the memory inscribed in the landscape of counties Tipperary and Limerick sustained Dan Breen and his comrades in their effort to spark a revolution. Imprisoned in simultaneity, with our horizons confined to a two-dimensional landscape lacking temporal depth, it becomes more difficult to perceive an alternative to globalised late modernity. The historical amnesia produced by the dissolution of memory into data and the commodification of the past as entertainment is therefore profoundly oppressive. Postmodern superficiality is a prop for the status quo. Fredric Jameson (1991) argues that whereas modernism still believed in some residual zones of nature or the archaic, postmodernism revels in the process of commodification, which seems to have taken over all spheres of life and closed down every other dimension of reality. In this context the primordial depth of place can offer us refuge from the stultifying homogenisation of global consumer capitalism. From Standing Rock to Eris in County Mayo – the site of longstanding protests against a pipeline bringing natural gas onshore – and a thousand other places where local people resist corporate-led ‘development’, ‘local and national memory practices contest the myths of cyber-capitalism and globalization and their denial of time, space, and place’ (Huyssen, 2011: 436). The more globalisation erodes the social frameworks of memory, the more important become those places where it is inscribed and preserved. These can become loci through which we rediscover our collective pasts as a living force in the present. The primordial depth of place is our opening to an imaginative terrain peopled by gods and heroes, through which spirits and ancestors move, and where the founding events that define a community are constantly replayed. Moreover, it is a terrain through which we too can journey, shaman-like, to communicate with the spirits and the ancestors, relive their trials and triumphs, and return transformed and inspired.

Notes 1 Brian Boru (941–1014) was Dál gCais king of Munster and for much of his career the paramount king of Ireland. Subsequent historical tradition, beginning with the twelfthcentury Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh, depicted him as leading the Irish in a national

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struggle against the Vikings, who had in reality been thoroughly integrated into Ireland’s own politics of inter-dynastic feuding by this time. 2 Patrick Sarsfield (1660–1693) was a Jacobite commander in the Williamite War of 1689–1691. One of his most famous exploits was the destruction of a convoy of Williamite artillery destined for the siege of Limerick at Ballyneety in 1690, supposedly with assistance from the Tipperary outlaw Galloping Hogan.

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Habits of home

In the late 2000s padlocks began to appear on bridges and other public structures in cities across Europe. They were placed there by couples who would inscribe their names on a lock, affix it to a railing, and throw the key into the river below. The ‘love locks’, as they are known, are intended as a symbol of eternal love. The practice achieved global notoriety in June 2015, when Parisian authorities removed tens of thousands of locks attached to the Pont de Arts bridge due to fears their weight could cause the parapet to collapse. The trend appears to have originated in Italy, where in 2006 the author Federico Moccia published his novel I Want You, which sold 1.1 million copies and was adapted for film the following year (Fisher, 2007). The book’s hero tells a potential girlfriend an invented legend about how lovers would wrap a lock and chain around the third lamppost on the northern side of the Rome’s Ponte Milvio, close the lock and throw the key into the Tiber. Those who performed the ritual would never leave each other. But the fictional tradition quickly became a reality, as couples began to write their names on padlocks, which they chained to lampposts on the bridge (Ibid). Within a year the practice had spread to Paris, where many visitors mistakenly assumed it was a long-standing tradition associated with the bridges across the Seine. Subsequently, love locks began to appear on bridges across Europe, Asia, North America and elsewhere. The symbolism of the love lock, with its promise of a love that will remain forever unbroken, is especially powerful and poignant in an age when relationships are more fragile than ever before. But what is fascinating is the way in which a novel practice seems to have spontaneously claimed the kind of mythical origins that would make it seem like a genuine tradition. Thus it is frequently claimed the love lock originated in Serbia during the First World War. A schoolmistress called Nada from the town of Vrnjačka Banja fell in love with an army officer named Relja. After their engagement he departed for the war, where he fell in love with another woman, leaving Nada to die of heartbreak. Subsequently, the story goes, young women from Vrnjačka Banja started writing down their names and those of their loved ones on padlocks, and affixing them to the railings of the bridge where Nada and Relja used to meet, in the belief that this would ensure their own lovers remained faithful. Not only has the practice been given a suitably romantic origin, but it is invariably attached to highly specific places, from Brooklyn Bridge in New

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York to the Vodootvodny Canal in Moscow, where it rapidly becomes a local ‘tradition’. What this suggests is that the symbolism of the love lock is not enough; people want it to rest on the authority of tradition. The sense of immemorial repetition, localised in place, enhances the significance of the practice. The very obscurity of its origins gives it the patina of a timeworn custom while enabling each couple to make it their own. The focus of this chapter is on how practices accumulate meaning through repetition and thereby integrate experience through time and across divergent settings. When such practices are broadly anchored in a social group and maintained over a period of generations, they form traditions; when they are more fluid and individualised, I call them ‘lifeways’. Tradition is not a matter of blind habit or automatic response to stimuli, but a form of social action which is deeply meaningful because it connects the present to the past, the individual to the community, and the immediate context with wider circles of experience. On the other hand, not all traditions are positive: for example, Bateson’s (2000) concept of schismogenesis indicates how whole societies can become frozen into inherited patterns of hostility and conflict. Tradition is characterised by what Weber (1968: 1006) termed its ‘everyday’ quality. For Weber, ‘the great bulk of all everyday action to which people have become habitually accustomed’ approaches the traditional type (Ibid: 25). Daily life cannot proceed on the basis of reflexive reasoning and constant choice; habit is required for it to run smoothly. Large parts of most people’s days are organised around routine sets of activities which can proceed with a minimum of planning and decision. Such routines can become profoundly meaningful. Wallace Stegner described the satisfaction he experienced tracing paths and tracks on his father’s farm in Saskatchewan: ‘they were ceremonial, an insistence not only that we had a right to be in sight on the prairie but that we owned and controlled a piece of it. . . . Wearing any such path in the earth’s rind is an intimate act, an act of love’ (quoted in Relph, 1976: 10). Habitual activities can also create a feeling of comfort and security. Home is strongly associated with stable surroundings and regular routines (Douglas, 1991; Rapport & Dawson, 1998; Jacobson, 2009). As Gaston Bachelard writes: the house we were born in is physically inscribed in us. It is a group of organic habits. After twenty years, in spite of all the other anonymous stairways; we would recapture the reflexes of the “first stairway”, we would not stumble on that rather high step. . . . We would push the door that creaks with the same gesture, we would find our way in the dark to the distant attic. The feel of the tiniest latch has remained in our hands. (Bachelard, 1994: 14–15) Anthony Giddens (1989, 1994) stresses the connection between routinization and ontological security: ‘Tradition has the hold it does, it can be inferred, because its moral character offers a measure of ontological security to those who adhere to it’ (Giddens, 1994: 65). It provides an anchorage for that ‘basic trust’

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in the world which is central to the continuity of identity and the effective conduct of social relations (Ibid: 81). Craig Calhoun likewise argues that we need to see tradition as not just about antiquity and communication across the generations, but also about practical, everyday social activity. ‘Tradition is the tacit knowledge which allows participation in social life’ (Calhoun, 1983: 895). In the words of Edward Shils: human beings, at least most of them, much of the time do not fare well in a disordered world. They need to live within the framework of a world of which they possess a chart. They need categories and rules; they need criteria of judgment. They cannot construct these for themselves. (1981: 326) Tradition provides such a chart, inculcating the background assumptions taken for granted by individuals in the conduct of their daily lives and offering a framework for understanding the world (Thompson, 1996: 91). Traditions and lifeways are associated with specific contexts – particular places, occasions and social groups. By structuring and regulating the repetition of traditional practices, these contexts help them accumulate significance. At the same time, traditions particularise the places or occasions where they are carried out. They act as carriers of memory and markers of identity. Love locks, for example, are associated with very specific places, usually prominent or iconic bridges in large cities. The specificity of these locations – a love lock cannot be attached to just any railing – help endow the practice with its significance. At the same time, the accumulation of love locks gives these places a new meaning, consecrating them to the gods of romance. Through its performance, this ‘tradition’ binds together the inherent symbolism of the love locks, the physical context with which they are associated, and the identity of the lovers who perform the practice, to create a local context which is at once particularised and bounded, concrete and participatory. The result is a matrix of significance which draws in other couples, curious observers, local residents, and municipal authorities, which may either promote the love locks as a tourist attraction or remove them as an eyesore. The enactment of tradition – even invented ones – generates localised concentrations of meaning which integrate experience across time and space, and anchor identity and belonging.

Tradition, memory, place On Christmas Eve a family gathers to open the presents collected under the Christmas tree, because this has been their custom for as many years as they can remember, and otherwise ‘it would not be Christmas’. In a Samoan village in the 1920s, a man dies and his sister prepares the body for burial, anointing it with turmeric and rubbing it with oil (Mead, 1943: 70). On their anniversary, a couple return to the café where they first met, as they have done on this date every year. In Greenland in the 1300s, Norse farmers continue to raise cattle

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centuries after their original settlement, even though the animals are completely unsuited to the ecology and climate of the island and must be kept indoors for nine months of the year, because cattle-raising has prestige in Norse culture (Diamond, 2005). In an Italian New Age community, animals are used for Christian names and vegetables for surnames: this is one of the usages which mark its members off from the outside world (Jones, 2007). Among the Kgatla people of Bechuanaland, a couple is married according to the traditional ceremony: the peritoneum of a slaughtered goat is cut into strips and hung around the necks of the bride and her female companions (Schapera, 1971: 63). In an Irish town, the local hunt gathers on the main street on St Stephens Day before riding off, following a custom that extends beyond living memory. A Kabyle bride is welcomed to her new home by an old woman holding a sieve that contains fritters, eggs, wheat, beans, dates, nuts, dried figs and pomegranates (Bourdieu, 1979). Some of these practices are anchored in a wider social milieu than others, or have been repeated over longer periods of time: some are clearly traditions, others might be better termed family or communal lifeways. But all are modelled on patterns of behaviour handed down from the past, and this is what imbues them with their meaning. So for the couple who return to the same café every anniversary, the repetition of the act year on year echoes and renews the significance of their original meeting. With even greater potency, among the Kgatla or the Kabyle, such practices as hanging the peritoneum of a goat around the bride’s neck or greeting her with a sieve of food crystallise her change of state, because these actions have been carried out on the occasion of a marriage countless times in the experience of everyone in the community. It is not primarily in the practice itself that its significance lies (although in either case it is possible to decode the wealth of its symbolic content), but in the consistent repetition of the practice within a particular context. The word tradition derives from traditum, meaning that which is transmitted or handed down from the past to the present (Shils, 1981: 12). Weber writes of tradition as ‘the belief in the inviolability of that which has existed from time out of mind’ (Weber, 1968: 1006). Yet there is more to tradition than the blind imitation of the past, or an ‘almost automatic reaction to habitual stimuli which guide behaviour in a course which has been repeatedly followed’ (Ibid: 25). Tradition, as Giddens writes, ‘is not the mechanical following of precepts accepted in an unquestioning way’ (Giddens, 1994: 62). Traditions are never simply received as pre-given verities but are always open to reinterpretation and adaptation (Heelas, 1996: 8). Even societies like the Kgatla or Kabyle had been thoroughly penetrated by missionaries, traders and colonial administrators: their members had other models of behaviour at hand. More generally, smallscale societies are both internally pluralistic and aware of alternative ways of life, such as those followed by their neighbours (Ibid). In traditional societies, choices must still be made, although they must take close-knit communal ties and long-term social relationships into account to a greater degree than in our own (Calhoun, 1983: 896).

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The essence of tradition is therefore not blind imitation, but respect for the past combined with the stable association of particular patterns of action with specific contexts. Divorced from these contexts, the practices would be meaningless. Who would open a Christmas present in June? Why would a contemporary American anoint her dead brother’s body with turmeric and oil? In context, their repetition mobilises the resources of collective memory to convey a sense of the significance of the occasion: ‘It feels like Christmas’; ‘We buried our brother well’. In this way traditions underpin the significance attached to a festival, a relationship, a lifepassage, or a place. This binding together of an oft-repeated practice and the specific (non-functional) context in which it is repeated generates a distinct (and localised) context of social action. It also enables traditions to become carriers of collective memory and markers of the identity of a group and the roles and status of individuals within it. Chapter 4 outlined how a particular dimension of meaning – ‘primordial depth’ – becomes attached to places which have been the site of prolonged dwelling. Memories, stories and customs echo down the centuries, mutually enveloping and reshaping each other and gaining new dimensions of value and significance. A similarly echoic quality is possessed by traditions. Repetition adds to their significance and imbues the social, spatial and temporal contexts within which they are practised with a special depth of meaning. For Weber, ‘Strictly traditional behaviour . . . lies very close to the borderline of what can justifiably be called meaningfully orientated action, and indeed often on the other side’ (1968: 25). However, the meaning of an action does not reside only in its conscious referent but also in its encrusted associations, its symbolic significance to the actor and their community, and the links it forges to the ancestors and the gods. From this perspective we might say that traditional behaviour is the most meaningful form of social action. What Triona Ni Shíocháin writes of the echoic style of traditional oral verse can be said of tradition more generally: it ‘provides some semblance of continuity for the community, a relief, as it were, from a permanently “liminal” existence’ (2014: 85). It is no accident that most of the traditions cited above relate in one way or another to rites of passage, or that in our own society it is precisely at such moments that we tend to fall back on its resources to symbolise a changing identity or status. For it is precisely during such transitions, in the liminal moments when we undergo a change of state, that we seek the reassurance of familiarity and the continuity of custom. Hence people often struggle to hold on to their traditions when, in strictly instrumental terms, they pay a high price for doing so. Just as collective memory interweaves past and present to shape – or reshape – communal narratives and identities, traditions are dynamic and adaptable. As Shils writes, ‘Every tradition, however broad or narrow, offers a possibility of a variety of responses’ (1981: 44). The reinterpretation of tradition is an integral part of its transmission and reproduction, and is wholly compatible with a continuing reverence for the past. For example, Tríona Ní Shíocháin (2014) demonstrates, in a close reading of the work of the nineteenth-century Irish oral poet Máire Bhuí Ní Laeire, how traditional signifiers of sovereignty and identity were

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used to articulate a millenarian vision which inspired agrarian radicals in Munster during the 1820s. Máire Bhuí, amongst others, was central in transforming the Jacobite ideology and imagery of the early 18th century into Jacobin concepts of the late 18th century, and, crucially, ensured the endurance of these Jacobin concepts through to the 19th century agrarian movements. (Ibid: 75) Máire Bhuí’s poems often took the highly traditional aisling form, a vision poem in which the poet meets a supernatural woman, the spéirbhean, who embodies the sovereignty of Ireland. The aisling incorporates deeply archaic conceptions of sovereignty and the role of the poet as intermediary between the territorial goddess and the community. Máire Bhuí’s poetry echoes themes familiar from seventeenthand eighteenth-century Gaelic poets who wrote in the genre – a passionate desire to reclaim the land, hostility toward the English and Scottish settlers who have taken it and to their Protestant religion – but meshes these with contemporary political concerns, prophesying the overthrow of the existing order and its symbols of wealth and privilege. In one poem the Catholic politician Daniel O’Connell takes the place of the traditional saviour figure, the rightful Jacobite king (Ibid: 81). A new political discourse is being created, firmly rooted in the history and identity of the community. Central to this process of meaning creation is what has been termed ‘traditional referentiality’. Quoting John Miles Foley (1991), Ní Shíocháin says this ‘entails the invoking of a context that is enormously larger and more echoic than the text or work itself, that brings the lifeblood of generations of poems and performances to the individual performance or text’ (Ibid: 78). This idea can be extended beyond the context of oral literature and is close to the concept of ‘primordial depth’. A traditional practice, like the words of a song or poem, invokes a deep past and brings it to bear on the present. For Ní Shíocháin the liminal moment of song allows a creative melding of past and present in which the collective memory and narrative of the group is regenerated: new ideas are naturalised and incorporated almost seamlessly into a shared history and identity. But this holds true for nearly any traditional practice at moments of collective effervescence. ‘Memory is not just recollection but creative interpretation of the meaning of past events’ (Ibid: 82). The result is that tradition, as in the case of Máire Bhuí Ní Laeire, can adapt itself to new circumstances while retaining its integrity and its connection to the past. Traditions are organic things which are born, grow, mature, weaken and can ultimately die (Giddens, 1994: 63). ‘The integrity or authenticity of a tradition, therefore, is more important in defining it as a tradition than how long it lasts’ (Ibid ). This integrity derives not from simple persistence over time but the continuous work of interpretation carried out by each generation that inherits the tradition and seeks to fit it to the present (Ibid: 64). Any tradition has the character of a palimpsest, with the interpretative work of generation after generation overlaid,

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creating something whose meaning lies precisely in an echoic relationship between the present and the layered past. Edward Shils writes that tradition is constituted by an overlay of strata ‘each of which at one time was a new acquisition; each variation changes the other parts of the possessed tradition. . . . The parts of a tradition . . . are connected with each other by subsumption and mutual implication’ (1981: 112). Participation is as central to tradition as it is to collective memory. A living tradition involves an active communion of the generations. When this is lost the tradition is either forgotten or becomes a museum piece. The integrity of tradition is central to the identity of both social groups and the individuals who compose them. Traditions provide ‘symbolic materials for the formation of identity both at the individual and at the collective level’ (Thompson, 1996: 93). Giddens writes that because identity is the product of continuity over time, threats to the integrity of tradition are often experienced as threats to the integrity of the self (1994: 80). Social practices cease to be in the moment of their completion; consequently, a society ‘must be incessantly re-enacted, its communications must repeatedly be resaid’ (Shils, 1981: 166). The chain of tradition and the memory embedded in it allows societies to go on reproducing themselves while also changing (Ibid). Alongside collective memory, tradition provides a society with its ethos, the characteristic ways of doing things which are the foundation of its moral order. Unless the past is not only remembered but also continually reinscribed in the present through traditional practices, we risk losing a shared sense of who we are and how we should conduct their lives. History crystallised as tradition becomes indistinguishable from nature; it is not corralled into the past but is part of the taken-for-granted fabric of everyday life. What Bourdieu wrote of the habitus applies to tradition: it is ‘history turned into nature, i.e. denied as such’ (1977: 78). Giddens suggests that tradition preserves aspects of culture by rendering them external to human activity. By presenting certain practices or beliefs as ‘natural’, it places them outside the scope of human intervention (1994: 76). Another way of putting this is to say that tradition removes certain usages from the sphere of the contingent by assimilating them to the existential frames of physical place, accumulated time and natural cycles. They are identified with an order superior to the exigencies of the contemporary – the wisdom of the ancestors or the will of the gods. Hence the tendency for traditional societies to locate the founding moments of practices or institutions in a sacred time outside the flux of history – illud tempus (Eliade, 1959). Today we still try to situate what is most valuable to us outside the realm of contingency and change, as when lovers declare that their relationship was ‘written in the stars’ or simply ‘meant to be’. It is in this sense that traditions ‘usually possess an obvious normative significance’ (Campbell, 1996: 162). The character of rightness is inherent in traditional practice; it is not dependent on conformity to some external principle, whether of reason, fashion, or legislation. ‘The tradition is its own warrant. It is not held subject to verification by experience. The notion of right is in the folkways. It is not outside of them, of independent origin, and brought to them to test them’

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(Sumner, 1906: 28). What is habitual and familiar gains a certain authority from this very fact; this is reinforced when its origin is located outside the normal exigencies of social life. The perception of tradition as the natural and selfevidently correct way of doing things was underlined, in pre-industrial societies, by the fit between traditional lifeways and relatively stable conditions of existence. Most of the time, the traditional way of doing things worked, because it was adapted to the conditions of life on the basis of long experience. Traditional ways seemed part of the order of the cosmos; to depart from them would be to step outside this order and court ill luck. ‘The fear of magical evils reinforces the general psychological inhibitions against any sort of change in customary modes of action’ (Weber, 1968: 37). An interconnected body of tradition, localised in a physical place or social setting, constitutes the habitus of a group. The concept of habitus has a long history, extending from Aristotle through Thomas Aquinas to Marcel Mauss and Pierre Bourdieu. For Mauss, the notion of habitus functions as a bridge between culture in the abstract and its physical expression in everyday life. Habitus is the manifestation of the cultural perspectives and accumulated ‘practical reason’ (Mauss, 1973) of a social group in everyday activities and bodily routines. Likewise, for Bourdieu habitus is ‘a socially constituted system of cognitive and motivating structures’ which manifest at the level of the individual (1977: 76). It represents the persistence of the past through the unselfconscious medium of the habits learned from that past; collective memory as social practice, preserved in customs and usages rather than through deliberate recollection and commemoration. Cultural meanings and shared values are embodied in seemingly minor details of dress, bearing, or physical and verbal manners, ‘instilling a whole cosmology, an ethic, a metaphysic, a political philosophy, through injunctions as insignificant as “stand up straight” or “don’t hold you knife in your left hand”’ (Ibid: 94). In consequence, habitus shapes how we interpret the world. For Michel Maffesoli it is ‘a persistent action that instils in beings and things their way of seeing the world; it is practically a matter of genetic coding, limiting and delineating, in a much more profound manner than the economic or political situation, their way of being with others’ (1996: 20). Habitus represents the crystallisation of past experience into a structure of habitual dispositions, which shapes our response to subsequent experience, and which therefore tends to reproduce the conditions out of which it grew (Bourdieu, 1977). By naturalising much that is the product of history, habitus renders large portions of social life immune to critical debate and conscious choice, creating a shared lifeworld which is both timeless and deeply familiar. Habitus is therefore a large part of what makes the home environment ‘one thoroughly imbued with the familiarity of past experience’ (Dovey, 1985: 3). It is only when things or people are out of place, routines disrupted and homes broken up that we become aware of the support such unselfconscious familiarity offers to social life, and to our own sense of security, recognition and contentment. Habitus is embedded in physical spaces and social settings which localise the meanings carried by its practices and cue their performance. Both Bourdieu (1977)

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and Giddens (1989) argue that space comes to have meaning through practices. These can be formal and ritualised, or they may be closer to daily routines. ‘Almost any form of repetitive tradition reestablishes place and expresses its stability and continuity’ (Relph, 1976: 32). Hence places are inscribed with meaning not by abstract acts of cognition, but through the everyday actions and human encounters which unfold within them. But the relationship also works the other way. Tradition involves not just the repetition of a practice but also its repetition in a particular context. If tradition, as Giddens writes, is bound up with collective memory (1994: 63), this is because it is associated with the settings in which memory is embedded. A traditional pattern of action is maintained because it is what we have always done here. The spatial or temporal context operates to localise meaning and preserve it, and so brings to bear on our action the full resources of collective memory. A religious ceremony carried out in a church may instil a sense of solemnity even in the non-believer; the same ceremony conducted in a secular space such as an airport would lose much of its resonance. Putting up a Christmas tree in July would be meaningless, but doing so in December marks the beginning of the festive season. Place and time also cue the performance of particular practices and so preserve them. On entering a courtroom our voices drop and our behaviour becomes more restrained. The coming of Halloween may stir childhood memories of games like bobbing for apples or making a jack-o-lantern and stimulate us to play them with our own children. Place is inscribed with meaning through the practices that make up the habitus, but it also concentrates their significance, activates memory and cues future performance. Hence home is composed of both a body of cultural patterns, often rooted in childhood experiences (Dovey, 1985), and the physical spaces within which these patterns unfold. As Iris Marion Young writes: The arrangement of furniture in space provides pathways for habits – the reading lamp placed just here, the television set just here. . . . The home is an extension of and mirror for the living body in its everyday activity. (Young, 2005: 139–140) Routines can give meaning to space even when life is nomadic: ‘the Kung bushmen of the Kalahari Desert create a new home every night with just a fire to mark the center and a small windbreak or symbolic entry. These are enough to evoke a complex schema of spatial meanings that orients everyone in relation to the fire’ (Dovey, 1985: 5). But while practices can carry meaning, place provides a centre in which they are concentrated and where meaning is localised. Without this centre, the significance carried by practices would be dissipated and dispersed. The physical expression of that centre is most often the house. In traditional societies in particular, this takes on a unique importance as the embodiment of the ‘generative schemes’ of the habitus (Bourdieu, 1977: 89). Bourdieu’s essay on the Kabyle house describes how the spatial organisation of the building and the objects within, and the routine activities which take place there, form part of a symbolic

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system in which each derives its meaning from its relationship with all the others (Bourdieu, 1979). All the actions performed in such a space ‘are immediately qualified symbolically and function as so many structural exercises through which is built up practical mastery of the fundamental schemes’ of the habitus (Bourdieu, 1977: 91). Therefore, a guest is honoured by being seated at the west wall, facing the door and in full daylight, while the lower part of the house associated with darkness and fertility is where the animals are brought in at night and the seed corn is stored (Bourdieu, 1979). The result is a world of intimate familiarity, every corner of which is permeated with meaning. In contrast to purely individual habits, which are unrelated to wider patterns of life or the ethos of a community, habitus refers to an interconnected body of tradition, which is localised in a specific context and carries the collective memory of a social group. Yet tradition is not only a feature of past societies. Not alone do older traditions persist in modern societies characterised by reflexivity and rapid social change; new traditions have been invented at an unprecedented rate to replace those which have been rendered obsolete (Hobsbawm & Ranger, 1992: 4). As the love locks illustrate, even the most novel practices can become endowed with a patina of timeless tradition, especially when this affords our participation in them a heightened significance.

The moving centre The Achilpa, an aboriginal tribe, had a sacred pole which they carried with them in their wanderings. It represented the cosmic axis fashioned by a divine being called Numbakula, which he climbed to disappear into the sky after creating their ancestor and fashioning their institutions. It was around this sacred axis that territory became habitable and was transformed into a world. By carrying the sacred pole and choosing their direction according to how it bent, the Achilpa, while continually on the move, were able to remain always ‘in their world’ and, at the same time, in communication with the sky into which Numbakula vanished (Eliade, 1959: 33). While places are fixed and immobile, people can carry traditions and practices with them in their journeying through the world. If home is the centre of the world from which we endow it with meaning, can habitual practices allow us to take this centre with us as we move? Kirsten Jacobson writes that home is ‘a pervasive structure, providing the core to all our action’ (2009: 364). Precisely because it habituates us to particular ways of doing and perceiving things, we can ‘make ourselves at home’ in situations far from our physical home (Ibid: 369). Someone who is a habitual reader may be more at ease when sitting alone in a restaurant or filling time waiting for someone if they have a book with them, whereas a person from a very ‘chatty’ household in the same circumstances might be more comfortable making small talk with strangers (Ibid: 369). Children often carry a stuffed animal, a favourite toy, or a security blanket into an unfamiliar place. In this way familiar habits or interests allow us to settle ourselves in unfamiliar settings; they provide coherence to our

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experience even in new surroundings, and so we carry our home with us. Jacobson argues that the comfort provided by our ability to be at home empowers us to go out into the world (Ibid: 370). Nonetheless, Jacobson assumes the stability provided by a pre-existent home. It is a significant step from this to the idea that ‘home may not be . . . a singular physical entity fixed in a particular place, but rather a mobile, symbolic habitat, a performative way of life and of doing things in which one makes one’s home while in movement’ (Morley, 2001: 47). John Berger writes about how those displaced from their original home by migration and social change improvise a shelter and preserve their identity through habit: To the underprivileged, home is represented, not by a house, but by a practice or set of practices. Everyone has his own. These practices, chosen and not imposed, offer in their repetition, transient as they may be in themselves, more permanence, more shelter than any lodging. (Berger, 1984: 64) At the opposite end of the social scale are those who are mobile through choice or profession. Jan Duyvendak (2011: 13) argues that highly mobile people can have a sense of attachment to generic locations like international hotel chains, as well as generic goods and services. For these people the standardised quality of such locations provides them with the predictability, safety and familiarity which makes them feel at home, while remaining separate from places and their pasts (Ibid: 13). They feel at home in generic places precisely because of their ‘light’ nature (Ibid: 34). A similar argument is made by Nowicka (2007), based on a series of interviews with highly mobile professionals. For these people, home is found in a routine set of practices and habitual social interactions which are divorced from place. Mobile individuals organise their homes primarily around the rituals of family and daily life: activities like cooking together at weekends, or daily routines such as power-walking or exercising in a gym (Ibid: 78). Consequently, the infrastructure which enables them to carry on these routines irrespective of location – schools, restaurants, parks, places in which to practise one’s hobbies (for example, fitness studios), cinemas and theatres – is important. These generate a feeling of familiarity and security. ‘Places all around the world in which these facilities are at hand . . . are like a landscape in which one can move freely’ (Ibid: 80). Insofar as home means such networks of familiar elements, it ‘can be geographically located anywhere and everywhere and, what is more important, it can move with you’ (Ibid: 83). For Nowicka’s interviewees, home is defined as a shared point of reference: ‘It is not a place that makes home but the social relations that orbit round this focal point’ (Ibid: 77). Immediate family provides this focal point, offering a feeling of stability in a life full of changes. However, there is an interesting ambiguity here; even though home is not localised in geographical terms, the relationships which provide the focus for these people’s lives are still located physically, and this

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location becomes a point of reference, a centre of departure and return. Home remains ‘emplaced’, even when this emplacement is not permanent. Moreover, this mobile lifestyle is not without its costs. Jan Duyvendak cites the character played by George Clooney in the film Up in the Air as an example of somebody who is at home in the generic world of hotel chains and airport lounges. However, the message of the film is that such a life is ultimately unsatisfying; in the end, the character comes desperately to desire the anchorage of relationships, family and home. Nowicka’s interviewees complain that they are only ‘part-time family members’ and keep missing important family events like children’s birthdays (Nowicka, 2007: 79). In an uncanny echo of the George Clooney film, one expressed the belief that the more relationships one has – both to material objects and people – the more difficult it is to travel frequently. Even renting a flat or owning a house makes a difference. The interviewees also felt that their regular absences are destructive of their relationships with people and their intimacy. This reflects the reality that the more home becomes mobile, the more it becomes individuated and privatised; the only centre is one’s moving self (Rapport & Dawson, 1998: 27). Habitual practices and routines are carriers of meaning which we can use to familiarise new surroundings and make us feel at home in different environments. The generic settings which have proliferated in the globalised world – from international hotel chains to McDonald’s – support such practices and provide an element of familiarity and reassurance for a mobile population. But whereas tradition anchors us in an existential community and its collective memory, the routines cited by Duyvendak and Nowicka are based on individualised practices which, at most, connect the self to its own past. Hence there is a significant difference between habitus and habit. In contrast to the Achilpa, who moved as a group through a familiar territory, today’s global nomads travel as individuals through a landscape devoid of memory. Moreover, while family relationships and their associated lifeways provide a vital centre of meaning, high levels of mobility tend to put them under pressure. Those most acclimatised to life in a globalised society try to create homes from bundles of habitual practices and circles of intimate relationships, but in the absence of the stabilising forces of collective memory and place, they struggle to hold them together.

Modernity and the endurance of tradition At the outset of this chapter I identified two types of habitual behaviour which accumulate meaning: traditions, which are temporally enduring, shared widely across a society, and merge into a coherent habitus; and lifeways, which are more fugitive and individualised. Modernity can be characterised as involving a gradual, staggered, uneven erosion of tradition and its replacement by a combination of lifeways and the rationalised routines imposed by the functional requirements of institutions and technologies. However, for most people the result is not the world depicted by social theorists like Giddens and Beck, where self-reflexive individuals chart their own biographical trajectories. Habit and repetition cannot be

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eliminated from our lives. Modern institutions create their own routines, which in some circumstances can approximate traditions (Heelas, 1996: 9). Moreover, traditions and lifeways are constantly regenerated in those areas of social life which fall outside rationalised institutions and the atemporal spaces of the global market and communications media. While routine may be inseparable from social life, not all routines are equally meaningful. In Chapter 4 we cited Halbwach’s distinction between functional and social life and his argument that the latter was the domain of collective memory. Traditions and lifeways are likewise primarily associated with social as opposed to functional life. They crystalise organically out of the everyday actions of individuals and communities and are intrinsic to their identities. ‘Habits are roads we have paved for ourselves’ (Robert Coles, quoted in Seamon, 1979: 54). In this they contrast with the mechanical routines which serve the institutional needs of modern society. These are extrinsic to the identity of the individuals, and rather than being patterned after a real or mythical past, they are guided by instrumental reason and subject to constant revision. A further distinction between tradition and instrumental routine is that the latter has no deep significance or symbolic meaning; its functions and justifications are technical rather than ideological (Hobsbawm & Ranger, 1992). ‘Wearing hard hats while riding makes sense . . . wearing a particular type of hard hat in combination with hunting pink makes an entirely different kind of sense’ (Ibid: 3). Indeed, in many cases, the more objects are unfettered by practical use, the more they are liberated to take on symbolic and ritual significance. For Weber the rational action which governs modern bureaucratic forms, by contrast with traditional action, is defined by reflexivity: ‘One of the most important aspects of the process of “rationalization” of action is the substitution for the unthinking acceptance of ancient custom, of deliberate adaption to situations in terms of self-interest’ (1968: 30). Rationalisation, therefore, dissolves the takenfor-granted and everyday quality of the world by introducing distance and critical reflection. This quality of unchallengeability has disappeared from much of the contemporary social world (Campbell, 1996: 164). A bus timetable outlines a set of repeated actions grounded in a physical location, but it does not found a tradition, because the logic which governs its operation is that of instrumental reason rather than respect for precedent and the echoic structure of collective memory. From the perspective of the company, the hundredth journey of a bus is no more significant than the first, and the continuation of the route is always subject to revision, which will be based on operational requirements rather than the ‘tradition’ of there being a bus to Cork. In contemporary society, ‘There is no logic, or moral authenticity, to doing today what one did yesterday’ (Giddens, 1994: 71). The result is that many of the routines we follow in modern societies ‘are materially secure or safe, but psychologically and morally unrewarding’ (Giddens, 1989: 279). But not every feature of contemporary life is governed by instrumental reason or geared towards the efficient functioning of bureaucratic institutions. Claims that we are living in a post-traditional age ‘are highly contestable . . . great swathes of

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the population would appear to have quite distinctive and enclosed ways of life’ (Heelas, 1996: 1). For Gross (1992), although he laments the erosion of tradition, it persists at the centre of society in religious, educational, political and cultural institutions; on the periphery of society in ethnic enclaves, rural areas and urban bohemia; in the interstices of society in family practices, kinship institutions and personal emotional ties; and underground, in linguistic minorities, religious sects, tribal groups and revolutionary movements. These are the places which, through either their cultural authority or their peripherality, have been most immune from both institutional rationalisation and the penetration of the global market and public arena. For many people the most important aspects of their identity remain anchored in tradition: If a person thinks of himself – not just of his ‘interests’, but of himself – he will frequently think of his sex, his age, his family, his ethnic, national, and religious connections, the places where he was brought up and educated, his profession or occupation. Most of these features are defined historically. (Shils, 1981: 49–50) Finally, while through the impact of the mass media and global communications networks the symbolic materials which comprise traditions have become increasingly detached from social interaction in a shared locale, these traditions are continuously being re-embedded in new contexts and re-moored in new kinds of territorial unit (Thompson, 1996: 94). An example is the way in which Indian traditions of spirituality – from yoga to Krishna worship – have been distributed throughout the west since the nineteenth century, first as a result of colonialism, travel and trade, later through the mass media and popular culture, and more recently via the internet. Moreover, modernity has been characterised by repeated attempts to reconstruct or even ‘invent’ tradition. This has been particularly prominent in the sphere of politics and public life (Hobsbawm & Ranger, 1992: 11). ‘Indeed most of the occasions when people become conscious of citizenship as such remain associated with symbols and semi-ritual practices . . . flags, images, ceremonies and music’ (Ibid: 12). These ‘invented’ traditions serve to establish social cohesion and symbolise membership of a group, especially the nation; legitimise institutions; and inculcate beliefs, value systems and conventions of behaviour (Ibid: 9). Their prominence in the political sphere is significant, because it demonstrates that political allegiance and collective action cannot be achieved on the basis of rational calculation or functional integration alone, but rely on social bonds generated by deeper, ‘irrational’ processes. In order to ensure their loyalty and willingness to sacrifice for the common good, citizens must feel a sense of participation in the nation, of consubstantiality with their compatriots, whose anthropological roots have been explored by Durkheim (2001) and LévyBruhl (1975). Traditions, whether genuine or invented, are a primary means of generating this participation. Alongside the rituals of political life, the desire for

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tradition appears today in forms as divergent as the attempted resurrection of pre-modern or indigenous spiritualties (Druidism, Norse paganism, American Indian religions), the vogue for craft beers, the spread of a ‘hipster’ aesthetic centred on vintage styles and artisan foods, and home and garden centres that market a carefully crafted nostalgia. Paul Heelas (1996) argues that industrial society itself now has a history sufficiently long to provide the basis for tradition. Features of contemporary life such as the car, suburbs, trains, schooling, factories, bureaucracy, office work, beach holidays and tourist sites are the loci of modern traditions which ‘tie three or more generations into cohesive communities of continuity’ (Ibid: 11). Likewise, according to Edward Shils, ‘The contemporary societies of the West are linked to those of a century ago by approximations to identity in modes of political life, the organization of universities, types of religious institutions, beliefs, and ritual, and the legal system’ (1981: 37). So should we speak of a tradition of suburban living extending back to the nineteenth century? Or traditions of summer holidays and the office party? Perhaps, but the status of these practices is fundamentally different from that of traditions in pre-industrial societies, or the more definitive traditions which still persist in areas such as ethnic identity and religious belief. In the first place, while tradition is history naturalised, the pattern of the past repeated in a way that is taken for granted and therefore acquires normative authority, this can be said only in a much-weakened sense of the practices listed previously. Certainly there may be an expectation that the firm will hold an office party at Christmas, but it can readily be cancelled if the company has a bad year, without violating the cosmic order. You may build your evening schedule around watching Coronation Street, and this may be a deeply significant part of your day, but with a hundred other TV channels vying for attention, it is very obviously a matter of individual choice. Second, these kinds of habitual behaviours tend to be increasingly individualised and no longer form part of a habitus, in the sense of an interconnected body of traditions localised in a physical place or social context. Certainly it is possible to identify bodies of related practices which – at least stereotypically – can be associated with, for example, a middle class suburb, a council estate, or a farming community. But generally the enmeshment of habitual behaviours within a cohesive habitus, shared by a social group, is less common today than it was even a few decades ago. Nowadays the supporter of a football club in an English industrial city might be a wealthy banker in London or a teenager in China who share nothing else in common; and housing estates near the stadium which once poured out their inhabitants every match day may be colonised by middle-class gentrifiers with passions as various as snowboarding and American football. Following a team and going to a match can still be significant actions, but they are no longer part of a cohesive habitus. A fundamental cause of this is the growing separation between the symbolic materials and habitual practices which form the raw material of tradition and the physical places within which they were formerly inscribed.

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The ‘traditions’ of industrial society are anchored in history as opposed to myth, not naturalised but essentially contingent, increasingly fragmented and incoherent, and progressively more separated from place. In other words, while they serve some of the functions of tradition, they are better thought of as ‘lifeways’. Tradition incorporates the resources of collective memory into the taken for granted fabric of everyday life; lifeways operate in much the same way, but the memories on which they draw are not as broad-based or as deep. The boundary between the two categories is necessarily fluid. For Edward Shils a belief or practice needs to survive for at least three generations to be a tradition (1981: 15); a lifeway might endure any length of time from a few years to several generations. While tradition claims the moral sanction of the collective past, lifeways carry less authority, although there may still be considerable pressure on individuals to maintain them – as in the exasperated parent’s cry to their teenage son or daughter, ‘But we always holiday together as a family!’ Examples of such lifeways include gathering for family dinner on a Sunday, holidaying in the same place every year, or going to the match on Friday night wearing your ‘lucky scarf’. Just like traditions, lifeways involve the stable association of particular patterns of action with specific times, places and social groups. Divorced from this context the practices carry little significance, but through repetition in context they accumulate meaning and mobilise the collective memory of a family, community or group. Lifeways therefore express the identity of individuals and collectives, and afford a sense of continuity with the past. However, that past is usually far shallower than in the case of tradition. Moreover, lifeways are more likely to be shared with a family than a nation, a group of friends or a club than a religion. Consequently, their authority is weaker than that of tradition, and they are more readily changed or abandoned. Yet they operate in the same way and express the same need to integrate our experience across time, space and social contexts in order to feel at home in the world.

Conclusion Ultimately, the source of tradition lies in the crystallisation of habit in everyday life. The ‘traditional’ emerges as a by-product of social action itself, a consequence of the Weberian process of routinisation, and once in existence it accretes authority simply by virtue of repetition (Campbell, 1996: 166). ‘The postmodern world of flux and reflexivity is really a creation of the intellectuals; it is not now and never can be the world of real life’ (Ibid). The raw material of such habitual practices is almost infinitely varied and can include elements of institutional routines or consumer products which in themselves are the antithesis of ‘traditional’, but which have been absorbed into everyday practice and thence into individual and collective memory and acquired new meanings. Tradition is not something confined to the past, to a world irrevocably lost, but it has the ability to constantly regenerate and renew itself. Tradition has not disappeared so much as it has been displaced from the institutional centres of social life, to areas

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outside the control of rationalised bureaucracies, the market and the public sphere. Ceasing to be the lawgiver of an entire society, it has shrunk to find refuge in the private worlds of associational life and the home. Yet while the ‘folkways’ (Sumner, 1906) may have partially retracted into those family or small-group ‘lifeways’ which are their original root, they retain their power to structure and give meaning to our lives.

6

A sacred economy

Finding Your Roots is a documentary series aired on the American television channel PBS. Each episode reconstructs the family history of a celebrity guest using a combination of archival research and genetic techniques. The guest is given a Book of Life, which includes genetic results, a detailed family tree, copies of historical records and photographs of newly discovered family members. The series was rocked by controversy in 2015 after it emerged that an episode which featured the actor Ben Affleck excluded any reference to an ancestor of his who was a slave-owner due to Affleck’s lobbying of the producers. In a subsequent statement, Affleck acknowledged his embarrassment over the affair but insisted ‘We deserve neither credit nor blame for our ancestors’ (Seemayer, 2015). However, his desire to keep this piece of family history secret suggests otherwise. While contemporary society formally subscribes to the belief that each of us forges our own identity rather than being defined by our familial past, we still cannot help feeling that our ancestors say something about us, that in some way they form a part of our being – even in the case of a slave-owner who lived nearly two centuries ago. More traditional societies ritualised this belief and gave it physical expression in their dwellings. In their classic study of rural Irish life, anthropologists Arensberg and Kimball describe the ‘west room’ in the traditional Irish cottage to which the elderly farmer and his wife would retire when control of the farm had passed to their son: in this room all the objects of sentimental value are always kept: the religious pictures, the ceremonial objects brought in by the bride at marriage, and the bric-a-brac associated with the past members of the household. . . . The family heirlooms are there, and, lining the walls along with religious pictures, there appear the photographs of members of the family, especially the familiar daguerreo-types of the last century. Whatever ‘fine’ pieces of furniture there may be, such as highboys, cabinets, brass candlesticks, are kept here, as are all the religious objects used when mass is celebrated in the house. All these objects are inalienable in the sense that the family parts with them only when it must. They descend from father to son with the house and the farm on which it stands. (Arensberg & Kimball, 1968: 129)

A sacred economy 109 Two kinds of objects were associated with this room: explicitly religious ones such as holy pictures and the accoutrements of the mass, and those associated with past generations of the family. These objects are described as ‘inalienable’, like the ancestor masks of a Roman household or the sacred Maori bones and stones mentioned in Chapter 3. The association of the ‘good room’ with the ancestors is indicated not just by the presence of family heirlooms and the pictures of deceased relatives on the walls, but also by the accommodation here of the elderly couple during their twilight years. The room was situated at the western end of the cottage, behind the hearth – a location associated in Irish folklore with the fairies, whose ‘fairy paths’ invariably passed by the western end of the house. The fairies were chthonic spirits associated with particular features of the landscape, such as earthworks, thorn trees and fields. Those who died suddenly were often believed to have been ‘taken’ by them, and they might subsequently be seen participating in their processions and festivities. The movement of the old couple into the west room as they relinquished control over the day-to-day workings of the farm therefore identified them with ‘the forces of the dead and the symbolic unity of the family, past and present’ (Ibid: 130). The west room was a sacred space separate from the profane activities involved in the everyday maintenance of the household, dedicated to the ancestors who had occupied and tended the family land. It served as a reminder to the current occupants of their place within the succession of generations, anchoring their identity and providing a framework within which events such as marriages, births and deaths could be assimilated to the ongoing story of the family and household. The term commensality usually refers to the practice of eating together and the social group which engages in it. In this chapter I extend the term to include all those activities which involve a shared participation in the sustenance and reproduction of biological life, outside of a commercial framework – the preparation and consumption of meals, the provision of warmth and shelter, procreation and childrearing. In contrast to contractual bonds, which operate between individuals who remain separate legal abstractions, commensality involves sharing the very substance of life, establishing an intimate participation in the other. It generates that ‘mutuality of being’ (Sahlins, 2011a) which is the essence of kinship. Commensal bonds draw strength from their visceral nature, their closeness to the existential frames of biological cycles, face-to-face relations and affective participation, and tend to be more enduring than contractual relationships. The result is a localised social context which is immediate (because it involves face-to-face, indeed skin-to-skin, relations), participatory (since these relations rely on a continual sharing of the most intimate aspects of life), bounded and particular (since we can have such relations with only a limited number of people at any one time). This context of biological or fictive kinship in turn provides a centre where the elements of social life can anchor themselves and a frame of reference which endows our lives with meaning. Commensal bonds are not confined to the household or family. They underpin many forms of associational life and can be traced in the classical city state, medieval guilds and Christian monasteries. However, here we will focus on their

110 A sacred economy unfolding within the household, which provides their origin and model. In modern societies, home has increasingly come to mean a purely domestic sphere identified with the family, and the family in turn tends to be defined primarily in terms of a sentimental bond between individuals. However, the Greek term oikos, from which is derived the prefix to our words ‘economy’ and ‘ecology’, reminds us of the foundations of the household as a unit of collective maintenance and a centre for the reproduction of human life. This was recognised by Weber, who wrote: ‘Separated from the household as a unit of economic maintenance, the sexually based relationship between husband and wife, and the physiologically determined relationship between father and children are wholly unstable and tenuous’ (Weber, 1968: 357). Economic maintenance here refers not to monetary exchange but to the collective acquisition and consumption of the necessities of life. The Latin familia, the Greek oikos, the Catalonian casa and the Serbian kucá all encompass the family, their dwelling and the economic resources necessary for their support in a single unit which ‘combines social, economic, and ritual practices in its own biological and social reproduction’ (Birdwell-Pheasant, 1999: 7). In this chapter I will explore the household as the centre of a web of exchange – simultaneously biological, economic, social and cultural – which ensures the reproduction of social life and generates a localised context which integrates experience and becomes a powerful centre of meaning. At the heart of these exchanges is the substance of both biological and social life: hence the sacred character of the household in traditional societies. This character was concentrated in particular locations within the house, above all the altar corner and the hearth, and in the shared meal as a ritual of social integration. We will now examine each of these in turn as centres of integrative meaning within the household.

Hearth and home A household has been defined as ‘an enterprise that one or more adults consensually establish in a particular dwelling unit in order to produce and consume shelter, meals, and other domestic services’ (Ellickson, 2008: 128). The household is characterised by co-residence, economic co-operation involving the pooling of resources among members, and the central role of procreation and child-rearing (Birdwell-Pheasant, 1999: 3). The members of a household may not always belong to the same family; however, on all continents in all historical periods, the core members of a household have usually been related by blood or marriage (Ellickson, 2008: 37). Family and household ‘not only belong to the same universe, they are mutually constituting’ (Birdwell-Pheasant, 1999: 3). The materiality of the home helps to constitute the family group economically and symbolically over time (Ibid: 27). Beneath the multiplicity of its historical forms, the kernel of the household persists; a social unit founded on the collective provision of the most universal and basic human needs. As such, it is perhaps the fundamental, irreducible element of society, the cell in which social life reproduces itself. But the household is also the setting for experiences which, while they sustain and reproduce the social, connect us to realities beyond it, and refuse to be

A sacred economy 111 contained by the meanings that culture ascribes to them or the practices and identities it builds on their foundations: the consumption of food and warming of our bodies, the nurture of children and care of the elderly, sexual relations and childbirth, illness and death. These are not simply biological processes but framing realities which structure the social world and the life-passages of individuals. They are transformative experiences which provide the foundation for some of our most basic values. They connect us to the sacred – in other words, to that which is most profoundly real (Eliade, 1958). ‘Hunting and gathering, food-sharing, initiation and marriage, bearing and rearing children, are all expressions of a mode of activity which is social and visceral – the activity of bringing life into being and sustaining it’ (Jackson, 1995: 154). Among the aboriginal tribe the Warlpiri, who until recently pursued a hunter-gather lifestyle, home is a word for where these things happen, the place of birth and initiation (Ibid). From this perspective we can understand why in many cultures the house, as the space in which these life-sustaining and life-transforming processes unfold, is sacred. For peoples as diverse as those of ancient Rome, New Caledonia, Cambodia, Vietnam and China, the house was the only temple, and to be separated from the household was to be separated from one’s religion as well (Rapoport, 1969). The British anthropologist Lord Raglan believed the sacred character of the house originated in the Neolithic and was due ‘to its originally having been the scene of the most important rite in early religion, the marriage of Earth and Sky . . . which was believed to ensure fertility and prosperity’ (1964: 86). This took place in a building representing the cosmos in which earth and sky are enclosed – the prototype of the house. Joseph Rykwert likewise traces the idea of the primitive hut in architecture back to a ritual enclosure built for the celebration of the sacred marriage, a paradigmatic building whose mythic archetype is Adam’s house in Paradise (1981: 190). For traditional peoples the activities which reproduce and sustain human life had a sacred quality, because they connect us to processes which are both infinitely mysterious and larger than the individual or even human society. Down to the present day, as noted by Bollnow (1961: 33), ‘the house has a certain sacred character’. This quality is centred in the hearth. For Joseph Rykwert, ‘the very notion of home seems to have grown up around the hearth’ (1991: 51). Ferdinand Tönnies writes that ‘the hearth and its living fire are, as it were, the core and the very essence of the house’ (2002: 54). The taming of fire stands at the origin of culture and settlement (Ibid). As well as light and heat, a means of cooking food, and a source of security, the hearth provided a natural centre around which a group could gather. The control of fire therefore led to an intensification of social life, since the nightly gathering around the hearth afforded the opportunity for discussing the day’s events and making plans for the following day, recalling the past and debating future prospects (Orians & Heerwagan, 1992). Such conversations were more likely at night when the urgencies of the day were over and the fire symbolised the attractions of sociability, comfort, light and warmth (Ibid: 567). Writing at the time of Augustus, the architectural theorist Vitruvius had a similar intuition, imagining language, society and settlement developing around the first fires:

112 A sacred economy Since the invention of fire brought about the congress of men, and their counsel together and cohabitation, and since many people now met in one place . . . some of that company began to make roofs of leaves, others to dig hollows under the hills, yet others to make places for shelter in imitation of the nests and buildings of swallows out of mud and wattle. (Vitruvius, quoted in Rykwert, 1981: 105) Fire stands at the origins of architecture, intimately entwined with the foundation rites of both cities and households (Fernández-Galiano, 2000). The hearth possessed a sacred character in many societies. In the Kabyle house the fireplace and the stones surrounding it possessed magical power to give protection from illness and the evil eye and to bring fine weather. It was forbidden to spit into the fireplace, to spill water on it or to weep tears there (Bourdieu, 1979: 144). Among the Ainu the goddess of the hearth was addressed during all rituals because she was the mediator between the Ainu and the other gods (Ohnuki-Tierney, 1972). The ash renewal rituals, in which ash and sand were removed from the hearth and replaced with fresh sand from the beach, were an important religious event, believed to ensure the rebirth of the goddess. The hearth itself was the heart of the house and therefore of the universe (Ibid). Among the Buryats of Siberia the fire spirit lived in the hearth of each tent. He received sacrifices before all the other gods, and no stranger might take away a light from the fire (Lord Raglan, 1964: 77). For the Aztecs the hearth was the image and incarnation of the god of fire (Ibid: 78). Among the Zafimaniry of Madagascar, lighting the first fire on the hearth is a central part of blessing a new house, while the first child of a family is associated with the house of its mother’s parents by smearing the soot of their hearth on its forehead (Bloch, 1995: 76). According to De Coulagnes the hearth is ‘the symbol of a sedentary life’ (1916: 78). Archaeological evidence from both Neolithic and Iron-Age Europe suggests that when a house was replaced the stone-lined hearths were sometimes reused, as if to underline the continuity between the new house and its successor (Bradley, 2005: 53). One possible derivation of the names of the Greek hearthgoddess Hestia and the Roman Vesta is from an Indo-European root *wes-, meaning ‘to live in, to occupy’ (Rykwert, 1976: 104). Among the Pawnee Indians, both the house – the traditional earth lodge – and hearth are strongly associated with the stability and nurturing power of Mother Earth (Monroe & Williamson, 1993: 115). Fire was also identified with life and seen as the animating spirit of the house (Fernández-Galiano, 2000: 13). In parts of Wales it was believed that if the hearth fire were allowed to go out, it would bring misfortune on the family, and in some cases the same fire was kept burning for generations (Lord Raglan, 1964: 76). In the Hebrides likewise the hearth was never quenched, but ritually smoored at night to the accompaniment of a prayer (Ibid). In Ireland, if a family moved home, live coals would be taken from the old fire to place in the new one. According to Lord Raglan, ‘There is ample evidence that the reason the hearth-fire was kept perpetually burning was that it was regarded as the abode of the hearth spirit or domestic

A sacred economy 113 deity’ (1964: 77). A similar belief animated the keeping of perpetual fires such as that of Vesta at Rome. A perpetual fire burned at Kildare in honour of the Irish saint Brigit down to the Reformation. It was tended by a convent of nuns, and no man was allowed within the sacred enclosure, which was circular like the temple of Vesta (Condren, 2002). The custom may have had a pre-Christian origin, for Brigit was originally a pagan goddess, whose name is preserved in the tribal name of the Brigantes found in Britain and Gaul. The goddess Sul was likewise associated with a perpetual fire at Bath, the Roman Aquae Sulis (Ibid: 57). Among the Ashanti a fire was kept lit by the senior wife of the king: this was the hearth of the state, and the kingdom would endure only as long as the fire was maintained (Lord Raglan, 1964: 78). Similar customs are recorded of the Herero of southwest Africa and the Bauchi of northern Zimbabwe (Ibid: 80). Among the Iroquois League, the Onondagas, who lived in the middle of the confederacy of tribes and hosted meetings of its grand council, were known as ‘keepers of the fire’ (Monroe & Williamson, 1993: 9). In each case the hearth was the symbolic centre of a social unit, whether family, state or tribe, with whose survival its continuance was associated. The hearth represents origins and rootedness, the stability of family and communal ties, and the succession of generations. In many cultures sharing a hearth defines the household. In the communal houses of Langkawi, Malaysia, there may be many cooking stoves, but there is never more than one hearth, for co-residence means sharing a hearth (Carsten, 1995: 110). Among the Kelabit people of Borneo the basic social unit in the longhouse is the hearth group, whose members eat together three times a day, forming a semi-circle around the hearth itself (Janowski, 1995: 97). ‘The centre of the life of a Bemba hut is the fireplace’ (Richards, 1950: 89). The basis of censuses and tax collection in the European Middle Ages was the hearth, not heads of houses or individuals (Ariés & Duby, 1988: 425). While the Serbian collective household or Zadruga sometimes provided each married man and his family with a separate structure for sleeping and storing their personal possessions, the only fire was in the main room where food was prepared and the heads of the group resided. ‘This served as a symbolic statement that the united family had only one hearth’ (Rasson et al., 1999: 185). But if the hearth is a symbol of stability and continuity, it is also instrumental in processes of transformation, which circulate the substance of life within and between households in the same way as the heart pumps blood through our body. Around the hearth the elements of biological and social life mingle and are transformed into the society of the household. Raw food becomes cooked and is changed into human flesh. Food and drink are passed around in the ritual of the meal. Conversation flows. Songs are sung and stories told, and neighbour and guest are welcomed into the family circle. Among the Turkanoan people of North West Amazonia, the ‘focal hearth is a womb which cooks the bread as a womb “cooks” a child, the starch and fibre of manioc bread being compared to flesh and bones’ (Hugh-Jones, 1995: 231). In Langkawi the work of women at the hearth in transforming raw food into cooked produces the shared substance, kinship, of those who live together in one house (Carsten, 1995: 120). The same image of

114 A sacred economy transformation is applied to a couple after they begin to have sexual relations, when they are said to be ‘cooked’ (Ibid). Houses are constantly transforming what passes through them, and the different elements that enter the house – meat and vegetables, kin and affine – are mixed and blended at the hearth (Carsten & HughJones, 1995). Based on a study of commensality in a Greek village, one author writes: the house contains within its walls those processes which transform the natural into the social. . . . Cooking and eating to sustain the body, sex and the bearing of children, and sleep should all take place within the guarded and enclosed confines of the house. (Iossifides, 1991: 7) The dedication of perpetual fires to female divinities such as Brigit or Vesta, who in at least one of their aspects represented the earth, also demonstrates an association between the hearth and the chthonic powers, spirits immanent in the soil which both nourishes the crops and houses the ancestral dead. As a symbol of origins and as the centre around which the nurturing and transformative activities which sustain the household revolved, it was natural to associate the hearth with the ancestors. In some ceremonies among the Ainu, the goddess of the hearth, Fuchi, and the spirits of the dead were worshipped together (Ohnuki-Tierney, 1972: 10). Among the Zafinmaniry the house inhabited by an ancestral couple is called a holy house, which provides blessings to their descendants; on special occasions a meal is cooked on the hearth with the original pot, spoon and dish, and speeches and requests are addressed to the central post (Bloch, 1995: 81–82). The practice of carrying fire from the parental hearth to a new household on the occasion of marriage or the building of a house is attested not only in ancient Greece but also in cultures as far apart as those of India, Russia and Wales (Lord Raglan, 1964: 78). In such rituals the symbolism of the hearth is deepened, as the fertilising and nurturing power of the individual household is seen to derive from wider patterns of relationship to ancestors and kin. In traditional societies the hearth was the centre around which the elements of biological and social life were concentrated and transformed; a place where light and warmth, cooking and eating were shared, and gossip and storytelling, laughter and song generated a conviviality which contrasted with the darkness and danger outside. Establishing a hearth signalled an intention to settle, to put down roots; hence it represented stability and the social relations which grew up as a result, whether those of a household, city or kingdom. It was a symbol of origins, reminding those gathered about it of their ancestors and kin, who established the hearth and were buried in the earth upon which it was fixed. To gather at the hearth was to participate in a web of relations to those who shared it in the present or had done so in the past. It was to establish a particular kind of bond, a mutuality of being, between people warmed by its heat and nourished by the food it cooked, and whose identities were forged and reforged in the social circle of which it was the centre.

A sacred economy 115

The shared meal The meal has been described as ‘one of the most fundamental and universal social institutions’ (Kuhling & Keohane, 2007: 141). There is no more basic aspect of our experience than the need to eat, and by elevating this naturalistic function into a stylized and aesthetic form, the shared meal has an immense socialising power (Simmel, 1997; Kuhling & Keohane, 2007). In mythology and religion, the image of the Knights of the Round Table or the story of the Last Supper stress the role of commensality as social cement. A shared sacrificial meal was a feature of the religious cults of antiquity and of many indigenous religions, and this reaches a culmination in the Christian Eucharist. While this may be a paradigmatic example, all religions have a sacrificial/ celebrational meal at their very centre, as the meal is the ritual commemoration of gift exchange and the sacrifice that gift-giving entails . . . immediate bodily appetite denied in favour of communication with the Gods, ancestors, children, friends and even strangers. (Kuhling & Keohane, 2007: 143) A meal is quite literally an act of communion, which reasserts the bonds of family and community and makes friends and companions out of strangers. By eating together the participants are felt to create a common flesh and blood. In the words of the French anthropologist Maurice Bloch, ‘eating together is not a mere reflection of common substance, it is also a mechanism that creates it’ (1999: 142). Among the Tukanoan speakers of North East Amazonia, the sharing of food is essential to the unity of the longhouse communities in which they live. While food is produced at a family level with men and women usually working alone, it is cooked and consumed communally. Meals are eaten near the centre of the house, in a public space reserved for unifying rituals (Hugh-Jones, 1995: 231). On the island of Langkawi the sharing of food is believed to create kinship (Carsten, 1995: 114). Among Malays ‘being one family, one kinship group, one local group cannot be envisaged in terms that do not, in part, refer to the act of eating that which has been cooked on one hearth’ (Bloch, 1999: 139). It is reported of the Polynesians of Anuta Island: ‘When an Anutan offers food, it is not only food but love [aropa] which is being presented, and if the intended recipient declines to partake he is symbolically rejecting the donor’s love as well’ (Feinberg, 1981, quoted in Sahlins, 2011b: 234). In modern Greece the meal, at which its members sit together and share the products of their work and care, defines the household (Iossifides, 1991: 7). On the Friday before a wedding the families of bride and groom exchange loaves of specially made bread called bouyatses, symbolically uniting the two families (Ibid: 11). In rural Sardinia, as in many similar societies, every social interaction is mediated by the giving and receiving of food and drink (Counihan, 1984: 53). A French study found that it is through the recalling of shared meals that individuals’ memory of their family is most strongly realised (Muxel, 1996, quoted in Bloch, 1999: 138).

116 A sacred economy Shared feasting was at the heart of the solidarity of the medieval guild (Rosser, 1994; Murray Kendall, 2001). Both ‘company’ and ‘companion’ derive from the Latin cum-panis, ‘with bread’ (Ariés & Duby, 1988: 18). Milk-kinship – the bond forged between foster siblings who were breast-fed by the same mother – has underpinned political allegiance in locations as far apart as Gaelic Ireland and the Hindu Kush (Parkes, 2003). Among the Karakaitags of Daghestan: As soon as a son was born to their ruler (Utsumi), the child was taken to all the villages of the tribe, from one to another, where all the women in milk gave him suck until he was weaned. After the performance of this ceremony, the child was regarded a blood relative by milk relationship to every member of the tribe, the foster-brother of each and all of them, and accordingly he was assured their affection, assistance and help during the whole span of his life. (Grigolia, 1962, quoted in Parkes, 2003: 752) If the sharing of food is a communion, it follows that hospitality has the power to make a friend out of a stranger. The Bedouin of Jordan have a proverb: ‘The generous one is beloved of God’ (al-karim habib ullah) (quoted in Shryock, 2008: 406). They relate how some of their ancestors became members of their tribes through specific acts of food sharing and protection (Ibid: 407). In the 1780s the French traveller Constantin-François Volney wrote of the Bedouin of Greater Syria that once they had consented to eat bread and salt with a guest, nothing could induce them to betray him (Ibid: 412). In Sardina, ‘if you were eating and a person came to the door, you must always offer him some food. And if you were baking bread, and a person came to the door, you must always give him a piece of the freshly baked bread’ (quoted in Counihan, 1984: 53). Hospitality is a sacred duty in most of the world’s religions. As well as an act of communion, sharing food with a stranger was formerly an act of trust, an expression of confidence in their goodwill, since there was always the possibility that unfamiliar food might be poison (Bloch, 1999). But there is more to the shared meal than the food itself. At all times, and in all societies, eating has been regulated and ritualised. The sharing of food is too essential for survival to be left to improvisation. Eating is converted into a social act, the meal, and it is loaded with symbolic meaning. (Sjögren, 1991: 89) The etiquette associated with the meal serves as a reminder that eating is about relationships, and not just the satisfaction of appetite. In many cultures eating is surrounded by complex patterns of ritual and taboo. Among Muslims a man must wash his hands before and after eating and eat with his right hand only (Lord Raglan, 1964: 49). In ancient Rome the statues of the Lares were placed on the table during family meals, and a sacrifice of wine and incense was offered to them between the first and second course (Scheid, 2003: 91). In India, ‘during the

A sacred economy 117 morning puja, prasad (‘blessed’ food) is first offered to God’ (Bryden, 2004: 30). In most Western societies the practice of saying a grace before meals was widespread until relatively recently, and it is still considered impolite for a guest to start eating until their host has invited them to begin. In each case, appetite is restrained by the demands of sociability. Something as simple as eating with a knife or fork instead of one’s fingers distances us from the physical substance of the food and creates a social form which is shared among those at the table. It signifies ‘the transcendence or transformation which materialistically individual selfishness experiences through the transition into the social form of the meal’ (Simmel, 1997: 132). Hence, laying the table for a meal is more than a utilitarian procedure: Everything is controlled by aesthetic norms, and those norms, freely obeyed and freely varied, convey some of the meaning of family life. . . . Ordinary objects on the table have been, as it were, polished by domestic affection. Their edges have been rubbed off, and they speak in subdued, unpretentious tones of belonging. (Scruton, 2012: 262–263) Through etiquette and courtesy, the animal process of eating is turned into both a social cement and a sophisticated carrier of cultural meaning. The socialising power inherent in the elevation of eating to an aesthetic and ritualised activity is illustrated in Book VII of the Odyssey. Arriving in Phaecia as a helpless suppliant, Odysseus is welcomed by King Alcinous and gains his assistance. The stranger’s admittance to the society of the Phaecians is formalised through a feast: A maid brought water soon in a graceful golden pitcher and over a silver basin tipped it out so the guest might rinse his hands, then pulled a gleaming table to his side. A staid housekeeper brought on bread to serve him, appetizers aplenty too, lavish with her bounty. As long-suffering Odyssseus ate and drank, The hallowed King Alcinous called his herald: ‘Come, Pontonous! Mix the wine in the bowl, pour rounds to all our banqueters in the house so we can pour out cups to Zeus who loves the lightning, champion of suppliants – suppliants’ rights are sacred. . . . All burst into applause, urging passage home for their newfound friend, his pleading rang so true. And once they’d poured libations out and drunk to their hearts’ content, each one made his way to rest in his own house. (VII, 204–215 & 262–266)

118 A sacred economy The ritualisation of eating, and the control over animal appetites which it represents, is at the heart of the feast’s power to establish and reinforce social bonds. Alcinous is a hospitable king who keeps a lavish table, and this bounty strengthens the ties between the king and his companions. The wanderer Odysseus is welcomed at their feast, and after sharing food and drink with the king, he tells his story and is promised aid for his journey home. Applauded by the guests, Odysseus is turned from a stranger into a ‘newfound friend’. The invitation to the gods to take part in the feast takes on added significance in this context: Zeus, as king of the gods, is guarantor of the social order reflected and reinforced in the ritual of the meal. In a society where violence was a regular feature of social life and almost any stranger could pose a threat, the power of commensality to generate and cement social relationships played a vital role. It is instructive to contrast Homer’s depiction of feasting with a more contemporary scene – in this case taken from the novel Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre (winner of the Man Booker Prize in 2003). The protagonist, a teenage boy who is wrongfully suspected of murder, decides to slip out of town. As he makes his final preparations, he catches sight of the local policewoman through the window of a take-away: Then, next thing you know, Fate puts Vaine Gurie in the Pizza Hut opposite my bank. She sits by the window, hunched over a wedge of pizza. Sitting by the window ain’t a sharp idea for a diet fugitive, but you can see the place is overflowing with strangers. I stop and fumble in my pack, watching her through the corner of my eye. . . . Fat ole Vaine, stuffing emptiness into her void. Her eating strategy is to take six big bites, until her mouth’s crammed to bursting, then top up the gaps with little bites. Panic eating. Here’s me yearning for Mexico, there’s Vaine hogging herself slim, just another fragile booger-sac of a life. (Pierre, 2003: 84) These few lines provide an image of the transformation that has overcome eating in our consumer culture. Pizza Hut is part of an incredibly complex twenty-firstcentury food industry, but the end result of this commercial and technological sophistication is a relapse into eating as the solitary satisfaction of appetite. But unlike an animal, which eats only to satisfy its physical needs, Vaine Gurie – cramming food into her mouth in a roomful of strangers – is using food to fill the void left by the absence of spiritual and social satisfactions in contemporary society. Hence her gorging is insatiable. When food production is industrialised and food preparation outsourced from the household, our relationships to the food we eat, the places it comes from, and the people around us are impoverished. The participation which is at the heart of commensality is diminished, and the capacity of the meal to transubstantiate appetite into sociability undermined. Stripped of its social and sacred character, divorced from healthy relationships, eating becomes disordered and addictive – a repetitive, meaningless activity without limits. Food which has been industrially produced and packaged and is sold for instant

A sacred economy 119 consumption is ‘emptiness’ – without nutritional value or social meaning. When our culture no longer offers real meaning or stable relationships, the resulting disintegration affects not just the social body but the individual personality as well. Vaine Gurie, ‘stuffing emptiness into her void’, is a casualty of a society which no longer offers its members the sense of belonging and meaning which come from inhabiting a shared home.

The veneration of ancestors The hearth is not the only location within the household where commensal bonds are embodied. Ancestor veneration is one of the most widespread forms of religious expression, and it is usually associated with a sacred or privileged area which is an almost universal feature of the house in traditional societies (Rapoport, 1969). Throughout much of central and eastern Europe the house was arranged with the ‘Lord’s corner’ or Herrgottswinkel, where religious objects were kept, in the northwest. Eating took place in the quadrant of the house which contained the Lord’s corner, with the father seated at the head of the table, nearest the sacred objects (Ibid: 54). Traditional Russian houses likewise maintained a ‘red corner’ or ‘holy corner’ where icons were hung, guests entertained, and the family ate around a common table (Figes, 1997: 95). In China, although the whole house was sacred, the northwest corner was the most sacred and contained an ancestral altar with an ever-burning lamp (Lord Raglan, 1964: 9–10). In Manchu houses the ancestors of the family and the god of the hearth were both worshipped (Ibid). The northeast corner of a traditional Ainu house was considered the holiest. This was the residence of the deity of the house, who was second in importance only to the goddess of the hearth (Ohnuki-Tierney, 1972: 437). In the Mongol yurt the household altar was always on the left of the bed as one entered (Rapoport, 1969: 54). Among the Purum of Vietnam the house was divided into two parts. One, the first to be erected, contained the altar of the house-god and a ritually important post near which the owner slept (Lord Raglan, 1964: 9). In the house of each family head among the Anang of Nigeria stood a shrine honouring the ancestors at which sacrifices were made (Ibid: 10). Among the Baila people of Zimbabwe a spot at the foot of the central pole of the hut was the altar to the ancestors, while among the Zulus a space was reserved for the ancestors at the back of every hut (Ibid: 11). In houses in Madagascar the north wall was the place for the ancestor cult (Rapoport, 1969: 55). It is still the custom to throw the first capful of a newly opened bottle of rum into the northeast corner of a room to give the ancestors their due share (Bradt, 2011: 13). When a man of distinction died in the Melanesian island of Santa Cruz, a stock of wood was set up in his house and offerings were made to it (Lord Raglan, 1964: 10). Likewise, in South Sulawesi, Indonesia, the ancestral spirit is installed in a shrine located in the attic of a house. The spirit must be fed regularly with offerings of rice, meat and betel (Gibson, 1995: 138). Hence we find a widespread pattern in traditional societies whereby a particular location within the house is regarded as privileged. Two ideas seem to inform this

120 A sacred economy pattern of belief: a conviction of the continuing physical and spiritual dependence of the household on its forebears, and the idea that the house itself is in some way animated by the vital spirits of its occupants, past and present. Thus among the Kwakiutl Indians on Vancouver Island, the ancestors were represented in paintings on the front of houses and in the carved house posts, while the house itself was thought of as a living being, belonging to the entire family line rather than any individual occupant (Monroe & Williamson, 1993: 75). A Maori meeting house is conceived as a living organism, each element of which corresponds to some part of the body of the ancestor of the group (Bradley, 2005: 48). Among the Lio people of Indonesia, each house has a sacred area towards the back where sacrifices are performed and offerings to the ancestors are left. A tall upright panel is placed there on which relief carvings depict the ancestral couple of the house or, more commonly, a female figure representing the house itself (Howell, 1995: 159). When the priest-leader of a lineage dies, his body is placed on a mat in the centre of the clan-house. Today he is buried after a couple of days. In the past his decaying flesh fell onto the ground below until only the bones were left. . . . In other words, the person of the priest-leader – a future communal ancestor – literally merges into the building – and vice versa. (Ibid: 160) For the Lio the house is an animate being, and the sources of its animation are the spirits of the ancestors who merge with it and give it life, just as they gave life to their descendants. Likewise among the Paiwan, an indigenous people of Taiwan, we can trace an association between the house spirit and the ancestral dead. The house was the dwelling of a guardian spirit called an umaqan (Tan, 2001: 154). This being protected the inhabitants from attacks by evil spirits while punishing those who did not show it appropriate respect. Offerings were made to it at the tavi, an altar placed in an alcove off the principal room. The umaqan came into existence during the inauguration ceremony, which took place when the house was built, and offerings to the ancestors were required to create it. It was the personified spirit of the house, and was composed of the different elements of the dwelling, both possessions and persons, so that the granary, the hearth and the couple themselves were integral parts of the guardian spirit. The most important role of this spirit was to preserve and foster the fertility of the house and its inhabitants (Ibid). The Paiwanese maintained a close relationship with their ancestral house all their lives, and after death they were frequently buried in a tomb-cave beneath its floor. However, this was an honour afforded only to those who died a ‘good death’ (Ibid: 156). They would then be worshipped as ancestors, and people believed the presence of their corpse in the tomb-cave brought fertility to the house. The more corpses a house possessed, the more fruitful and prosperous it would be. These examples of certain privileged ancestors being buried in the house are far from unique. A Latin commentator on Virgil says it was an ancient Greek and

A sacred economy 121 Roman custom to bury the dead in the house, while it has been claimed that the early Germanic peoples used to bury the father of a household beneath the hearth (Lord Raglan, 1964: 12). Among the prehispanic Maya, entire lineage groups lived in substantial houses which had shrines devoted to their common ancestors, some of whom were buried within the compound (Gillespie, 2000: 469). In the Ostionoid period (c. 600 AD) of Puerto Rican culture, burials took place in the interior of houses (Keegan, 2009: 375). Among the Jivaro of Ecuador, a man was usually buried in his house; some food was left with him, and it was then shut up and abandoned. However, when women or children were buried in the house it continued to be occupied (Lord Raglan, 1964: 68). The Rotinese ‘used to bury their dead in the floor of the house, their spirits being thought to take up residence in the attic’ (Waterson, 1995: 55). Village leaders among traditional peoples in Guiana are sometimes buried in the floor of the collective house (Riviére, 1995: 197). Among the Turkanoan people of northwest Amazonia, when the leader of a longhouse dies he is buried in the centre of the floor, the house is abandoned, and the community either reforms or divides (Hugh-Jones, 1995: 228). There is archaeological evidence for burial inside houses during the Neolithic in Syria (Guerrero et al., 2009). The practice has also been identified in Macedonia, Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, Croatia and at Çatalhöyük in Turkey (Naumov, 2007). At Neolithic sites across the Balkans, house burials appear to have been used for certain privileged individuals (Ibid: 255). These burials took place in specific areas of the house: close to the walls, close to the oven or hearth, and occasionally in the pits used to store grain. It has been suggested that the adults buried within the dwelling were particularly esteemed ancestors, and there is support for this view in the belief, formerly widespread in the Balkans, that the ancestors dwell exactly below the threshold and the hearth of the house (Ibid: 257). Such burials formed part of an ancestor cult in which the spirits of the dead gave protection and ensured the prosperity of the household in return for food offerings. Intramural burial of women and children, on the other hand, seems to have been related to the symbolic function of the house as a place of nurture and reproduction. Since pregnancy and birth took place within the house, it came to be associated with human fertility and growth and was seen as analogous to the womb. It was believed that if a child died at an early age, its rebirth would be ensured by burial inside the womb of the mother-house (Ibid: 258). This interpretation is reinforced by the excavation at Neolithic sites in Macedonia of a particular kind of pottery, the upper part of which represents a female figure, while in the lower part, instead of thighs and legs, a house is shown. These figures depict the house as a feminine space associated with conception, incubation, birth and growth. Hence the burial of the deceased inside the house, often in a fetal position, metaphorically returns them to the womb (Ibid). This interpretation receives support from ethnographic accounts of Slavic populations that practiced child burial. In times of high child mortality, the family buried the last deceased child in the ‘sacred corner’ of the house, below the window or below the parent’s bed, in the belief that the child would be protected by the house and its relatives. Among the Mazurs in Poland, it was believed that if a

122 A sacred economy dead child was buried beneath the threshold it would become a ‘klobuk’, a kind of house-spirit which lived next to the hearth or threshold and brought prosperity to the family (Ibid: 265). House burials can be related to the more general belief that the presence of the ancestors sanctifies the land in which they are buried. Among traditional African societies the group’s land is considered sacred because it is where the ancestors are buried (Pellow, 1992: 192). Small shrines, often in the shape of miniaturized huts, were placed close to domestic dwellings to house the ancestral shades, and offerings such as a calabash of pombe (native beer), a hen or a goat were made at them (Singleton, 2009: 318).1 Among the Tallensi the eldest son succeeds his father as custodian of the ancestral shrines, and the health of the family and the fertility of fields and livestock are believed to depend on the favour of the ancestors, who are part and parcel of the everyday life of their descendants (Fortes, 1961). In a large expanded family, some sacrifice or libation to the ancestors takes place nearly every week, particularly on occasions such as the start of the sowing season when the fertility of the fields or livestock is at issue (Ibid: 184). Among the Bemba people of East Africa, when a new hut is built a rafter from its predecessor is inserted in its roof so that the ancestral spirits will transfer to the new home, and when a village is constructed, the relics of the founding chief of the tribe are moved to consecrate the site (Richards, 1950: 89). The Chagga of Kilimanjaro bury their dead in the banana garden, which was until recently where a man built his house, had children and supported them from the land (Hasu, 2009: 195). Ritual practices connect both newborn children and the dead to the ancestral soil. However, not all the deceased become ancestors, only those for whom a specific ritual, involving a double burial, is carried out. The first stage traditionally involved burial inside a hut, accompanied by the sacrifice of a goat; about a year later the skulls and bones were moved to the banana grove, where an offering place to the dead ancestor was established (Ibid: 196). The Chagga exemplify how in traditional African religion only the more noteworthy of the deceased, such as male elders, became ancestors (Singleton, 2009: 318). These ancestors controlled the rain and the game, the fertility of the fields and the fecundity of women (Ibid: 319). Among the Akan, ‘The ancestor is the one who lived to a ripe old age and in an exemplary manner or did much to enhance the prestige and standing of the family, clan and tribe’ (Pobee, 1976: 7). The ancestors were believed to give children for the continuance of the tribe and to provide a good harvest (Ibid: 9). In return they demanded respect, offerings of food and drink, and obedience to the inherited traditions of the community.2 Likewise, among the contemporary descendants of the Maya in Mexico, it is believed that people owe the land they work and its continuing fertility to the ancestors or equivalent spirits who first lived there, to whom periodic offerings must be made (Gillespie, 2000: 474). In such practices we may trace the origins of the widespread belief in house spirits in European folklore. These attach themselves to a particular household, are generally helpful in nature, and usually dwell under the hearth or behind

A sacred economy 123 the stove. According to Jacob Grimm the English Robin Goodfellow, the French goblin, the German kobold, the Scottish brownie, the Danish nisse and the tomte of Scandinavia are all examples of what he calls ‘friendly familiar home-sprites’ (Grimm, 1882: 499). They are connected with the hearth: they frequently appear from under it, and they are commonly imagined as having red hair or beards and pointed red caps. According to Grimm they were originally hearth-gods, but this is certainly not their only significance. Their presence brings prosperity to the house and their departure removes it. Small offerings of food were traditionally made to them by servants. These spirits seem to attach themselves to persons rather than places, for there are several stories of farmers who moved to a new house to escape the spirit, only to have him follow them (Ibid: 499–513). The German kobold was a house-spirit that lived in the hearth. A tale from the Altmark depicts the kobold as ‘a fiery stripe with a broad head, which he usually shakes from one side to the other’ (Thorpe, 1852). Some legends say the kobold enters and exits a house through the chimney. Reports from western Uckermark in the mid-nineteenth century ascribe both human and fiery features to the kobold; he wears a red jacket and cap and moves about the air as a fiery stripe (Ibid). A kobold brings prosperity to the house, but in return the family must leave a portion of their supper for the spirit and treat him with respect, never mocking or laughing at the creature. In Scandinavian folklore the tomte or nisse was believed to take care of a farmer’s home and children and protect them from misfortune, in particular at night when the housefolk were asleep. In return the spirit required gifts of food, including a bowl of porridge on Christmas night. The Swedish name tomte is derived from the house lot or tomt . Other names for the beings – haugebonde (“mound farmer”) in Swedish and haugkall (‘mound man’) in Norwegian – connect them with the burial mound and suggest their origins in an ancestor cult. So does the old belief that the tomte was the ‘soul’ of the first inhabitant of the farm, he who cleared the tomt or house lot. The Finns believed in a domestic spirit which lived under the floor, and a special corner of the house was consecrated to them. They were believed to be the proprietary spirit of the land on which the house was erected, and propitiatory sacrifices were made to them when the dwelling was built. This spirit was also associated with the hearth, being at times referred to as ‘the mother of the fire’ (Lord Raglan, 1964: 11). House spirits are also found in the folk traditions of the Slavic lands, under the name of domovik or domovoj, meaning ‘the one in the house’ (Leach, 1972: 321). These spirits were tied to a particular household and usually represented the founder of the family, who watches over and protects the inhabitants of the house. It appears probable they inherited many observances from earlier snake-ancestor cults (Ibid). The domovik is pictured as an old, gray-bearded man, looking very much like the living head of the family. He lives behind the stove, or sometimes under the threshold (Jones, 1996: 147). He likes fire, and one of his punishments when the family displeases him is to burn down the house. When a new house was

124 A sacred economy built, the Polish homeowner would attract one of the domovoi by placing a piece of bread down before the stove was put in. When a Russian family moves from one house to another, the fire is raked out of the old stove into a jar and solemnly conveyed to the new one, the words, ‘Welcome, grandfather, to the new home!’ being uttered when it arrives. (quoted in Waite, 1920: 244) Some people might also make an offering to the domovoi to entice him to come with them, saying ‘Domovoi! Domovoi! Don’t stay here but come with our family!’ (Jones, 1996: 147). A portion of the family’s supper was left out overnight for the domovik, who was believed to assist with the housework and guard against the intrusion of strange and hostile spirits. The Mordvin people in the Volga basin of Russia likewise sacrificed to the spirit of the guardian deity of the homestead (Lord Raglan, 1964: 11). By the time they were collected and written down in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, these European traditions had become trivialised and reduced to the status of fairytales: ‘the once familiar and faithful friend of the family under heathenism has gradually sunk into a bugbear or a taunt to children: a lot he shares with the goddesses and gods of old’ (Grimm, 1882: 514). Enough remains, however, to suggest striking similarities to the Roman lares: household spirits, variously attached to a family or place, who offer protection and prosperity in return for small offerings of food as well as reverence and respect. All these house spirits were closely associated with the hearth, the stove or the fire; and in the Scandinavian and Russian cases in particular there are strong indications that they preserved the memory of a pre-Christian cult of the ancestors, associated with the founder of the house or farm. We have seen that the hearth is widely associated with settlement, origins, rootedness and fertility. Hence it made a natural dwelling place for ancestral spirits, whether their mortal remains were buried underneath or, as was no doubt more common, elsewhere on the family land. Alternatively, the ancestors might be identified with the corner of the house where objects belonging to them – the sacra of the household – were stored. The house itself, moreover, could be conceived as animated by a spirit which embodied the combined vitality of its current and previous inhabitants, as well as that of the building itself, which took on life and personality through the rituals attending its construction. The house spirit, therefore, could combine elements of the ancestors, the hearth god and the chthonic powers. We must remember that the logic of myth is not overly concerned with separation and distinctions; boundaries are fuzzy and beings readily flow into one another and become identified through associations of character or function.

The commensal bond This chapter has traced a widespread and deep-rooted pattern of belief in traditional societies. The house is sacred, and this sacred character is localised both in the hearth and in a particular area of the building – a corner, wall or

A sacred economy 125 post – which is associated with the ancestors and the chthonic powers. These privileged ancestors are those who were ‘good householders’ – who founded lineages, fertilised the fields through their labour, built houses and maintained them. Buried either in the house itself or on the family land, they are absorbed into the spiritual substance of the building. Showing respect to them ensures the fertility of crops and animals, and the health and fecundity of the human inhabitants of the household. The house itself, animated by the successive generations of life within, is imagined as a womb (Lord Raglan, 1964: 150), a place of nurturance and rebirth, whose potency is concentrated in the sacred corner. Central to these beliefs is the feeling of participation, a kind of consubstantiality between objects and people which to us appear distinct (Lévy-Bruhl, 1975). The deceased ancestors participate in both the physical fabric of the house and the personality of their descendants; the family participates in the house it inhabits and land on which it stands; the family members participate in one another’s substance. Likewise, those who regularly share a hearth or a meal participate in each other’s being to a greater or lesser degree. Many of these beliefs have a pedigree which goes back to the Neolithic period. As Weber writes, the household requires for its existence a certain degree of organised cultivation of the soil (1968: 358). The social form of the Neolithic village was built on bonds across the generations: ‘One generation draws benefits from the previous generation’s agricultural labour, its ditches and wells, its animalbreeding, its nurture of the forest and its management of the grain store’ (Ratnagar, 2003: 23). For people living on land cleared and tended by their forebears, and in which their bones were buried, ancestor veneration was a religious observation which reflected powerful pragmatic and emotional realities. It is possible that both the ritualization of domestic life, and the investment of meaning in material culture, increased significantly during the Neolithic period, as people adopted a more sedentary life (Bradley, 2005). But the beliefs I have traced possess a wider significance, which endures to this day. They suggest that the household exists only through its participation in a sacred economy symbolised in the hearth, the shared meal and the altar corner. This is a network of exchanges which ensures the circulation of the substance of biological and social life: food, warmth, procreation, nurture and care. Through it the members of the household are integrated as a unit, and the present generation is connected to those who have gone before. The sacred character of the house comes from this intuition that the daily life of the household is embedded in something larger, an ecology which extends back towards the ancestors and outwards to the surrounding landscape, while concentrating its meaning in a centre that ensures the reproduction of biological and social life. It suggests that we only exist by virtue of our participation in webs of relationship which are not merely physical or economic, but ultimately sacred in character – a participation which is not a matter of exchanges between discrete individuals but involves the merger and mutual blending of each other’s being. Hearth and altar corner are sacred because they embody the commensal bond.

126 A sacred economy Tönnies suggests the manner in which commensality generates and sustains social relations when he writes: The house constitutes the realm and, as it were, the body of kinship. Here people live together under one protecting roof. Here they share their possessions and their pleasures; they feed from the same supply, they sit at the same table. The dead are venerated here as invisible spirits, as if they were still powerful and held a protecting hand over their family. (2002: 42–43) From this intimacy of shared existence arises the assumption of a unity of purpose and identity, which he sees as characteristic of gemeinschaft (Ibid: 37). The sociologist C. H. Cooley (1902) contrasted primary social relations, which are faceto-face, intimate and relatively permanent, with the secondary, contractual relations characteristic of modern societies. But this distinction fails to capture the nature of the commensal bond, which is characterised by a shared selfhood. The household is the centre of activities which, when they take place in common, possess a unique socialising power. These activities centre on the shared acquisition and consumption of the necessities of life, and include cooking and eating, the provision of warmth and shelter, childbirth and child-rearing, sexual relations and sleep, the care of the elderly and sick. They are visceral, necessitating the intimate, bodily and emotional participation of the self. Moreover, they are frequently linked to life-passage rituals during which the self undergoes a transformation (Turner, 1990; van Gennep, 1992). Those who share them share not just one aspect or episode of life, but universal experiences involving the totality of the self. Marshall Sahlins (2011a) defines kinship as mutuality of being, and this phrase suggests the essence of the commensal bond. For Sahlins, ‘kinsmen are persons who belong to one another, who are members of one another, who are co-present in each other, whose lives are joined and interdependent’ (Ibid: 11). Tribal members may use the first-person pronoun to refer to the group as a whole, recount the feats of ancestors long dead as their own doings, and speak of tribal lands as personal possessions (Ibid, 2011b: 228). Australian aborigines refer to their clan as ‘my body’, in the same way as the Christian marriage ceremony speaks of becoming ‘one flesh’ (Hyde, 2007: 17). This echoes Lévy-Bruhl’s concept of participation; among ‘primitive’ peoples, each represents himself to himself as an element of everything social and organic to which he belongs and in which he participates . . . he is what he is through his participation in the common stock – not simply in the clan as it exists in the present, but in the more or less recently deceased ancestors and in the mythical ancestors, and in the totem of the group. (1975: 75–76) Those who share the commensal bond participate in each other’s substance because they are engaged together in the processes which sustain and reproduce life itself.

A sacred economy 127 The commensal bond is not limited to biological kin. As we have seen, the household is a locus of transformation, into which strangers can be integrated through marriage, fosterage, adoption and hospitality in the same way as raw food is cooked and becomes a medium of sociability. ‘Mutuality of being’ applies to the constitution of kinship by social construction as well as by procreation (Sahlins, 2011a: 2). What Fustel de Coulagnes (1916) writes of the classical world is applicable elsewhere; the source of kinship was not the material fact of birth, but participation in the religious cult of the family and sacrifice to its Lares. We have no space here to go through the many examples of fictive kinship anthropologists have identified, and which continue to play an important role in households, fraternities and religious sects to this day. It is worth noting, however, with Sahlins, that ‘the constructed modes of kinship are like those predicated on birth precisely as they involve the transmission of life-capacities among persons’ (Ibid: 6). In other words, the biological is present even in what seems a purely social construct. The commensal bond provides the foundation for circles of intimate relations which provide localised social contexts of unique strength and durability. Within these contexts, above all that of the household, the elements of individual and social life accumulate over time and gain coherence through their association with a specific social group. The household is the nexus of the most important relationships of our lives, from which others – to extended family, friends, neighbours and workmates – extend outwards, occasionally taking on particular salience but rarely becoming as enduring or as central to our identity. Within the household there evolve a body of habitual practices and daily and weekly routines which establish the distinct tenor of its life. These provide its members with a sense of unity among themselves and distinctiveness as regards the outside world – and are usually localised in the physical fabric of the dwelling. Household and family thereby come to define the most basic horizons of our experience, providing the essential frame of reference through which we interpret reality. Today, the hearth is frequently replaced by the television as the centre of the home, the shared meal by casual eating, and the ancestral altar by the trophies and souvenirs of an individual life. Yet the relationships which they symbolise remain important. Sharing a single roof, holding possessions in common, and eating from the same supply continue to define the household; and while its members may no longer gather around a common hearth, the sharing of shelter still generates a community of fate. The members of the household remain embedded in networks of exchange with each other, which are simultaneously biological, economic, social and cultural. Those who share in the activities of everyday nurture and caring of which it is the centre establish an intimate participation in each other which is perhaps the strongest foundation of social bonds. These processes also persist as social potentials with a wider field of action. The sharing of food has an immense socialising power, whether among family members or at a neighbourhood barbecue. We still instinctively feel that we participate in some way in our ancestors and that they shape our identity, as the controversy around Ben Affleck and Finding Your Roots illustrates. Above all, this archaeology of the symbolic centres of the household reminds us that we are not detached and atomised

128 A sacred economy individuals, and that the basis of relationship is participation in one another’s being. The commensal bond retains its potential to found relationships which are both intimate and enduring, and these in turn anchor our identity and help give meaning to our experience.

Notes 1 In an interesting parallel to the Roman cult of the Lares, such shrines were sometimes located at crossroads (Singleton, 2009: 328). 2 Once more, note the parallel to the Roman cult of the Lares: ‘a traditionalist Akan even of today would not dare eat without putting the first morsel down for the ancestors. Nor would he drink anything, except drugs, without pouring the first layers to the ancestors. . . . Before and after travel, libation is poured to the ancestors to seek their blessings or in thanksgiving for the blessings on the journey’ (Pobee, 1976: 10).

7

Gifting and recognition

In the most famous of all Christmas stories, the first act of Ebenezer Scrooge upon his reformation is to dispatch a Christmas turkey to his impoverished clerk, Bob Cratchit, and his family. His second act is to give a large sum of money to a gentleman collecting for the poor and destitute of the town. A Christmas Carol records Scrooge’s passage from the frozen isolation of a miserly and mean-spirited existence to renewed life as a full participant in the world of human interchange and conviviality. It is no accident that this transformation is symbolised by the giving of a gift, for there are few means of establishing and maintaining relationships so powerful. However, as Dickens’ story also illustrates, the relationships created by gift exchange tend to be strongly localised and frequently intertwined with those of household and family. At the beginning of the story Scrooge is described as someone who wishes to ‘edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance’ (Dickens, 1994: 8). By the end, ‘He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew’ (Ibid: 76). When we first encounter him, Scrooge refuses all intercourse of social life; he is a man without friends, whose forbidding presence means no passer-by would so much as ask him for the time of day. In the visions subsequently brought to him by the spirits of Christmas Past and Present, this isolated and joyless existence is repeatedly contrasted with convivial scenes of families and friends united through the sharing of food, laughter and jollity: at the merchant Fezziwig’s where Scrooge had been an apprentice, at Bob Cratchit’s house on Christmas Eve and at the home of Scrooge’s nephew. What these scenes underline is that Scrooge’s isolation derives not just from his reluctance to part with money, but more fundamentally, from his refusal to give anything of himself. In an important passage Scrooge reflects on why he and his fellow apprentice had been so full of gratitude to Fezziwig for holding a Christmas party which cost his employer only a few pounds: He has the power to render us happy or unhappy; to make our service light or burdensome; a pleasure or a toil. Say that his power lies in words and looks; in things so slight and insignificant that it is impossible to add and count ‘em up: what then? The happiness he gives, is quite as great as if it cost a fortune. (Ibid: 33)

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Fezziwig paying for the entertainment is less important than the fact that he throws himself into the festivities with the greatest energy, welcoming all comers and disposing smiles and handshakes all round. This memory, in turn, causes Scrooge to reflect on his own relationship with Bob Cratchit. For what makes him seem an ‘Ogre’ (Ibid: 48) to Cratchit’s family is as much his hard and unfeeling manner as the poor wages that he pays. What, after, does Scrooge’s villainy consist in? He pays his taxes, he does not commit any crimes; he could argue that he is a productive member of society who provides employment and business in his city. Yet he is obnoxious because he is willing neither to give nor accept those everyday gifts of courtesy and care which make up the small change of social life. Consequently, he is incapable of any relationship beyond the narrowly commercial. By contrast, what makes Bob Cratchit’s home a haven of warmth despite his poverty is the recognition and care for each other which his family express in word and gesture. Significantly, the location of these exchanges is the household circle, depicted at Christmas, which for the Victorians was very much a festival of domesticity. Scrooge’s redemption, his change of heart, involves opening up to the everyday life around him so that he is able to give and receive pleasure. In phrases that mirror the initial description of his isolation, we are told that Scrooge ‘walked about the streets, and watched people hurrying to and fro, and questioned beggars . . . and found that everything could yield him pleasure’ (Ibid: 74). Gifts are at once the medium and the symbol of this reestablishment of social ties. By sending Bob Cratchit the biggest turkey he can find, Scrooge is recognising him as a fellow human being to whom he is bound by a mesh of mutual responsibilities and affective ties, rather than a hired hand to whom his obligations are merely contractual. The implications of this change are signalled when we are told that Scrooge became a ‘second father’ to Cratchit’s crippled son, Tiny Tim (Ibid: 76), whom an earlier vision had predicted would die if the future were not changed. It is significant that this relationship is described using the register of family ties, because in modern societies gift exchange and recognition tend to be centred in the household, from where they expand outward to friends and neighbours. As Mauss (1990) recognised, gift exchange is a dynamic, ongoing process through which social relationships are created, maintained and expanded in an ever-widening circle. Gift exchange also implies recognition of the person with whom the gift is exchanged as significant in themselves, apart from any instrumental relations or legal obligations we may have to them. Just as in Chapter 6 the concept of commensality was broadened out from the sharing of food to the sharing of whatever sustains and reproduces life under one roof, here gift exchange is conceptualised as not just the exchange of material goods, or even services, but as embracing all symbolic acts of recognition. Through the interlocking processes of gift exchange and recognition, a nexus of relationships is created and sustained – to household and family, friends and neighbours – which provides a local context of action with which other aspects of social life (habits, practices, rituals and symbolic meanings) become associated and enmeshed. It frames our experience and provides the prism through which we approach the wider world.

Gifting and recognition 131 Both gift exchange and recognition involve an intimate participation in the identity of others: as Mauss (1990) stresses, a part of one’s self always goes along with the gift, while recognition is defined by Pizzorno (1991) as the reciprocal constitution of social identities. In each case the self is shaped and reshaped in mutuality with others through participation in a nexus of social relations which pre-dates it, rather than existing ab initio as an asocial ego. Moreover, in contrast to a commercial exchange, which is complete in the instant of the transaction, every exchange of gifts leaves a surplus of obligation, which prepares the ground for a new exchange in the future (Eisenstein, 2011). Consequently, gift exchange is orientated towards the maintenance of relations across time, and tends to give rise to relationships that are more enduring than purely contractual ones. The relationships involved are almost invariably face-to-face, and while circles of gift exchange and recognition are dynamic and can readily open outwards to accommodate new participants, they are also inherently bounded by the constraints of space and time. Consequently, the contexts of social action which they generate tend to be localised, not necessarily in space, but in terms of being immediate, bounded and particular.

Gift relations It is the essence of the gift, as Mauss recognised, that it cannot be fully separated from the giver: ‘to make a gift of something to someone is to make a present of some part of oneself’ (Ibid: 16). Things participate in the personality of those who possess them; the Roman familia included the res or goods of the household as well as the people (Ibid: 63). Hence, gift cycles involve, as it were, ‘a constant exchange of a spiritual matter, including things and men, between clans and individuals’ (Ibid: 18). In the process of gift exchange, ‘Souls are mixed with things; things with souls. Lives are mingled together’ (Ibid: 25). It is for this reason that Charles Eisenstein understands gifts as sacred: because they are unique, insofar as they partake of the personality of the giver, and simultaneously promote interdependency, expanding the circle of the self to include the entire community (2011: 18). ‘Gifts cement the mystical realization of participation in something greater than oneself which, yet, is not separate from oneself’ (Ibid). The line between gift and commodity, sacred and profane exchange is determined by the extent to which the things exchanged partake in the personality of their owners. For a thing to have market value it must be emotionally detachable or alienable from ourselves; only then can it be quantified, weighed in the scales and fitted with a price tag (Hyde, 2007: 64). In ancient Rome, in contrast to the familia, pecunia – goods less implicated in the collective identity of the household, such as the cattle in distant fields, metals and money – could be traded. A similar distinction between property which is part of the family sacra, and can only be exchanged in the form of a gift, and property which is more readily alienable, was noted by Mauss in a variety of different cultures (1990: 64). From this the cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange naturally follows: ‘a gift

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establishes a feeling-bond between two people, while the sale of a commodity leaves no necessary connection’ (Hyde, 2007: 58). Gifts therefore create relationships, in contrast to market exchanges where the goods are separate from the seller. The gift is ‘the very principle of normal social life’ (Mauss, 1990: 89). Because the things exchanged in gift relationships are never completely detached from those who carry out the exchange, ‘The mutual ties and alliance that they establish are comparatively indissoluble’ (Ibid: 42). This is why presents are exchanged on occasions such as a marriage: as Mauss notes, they operate to give the two ‘sides’ in the alliance the same nature (Ibid: 25). Gift exchange therefore underpins kinship – especially if we adopt Sahlin’s (2011a) definition of this as mutuality of being, a characteristic of persons who are members of one another and participate intrinsically in each other’s existence. Kin are enmeshed in particularly thick and intricate webs of gift exchange; however, the dynamic quality of the gift extends beyond the immediate members of the family to integrate friends and neighbours into its social circle. Cheal (1988) argues that the defining characteristic of the gift is redundancy; a gift is something beyond what we would expect to receive, and often brings no net advantage to its recipients because of the reciprocity built into gift exchange. An example is wedding gifts, which often only cover the cost of the hospitality provided to guests at the wedding dinner (Ibid: 139). For Cheal, therefore, gifts are ‘symbolic media for managing the emotional aspects of relationships’ (Ibid: 5). It is their expressive rather than their instrumental functions which are important. The gift economy serves as a ritual means for the maintenance and reproduction of the small social worlds which provide the core of people’s emotional lives. These are embedded in a moral economy of gift relations distinct from the market. Within this moral economy, ritual transfers of gifts ‘provide the means with which to construct social ties, and the time and symbols with which to think about them’ (Ibid: 104–105). The instrumental redundancy of the gift places the emphasis on its social value as an expression of affection or regard and the desire to establish or maintain a relationship. We might wish to qualify Cheal’s strict distinction between the instrumental and symbolic value of the gift, since even in contemporary societies gifts often have a practical value: think of the blankets and baby clothes presented to the parents of a newborn, or the gifts given to a young couple establishing a home together. However, Cheal is correct to highlight the crucial role of gifts as symbolic media signifying not just the existence of a relationship but frequently also its character, health and the degree of closeness involved. While market exchanges are complete in themselves and create no further obligations, gift exchanges are open-ended, which further contributes to the creation of an ongoing relationship between the participants (Eisenstein, 2011: 17). A number of features of gift exchange facilitate this relationship. First, there tends to be a separation in time between the receipt of a gift and its return (Mauss, 1990: 45). This makes it harder to assess the equivalence of the exchange. Second, as Lewis Hyde (2007) notes, there is no certainty at the moment of giving a gift of getting a return of equivalent value, or any return at all. A gift is not a gift if the nature of the return expected is specified in advance; in this case it becomes barter or sale

Gifting and recognition 133 (Eisenstein, 2011: 274). Malinowski described how, in the Kula, the system of gift exchange in the Trobriand Islands, it was prohibited to discuss, bargain about and compute the relative value of the gifts being exchanged. The counter-gift was a matter for the giver, and could not be enforced by any kind of coercion (Hyde, 2007: 15). This means there is frequently a surplus of obligation left over after a gift ,which instigates further exchange. ‘A market exchange has an equilibrium or stasis: you pay to balance the scale. But when you give a gift there is momentum, and the weight shifts from body to body’ (Ibid: 9). Third, there is the dynamic implicit in Mauss’ famous three ‘laws’: the obligation to give, the obligation to receive and the obligation to reciprocate. Even if a particular exchange of gifts establishes a rough equivalence, the obligation to give, and to give again, remains. This means that gift giving is a spiral, in which participants incessantly pass on gifts or favours which incorporate an element of their own personality, maintaining a permanent state of shared participation and mutuality of being among those so connected. Lewis Hyde writes, ‘whatever we have been given is supposed to be given away again, not kept. Or, if it is kept, something of similar value should move on in its stead . . . the gift must always move’ (Ibid: 4). Not to reciprocate, or to break the circle, is to refuse communion. ‘To refuse to give, to fail to invite, just as to refuse to accept, is tantamount to declaring war; it is to reject the bond of alliance and commonality’ (Mauss, 1990: 17). ‘To refuse a gift is to spurn relationship’ (Eisenstein, 2011: 243). Gifts are not confined to dyadic exchanges, but have formed the basis of entire societies. The example of the Trobriand Islands – where gifts travelled in a circuit of the islands lasting between two and ten years – demonstrates the ability of gift exchange to create a community out of individual expressions of goodwill (Hyde, 2007). By contrast, in most contexts a transfer of money signals social distance (Ellickson, 2008: 110). Hence the predominance or absence of gift relations is a crucial marker distinguishing relations between those who share a common home from those with strangers. Lewis Hyde notes that ‘commodity exchange will be either missing or frowned upon to the degree that a group thinks of itself as one body’ (2007: 63). Thus, the Jews in the Old Testament were prohibited from engaging in usury among themselves but could lend at interest to outsiders. The breakdown of gift relations usually signals the breakdown of community (Ibid: 5). Thomas Jefferson had a saying that ‘The merchant has no homeland’ (Ibid: 116). Commodity exchange is both the product and the purveyor of alienation and estrangement. Among traditional peoples the circle of the gift expands beyond the society of the living to include the dead, the natural world and the gods – gifts to whom incite their generosity in return, and so secure the fertility of animals, humans and the land (Mauss, 1990: 18). In Latin, traditio meant both the surrender of a possession and a teaching or saying handed down from earlier times. This underlines the degree to which culture is a gift from the ancestors – one which, like all gifts, creates a spiritual bond. The abundance of nature was likewise seen by traditional peoples as a gift which confirmed them in their relationship with the land. The Kwakiutl Indians gave an elaborate welcome to the first salmon caught in the year, and returned its skeleton intact to the water (Hyde, 2007: 27–28). In the Old

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Testament, God gives the tribe its wealth, and the first fruits of that wealth are given back to Him as a return gift (Ibid: 20). Fertility and growth are common results of gift exchange in folklore, where generosity is invariably rewarded with good fortune and success (Ibid: 26). Generosity has as its root genere, the Old Latin for beget or produce, and the generations are its consequence (Ibid: 36). In some German villages the scale of the wedding gifts was seen as an indication of the future fertility of the young couple (Mauss, 1990: 78). Perhaps these beliefs stem from the fact that participation in the circulation of the gift nourishes those parts of our being that are not entirely personal, which derive from our connection to the group, nature, the ancestors or the gods (Hyde, 2007: 39). Whereas commodity exchange is based on severing things from the common wealth of nature and humanity and creating an artificial scarcity (Eisenstein, 2011), gift exchange is the economy of abundance and mutual participation. For Mauss the gift is a total social fact: religious, juridicial, moral, economic and aesthetic (Mauss, 1990: 101). It pre-exists, and transcends, the fragmentation of life into dichotomous and mutually exclusive spheres which is characteristic of modernity. Instead, within a gift economy the elements of social life form an undifferentiated whole in which all its members participate. Such an undifferentiated nexus of social life is preserved in the household, which is a gift economy par excellence, in that it operates on the basis of shared access to the goods it produces or obtains, distributed on the basis of need rather than in return for payment. For Weber the household ‘implies solidarity in dealing with the outside and communism of property and consumption of everyday goods within’ (1968: 359). It allocates space, time and resources for the collective good, and does so as a community rather than a monetary economy using criteria of cost efficiency (Douglas, 1991: 297). As Mary Douglas writes: Not a money economy, the home is the typical gift economy described by Marcel Mauss. Every service and transfer is part of an ongoing comprehensive system of exchanges, within and between the generations. The transactions never look like exchanges because the gesture of reciprocity is delayed and disguised. No one can know the worth of their own contribution to the home. (Ibid: 302) The ‘gifts’ exchanged within the household include not only food and shelter but also nurture and care, social interchange, and recognition of our identity as a member of the family group. In fact, all the things which go into maintaining successful relationships among household members – love, companionship, emotional support, a listening ear, attention to the other’s needs – partake of the nature of the gift. These processes of gift exchange and recognition build up relationships based on circles of reciprocity and mutuality, whose members depend on each other for both their practical and emotional needs, and so come to participate in one another’s being. Underpinning this pattern of intimate exchange is the need to care for the young (as well as the elderly and the sick), which helps ensure the solidarity and capacity

Gifting and recognition 135 for self-sacrifice that are required for the household to operate (Ibid: 306). The household is therefore founded on the unconditional gift of nurture and care for those too weak to offer anything in return – a gift offered instinctively rather than as a matter of conscious choice. According to David Cheal, ‘it is in the process of nurturing life – in biological reproduction and in the reproduction of everyday life – that the deepest commitments to giving of oneself are located’ (1988: 89). Charles Eisenstein writes of the resulting centrality of the gift to human experience: We are born helpless infants, creatures of pure need with little resource to give, yet we are fed, we are protected, we are clothed and held and soothed, without having done anything to deserve it, without offering anything in exchange. . . . Our lives are given us; therefore, our default state is gratitude. (2011: 14) Mauss wrote of the gift: ‘this morality and organisation still function in our own societies, in unchanging fashion and, so to speak, hidden, below the surface, and . . . in this we have found one of the human foundations on which our societies are built’ (Mauss, 1990: 5). More recent writers have agreed: for Keohane and Kuhling (2014: 30) the gift ‘is formative and constitutive of all social relations, and is the foundation of civilisation’. The gift has a dynamic power to create relationships and to maintain them, and this includes not only relationships with our contemporaries but also with our ancestors and with the natural world. The gift connects. And because to give a gift is to give a part of one’s self, it connects us not as discrete and separate beings flashing signals across a void, but as participants in a web of mutuality which is the very origin and centre of our being. At the same time, it is important to recognise that the impact of the gift is strongest when the exchange is an immediate one between particular individuals who are known to each other, and that the relationships thus created operate most powerfully when they form relatively stable and localised networks. Attempts to theorise the gift as a basis of the modern welfare state (Mauss, 1990; Titmus, 1973; Keohane & Kuhling, 2014) run aground on the fact that the involuntary exchange of resources with anonymous individuals whom we will never encounter does not generate solidarity in the same way as the voluntary exchange of goods and favours with specific partners with whom we participate in an ongoing nexus of relationships.

Circles of recognition The giving of gifts is inseparable from recognition of the personality of our partners in the exchange. In other words, the bond created by the gift is more than instrumental, and we relate to our partner in gift exchange as a whole person with their own identity, preferences and needs, rather than an abstract entity defined in purely economic, legal or contractual terms. This is the significance of the ‘redundancy’ of the gift noted by David Cheal (1988). The relationship between gift

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exchange and recognition is encapsulated in the Tsimshan story of ‘Little Otter’ recounted by Mauss. Little Otter was killed in his animal form while out fishing by a tribe who did not know who he was, because they had not been invited to the feast where his grandfather presented him to the other chiefs. ‘The potlatch, the distribution of goods, is the basic act of ‘recognition’. . . . One ‘recognizes’ the chief or his son and becomes ‘grateful’ to him’ (Mauss, 1990: 52). Gift exchange therefore involves a double act of recognition: you recognise those to whom you give, those you invite to the feast, and in accepting the gift they recognise you as the giver. Each participant leaves with their social identity reaffirmed and reinforced. For Alessandro Pizzorno the roots of social order are found in such processes of mutual recognition (1991: 227). Sociality is based not on rational actors maximising utility or self-interest, but on relations between people who attribute to each other a social identity (Ibid, 2008: 162). The self is constituted by the recognition bestowed by others, and this constitution is mutual (Ibid, 1991: 219). The individual self is therefore a relational entity, dependent on others for recognition, and emerges from the social world rather than preceding it. Likewise, our values and interests are not pre-social givens, but are constituted through their recognition by the collectives of which we are members. As Pizzorno writes elsewhere: it seems difficult to hold values, to be gratified by rewards, to enjoy satisfactions, without referring to other individuals who are able to recognize those values, rewards, satisfactions, and to respond in some terms to them. (1986: 360) Indeed, the fundamental human desire for self-preservation refers not primarily to physical survival but to the preservation of one’s identity, which is dependent on gaining recognition from others (Ibid, 1991: 226). Gift exchange is a particularly powerful means for the mutual constitution of social identities, as suggested by the story of Little Otter. Perhaps this is why the giving of gifts so often accompanies a rite of passage. A wedding present recognises the new identity of the recipients as a married couple. Likewise, the gifts given on such occasions as the birth of a child, a confirmation or bar mitzvah, or on graduation or retirement signify not just appreciation or affection but the acquisition of a new social identity on the part of the recipient. A birthday or Christmas present is usually selected to reflect something of the character or interests of the person to whom it is given. Gifts exchanged by a couple on occasions such as their wedding anniversary similarly constitute a mutual reaffirmation of their relationship. Such an exchange of gifts ‘usually confirms that a relationship is anchored in a framework of mutual recognition of the participants’ social and personal identities’ (Cheal, 1988: 22). One corollary of Pizzorno’s theory of selfhood is that the unitary choosing subject potentially turns into a plurality of role-performing actors, adopting different identities and values according to the multitude of social situations in which they may find themselves. The self is not a monad, but relational and participatory; it

Gifting and recognition 137 subsists in our relationships with others, with whom we reciprocally constitute our identities. We see ourselves in the mirror of other eyes, and when this mirror is absent what remains is little more than a ghost. How then to maintain coherence in our selfhood over time? ‘A person is a succession of choosing selves that may have something in common only if they are located in a common circle of recognition’ (Ibid, 1986: 368). Maintaining a cohesive identity and avoiding confusion over values requires the support of a stable and durable circle of people who recognise the same values. It is easier to maintain an identity as an environmentalist if you are actively involved in some campaigning organisation; as a Jehovah’s Witness, if you are a part of a congregation; as a recovering alcoholic, if you join Alcoholics Anonymous. Through mutual recognition we give and receive the matter of our psychic lives, just as in the domestic activities of the household we exchange and transmute the substance of our physical existence. In fact, material exchange and social recognition can hardly be distinguished in practice, for outside of strictly commoditised relationships each implies the other. Gift exchange and mutual recognition are therefore essential to our existence as social beings, and wherever we encounter them, whether it be in a household, neighbourhood, voluntary association or religious congregation, we quickly come to feel at home. This may be with a close-knit circle of friends; it may be with members of a religious or political group who share our most important values; or it may be within a community formed on the basis of some other commonality such as ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation. However, the most intimate and enduring circles of recognition are usually found within the household and family. The stability of relationships within the household is vital for the construction and preservation of the self. Home ‘is where I don’t need to explain who I am. . . . In the place where we are not at home, we have no name’ (Norris, 1990: 242). As bell hooks (2009) writes of her own childhood, ‘Home was the place where the me of me mattered’. Home is where we are recognised without difficulty, and consequently do not feel the need to wear a mask or act a part. This kind of instant recognition and ease of understanding can only come about through long familiarity. Perhaps this is part of the reason why sheer presence is, as Mary Douglas notes, so important to the home: ‘the main contribution of members to the collective good is to be physically present at its assemblies. An act of presence is a public service. Absence is to be deplored’ (Douglas, 1991: 301). What grants us entry to any home is an initial act of recognition. In the case of a household, this takes place at the ritual welcoming of a new baby into the world, a marriage partner into the family, or a guest into the house. Ongoing acts of recognition follow, which are integrated into the web of symbolic and biophysical exchange centred on the household, mutually constituting it as a site of social reproduction. In the case of other associations, there may be formal acts of initiation or informal rites of welcome which grant the incoming member a new identity as part of the group, thus enabling them to participate in its reciprocal circle of recognition. Mutual recognition, then, is the currency of home, spent in countless daily acts of attention and care, words and gestures, shared references and silent

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understandings. In this respect, home contrasts sharply with the public arena, which is characterised by Szakolczai (2013) as a theatrical space where people wear masks both to protect their identity and as a means to power. Home, on the other hand, is characterised by the assumption that you truly are as you appear, with no discrepancy between a ‘public’ and a ‘private’ self. Consequently, it is a place ‘where impulse can be spontaneous and free. It contrasts with public environments where people must partake in roles and behaviours required to maintain a particular public image’ (Seamon, 1979: 83). The basis of this freedom of social intercourse is the participatory character of relationships based on commensality, gift exchange and mutual recognition; since our identity is reciprocally constituted by those with whom we share a home, there is no need for self-consciousness or disguise. This can become problematic, however, in a highly individualised society, as we may feel the social identity ascribed to us by others diverges from who we truly are ‘inside’. In some cases, this discrepancy may be experienced as so crippling or painful that a total break becomes necessary to resolve it. We must ‘leave home’, physically and socially. Yet typically this simply initiates a quest to find another home, this time among people who recognise us ‘as we truly are’.

Conclusion Gift exchange as we have described it extends beyond the transfer of goods to capture a logic of social exchange which is ubiquitous in everyday life – one where there is a constant interchange of goods, services and gestures, which as Cheal (1988) puts it are ‘redundant’ in instrumental terms. As such, gift exchange blends into those processes of mutual recognition through which we reciprocally constitute each other’s social identities. Gift exchange and recognition therefore operate as two conceptually distinct, but practically inseparable processes. Alongside commensality, these processes are integral to sociability – the construction and maintenance of social relationships outside the spheres of economic exchange or legal-bureaucratic obligation. Because the resultant relationships are immediate, particularised and based on intimate participation, they comprise localised contexts of social interaction which integrate experience and generate a sense of belonging and home. As in the case of commensality, relationships founded on gift exchange and recognition generate ‘mutuality of being’ (Sahlins, 2011a). Even more than is the case with commensality, the processes of gift exchange and recognition can be traced at different scales of social life. However, the core locus of both in contemporary society is the household. Because gift exchange and recognition, like the commensal bond, result in the mutual participation of people in each other’s identity, the members of a household exercise a powerful moral claim on each other. According to Weber in his discussion of patriarchal authority, the household is ‘the fundamental basis of loyalty and authority, which in turn is the basis of many other groups’ (1968: 359). Relationships within the household are characterised neither by contractual freedom nor the maximisation of self-interest, but implication in a web of exchanges which precedes, and constitutes, the individual. These kinds of obligation can at

Gifting and recognition 139 times appear oppressive and stifling, but they also offer a security which can be found nowhere else. As Robert Frost said, home is the place where they have to take you in. Roger Scruton argues (2012) that our obligations to parents and family, place and community, upon which we depend for nurture and without which we could not develop into persons, are fundamentally different from those which arise from the free dealings between adult individuals. ‘The Romans knew them as obligations of piety (pietas), meaning that they stem from the natural gratitude towards what is given, a gratitude that we spontaneously direct to the gods’ (Ibid, 2012: 224). Pietas meant ‘dutiful conduct towards the gods, one’s parents, relatives, benefactors and country’ (Lewis & Short, 1880, quoted in Fortes, 1961: 178). Gratitude and piety as social motives are at once ubiquitous, powerful, and – in contemporary public discourse – largely ignored. Their presence underlines that, contrary to the contractarian myth, society is not an agreement between preexistent individuals. Instead, it is through the network of exchanges we have described – the interchange of gifts and recognition, the sacred economy of home – that the individual comes into being and grows into consciousness. ‘Before he is “cast into the world,” as claimed by certain hasty metaphysics, man is laid in the cradle of the house. And always, in our daydreams, the house is a large cradle’ (Bachelard, 1994: 7). Hence the ground of ethics and social life is not abstract reasoning or the selfinterest of individuals, but the transmission of an ‘ethos’ – a shared sense of who we are and how we should conduct our lives – within the framework of relationships founded on the closely related processes of commensality, gift relations and recognition. These unfold first of all within the household. ‘Home, insofar as it is an intimately lived-in place, is imbued with moral meaning’ (Tuan, 1991: 105). In a known and familiar habitat, ‘we can be “ethical” in the originary sense of this word, which implies a community of like-minded creatures’ (Casey, 1993: 292). Home provides not just the origin but the ongoing motivation for ethical behaviour. As Roger Scruton (2012) argues, an ethical life cannot be derived from abstract principles, but requires concrete, historically rooted obligations. He describes oikophilia, the love of home, as ‘a motive that comprehends all our deepest attachments, and which spills out in the moral, aesthetic and spiritual emotions that transfigure our world’ (Ibid: 214). Originating in our need for nurture and safety, oikophilia is a transformative emotion which imbues our surroundings with moral significance. ‘It is a call to responsibility, and a rebuke to calculation. It tells us to love, and not to use; to respect, and not to exploit. It invites us to look on things in our “homescape” as we look on persons, not as means only, but as ends in themselves’ (Ibid: 253). This kind of ethic does not arise from critical reflection and debate but from the taken-for-granted values and relationships of everyday life. Our home is not something external to us which we can easily reflect on; insofar as it is our home, we are on the inside, enmeshed in a network of exchanges which sustains both our identity and our physical and social being. It is only when everyday life stops being taken for granted that values become problematised, and the slide towards critical aporia begins. There is therefore a close connection between

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homelessness and anomie, the loss of place and the erosion of social norms (Casey, 1993: xi). These processes, which embody the deep anthropological roots of social relations, are being challenged in contemporary society. The reduction of the household’s functions, the erosion of its independence, the pervasive monetisation of relationships, and the penetration of technology into the most intimate crevices of domestic life, have narrowed the scope of the household economy and weakened its hold over its members. Gifts create obligations and in contemporary society any obligation is often seen as a threat (Eisenstein, 2011: 243). The giving of a gift places the recipient in a position of dependence on the donor (Mauss, 1990); mutual gifts create mutual dependence, in contrast to the individualism of commodity exchange. ‘When we pay for everything we receive, we remain independent, disconnected, free from obligation, and free from ties’ (Eisenstein, 2011: 243). Yet obligation is inherent in relationship, and to refuse every obligation is to refuse relationship – the situation in which Scrooge finds himself at the outset of A Christmas Carol. Restricted in scope though its functions may be compared to the past, the household continues to be the emotional centre of people’s lives and to function on the basis of daily acts of gift exchange and recognition. And its foundation remains the unconditional gift of nurture and care to beings too weak and helpless to reciprocate. To participate in this sacred economy is ‘to emerge from self’ (Mauss, 1990: 91) into the world of sociability and interrelationship. It is to acknowledge our connectedness to others (the tribe), to the past (the ancestors) and to existential being (the gods), and to centre these webs of connection in a home. The self is not a monad, but is woven from a web of reciprocal participation in the being of others. At the most fundamental level, to come home is to accept this, and work to repair and sustain these relationships which are the basis of a meaningful life.

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The boundaries of home

According to ancient writers, the city of Rome was founded on 21 April in the year 753 BC. When the auspicious day arrived, Romulus first assured himself of the gods’ blessing by taking an augury from the flight of birds. Next, his followers, having purified themselves by leaping through fire, dug a pit at the centre of the future settlement into which they threw clods of earth from their homelands and the first sheaves of the harvest. The pit was filled up, an altar built on top, and here they lit a sacred fire, the common hearth of the new city. With his head covered and draped in a ceremonial toga, the founder then yoked a white cow and bull to a plough and drove a furrow around the future boundary of the city. His followers came behind, picking up the clods of earth and piling them on the inside of the furrow to mark the line of the wall and ditch that would surround the settlement. This series of ceremonial actions was called the Etruscan rite, and in historical times it took place at the foundation of any Roman colony. According to Joseph Rykwert, the most important part of the whole ceremony was the cutting of the sulcus primigenius, the first furrow, around the future boundary of the city (1976: 65). This was the act which defined and constituted the civic space. The act of ploughing is frequently used in ancient literature as shorthand for the foundation ceremony as a whole: Virgil does so, for example, on at least three occasions in The Aeneid (Book I, 425; V, 755; and VII, 157). The ceremonial ploughing was also frequently depicted on the coins of Roman coloniae as a symbol of their foundation (Eckstein, 1979: 90). The plough was driven counter-clockwise, and whenever it reached the place marked out for a future gate it would be lifted up and carried over. It was this carrying (portare) which provided the root of porta, a gate (Rykwert, 1976: 65). Openings were thereby left in the sacred boundary of the city through which profane traffic might come and go. At the close of the ceremony, the founder sacrificed the bull and the cow and addressed a prayer to Jupiter, Mars and Vesta (Carandini, 2011: 57). The boundaries of the urbs were thereafter sacrosanct. An ancient law prescribed the death penalty for anyone who committed the sacrilege of climbing over the city’s walls (Rykwert, 1976: 134). Romulus allegedly killed his brother Remus for the crime of leaping in contempt over the ditch he had cast up at the site of the planned wall of Rome. Moreover, these boundaries were ritually reinforced on a

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regular basis. On at least two occasions during the year the boundaries of Rome were lustrated by the dance of the Salian brothers. At the festival of the Lupercalia, a party of young men ran around the ancient limits of the city on the Palatine Hill. The pomerium was also reinforced at times of crisis: Following dire portents, the pontifices purified the city with solemn lustrations, moving round the circuit of the pomerium. For example, in A.D. 43 the discovery inside a temple on the Capitol of a horned owl, a bird considered to be particularly inauspicious, led to the lustration of the city. (Beard, 1998: 193) The act of driving the first furrow constituted the town as an urbs, as a civic, political, and religious unit which was more than the sum of the individuals who composed it. It did this by physically marking and ritually consecrating the city’s boundaries. Only the deities of the city and its inhabitants were allowed inside, foreign gods being consigned to temples outside the walls, and only within its limits could the auspices of the city be taken (Fowler, 1911). The sacred character of a city’s boundaries was therefore at least as important as their practical value as a means of physical defence. The boundaries constituted the city as a distinct entity; drawing them was an act of creation, bringing cosmos out of chaos. They offered security through defining the city as an enclosed and familiar space. In this respect it is significant that the Latin word condere, ‘to found’, literally means ‘to hide’ (Carandini, 2011: 54). The city walls raised on the foundation of the first furrow gave the inhabitants ontological as well as practical security. In The Sacred and the Profane (1959), Mircea Eliade distinguishes between two fundamentally different kinds of space. Profane space is homogenous and neutral, a geometric expanse with no qualitative difference between its parts. Sacred space, on the other hand, is constituted by a multiplicity of centres, the sites of hierophanies where some aspect of divinity has been revealed. These are both qualitatively different and more intensely real than other areas of space. From this perspective, boundaries are more than arbitrary lines on a map; they mark out divergent realities. For the believer a church participates in a different space to the street outside, and its threshold separates two modes of being, the profane and the religious (Ibid: 25). According to Eliade, modern non-religious man inhabits profane space, which in its geometrical uniformity has been stripped of sacred significance. But even in industrialised society there are privileged places, ‘qualitatively different from all others – a man’s birthplace, or the scenes of his first love, or certain places in the first foreign city he visited in youth’ (Ibid: 24). These ‘are the “holy places” of his private universe’ (Ibid: 24). Home is one of these holy places, just as it was to those traditional peoples who, as we have seen, built their houses or tents as replicas of the cosmos. Home – whether at the scale of a house, an urban neighbourhood, a small town, or a country – is perceived as qualitatively different from the surrounding space. It is the centre around which we organise our world, a centre which concentrates value so that it appears more intensely real than anywhere else. As such

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it takes on many of the qualities Eliade ascribes to sacred as opposed to profane space. This is why the boundaries of home are important; they distinguish a particular way of being. The cutting of the sacred furrow around Rome established the identity of the nascent city, distinct from that of the villages which had preceded it, and transformed the inhabitants of those villages into citizens of the Roman state. The inscription of symbolic boundaries crystallises such discrete ways of being and belonging and stabilises them across time through their association with a particular place or social setting. It does so by defining a localised context of social action within which experience takes on coherence and meaning. The ritual inscription of boundaries particularises space as home and place, endowing the life within with a distinctive quality which infuses future experience. The boundaries of home are not legal and political but psychic and psychological, religio-magical and symbolic. They are constructed and reinforced through both ritual and the habitual actions of everyday life, and they require the full participation of the inhabitants if they are to be effective. Their function is not just to define ownership of a stretch of territory, but more fundamentally, to mark out a space as familiar and secure. They offer us refuge and intimacy, ontological security and an enclosed world within which meaning can take shape.

Threshold and boundary rituals The Neoplatonic philosopher Porphyry wrote in The Cave of the Nymphs that ‘A threshold is a sacred thing’ (quoted in Bachelard, 1994: 223), and the doorway, as the principal entry to a house, is in many cultures protected by ritual and taboo. Most people are familiar with the practice of nailing horseshoes over a door to protect the household from bad luck. Similar customs have been recorded worldwide since antiquity. In ancient Egypt, inscriptions on the side-posts and lintels of doors were designed to bring good luck to the house (Trumbull, 1896: 68). In Uganda every house traditionally had charms hung above the door, while others were laid across the threshold (Ibid). In Russia a cross was drawn on the threshold to keep off witches. When a house was being built in Lithuania, a cross or other lucky object was buried under the threshold (Ibid: 17). In China coins were put under the door sill when it was laid and charms fastened over it (Ibid: 71). In Japan a thin rope of rice straw called the shinenawa – one of the sacred symbols of Shintoism – was traditionally suspended over the entrance of a house (Ibid). Among the Kabyle, at the spring equinox a bouquet was hung from the lintel of the door and a little bag of herbs buried at the threshold of the stable to secure fertility and protection in the year ahead (Bourdieu, 1977: 148). It was the custom in Britain, when a house was being built, to protect the threshold by leaving implements crossed over it until it was in use (Richardson, 1993). In the traditional North-Indian courtyard house, the haveli, a statue of Ganesh over the main entrance welcomes guests and secures prosperity (Bryden, 2004: 34). In many parts of India, women create intricate threshold designs by trickling finely ground white stone or chalk powder through their hands. Renewed every day as part of

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their regular housework, these designs are associated with the goddess Lakshmi and ritually safeguard the passage between inner and outer space, while also having a larger, cosmic significance (Dohmen, 2004). The practice of avoiding contact with the threshold is widely attested, and in a range of cultures there are prohibitions on sitting, working, or stepping upon it (Porter, 1993). The custom of entering the house in one big step so as to avoid the threshold continues to be attested in modern Paris (Rosselin, 1999: 56). It is likely that this aversion to stepping on the threshold arose from a feeling that to do so would breach the boundary of the household. This is manifest in the belief, common in Poland and Russia, that it is bad luck to shake hands or kiss across the threshold. Either of these actions would involve a symbolic breach of the boundary, which could let bad luck into the home. A similar fear would seem to lie behind many bridal and burial customs. The practice of carrying a bride over the threshold of her new home has an ancient lineage, forming part of the marriage ceremony in civilisations as diverse as ancient Rome, Greece, Assyria, China and India (Trumbull, 1896: 36–39). Among the Kabyle, a bride crosses the threshold on the back of one of her husband’s kinsmen, but never her husband, ‘for the person who carries her interposes himself, intercepting the malignant forces which might otherwise affect her fertility and of which the threshold, the meeting point between two opposed worlds, is the site’ (Bourdieu, 1979: 280). The passage of a corpse across the threshold was likewise a source of apprehension. According to Trumbull: It is not allowable to carry out a corpse through the main door of a house in Italy. There is a smaller door, in the side wall, known as the porta di morta, which is kept closed except as it is opened for the removal of a body at the time of a funeral. (1896: 24) In India, if somebody died at a particular phase of the moon it was impermissible to carry their body over the threshold (Ibid: 23). Certain of the natives of Alaska went so far in their horror of defiling the threshold with a corpse that the dying were driven out of the house so as not to pollute it by their death (Ibid: 224). In Japan the threshold was sprinkled with salt after a funeral (Ibid: 20). Marriage and death are both liminal moments when the composition of the household is in flux, and this expresses itself in a heightened concern for the maintenance of its symbolic boundaries. It is not just the individual householder who has felt the need to ritually assert the boundaries of their home. The inhabitants of towns and villages have frequently sought to delimit the frontiers of their territory by symbolic means. An example is the ancient custom of beating the bounds, which was practised by the Christian Church from at least the sixth century and is still observed in some English parishes today (Davidson, 1993: 8). Led by the parish priest and parochial officials, old and young members of the community walked the boundaries of the parish on Ascension Day or during Rogation week. A crowd of young boys carried green boughs with which they beat the boundary markers. Originally the boys

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themselves were likely to be beaten, bumped, thrown into streams and dragged through hedges in order to impress the parish boundary on their minds. The ceremony had a practical purpose in the days before modern maps and survey techniques; it ensured that the boundaries of the village lands were intact and impressed the memory of where they lay on the younger generation. But it also had a ritual purpose, as hymns were sung and blessings invoked on land and harvest. In the village of Anderen in the Netherlands as late as 1949, ‘village elders and teenaged youths continued the annual practice of inspecting the boundary markers. The elders, to ensure that the young would not forget the exact location of the markers, boxed the youngsters’ ears’ (Tuan, 1979: 166). In traditional China each town was the market and administrative centre for its surrounding rural hinterland. This region was symbolically reinforced at regular intervals by a religious procession, which defined the earthly domain of its temple god (Ibid: 169). In medieval Europe the walls of cities were ritually consecrated by priests walking in procession to defend against the devil, sickness and death (Eliade, 1959: 49). In ancient Rome the 23rd of February was the occasion of the Terminalia, a festival in honour of the god Terminus, who presided over boundaries. Both private families and the Roman state used the occasion to reaffirm the ancient limits of their land: His statue was merely a stone or post stuck in the ground to distinguish between properties. On the festival the two owners of adjacent property crowned the statue with garlands and raised a rude altar, on which they offered up some corn, honeycombs, and wine, and sacrificed a lamb (Hor. Epod. II.59). They concluded with singing the praises of the god (Ovid. Fast. II.639, &c.). The public festival in honour of this god was celebrated at the sixth milestone on the road towards Laurentum (Id. 682), doubtless because this was originally the extent of the Roman territory in that direction. (Smith, 1875: 1112) Similarly, the Greeks had a cult of Zeus horios, Zeus of the boundaries, who guarded the frontiers of both privately owned land and the city state (Rykwert, 1976: 107). In more recent times, Arnold van Gennep records a variety of practices used to mark the boundaries between the territories of different villages or tribes. On the Ivory Coast, portals formed of two stakes driven into the ground, with a pole running between them on which hung skulls, eggs and other charms, notified the traveller that he was entering a new village and offered its inhabitants protection against evil spirits. At Loango in present-day Gabon, a palisade was erected across the road to prevent diseases from entering the territory of a village (van Gennep, 1992: 17). In other regions a bundle of herbs, a piece of wood, or a stake adorned with a sheaf of straw would be placed in the middle of the path or across it (Ibid). Significantly, these structures were not placed all around the boundary of a village, but only on paths or crossroads; they were not defensive, but magico-religious in character.

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If the boundaries of home are constituted by ritual, they need to be renewed on a periodic basis. At times of stress this imperative takes on an added urgency. It was the custom among the Slavs, during a time of pestilence, for the women of a village to drag a plough naked and cut a deep furrow around the settlement (Davidson, 1993). In North India a circle was drawn around a village during epidemics to keep the demons of sickness from entering the enclosure (Eliade, 1959: 49). In the ancient world, when a city was polluted by murder, public crime or impiety, it might be ‘lustrated’, with the priests carrying out a ritual of purification involving the ceremonial re-affirmation of its boundaries. In Ireland the festival of Bealtine on the first of May was traditionally a liminal period marking the transition from spring to summer, a time when it was felt necessary to reaffirm boundaries (Lysaght, 1993). A common belief was that the profit from the cattle for the year ahead could be stolen by the use of charms, through which their milk or butter would be appropriated by a neighbour. A range of precautions were therefore taken around the time of May Eve. Nothing belonging to the farmhouse or cow byre would be lent or given away. Spring blossoms were placed over the door or across the threshold, on windowsills and above the entrance to the byre. In Laois the custom was recorded of the father of the house lighting a candle and blessing the threshold, hearth and four corners of the dwelling with Holy Water on May Eve. In other parts of Leinster in the mid-nineteenth century the farmers, accompanied by their family and servants, walked the boundaries of their fields carrying farming implements, seeds of corn and sprigs of vervain. At the four cardinal points they would halt, dig up a sod, sow some of the seed, and sprinkle the ground with vervain. In still other places the custom was to place twigs of the Rowan tree at the four corners of the fields, or sprinkle Easter water along the boundary fence (Ibid). These customs are far from unique: in many parts of the world we find rituals in which the four corners of a house are blessed to protect the inhabitants and their property (Lord Raglan, 1964, 166–167). In most of the world’s cultures, territorial boundaries have been given the sanction of religious protection. In Roman law the punishment for the unauthorised moving of a boundary stone was outlawry (Rykwert, 1976). Boundary stones from the Kassite period in Babylonia are inscribed with curses on anyone who would seek to destroy or move them (Ibid: 113). This is because such boundary markers do more than inscribe the legal frontiers of a property: they demarcate the place a family or community identify with and have made their own. To erase a boundary is therefore to undermine the identity of a community and threaten its security. Removing boundary markers was an offence against the gods because it threatened chaos, undoing the structures which gave security and order to everyday life.

Boundaries and ontological security The practices we have described are all related to a desire for security and protection. But what kind of security is being sought? The ritual gates set up at the entries of an African village or coins placed under a threshold in China were seen as

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offering defence from concrete evils like sickness, accidents or theft. But this is plainly not based on a rational calculation of risk, but on some feeling that is deeper and more primordial. These boundaries are not so much physical as they are psychic and psychological; they are constructed and periodically reaffirmed through rituals, particularly at times of crisis or stress. Their construction is intimately related to the need to establish home as a place of ontological security – one which is familiar, delimited and a centre of meaningful order. Giddens defines ontological security as: ‘The confidence that most human beings have in the continuity of their self identity and in the constancy of their social and material environments’ (1991: 92). Ontological security is a sense of the basic reliability of persons and things. As such, one of the most basic preconditions for ontological security is a sense of familiarity with, and control over, our immediate surroundings. As Thomassen (2014) writes, meaningful human experience of social environments is not possible without the recognition of boundaries, divisions of spaces, and in-between spaces or liminal zones. Boundaries ‘are necessary for the framing of human experience and for thought itself’ (Ibid: 20). Boundaries control passage; by this means they ensure the space inside the boundary remains familiar and comprehensible. This is usually due as much to their psychological influence as to their physical presence. Medieval city walls were often in disrepair, had gaps or consisted merely of a ditch and a series of ‘bars’ or customs gates, yet they still regulated the entry of goods and people into the town. A contemporary teenager feels their bedroom is their personal space, and their parents may even knock before they enter, but this boundary rests only on convention. Even the fenced and patrolled US border with Mexico is porous and as much a psychological deterrent (or reassurance) as a physical barrier. Eliade suggests the fortifications of towns and cities began as magical defences, designed to repel invasions by demons and the souls of the dead rather than attacks by human beings (1959: 49). Boundaries always operate at both a symbolic and physical level. David Seamon argues that home appropriates space, and consequently requires the residents’ ability to control passage in and out (1979: 80–81). Such control enables them to clarify the identity of the space within and promotes feelings of physical and ontological security. As Bollnow writes, Outer space is the space of openness, of danger and abandonment . . . [man] needs the space of the house as an area protected and hidden, an area in which he can be relieved of continual anxious alertness, into which he can withdraw in order to return to himself. (Bollnow, 1961: 33) For Bachelard, home ‘concentrates being within limits that protect’ (1994: xxxviii). If we review traditional practices associated with the crossing of the threshold, we see that the role of the boundary is not simply to exclude, but to regulate and manage the passage between inside and outside by enabling a gradual process of

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familiarisation of the stranger. According to Arnold van Gennep, in traditional societies: foreigners cannot immediately enter the territory of the tribe or the village; they must prove their intentions from afar and undergo a stage best known in the form of the tedious African palaver. This preliminary stage, whose duration varies, is followed by a transitional period consisting of such events as an exchange of gifts, an offer of food by the inhabitants, or the provision of lodging. The ceremony terminates in rites of incorporation – a formal entrance, a meal in common, an exchange of handshakes. (van Gennep, 1992: 28) Previously it was the custom in both Syria and Egypt to welcome an honoured guest by slaughtering an animal and shedding its blood on the threshold of the house (Trumbull, 1896: 3). The ritual signified the incorporation of the newcomer into the family group as they stepped over the blood on the threshold. Likewise, among the Arabs of Central Africa a sheep was slaughtered at the door of a hut or tent when it was intended to honour a guest (Ibid: 9). Among the native tribes of Liberia a fowl was killed and its blood sprinkled in the doorway on similar occasions. In these customs the threshold is not so much a barrier as the place where the guest is ritually incorporated into the family. Marriage is rich in threshold customs, for in traditional societies it involved the formal departure of the bride from her parents’ house, followed by her incorporation into a new household. Among the Wallachians a bride would smear the doorposts of her husband’s house with butter or honey as she was about to cross the threshold (Ibid: 29). In Rhodes, as the newly married couple passed through the doorway of their home, the husband dipped a finger in honey and traced a cross on the door, while crushing a pomegranate which had been placed on the threshold with his foot (Ibid: 31). In parts of Syria, when a bride was brought to her husband’s home, a lamb or kid was sacrificed on the threshold, and she stepped over its blood to mark her adoption into the family (Ibid: 26). A similar custom was followed among the Egyptian Copts and among the Armenian Christians of Turkey. In each case the custom involved both a rite of incorporation of the bride into her new household and the ritual reestablishment of the boundaries of that household after the entrance of a stranger. What seems to be underlined in all of these traditions is the importance of the threshold as a regulative boundary, which structures passage in and out of the home and maintains it as a familiar and ordered space in contrast to the profane world outside. The word ‘familiar’ derives from the Latin familiaris, meaning both ‘familiar, intimate, friendly’ and ‘domestic, of a household’ (Online Etymology Dictionary, 2015), showing the close relationship between these ideas. Yi-Fu Tuan writes of home as an intimate place, embodied in countless details of quotidian life experienced and remembered – the hidden corners and individual furnishings of a house, the streets and shops of a town. The heightened reality of home is based on the familiarity of the daily round, ‘unobtrusive like breathing’ (Tuan, 1979: 146).

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The boundaries of home designate a little world which is small enough for us to come to grips with, to manage and to know intimately. Gaston Bachelard suggests that our most profound feelings of well-being take us back to the primitive refuge, where we can hide away, snug and concealed (1994: 91). This is why home is often imagined as a nest. In such spaces we find ‘the origin of confidence in the world’ (Ibid: 103). Ontological security stems from enclosure within the limits of a home that both embraces and conceals us – and this in turn depends on the power of boundaries to control passage and shield us from the public gaze.

Boundaries and meaning But boundaries have an even deeper significance than offering protection and ontological security. They mark out the space of home as qualitatively different from the world beyond: a centre of concentrated value, heightened reality and meaningful order. By delimiting a localised context of social action, they focus and intensify the accumulation of experience in a place called home and its integration into a coherent world of meaning. By marking off this space from the realm of the profane, they particularise that experience and heighten our sense of intimacy and participation. To feel at home, it is necessary that our world has an immanent order – one which is not imposed on us from without but arises organically from the routines of everyday life. To discover such an order requires the establishment of boundaries which delimit experience, so that it is brought within our grasp and rendered manageable and familiar. In academic literature boundaries are often portrayed as exclusionary and oppressive, deployed by those in power to control individuals or maintain their own privilege. Symbolic boundaries are defined by one authority as ‘the lines that include and define some people, groups and things while excluding others’ (Epstein, 1992: 232), with the emphasis being on those excluded. For Doreen Massey boundaries have a dual role, ‘to establish insiders, those who belong to that place’ and ‘to establish outsiders: those who do not belong’ (Massey, 1995: 99). A key theme in the literature on boundaries is their relation to institutionalised social differences, such as those of class, gender, race and national community (Lamont & Molnár, 2002). Symbolic boundaries are ‘an essential medium through which people acquire status and monopolize resources’ (Ibid: 168). They are seen as reflecting and preserving the contours of social power (Massey, 1995). A related tendency sees communities as constituted by symbolic boundaries primarily through the ways in which these differentiate them from others (Cohen, 1998; Barth, 1969). ‘The boundaries are relational rather than absolute; that is, they mark the community in relation to other communities’ (Cohen, 1998: 58). For Arjun Appadurai, ‘Neighbourhoods are inherently what they are because they are opposed to something else and derive from other, already produced, neighbourhoods’ (1996: 183). Here, as in much contemporary social thought, identity is seen as deriving from the contrast with the ‘other’ (Rose, 1995). But as the examples given earlier suggest, the construction of boundaries is often stimulated not so much by a desire to underline a group’s distinctiveness

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from others as by a need to delimit experience and mark out a place as familiar, habitable and secure. Nor are these boundaries accidental, arbitrary or random; they crystallise out of the shared experience of a group. Rather than being relational, constructed in opposition to the identity of another community, they are immanent in the particular configuration of lifeways, the conjunction of people and place which gives a location its unique character. The critique of boundaries as exclusionary, and of identity as relational, echoes the arguments we encountered earlier, in Chapter Three, which seem to deny places any capacity for autochthonous development and see them merely as a nexus of outside influences. Such arguments ignore the physicality of place which embodies and fixes the legacies of past dwelling, and its temporal depth which provides the medium within which these legacies combine into a figuration, a pattern of social life that acts as a centripetal force with the ability to absorb new elements and stamp them with its character. If place is conceived as a figuration, boundaries need not be considered exclusionary, for places can embody change and continuity, porosity and boundedness at the same time. It is only in particular circumstances, closely associated with processes of rationalisation in political and social life, that these relatively elastic boundaries turn into rigid lines of demarcation, or are systematised as legal or political borders.1 What the various ‘critical’ accounts also ignore is the way in which boundaries, far from being uniformly oppressive, can offer shelter from the cruelties and injustices of the world at large. The focus in the rituals of boundary creation outlined earlier is not on the exclusion of certain people, but the creation of a protected space within which a meaningful lifeworld can take form. This continues to be the case today, most clearly in the household, where everyday observances create an ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ – but one which is primarily concerned with the management of space rather than the exclusion of individuals. Boundaries crystallise out of everyday acts of dwelling, embodied in localising processes such as the cultivation of place, the accumulation of memory, the evolution of lifeways, and mutuality of being achieved through sharing hearth and board and participation in circles of gift-giving and recognition. These processes endow particular spaces (both physical and social) with a value which distinguishes them from others, although the lines of demarcation may be fluid and uncertain. The ritual or symbolic assertion of boundaries preserves and strengthens that value, thereby generating or sustaining localised contexts of social action. To appropriate a location and turn it into a home is inevitably to separate it from its surroundings. In Scandinavia somebody who wished to lay claim to a piece of land would hallow it by carrying fire around it (Kvideland, 1993). In ancient Rome, as we saw earlier, colonists ritually traced the outline of their new city with a plough. Someone who moves into a new house or flat can only begin to make themselves at home when they have closed the door on the landlord or estate agent. The philosopher Edward Casey stresses how boundaries can be creative. To set a boundary or limit ‘is not the nugatory notion of mere cutting off . . . the limit of an existing thing is intrinsic to its being, a condition for its very existing’ (1993: 15). Or as Heidegger puts it, ‘A boundary is not that at which something stops, but,

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as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing’ (1971: 154). As Mary Douglas argues in Purity and Danger (1970), finding a meaningful pattern in experience requires us to reject inappropriate elements and establish boundaries. The ritual symbolism of boundary-maintenance and purification – whose contemporary equivalent can be something as commonplace as cleaning and tidying our house – is ‘an attempt to create and maintain a particular culture, a particular set of assumptions by which experience is controlled’ (Ibid: 153). The primary function of boundaries, therefore, is to make the world familiar, habitable, meaningful and secure. The French prehistorian André Leroi-Gourhan, noting that the oldest traces of building are contemporary with the first rhythmic marks, connected the origins of human symbolism with the control of space: Such archaeological evidence [as there is] would seem to justify the assumption, that from the higher paleolithic period onwards there was an attempt to control the whole spatio-temporal phenomenon by symbolic means, of which language was the chief. They imply a real ‘taking charge’ of space and time through the mediation of symbols: a domestication of them in a strict sense, since it involves, within the house and about the house, a controllable space and time. (quoted in Rykwert, 1981: 21) In other words, while ‘the foundation of moral and physical comfort in man is the altogether animal perception of the perimeter of security, the enclosed refuge’ (Ibid), from the beginnings of human culture symbolic boundaries have been used to reinforce or substitute for that experience, thereby creating a home. The value accumulated through dwelling becomes concentrated within such boundaries, establishing a shared world of intimate meaning. Simmel stresses the exclusivity of space, which has the result that ‘To the extent to which a social formation is amalgamated with or is, as it were, united with a specific extension of land, then it possesses a character of uniqueness or exclusivity that is not similarly attainable in other ways’ (1997: 138). Consequently, we conceive of the space which a social group fills up as a unit that expresses and supports the unity of that group (Ibid: 141). This boundary is produced by society, not given by nature; it is a function of the cohesion and identity of a social group. However, the density of interrelations between members of a community and their sense of psychological unity and coherence, ‘grows into an image – as if experienced in our senses – of a solid surrounding boundary line’ (Ibid: 141). This in turn is underpinned by the reinforcement which social processes of demarcation receive from being spatialized. A boundary has a similar significance for a social group as for a work of art, both closing it off against the surrounding world and holding it together (Ibid: 141). It proclaims that a world is located inside which is subject only to its own laws. Symbolic boundaries are constructed through social practices which demarcate a locale – physical or social – as having a particular value, and so assist in the

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creation of a world of concentrated meaning. Such symbolic borders can in turn form the basis of social identities. In many of the rituals we have traced it is not just the physical perimeter of home that was being marked, but the confines of belonging. By tracing the limits of their shared space, the inhabitants of an English parish or Roman colony reminded themselves of the things which brought them together and reconstituted themselves as a group. Such processes of boundary formation can certainly result in the deployment of social or cultural distinctions to protect privilege and exclude outsiders (Bourdieu, 1984), but they can also be used by oppressed groups to carve out a space where they can experience a measure of dignity and freedom (hooks, 1990). They may be employed by a commune or religious sect to protect their distinctive way of life against the wider world (Kanter, 1972). Or most commonly, they simply provide the members of a family or community with a familiar space in which they feel at home.

Refuge, intimacy, freedom Home has often been characterised as a refuge or retreat. Yi-Fu Tuan comments that humans are unique among primates in their sense of home as a place where the sick and injured can recover under solicitous care, a base where the weak may stay while the fit go out to gather, hunt or fight (1979: 137). For O. F. Bollnow, it is through the house that ‘man carves out of universal space a special and to some extent private space’ (1961: 33). For Kirsten Jacobsen, home is a sanctuary where the outside world can be temporarily set aside: ‘With the exception of our organic bodies, there is virtually no other place in our experience that maintains this kind of inviolable self-enclosure’ (2009: 357). Even when people cannot erect physical boundaries around themselves, they tend to mark out ‘their’ space, through for example laying out their belongings or through regular and observable use of an area. Joseph Rykwert notes (1981: 191) that building enclosures or taking possession of an enclosed space such as that under a chair or table for making a ‘home’ is one of the commonest of children’s games. However, the idea of home as refuge has taken on a deepened significance since the eighteenth century, while becoming increasingly confined to the domestic sphere of the household rather than broader levels of dwelling such as the city or local community. From the seventeenth century onward, work was progressively separated from place of residence as a consequence of urbanisation and industrialisation, with the result that the home became an increasingly private and intimate space (Rybczynski, 1987; Hareven, 1991; Flanders, 2014). Beginning in the seventeenth century in the Netherlands, and spreading in the eighteenth century across the rest of Northern Europe, the household became less public, domestic comfort improved, children remained with their parents longer, and home became more exclusively associated with the family (Rybczynski, 1987). From being a place of work, education, religious observance, commerce, sociability and discipline, the middle-class household was recast as a private retreat. The world was split into separate spheres, which were increasingly characterised in gendered terms; while the working world

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became the province of men, home was the site of women’s domestic labour, which was devalued by being no longer seen as productive work. In the second half of the seventeenth century, household inventories in urban centres in the Netherlands suddenly begin to include window curtains, which had previously been virtually unknown, signifying the urge ‘physically to mark the boundary of one’s house, and family, from the undifferentiated masses living all around’ (Flanders, 2014). Between the mid-seventeenth and mid-eighteenth century, 81 per cent of houses in crowded London had at least one set of curtains, whereas 87 per cent of their provincial counterparts did not. Nor were curtains readily adopted, even by the wealthy, in the sparsely populated colonies. This suggests it was privacy, not light regulation or fashion, which lay behind their adoption (Ibid). By the 1820s curtains had become a standard feature of the middle-class home, and further elements were added to secure the inhabitants from prying eyes, both during daylight and when the rooms were lit at night. These included blinds, thin fabrics hung across the lower part of a window during the day, and coloured glass (Ibid). By the nineteenth century the British in particular felt ‘that for a house to be a home, it had to be separate from the world’ (Ibid). Likewise in America, the boundaries between home and the public world, which had earlier been extremely flexible, hardened, as apprentices, boarders, lodgers and dependent community members virtually disappeared from middle-class households (Hareven, 1991). In both America and Northern Europe, a host of popular writers extolled the home as a place of utopian retreat from the outside world, and emphasised its redeeming moral value in a corrupting environment. ‘The Cult of Domesticity glorified women’s domestic role as God-given and natural, the rough working world unfit for their delicate sensibilities’ (Matchar, 2013: 32). These ideals were reflected in the growing popularity of the suburban home, located in open countryside beyond the confines of the industrial city. This embodied the separation of work and home, of public and private, masculine and feminine spaces (Blunt & Dowling, 2006: 104). This idealisation of the domestic has been linked to the anxieties produced by rapid urbanisation and industrialisation (Hareven, 1991: 263). In his discussion of the cult of purity surrounding the seventeenth-century Dutch household, Simon Schama writes of how ‘home’ existed in a kind of dialectical polarity with ‘world’ and in particular the street (1988: 389). In the seventeenth century the Dutch were the world’s greatest travellers, building a commercial empire extending from the Americas to Malacca. However, these Calvinist merchants seem to have experienced an anxiety about the propriety of their worldly affairs, which led to an emphasis on the home as a sanctuary for Christian virtue, with the wife as its moral as well as mundane laundress (Ibid: 400). Likewise, for nineteenth-century bourgeois in Europe and America, an idealised domestic sphere preserved the moral economy and traditional virtues, which were being eroded in the public world by the same forces that undergirded their own prosperity. At home they sought relationships which could not be reduced to ‘callous cash payment’ and moral feelings not to be drowned in the ‘icy water of egotistical calculation’ (Marx, 1996: 7).

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Alongside the development of commerce and industry, the growth of the public arena in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century city enhanced the perception among the middle classes of the world beyond the domestic as both morally bankrupt and vaguely threatening. As theorised by Szakolczai (2013), the public sphere is a panoptic space of total visibility, a gladiatorial arena where nothing is taken for granted and one’s identity and status must be constantly defended. Critique, competition and display are used as weapons by individuals seeking to enhance their status or gain advantage over others. The public arena contains no principle of existential community and foregrounds our individual judgement, but at the same time reduces its inhabitants to a crowd governed by spiralling processes of imitation. It is an inherently ‘theatrical’ space dominated by popular entertainment, fashion and public opinion. We might note the continuities between this description of the public realm, which sees it as dominated by a procedural rationality which promotes the liquefaction of every aspect of social life, and the panoptic structures of the modern bureaucratic state, which in the same period were subjecting ever-increasing areas of life to regulation, quantification and surveillance. By contrast, the middle-class home was sheltered from the public gaze, and in particular from the gaze of strangers. As such it provided a haven within which its inhabitants’ status and identity were secure, reinforced by domestic circles of mutual recognition (Pizzorno, 2008). It was portrayed in contemporary literature as a place of intimacy and sincerity; here one could take off the mask worn in the public world and reveal the sentiments of the heart. Moreover, home was the locus of the one existential community that remained in industrial society – the family. The values bled out of a modernising world by rationalisation, commoditisation and the critical gaze of the public sphere could find a refuge in the domestic realm, behind brocade curtains and overhanging eaves, sheltered by shrubberies and garden walls, in suburban retreat from the dirt and noise of the industrial city. For Berger and Kellner the private sphere ‘has served as a kind of balancing mechanism providing meanings and meaningful activities to compensate for the discontents brought about by the large structures of modern society’ (1974: 166). The ‘irrational’ impulses and feelings which must be repressed in the spheres of industrial production and bureaucracy are here allowed come to the fore. Private life provides an anchor for personal identity, which shields it from the anonymity of the public sphere. ‘The transparency of the private world makes the opacity of the public one tolerable. A limited number of private relationships . . . provide the emotional resources for coping with the multi-relational reality “outside”’ (Ibid: 166–167). Crucially, however, the instability of the private sphere and the prevalence within it of personal choice mean that its compensations are experienced as fragile and unreliable (Ibid: 168). The idealised image of the domestic realm which emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries continues to inform popular conceptions of home to this day. In a study of the characteristics of interiors and consumer goods which North Americans view as ‘homey’, Grant McCracken identifies their ‘diminutive’ and ‘embracing’ properties as crucial (1989, 170–172). In ‘homey’ environments ceilings

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are low, doors and windows are small, space is divided up and filled with furniture and objects. Such characteristics make an environment easier to grasp and therefore more manageable (Ibid: 170). Likewise, ‘the surfaces of the homey environment exhibit a pattern of descending enclosure. Each surface is enclosed by a greater surface and in turn encloses a lesser one’ (Ibid: 171). This can be traced in the progression from a suburban cul-de-sac, through an enclosed yard, a house grown over with ivy and with an over-hanging roof, to a book-lined den or study, chairs and sofas drawn into a circle, and the encompassing wings of a deep armchair. ‘The occupant of such space is removed and protected from the outside world by an intricate series of baffles and mediators’ (Ibid). These enclosing layers are exemplified in Baudelaire’s description of a cottage in Wales inhabited by Thomas de Quincey: ‘The white cottage sat at the end of a little valley, shut in by rather high mountains; and it seemed to be swathed in shrubs’ (quoted in Bachelard, 1994: 38). Held and cosseted by the house and its contents, the occupant feels secure and protected from external threat (McCracken, 1989: 172). A survey of potential house buyers in the UK found that three-quarters of them would prefer to live in a leafy, village-style cul-de-sac, away from all traffic and passing strangers (Morley, 2001: 433). These characteristics of the homey environment underpin its character as a personal and familiar space, sheltered from the impersonal forces of the market and modernity (Ibid: 176–177). A study of attitudes among home owners in New Zealand found that home-ownership was felt to allow people more control over their environment and therefore privacy and an escape from surveillance (Depuis & Thorns, 1998: 36). While the domestic realm can be a site of physical and psychological oppression and abuse, its boundaries can also demarcate a space of freedom from the oppressions of the world outside. For Frederick Douglass, growing up in slavery, freedom was located in the childhood home he shared with his grandmother (Weir, 2008). Home as both escape from, and a site of resistance to, an oppressive society is also a persistent theme in the writing of the African-American feminist bell hooks. In her essay ‘Homeplace (a site of resistance)’ she describes growing up in a segregated community in the American South where black households were ‘spaces of care and nurturance in the face of the brutal harsh reality of racist oppression’ (1990: 384). The construction of home therefore takes on a radical political significance: Historically African-American people believed that the construction of a homeplace, however fragile and tenuous (the slave hut, the wooden shack), had a radical political dimension. Despite the brutal reality of racial apartheid, of domination, one’s homeplace was the one site where one could freely confront the issue of humanization, where one could resist. Black women resisted by making homes where all black people could strive to be subjects, not objects, where we could be affirmed in our minds and hearts despite poverty, hardship, and deprivation, where we could restore to ourselves the dignity denied us on the outside in the public world. (hooks, 1990: 384)

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Hooks goes on to connect the oppression of black people under South African apartheid with the physical destruction of their homes. Elsewhere she writes of her grandparents, black farmers in the rural south of America: ‘They believed in the value of land ownership because owning one’s land was all that made self-determination possible’ (2009: 205). As one commentator writes, the subversiveness which bell hooks finds in home ‘is based, paradoxically, on the very privacy of place that might seem, from another perspective, to be turning away from social and political reality’ (Casey, 1993: 302). Although, as many feminist writers have stressed, the domestic scene can be a place of oppression, particularly for women and children, ‘it can also be the place of most effective and lasting resistance to . . . tyranny’ (Ibid: 303). Iris Marion Young writes that ‘A person without a home is quite literally deprived of individual existence’ (2005: 152). For Young, privacy is necessary to individuation, and involves control over admission to a space and its contents. Given that panopticism (Foucault, 1991), or social control through enforced visibility, characterises modern systems of both government and corporate discipline, the liberating potential of home – whether at the scale of household or community – as an enclosed and protected space must not be underestimated. Of course, home as a refuge is not confined to the domestic sphere. For many of the world’s remaining indigenous peoples, geographical isolation and difficult terrain have afforded protection to their unique cultures (Scott, 2009). For immigrants, the recreation of their homeland in neighbourhoods such as the ‘Little Italys’ of twentieth-century America offered a sanctuary in a strange land, while for republican prisoners in the North of Ireland the Gaelic language, impenetrable to their jailors, gave them the privacy and refuge of a linguistic home. In the security of such a refuge, we can let down our personal barriers and achieve intimacy. Referencing the philosopher Karen Joisten, Roger Scruton suggests that the security of home is also a ‘hiding’, which is fundamental to the experience of intimacy, when all barriers between us are finally pulled away (2012: 233). Gaston Bachelard writes of how the privacy of the house gives us the freedom and space to dream (1994: 40). However, the location of the symbolic boundaries which render home a refuge and a place of intimacy have changed substantially over the past few centuries: first with the growing emphasis on the domestic sphere as contrasted with more public spaces, and again under the impact of technology and the information society. In traditional societies these boundaries were usually drawn collectively, as with an English village on Rogation Sunday or a Roman colony during the Etruscan rite. The ritual demarcation of boundaries articulated a common belonging and a shared world of meaning. Today the boundaries of home more often enclose an individualised and private reality – the suburban semi, the teenager’s bedroom, the ‘den’, the ‘shed’, the getaway cottage in the country – and have been shorn of their cosmological significance. Moreover, even these narrower boundaries have been eroded by communication technologies and the continued diminution of the functions of the household. The nineteenth- and twentieth-century ideal of suburban retreat always contained an inherent paradox, in that it was the technical systems of the modern world, such

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as sewers, piped water, gas lighting and later electricity, which made domestic comfort possible. Tim Putnam (1999) argues that by the mid-twentieth century the ‘private’ household was thoroughly infiltrated by both this technical infrastructure and the wider structures of modern life on which its members relied for education, employment and social provision. The result was the transformation of the home into a terminal in a vast network of technical infrastructures (Ibid: 146). Nonetheless, this impersonal infrastructure continues to be masked in the interior decoration of homes, which tends to emphasise the personal and anecdotal. Meanwhile, activities within the home have become more individualised (and at the same time de-personalised), with television, music devices and computers reducing the amount of shared family time (Ibid: 151). For Krishan Kumar, information technology has strengthened the individual at the expense of the family: If, as Philippe Ariés argued, the individualism of modern western society was contained by the modern nuclear family, then the attitudes and artefacts of the information society threaten that containment. . . . The home becomes the preferred site of individual activities, but it generates no collective purpose or sense of shared family values. . . . The home becomes less a ‘haven in a heartless world’ for the family, more like a hotel for paying (and non-paying guests). (Kumar, 2005: 178) Here then is something of a paradox. On the one hand, we see an ever deeper retreat from the public world into the privacy of domestic space since the industrial revolution. On the other hand, in contemporary society the boundaries of that space are increasingly dissolved and its internal coherence eroded by technologies which allow its members to participate in a virtual world that is at once individualised and global. Indeed, ‘the modern home itself can be said to be a “phantasmagoric” place, to the extent that electronic media of various kinds allow the intrusion of distant events into the space of domesticity’ (Morley, 2001: 428). The quest for refuge, intimacy and freedom in the domestic realm, which has defined the meaning of home for much of modernity, has reached a point where it seems about to dissolve its container, the anthropological household defined by the collective provision of basic needs and the shared processes of commensality, gift exchange and recognition.

Conclusion The establishment of symbolic boundaries around physical or social spaces helps create localised contexts of social action which offer ontological security, a heightened sense of meaning, refuge from the outside world, and a deepened intimacy among those within. In traditional societies the boundaries of a common home – whether village, city, kin-group or tribe – were collectively, and often ritually, delineated. In the process, a group defined their identity and inscribed it in both physical and social space. This remains the case today, when nation-states build

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fences on their borders, or groups deploy shared codes and habitual practices to police the boundaries of their social space. But the emergence of industrial society redefined how and where the boundaries of home were drawn. Whereas previously ‘home’ had embraced the entire lifeworld of a social group, there opened up a schismogenic division of experience between public and private spheres. The first was the arena of globalising forces, which have become ever more determinative of individual life. The second was constituted as the retreat of affective display and moral sentiment in a utilitarian and desacralized world. With home increasingly defined in terms of domesticity, the boundary between ‘home’ and ‘not home’ came to run through the middle of everyday life. The boundaries of home continued to be asserted, both by the physical baffles and mediators which protected the middle-class home from the outside world and such social conventions as the Victorian custom of leaving a card to announce a pending visit. But they were drawn around a privatised and familial space which comprised only a portion of its occupants’ existence. In the process, their role in defining the identity of a social group became less important than their significance in delimiting a refuge from the public world. By late modernity the domestic sphere was displaying a tendency to break down into individualised worlds of ever more personalised meaning, which are increasingly fragmented, fluid and unstable. The boundaries of the household remain important in delimiting a space of intimacy and refuge, although one increasingly penetrated by the demands of paid work. But the degree to which they circumscribe a shared universe of collective meaning is much reduced. The frontiers of our private worlds are now the walls of our bedrooms, the doors of single-occupant apartments, and above all, the algorithmic boundaries of the virtual spaces we increasingly inhabit, where experience is tailored ever more intensively to our personal tastes through search results, social media contacts, promoted videos or TV programmes and suggested news links. But can such spaces fulfil the functions of a home? They afford less ontological security and less stable systems of meaning than the collective homes of the past and only fleeting moments of intimacy. Instead, they are spaces of refuge and fantasy which offer a certain kind of freedom, but only temporary escape from the rationalised structures of globalised modernity. Arguably, the unmooring of private life from its economic and physical anchorage in the anthropological household (Chapters 6 and 7) means that the private is increasingly being absorbed into the public sphere. Yet despite this, the ritual inscription of boundaries still holds its power to mark out a space as our own.

Note 1 Natural boundaries tend to be round, while rationalised borders are more likely to be angular. According to Keohane and Kuhling (2014) the circular form of dwelling derives from the burnt-out circular clearing around a primitive fire, the gathering place which became the locus of the civilising process and in time the centre of larger political units: the clan, the tribe, the city and the state. ‘That the form of dwelling and human well-being is round is evidenced by the multiplicity and diversity of anthropological forms of

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housing and primitive settlement that are circular’ (Ibid: 34). According to Lord Raglan, ‘the world was, in early times, always thought of as round, and that was the reason why early cosmic buildings and the houses which copied them, are round’ (1964: 147). This echoes the perception of Gaston Bachelard that our most basic images of being tend to be round. As Edward Casey notes, this circular structure exemplifies self-enclosure and directs attention to the centre (1993: 133). As we have seen, the ritual affirmation of a boundary has typically involved movement in a circle. However, an evolution can be traced over time, across many cultures, from round buildings to rectangular (Lord Raglan, 1964: 182–94). We might speculate on the significance of this change, over and above its technical aspects; the shift from shelters whose organic form echoed those built by birds and insects, the womb and the earth itself, to ones whose geometric structure was planned and imposed from without. This parallels a shift in the character of boundaries, from crystallisations of everyday dwelling secreted in the same way as a snail secretes its shell, to rationalised forms that demarcate lines of social or political power.

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Patrick Kavanagh, the Monaghan-born poet who evoked the harshness and beatitude of his native ‘stony grey soil’, is not usually quoted as a social theorist. But Kavanagh’s distinction between healthy parochialism and unhealthy provincialism is sociologically significant: The provincial has no mind of his own; he does not trust what his eyes see until he has heard what the metropolis – towards which his eyes are turned – has to say on any subject. . . . The parochial mentality on the other hand is never in any doubt about the social and artistic validity of his parish. All great civilizations are based on parochialism. . . . Parochialism is universal; it deals with the fundamentals. (quoted in Quinn, 2003: 237) The world of home is parochial in the positive sense: the world of globalised modernity turns us all into provincials. In the preceding chapters we have explored a series of interrelated localising processes: the cultivation of place, the accumulation of collective memory, the crystallisation of tradition, commensality, gift exchange and recognition, and the inscription of symbolic boundaries. These operate to create local contexts of social action which are immediate, bounded and particular and are characterised by the ongoing participation of the occupants in their maintenance and evolution. Social relationships, meanings and practices are anchored within these contexts, and in the process become associated with each other and infused with a common identity and a pre-logical coherence. The result is to concentrate the elements of social life around a centre which becomes home. Home, in this sense, is where the world of experience takes on a coherent order which is immanent rather than imposed from without, and crystallises from a shared involvement in our surroundings and the practices of everyday life. It is a world thick with meaning where every action, object and place is encrusted with significance. We experience our home as both the centre of the cosmos and its point of most intense reality. In this chapter I want to explore the particular conjunction of time and space which underpins these localising processes, as well as their separation into distinct and abstract dimensions, which is one of the foundations of the modern world. In

Parish and province 161 doing so I will revisit the interpenetrating dynamics of localisation and globalisation explored in Chapter 1. Home, as we have seen, is a cosmion or little world to itself, whose experience is both profoundly integrated and qualitatively differentiated, untranslatable and all of a piece. The reorganisation of experience within abstract domains of space and time, on the other hand, allows its translation into quantitative terms, and thereby its decontextualisation and absorption within global networks of bureaucracy, communications and trade. The result is the separation of experience from both local places and the existential frames of human life, decentering the world and leading to the subordination of local places to global systems.

Living at the centre of the world Localising processes embody a particular conjunction of space and time. Chapter 3 referenced Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, in which ‘spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole’ (1988: 84). Home, likewise, can be thought of as a chronotope in which time and space become fused at a central point. In home, the flight of time is slowed down, as it clings to both physical spaces and bodies of social practice. As a consequence, time becomes simultaneously localised and cumulative. Saturated by memory, space becomes suffused with value, and practices take on a deeper patina of significance. The world is qualitatively differentiated between centre and periphery, inside and outside, home and abroad. A cosmos is generated which is most thick, vivid and real at its centre, and becomes progressively thinner as you proceed outwards. The result is a figuration – in the sense of Elias (1978) – which shapes future experience. Home, as a centre of meaning, not only influences everyday practices but also determines which experiences are accounted significant and how they are to be interpreted. Each home is a unique figuration of experience which tends towards continuity of form even while its substance undergoes continual change. In this chronotope time and space are neither abstract, uniform, nor empty; they bend and flow with the contours of the world of meaning that is home. ‘The time of home belongs to what Henri Bergson called la durée, the flow that we inwardly experience and which connects past to future through the lived present’ (Scruton, 2012: 233). This time has no existence aside from the succession of activities, and is subject to constant variation. ‘The deeper the experience of a moment, the greater the accumulation of experience. . . . The lived durée is not a question of length but of depth or density. Proust understood this’ (Berger, 1984). It is precisely in such moments of deeper experience that time accumulates most thickly in place. The space of home is likewise malleable. A point which is mathematically close may be practically very far away or even inaccessible (Bollnow, 1961: 36). Within the chronotope of home, people and places change their dimensions, appearing with enhanced intensity and scale insofar as they are more or less important to us. If we picture a town or city we know well, what do we see? Not the orderly grid of a street plan or map. Instead, the relations between the different elements will be altered to reflect our experience. Certain features leap out, bulking larger and drawn with

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bolder colours than the rest; others fade into the background and are hardly seen. Some distances are foreshortened, others may be exaggerated. Here we view the outline of a particular building in great detail, there we sketch a jumble of roofs. We fill the streets with figures, incidents and characters. We imagine the place in much the same way that a medieval artist would have painted it. Every homeplace has its own time, its own qualities of space, which are incommensurable and unique. Time, captured by space, endows it with depths beyond the physical. Because home is woven of value, it possesses interiority. ‘Places are very much things to be inside of’ (Cresswell, 2004). For Edward Relph (1976) the essence of place lies in the experience of an ‘inside’ which is distinct from an ‘outside’. For David Seamon, too, ‘Places of most profound at-homeness generally reflect existential insideness – the situation of unselfconscious immersion in place’ (Seamon, 1979: 90). This is expressed in the fact that houses, villages and even towns have often been modelled on the human body, the epitome of existential insideness. ‘The homology house-body-cosmos presents itself very early’ (Eliade, 1959: 172). The intensity with which we experience such insideness is an index of our identification with a place. The experience of being an ‘insider’ in turn offers support to our identity and underpins our self-assurance. A place so thoroughly permeated by meaning is often felt to be sacred. Mircea Eliade (1959) describes how in archaic societies the sacred constitutes a break in the homogeneity of space, marked by an opening which allows passage from one cosmic region to another. The world is spread out around this cosmic axis, growing less sacred and less real as one departs from the centre. Home is always in the middle, at the navel of the earth, symbolised by a mountain, tree, ladder or vine (Ibid: 37). It is the centre not in a geographical, but an ontological sense, the place from which the world is founded (Berger, 1984). Such a fixed centre allows us perceive the world around it as a cosmos, an ordered and meaningful whole. In traditional societies, everything that made sense of the world was real; the surrounding chaos existed and was threatening, but it was threatening because it was unreal. Without a home at the center of the real, one was not only shelterless, but also lost in non-being, in unreality. Without a home everything was fragmentation. (Ibid) In traditional societies space is organised according to a sacred geometry, in which each direction has its particular significance. Humans are at the centre of a world defined by the cardinal points in mythologies as diverse as those of Ireland, China, India, Egypt, the Americas, the Siberian plains and West Africa. In Gaelic Ireland the central province of Meath, associated with kingship and its attributes, was surrounded by four provinces representing the cardinal directions and associated with different qualities: Connacht with the West and learning; Ulster with the North and battle; Leinster with the East and prosperity; Munster with the South and music (Rees & Rees, 1961: 123). In Chinese cosmology likewise, each of the four cardinal points was associated with a series of related qualities: for example,

Parish and province 163 the east was associated with wood, the colour green, and spring (Tuan, 1979: 96). This cosmic order repeated itself at the level of the city and the individual house. ‘In China . . . a single roof tile encapsulates the essential order and meaning of the Chinese cosmos’ (Ibid: 100). Consequently, in traditional cosmologies, every temple, every city, and every house replicates the centre of the world. The Iranian land was termed the centre and heart of the world (Eliade, 1959: 40), while as early as the Qin period the Chinese termed their country zhongguo, ‘the Middle Kingdom’ (Keay, 2008: 101). As Yi-fu Tuan writes, ‘Mythical space . . . differs from pragmatic and scientifically constructed spaces in that it ignores the logic of exclusion and contradiction. Logically a cosmos can have only one center; in mythical thought it can have many centers’ (1979: 99). Hence, wherever people settle and make their home, there is the centre of the world. This ancient cosmological scheme is founded on the basic parameters of human experience, rooted in our embodiment and our interactions with the physical world. As John Berger writes: Home was the center of the world because it was the place where a vertical line crossed with a horizontal one. The vertical line was a path leading upwards to the sky and downwards to the underworld. The horizontal line represented the traffic of the world, all the possible roads leading across the earth to other places. Thus, at home, one was nearest to the gods in the sky and to the dead in the underworld. This nearness promised access to both. And at the same time, one was at the starting point and, hopefully, the returning point of all terrestrial journeys. (Berger, 1984: 54) Likewise, Bollnow (1961: 32) contrasts the homogeneity of mathematical space with lived space. The coordinating zero point that is the living individual, the vertical axis made by the human body standing between earth and sky, the horizontal plane of the earth on which we journey – these give us our basic orientation in the world. The result is a space marked by discontinuities, one where areas with distinct qualities are separated from one another by sharp boundaries. Traditional cosmologies were in tune with this existential relationship of the human body to the world; mathematical space denies it, since such space recognises neither a centre nor any qualitative difference between its parts. From this sense of being centred and grounded comes an unselfconscious confidence in the validity of one’s identity and way of life. This characterised nearly all traditional societies up until their contact with Europeans. The Greenland Eskimo imagined the Europeans were sent to Greenland to learn virtue and good manners from them: ‘Their highest form of praise for a European is that he is, or soon will be, as good as a Greenlander’ (Sumner, 1906: 14). Of course such an attitude can easily degenerate into chauvinism, but we might ask whether it had something to recommend it in comparison to what succeeded: the instinctive conviction on the part of indigenous or local cultures of their inferiority to the metropolis.

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The attitude towards the world which Kavanagh termed parochial (in the positive sense) was the default state of mind of people in all cultures for most of the world’s history; indeed, a glance at any local newspaper suggests that it remains the default state for many people today. ‘Parochialism’ continues, albeit somewhat weakened, to characterise the spheres of home, community and neighbourhood wherever they have retained a degree of integrity. Wherever localising processes have had an opportunity to take hold, wherever we live embedded in a rich pattern of association and meaning embodied in familiar places and practices, home is the magnetic centre around which our experience naturally organises itself. As the world of home thickens and deepens, we are able to dwell inside it, finding there a stable anchorage for our identity and a profound sense of ontological security. A location which to an outsider is merely a grid reference on a map or a series of anonymous streets has for those who dwell there an extension and depth out of all proportion to its geographical size; there can be an entire world, a whole cosmos, within.

The rise of mathematical time and space By contrast with the world of home, where space and time are both malleable and interfused, global systems rely on separate dimensions of space and time which are abstract, infinite, mathematical and uniform. These dimensions are social constructs, with a strictly modern pedigree. Norbert Elias (1992) writes that time as we experience it is a social institution, a set of symbols used for orientation in the incessant flow of events, rather than something which exists objectively or is experienced in the same way by everyone. Hence ‘humankind’s experience of what is now called “time” has changed in the past and continues to change today’ (Ibid: 39). Elias argues that the need for time measurement has advanced in tandem with the increased differentiation and integration of social life. With urbanisation and commercialisation, the synchronising of human activity took on a new importance, necessitating the development of a continuous time-grid as a common frame of reference (Ibid: 54). In his summation, ‘the longer, the more differentiated become the chains of functional interdependence which bind people to each other, the stricter becomes the regimen of the clocks’ (Ibid: 121). The world of mechanically (or digitally) measured clock time, which we now take for granted, is therefore a relatively recent development. Traditional peoples do not have our perception of time. The Sioux had no words for ‘late’ or ‘waiting’ (Ibid: 139). African philosopher John Mbiti, cited in Berger, Berger and Kellner (1974: 135), argued that traditional African societies lacked the concept of the future as it has developed in Western thought. Evans-Pritchard writes that ‘the Nuer have no expression equivalent to ‘time’ in our language, and they cannot . . . speak of time as though it were something actual, which passes, can be wasted, can be saved, and so forth’ (1940: 103). Rather than abstract time, they used particularly significant events as points of reference. Since these varied from group to group, time was ordered differently in separate places (Ibid: 105). Even

Parish and province 165 the names of the years, derived from events such as floods or wars, differed from tribe to tribe. Before the modern age, time for most people remained bound up with the course of events: whether the cyclical time of the seasons, or the episodic and irregular time of daily life. Nor was time homogenous or continuous. Intervals of sacred time, the time of festival, during which primordial mythic time was made present, contrasted with profane time (Eliade, 1959: 68). While profane time passed away and was lost, sacred time was infinitely repeatable, ‘the same that had been manifested in the festival of the previous year or in the festival of a century earlier’ (Ibid: 69). People sought to access this time when they founded a city or a house, tried to heal the sick, wanted to save the crops or ensure a fortunate reign for a sovereign (Ibid: 81–82). Space, likewise, was not abstract and uniform but malleable, shaped by topography and the relative ease or difficulty of travel. Space ‘does not exist save as a property of objects and events, expressing their nearness or distance’ (Giddens, 1989: 276). For the Nuer, space is more than mere physical distance, though it is affected by it, for it is reckoned also by the character of the country. . . . A broad river divides two Nuer tribes more sharply than many miles of unoccupied bush. A distance which appears small in the dry season has a different appearance when the area it covers is flooded in the rains. (Evans-Pritchard, 1940: 109) Jared Diamond notes that in the mountains of New Guinea a distance of 27 miles over rough terrain might as well be on the other side of the ocean (Diamond, 2012: 265). Concepts of space, like time, were therefore localised and bound to place. Among the Ainu the words for the cardinal directions are specific to the Ainu territory. ‘Ainu terms refer to specific objects in the Ainu universe and do not refer to abstract points on the globe’ (Ohnuki-Tierney, 1972: 442). In traditional societies in Europe, folk-measures of length were derived from the body – the span from the distance between the thumb and the tip of the little finger, the cubit from the top of the middle finger to the elbow, and so forth (Tuan, 1979: 45). In the European Middle Ages the growth of trade gradually brought about a new sense of time in certain segments of society – what historian Jacques Le Goff called ‘merchants’ time’ in opposition to the ‘time of the church’ (1980). As commercial networks developed, time became an object of measurement: the duration of a sea-voyage or the rise and fall of prices affected the merchant’s profits and therefore increasingly became the object of calculation. The greater the enlargement of the monetary sphere, the more important was the accurate measurement of time. In the fourteenth century a significant step towards the rationalisation of time took place when the church bells, which chimed the rhythm of religious offices, were supplemented by the bells of the town hall, which rang to mark the hours for commercial transactions and work (Ibid). By the second quarter of the fourteenth century, mechanical clocks had spread throughout the urbanised areas

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of Europe, and the hour achieved its mathematical sense of a twenty-fourth part of the day (Ibid: 49). According to Lewis Mumford it was this growing concern to measure regular intervals of time which caused people to conceive of abstract realms of time and space. At the end of the Middle Ages the mechanical regularities of the clock ‘dissociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences: the special world of science’ (Mumford, 2010: 15). This ‘emptying of time’ made possible the ‘emptying of space’; the accurate measurement of time allowed for the co-ordination of people’s activities even when they were not present in the same place. The medieval manner of organizing space and time, which privileged symbolism and meaning, gradually fell away and was replaced by the conception of space and time as abstract, empty dimensions organised according to quantitative relations. These changes in how people imagined space can be seen in the transformation of art and thought between the medieval and early modern periods. In medieval art, space was organised in qualitative terms and suffused with symbolism and meaning. Paintings adopted the perspective of someone immersed in the activity or place being depicted; buildings and figures were arranged according to their symbolic significance, while their size indicated their relative importance. In the rules of perspective elaborated in fifteenth-century Florence by Brunelleschi and Alberti, on the other hand, the world is perceived from the viewpoint of an elevated and distant spectator, generating a geometrical and systematically rationalised sense of space (Harvey, 1990: 244). In the same period the medieval tradition of map-making, which privileged the symbolic significance of space (depicting Jerusalem at the centre of the world), was replaced by a new school of cartography, which mapped locations according to a mathematical grid imposed on the surface of the earth by a viewer imagined as capable of observing it from above (Curry, 2002: 507). In each case the privileging of an external spectator presupposed the concept of an absolute space pre-existing particular places. Even more significantly, the early modern period witnessed the replacement of the Ptolemaic vision of a divinely ordered cosmos enclosed by nine celestial spheres with the infinite, uniform space of modern science. Foucault (1984) writes that medieval space was a hierarchic ensemble of places: sacred and profane, protected and open, urban and rural, celestial and terrestrial. Galileo’s constitution of an infinite and open space dissolved this ‘space of emplacement’; ‘a thing’s place was no longer anything but a point in its movement, just as the stability of a thing was only its movement indefinitely slowed down’ (Ibid: 2). As Koyré writes: This scientific and philosophical revolution . . . can be described roughly as bringing forth the destruction of the Cosmos, that is, the disappearance, from philosophically and scientifically valid concepts, of the conception of the world as a finite, closed, and hierarchically ordered whole . . . and its replacement by an indefinite and even infinite universe which is bound together by the identity of its fundamental components and laws, and in which all these components are placed on the same level of being. This, in

Parish and province 167 turn, implies the discarding by scientific thought of all considerations based upon value-concepts, such as perfection, harmony, meaning and aim, and finally the utter devalorization of being, the divorce of the world of value and the world of facts. (Koyré, 1957: 2) It is significant that this revolution faced considerable resistance even from thinkers who were favourable to the new science. Kepler, for instance, opposed the idea of infinite space precisely because it implied a universe without limits or a centre, one in which there could be no determinate place (Ibid: 61). It is only with Newton that the idea of the universe as infinite, uniform and void space becomes firmly established as the basis of science – a conception incompatible with any notion of the world as an ordered cosmos in which we can have a fixed place or home. The emergence of abstract and uniform dimensions of time and space played a crucial role in enabling globalisation. Giddens argues that the emergence of the concept of ‘empty space’ ‘may be understood in terms of the separation of space from place’ (1991: 18). In pre-modern societies space and place largely coincided, since most activities required the mutual presence of the actors. ‘The advent of modernity increasingly tears space away from place by fostering relations between ‘absent’ others’ (Ibid). This separation of time and space is central to the dynamism of modernity, facilitating the ‘disembedding’ of social life from local contexts of interaction and the development of rationalised systems of organisation. ‘Disembedding mechanisms depend on two conditions: the evacuation of the traditional or customary content of local contexts of action, and the reorganizing of social relations across broad time-space bands’ (Giddens, 1994: 85). This is enabled by the development of abstract tokens – coinage, standardised measures of space and time – and the evolution of expert systems which decontextualise knowledge (Giddens, 1991). As a result, place becomes increasingly phantasmagoric, penetrated through and through by social influences which are geographically distant, shaped by a network of relationships which extends far beyond its borders. Space which is mathematically measurable is also controllable, and this served the requirements of an age when rationalised control over space was becoming increasingly important for navigation, the determination of property rights, and the administration of newly centralised monarchies. With the Enlightenment ‘the conquest and rational ordering of space became an integral part of the modernizing project’ (Harvey, 1990: 249). Systematic mapping accompanied the enclosure movement in England, while Jefferson’s official US land survey played a similar role in underpinning state power and the private ownership of land in North America (Harvey, 1990; Curry, 2002). Whereas the relatively high degree of self-sufficiency in traditional societies found expression in a localised time experience, modernity is characterised by the expansion of a standard framework of temporal reference: clock time, the Gregorian calendar, and the convention of dating events from the Christian era

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(Zerubavel, 1982: 4). Until the eighteenth century, clocks showed solar time; in other words, they were set according to the sun as it appeared in any given locality. The result was that each city, town or village had its own time, which applied to it alone (Ibid: 5). Only with the establishment of a national transportation network, beginning in Britain with the mail-coach service in the 1780s and, crucially, the railways in the 1840s, was the need for a standardised national time felt. Because the mail coaches were committed to running on a strict schedule, they could no longer rely on locally based practices of time reckoning. Since the Royal Observatory in Greenwich was the most reliable in Britain, every mailcoach guard was required to carry a timepiece indicating Greenwich Mean Time, and the clocks in post offices along the route were adjusted accordingly (Ibid: 6). This synchronisation of local times was intensified when the railways brought different communities within more immediate reach of one another (Ibid). By 1855, 98 per cent of all public clocks in Britain were set to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) (Ibid: 7). A similar process unfolded in the United States with the spread of the railways there. Meanwhile, the laying of the Atlantic cable which connected Europe and America telegraphically in the 1870s raised the idea of standardising time internationally, something achieved at the International Meridian Conference in 1884 (Ibid: 13). Railways, steamships and the telegraph were shrinking the globe, and space was becoming equivalent to the (evershrinking) time it took to traverse it. The ‘characteristically modern domination of space by time’ (Casey, 1993: 6) had begun. David Harvey writes that modernity is characterised by ‘the collapse of spatial distinctiveness and identity, and the seemingly uncontrolled acceleration of temporal processes’ (1990: 209). Space imposes transaction costs on an economic system based on the division of labour and global trade, resulting in an inbuilt drive to overcome the friction of space through the elimination of spatial barriers and the rationalisation of spatial organisation. Moreover, to stay competitive, businesses need to constantly shorten the turnover time of capital, through technical and organisational innovations which speed up economic processes, simultaneously speeding up social life (Ibid: 232). As a result, the past two centuries have been characterised by waves of space-time compression: ‘the history of capitalism has been characterized by speed-up in the pace of life, while so overcoming spatial barriers that the world sometimes seems to collapse inwards upon us’ (Ibid: 240). Time has become increasingly synchronous and space relational, as events in widely different parts of the world interpenetrate. ‘The whole world’s cuisine is now assembled in one place in almost exactly the same way that the world’s geographical complexity is nightly reduced to a series of images on a static television screen’ (Ibid: 300). The past five centuries have therefore witnessed a transition from relatively closed and localised worlds to a globalised and inter-connected world. Standardised measurement of time and distance and improved transport and communication technologies have enabled co-ordinated social action independent of place. The harnessing of new kinds of energy in the form of coal, then oil, then electricity, super-charged this process, with globalising processes taking on an

Parish and province 169 unprecedented intensity. The rationalisation of time and space has grown from small beginnings – the chiming hours of a medieval monastery or the ideal cities of Baroque planners – to culminate in the just-in-time delivery systems and international division of manufacturing we see today.

A world without a centre How have these changes affected our experience of home, meaning and belonging? From our perspective, one of the most important aspects of this process is the way in which abstract dimensions of time and space allow experience to be translated into quantitative terms. This in turn enables people and objects to be extracted from local contexts, which are qualitative and incommensurable, and integrated into wider systems. Modern systems of market exchange, transport and communications, bureaucratic management, political control, science and technology are all reliant on being able to predictably locate people and things within uniform grids of space and time which encircle the globe. As a passenger on an airline, a supplicant at the welfare office, or the target of a marketing campaign, my life and experience are reduced to a set of data points, many of which have to do with spatial and temporal coordinates. Globalisation lifts people out of concrete places and incorporates them into rationalised systems which substitute spatial extension and rapidity of communication for temporal depth. In the process the very shape of the world is changed. Space expands to infinity, then collapses into a series of points in a network which are all equally accessible. Time no longer has anywhere to settle and accumulate. ‘We are at a moment . . . when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein’ (Foucault, 1984: 1). The result is a radical decentering of the world and of experience, as localised worlds of meaning are simultaneously destabilised and subordinated to global networks of unprecedented speed and complexity. The cosmic sphere generated when time and space flow around each other and fuse in the chronotope of home is replaced by an empty grid. In a world organised according to mathematical space and time, there are no fixed points of emplacement, no hierarchical differentials of value, and no centre, only temporary relations between objects in motion. Simultaneously, the existential anchorages which allow value become cumulative and transpersonal – concrete places, temporal depth, biological and bio-physical cycles, human embodiment itself – are erased or occluded by the virtual universe of global connections erected on the scaffolding of mathematical space and time. The dominance of abstract space and time severs the connections to the gods, the ancestors and the tribe which help us endow the world with meaning. To the ancestors; for when time can no longer cling to place, we lose our connection to the past. To the gods; for the infrastructure of the modern world shuts us off from the existential experience of external nature and human biological cycles. To the tribe; because abstract space and time dissolve localised networks of relationship embedded in place, and substitute transient encounters in global space.

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This occlusion of the existential frames of our existence is a defining feature of both the synthetic universe generated by modern technics and the virtual spaces of the information age. Increasingly we inhabit a space which is ‘engineered, not God-given; artificial, not natural; mediated by hardware, not immediate to wetware [the human body]; rationalized, not communalized; national, not local’ (Luke, 1996: 125). More and more, meaning is sought not in the past but in the future (Berger, Berger & Kellner, 1974: 72), but while the past is cumulative, the future annihilates both past and present. For a future-orientated sense of time, home is something to be transcended (Tuan, 1979: 180). In this context, localising processes struggle to operate effectively, and the localised worlds of meaning they create are increasingly fragile. All rely in differing degrees on the significance attached to physical places, accumulated time, face-to-face relationships, bodily practices and biological cycles. Hence, when globalisation weakens our relationship to place, distances us from the biological aspects of life, and replaces the accumulation of memory with the synchronicity of global networks, it becomes harder for significance to accumulate and cohere into localised worlds of meaning. Moreover, through globalisation, relationships, practices, meanings, identity and locale are disarticulated, lifted out of local contexts to float across global networks where they combine and recombine in ever more fluid and varied forms. In this way globalisation operates to reverse the impact of localising processes, even where they continue to subsist. Globalised social contexts have characteristics which are in many ways opposite to those of more local contexts. For the immediacy of local contexts, they substitute networks of relationship which are frequently tangible only through their effects at a distance; for their boundedness, open spaces of global flows; for their particularity, the generic furnishings of a cosmopolitan culture. While local contexts are participatory in the sense that their significance is determined by their occupants and inseparable from those occupants’ identity, the non-places of global transport and commerce refuse participation (Augé, 1995). All these characteristics of globalised contexts of social action make it difficult for personalised or localised bodies of significance to accumulate within them and form stable worlds of meaning. The result is we are increasingly left without local centres of concentrated value from which to order our experience. Social life and culture have become provincialised, in Kavanagh’s sense of the word. Two examples may illustrate how these developments permeate everyday life and transform its character. Throughout Ireland the names of individual fields and townlands, often many centuries old, encode the history and topography of particular places. During the economic boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s, as areas were ‘developed’ with suburban-style housing, the old place names were obliterated along with the fields themselves, replaced by generic labels from the estate-agent’s catalogue. More recently, the postal service has introduced a system of postcodes where a sequence of letters and numbers are substituted for the names of streets and houses. Simmel

Parish and province 171 writes: ‘naming documents an unmistakability and personality of existence. . . . Therefore it must disappear once interaction exceeds a certain breadth and rapidity’ (1997: 149). The old names of fields and townlands with their freight of localised memory anchored those familiar with them in a place. Their replacement with names meant to signify desirability or exclusiveness from the lexicon of a generalised Anglo-American real estate culture crystallises the shift to a typically provincial mentality: value resides somewhere else, and can only be captured by imitation. The introduction of postcodes constitutes a denial of the personality of place (whether house, street or town) and the very possibility of where you live being the unselfconscious centre of experience. Meanwhile, the expanding motorway network has bypassed market towns which were traditionally the focus of their rural hinterland. Cumulatively this represents an important reorganisation of space. The hierarchy of local centres which makes up the fabric of rural Ireland – the crossroads with its church and pub, the village, the market town – each with its own identity, a confidence in itself and the validity of its place in the world, is bypassed and cancelled out by the motorway. In the past, roads connected places: they had to be travelled slowly and involved the traveller directly in the landscape. Now they obliterate that landscape and its inhabitants. The motorway, like the postcode, substitutes a spatial grid imposed from outside for concrete places which are their own centres, decentring the world and institutionalising liminality. Driving on a motorway, especially at night, one has the sense that time bends in a loop, space disappears in everlasting sameness, and we realise the condition of Ivan Illich’s (1974) ‘permanent passanger’; eternally in transit, never reaching any destination, traversing the self-contained horizon of the road, our only human contact the lights of oncoming traffic as they rise out of the distance, dazzle for a moment, and fade out. Such a liminal condition is the necessary consequence of the manner in which globalising processes have separated experience from its existential anchors, translating it into quantitative terms which render it fungible and infinitely replicable. In contrast to the liminal stage in rites of passage (Van Gennep, 1992; Turner, 1964, 1990), in late modernity this condition of liminal suspension and perpetual fluidity is hard-wired into the technical and institutional structures which hold global society together, and the concepts of space and time which underpin them. Liminality, paradoxically, becomes our permanent condition (Szakolczai, 2000). This breakdown of taken-for-granted lifeways and a common home leads not – as is often claimed – to the flowering of individual self-expression, but rather to a situation where our identities and patterns of living, the way we dress, furnish our houses, feed ourselves and raise our children, are legitimate and desirable only insofar as they imitate a metropolitan standard held up to us in advertising and the media. This is the mentality of the provincial, who has no confidence in the validity of their own place and the ways of life transmitted through immediate social relations, and whose eyes are forever turned to track the fashions

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of the metropolis – now condensed to a handful of global cities and the media bubble which broadcasts the style and attitudes of their elites to the rest of the world. At the heart of provincialism is a problem of recognition (Pizzorno, 2008). For when localised circles of recognition have been culturally devalued, the provincial is forced to seek validation in the public sphere, where their identity cannot be taken for granted, but must be constantly recreated through performance (Szakolczai, 2013).1 For this the right costume and props – clothes, mannerisms, speech, attitudes, real estate and an array of consumer goods – are of course necessary. For the metropolitan elite, this condition of things is one of the principal foundations of their power. The emptying of space, the bracketing of accumulated time, and the subjugation of local places to global networks has served the purpose of both the bureaucratic state and the global market. The chronotope of home buttresses an assured identity and a confidence in the validity of localised lifeways: such shared systems of meaning in turn underpin culturally autonomous communities. The break-up of such localised patterns of human relations, through enclosures, conquest, colonialism, confiscations of land, the imposition of head-taxes and the seduction of local elites, was a precondition for the effective imposition of centralised political control and a system of economic growth based on global trade and the division of labour. The history of the past five hundred years can therefore be read as the story of how most of the world’s population have been forcibly turned into provincials. In the process, local places have been rendered progressively more dependent on metropolitan centres, which are the headquarters of bureaucracies and the marts of national or global exchange. The authority of these metropolises is not just administrative, political or economic, but charismatic. Lewis Mumford describes the impact of the emergence of national capitals in the absolutist states of the seventeenth century: ‘In the capital, provincial habits, customs, and dialects were melted down and recast in the image of the royal court: this became the so-called national image, national by prescription and imitative fashion rather than in origin’ (Mumford, 1961: 354). The penetration of fashion from such centres into the provinces was a crucial factor in the rise of the original ‘consumer society’ in the eighteenth century. Beyond Europe, a similar process of provincialisation occurred as colonialism broke down the self-contained worlds of traditional peoples and reorientated them – politically, economically and culturally – towards the imperial centre. Such provincialisation must be seen as a key driver of modernity. Whether in rural Britain and France, or Africa and India, people had to be robbed of their confidence in the validity of their own traditions and injected with a desire to mimic metropolitan ways if they were to provide a reliable market for consumer goods or actively cooperate with bureaucratic rule. Yet, localised cultures persist and continue to precipitate out of globalised society wherever groups of people have the opportunity to settle down and build lives of even temporary stability. Localising processes operate even in the heart of globalised modernity – and wherever they do so, they create worlds of meaning which

Parish and province 173 are to a greater or lesser degree centred in themselves and spin on their own axis, driven by dynamics distinct from those of the global systems that surround them. It is to the future of localisation, and the prospects of home, that we will turn in the conclusion.

Note 1 Contemporary ‘celebrity’ is an ideal-type example of this ongoing performance of identity, which accounts for much of the fascination with it.

Conclusion The future of home

The foundations of social life lie less in discursive consensus than in shared patterns of behaviour which are unselfconscious and barely articulated. It is in concrete and emplaced patterns of life rather than public debate or logical argument that the norms which allow society to function originate and are reproduced. Contrary to the dominant tradition of Western political thought, from Locke to contemporary rational choice theory, social and political action and a shared ethic (‘ethos’) depend on pre-rational, non-egotistical sources: the ‘we’ which derives from the experience of a common home. The creation of a world of meaning and a society go hand in hand. The basis of social cohesion and collective action is oikophilia, the love of concrete people and places – the ‘little platoons’ of family, community, club, neighbourhood and city, each rooted in a specific territory (Scruton, 2012). Moral feeling and civic responsibility arise from our sense of obligation to those individuals and groups with whom we identify, as well as from ‘natural piety’ – what the Romans termed pietas – a spontaneous gratitude for what is given us by parents, neighbours and friends. From this comes the willingness to share, sacrifice and accept mutual obligations. These feelings are not rationally inculcated as moral precepts: they are unselfconscious and pre-rational, arising from the intimate exchanges of daily life. Home, far from being a private retreat from the serious business of the public world, is the womb in which society and culture are created and reproduced. Consequently, localising processes open up certain societal potentials which globalising processes tend to close down. Aside from a deepened sense of meaning, they provide the foundation for individual and collective identities, moral certainty, ontological security, and enduring relationships. These in turn offer formidable bases for collective social action and the assertion of individual or communal autonomy. They can also underpin collective networks of gift exchange, welfare and mutual recognition which provide some element of economic and personal security outside the framework of the global market and the state. These potentials may come at a cost in personal freedom and individual choice, even though they can also be deeply rewarding. At its best, home is a world of nurture and care, intimate and familiar; a world of human closeness where defences can be lowered and our selfhood is inextricably blended with

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that of others; a world where we can be secure in our identity and certain of our place, without having to wear a mask or constantly prove ourselves; a world which offers the deep security of patterns of life that repeat themselves year after year and relationships not to be severed even in death. On the other hand, there are people who are happy to live with fluidity, contingency and uncertainty in return for the freedoms they bring. They find substitutes for the meaningful order of home in bundles of practices they carry with them, in the homogenised spaces of modern retail and travel, and in momentary experiences of emotional intensity or collective effervescence (Duyvendak, 2011; Rapport & Dawson, 1998). Whether you find such a life liberating or alienating is a matter of personal preference. However, it helps if the globalised world is one of ever-widening opportunity and choice. But what if instead it is a world of narrowing opportunity, insecurity, exploitation and surveillance? In this case it might be in our interests to renew the kinds of communities created by localising processes in order to find in them the security and protection which is being progressively withdrawn by the neoliberal state. There is moreover a close relation between integration and disintegration at the levels of society and the individual. Home and existential community are the foundations of a secure identity and sense of belonging. In their absence, life is progressively bled of value and meaning. The result is not just the dissolution of community but the disintegration of the human personality. The ‘homeless’ individual experiences a void which they attempt to fill through the frenetic pursuit of stimulation and the accumulation of consumer goods, providing the driving force of consumerism and the fetishism of economic growth. Loss of home goes hand in hand with an addictive personality and an addictive society. Globalisation involves the dismantling of the taken-for-granted relationships of everyday life and their reconstitution within spatially extended networks governed by rationalised institutions. The global market, the public arena, technological development and the bureaucratic state are all solvents of localised associations, and result in the dissipation and relativisation of value. Globalised networks tend to progressively liberate themselves from concrete places, the legacy of the past, and natural and biological cycles, creating a placeless, hermetically sealed ‘virtual reality’ where the accumulation of time is replaced by the simultaneity of a perpetual present. In most historical societies the full impact of globalising processes has been confined to an urban elite. However, over the past two centuries globalisation, powered by fossil fuels and technology, has become an accelerating spiral that has fundamentally restructured the everyday lives of the majority of people on the planet. Yet modernity could not have survived and reproduced itself without the countervailing spiral of localising processes, through which uprooted individuals have resettled themselves, accumulated memories and traditions, forged families and communities, and reproduced the cultural heritage of their societies. Localising processes continue to shape those areas of our lives which anchor our identities and provide a sense of meaning: the everyday interactions of home, family, community and intimate circles of friendship.

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Today many of the taken-for-granted institutional and cultural underpinnings of modernity, including exponential economic growth, the democratic welfare state, the disciplined and inner-directed subject, and the ideal of a public sphere founded on rational discourse, are being eroded, while overarching assumptions about progress and human control are challenged by a deepening ecological crisis. The advanced industrial economies, having seen economic growth decline over successive decades (Harvey, 2007), are now becalmed in what a growing number of economists are calling ‘secular stagnation’. This is accompanied by rising levels of social inequality (Picketty, 2014), which increasingly threaten to undermine the social contract. The twentieth-century social consensus represented by the welfare state is being dismantled – at an even greater pace since the Great Recession of 2008 – in a process which risks eroding the legitimacy of the state itself. This is reflected in growing levels of alienation from politics and declining trust in public institutions, coupled with the rise of populist movements of both left and right. Meanwhile the ecological underpinnings of modernity are coming unstuck. Climate change makes it imperative that industrial economies shift from fossil fuels as their primary energy source within a matter of decades, yet there are serious questions over whether renewable energy sources have the capacity to fuel the levels of economic growth and societal complexity we currently take for granted (Prieto & Hall, 2013; Weisbach et al., 2013; Hall et al., 2014; Lambert et al., 2014; Ferroni & Hopkirk, 2016). If, as Marx wrote, what the bourgeoisie produces is above all its own gravediggers, globalised modernity is likewise in the process of eating its own foundations. While the cosmopolitan elite speed through the rarefied heavens of finance and information like children of Olympus, for those who cling to earth there is the disorientation of constant change, alongside the daily degradations of a labour market transformed by outsourcing and robosourcing. Hence the waves of populist anger which regularly break the surface of our society like a tide pressed by contrary winds. Beneath the manifold crises of globalised civilisation lies a deeper crisis, one of existential homelessness, the loss of a sense of belonging and meaning which accompanies the liquefaction of almost every aspect of social life. Globalisation generates so much anxiety because ‘it is steadily dissolving the coordinates we have been using to make sense of experience’ (Levy & Sznaider, 2006: 1). Populist politicians in both Europe and America play on anxieties over globalisation by promising to reconstitute the national home, through cutting immigration and ‘taking back control’, but have no means of putting their rhetoric into practice. Young people seek refuge in the ‘new domesticity’ (Matchar, 2013) as work becomes increasingly unrewarding, precarious or unavailable, yet they are unable to afford homes of their own. The dominant conceptualisations of home in the twentieth century, the nation-state and the suburban nuclear household, continue to shape our personal and political aspirations, even as they are destabilised by globalisation and social change. Meanwhile, from a growing belt of broken and smouldering lands, driven by war and climate change, the desperate and hopeful assail the borders of the west – the first of myriads to come.

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In this time of troubles there are no universal solutions; indeed, the very desire for them is part of a modern episteme which is in the process of collapse. Communism died with the Soviet Union, social democracy has been bankrupted by its alliance with global capital, and neoliberalism is invalidated by the social and ecological devastation it has unleashed. Of the great ideologies only nationalism is staging a resurgence. But it is nationalism without history or a sense of place, a prop for the neoliberal state, draping a corporate agenda in the national flag. To survive we need to discover new forms of solidarity. This is primarily an archaeological task – to excavate, from under the tottering skyscrapers of modernity, the foundations of belonging. Consequently, we can no longer take it for granted that local identities or habitual lifeways are irrelevant in the brave new world of globalised late modernity. On the contrary, it is precisely the places where these have been preserved which may prove best equipped to flourish in the time ahead. History is not a one-way street, and there is no reason to believe the future will bring only an acceleration of the dominant trends of the past two centuries. Patrick Kavanagh’s insight that all great cultures are at their basis parochial is more astute than any number of delirious evocations of postmodernity. Meaningful ways of life evolve through the accumulation of experience in concrete places; this will continue long after New York and Shanghai have gone the way of Babylon and Nineveh. Not only does home persist, but it can also be recovered. At every stage of human history events such as wars, migrations and natural catastrophes have uprooted people and scattered them to new regions, and yet out of groups of strangers new centres of meaningful life, settled homes and existential communities have evolved. There are numerous trends and movements in contemporary culture which involve people turning their backs on globalisation and seeking more localised, and therefore meaningful and sustainable, lifestyles: farmers’ markets and community-supported agriculture, Transition towns and the local food movement, community energy projects and off-grid living, the artisan economy and alternative currencies, neo-homesteaders and ecovillages, to name but a few. Emily Matchar (2013) writes of the evolution of a ‘new domesticity’ in contemporary culture, characterised by the revival of crafts like knitting, sewing and embroidery; the rise of home baking, gardening and backyard poultry-raising; the culture of attachment parenting and home-schooling; and the popularity of downshifting and neohomesteading. What drives this cultural trend, in her view, is the longing of those in their twenties and thirties for ‘a more authentic, meaningful life in an economically and environmentally uncertain world’ (Ibid: 5). In his book Real England: The Battle Against the Bland (2009), Paul Kingsnorth details his encounters with people and groups who are battling the forces of homogenisation and globalisation to reclaim whatever is distinctive about their corner of the world: traditional pubs and locally brewed beers, independent shops, small farms, traditional villages and the heritage varieties of apple associated with particular English counties and soils. At the moment, such trends are more about the lifestyle and identity projects of individuals than a collective force capable of changing society. But if the current

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crisis of the key institutions of modernity, the global market and the national state, continues, they are likely to take on greater significance. Contrary to ‘progressive’ orthodoxy, existential communities with traditional values have historically offered the strongest resistance to global capitalism – from labourers struggling against enclosures and handloom weavers fighting mechanisation in the nineteenth century to contemporary movements of indigenous peoples and landless peasants in the global south. Craig Calhoun writes that Commitments to traditional cultural values and immediate communal relations are crucial to many radical movements, because they provide them with the internal social organisation necessary to radical collective action and because the introduction of modern capitalist-dominated social formations is incompatible with their ways of life. (Calhoun, 1983) Gupta and Ferguson (1992: 13) note ‘the ubiquity of place in collective political mobilization’, as does Harvey in relation to working-class movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (1990: 36–37). bell hooks writes that for black people in the agrarian south of America the experience of working the land and growing food, as well as their deep religious belief, gave them the sense there was an alternative to the capitalist system and an awareness of powers greater than mankind; this allowed them a certain autonomy and ‘kept them from seeing themselves as always and only victims’ (2009: 206). Such traditional communities offer a measure of autonomy from globalised economic and political structures, and an accompanying sense of personal dignity and worth. As the market and its handmaid, the neoliberal state, intensify their demands on the individual while narrowing the circle of those who share the fruits of the global economy, the social grounds for attempting to reclaim such autonomy may well emerge in the decades ahead. One potential response to the contemporary crisis is therefore to give renewed attention to localising processes at every scale at which they operate, from household and family to neighbourhood and town. This can involve a revitalised commitment to place, a determination to settle somewhere and cultivate its inhabitational possibilities. It can mean reinvigorating the collective memory of the locations we inhabit by resuscitating their past, commemorating people and events, and passing on their stories to future generations. It can include the preservation and recreation of family and community traditions or the invention of new ones. The power of commensal bonds can be recovered by finding new ways to venerate our (individual and collective) ancestors, and by reclaiming the power of the shared meal as an act of communion among the members of a family or a wider social group. Localised circles of gift exchange can be resuscitated to provide their members with networks of mutual aid and provide the foundation for an alternative economy. Shared rituals can be created to mark togetherness and circumscribe spaces of intimacy and freedom. In all these ways, we can

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reconnect with the existential frameworks of physical place, accumulated time, face-to-face relations and biological and biophysical cycles, and participate in creating a more meaningful world of shared belonging. Localising processes can thereby help create spaces of freedom and renewal on the edge of a globalised society which is becoming ever harsher as its social and ecological underpinnings erode.

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Index

African homeplace 155–156 Ainu sacred corner of house 119 Allard, LaDonna Brave Bull 81–82 Anang of Nigeria 119 ancestor veneration 119–124 Antaeus and Hercules myth: intersecting spirals 19–20; introduction to 8–9; liminality 17–19; local context of 12–16; as parable of globalisation 9–12, 16–17; quest for home 20–22 Appadurai, Arjun 149 appropriation of place 61–64 archetypes in self-narrative 42 Assmann, Jan 79 Athenian Acropolis 54–55 at-homeness 162 Augé, Marc 33, 84 Australian aborigines 36, 126 authenticity of tradition 96 autonomous communities 172 autonomy in place-making 59 Bachelard, Gaston 32, 33, 92, 149 Bealtine festival 146 Beatley, Timothy 57 Beck, Ulrich 86 Bedouin of Jordan 116 Berger, John 24, 101, 163 Bergson, Henri 161 Bloch, Maurice 115 Bollnow, Otto Friedrich 11, 32 Book of Invasions (Amergin) 62 boundaries of home: introduction to 141–143; meaning and 149–152; ontological security 146–149; refuge/ retreat of home 152–157; rituals of 143–146 boundary-making, as appropriation 63 Breen, Dan 69, 71, 78–79, 89

built environment 57 burial rituals 120–121 Calhoun, Craig 93, 178 Cartesianism 25–27, 30 Casey, Edward 52, 64, 77, 78, 79 causal-functional integration 48 Cheal, David 132, 135–136 Chevalier, Sophie 63 child burial rituals 121–122 Chinese cosmology 162–163 Chinese sacred corner of house 119 Christian Eucharist 115 Christianity 21, 71, 126 Christmas Carol, A (Dickens) 129–130, 140 Christmas observances/meaning 37–38, 40, 93 chronotope of place 60 civic responsibility 174 cognition and participation 30 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 37 collective action 174 collective homes 5 collective memory: defined 70, 84; future of 178; in golden age 82–88; history and 70–72; of home 21; introduction to 1, 13, 69–70; meaning-making and 34; place-making and 58; primordial depth of place 76–79, 99; social ethos and 79–82; social life and 103; summary of 88–89; topography and 72–75; tradition and 99 colonialism 22, 172 commensal bonds 1, 109–110, 124–128, 138 commensality, defined 109 commerce institution 17 commodity exchange 134

194

Index

communications media 86 communicative memory 88 communism 21, 71, 177 community identity 65–66, 156 community-supported agriculture 177 connectivity of place 51 Connerton, Paul 72, 86 connotation in meaning-making 41 consumerism 38, 89 cooking symbology 113–114 Corcoran, Mary P. 65 cosmicisation 11 cosmopolitan memory 87–88 Coulagnes, Fustel de 127 courtesy in eating 117 Cresswell, Tim 58, 84–85 Cult of Domesticity 3, 153

and 57; in social groups 30, 38–39; symbolism of 47 familiar, defined 148–149 fast-food restaurants 47, 102, 118 feasting, as appropriation 63 female divinities of hearth 112–114 fencing in, as appropriation 63 Field, The (Keane) 62 figuration concept 60–61, 150 Finding Your Roots documentary 108, 127 First People in Navajo legend 10 flag symbology 24 flaneurs 67 flight of time 161 Flinders, Carol Lee 24 Frankl, Viktor 31–32, 49 Frost, Robert 139

Dakota Access Pipeline 81 dance and figuration 60–61 death customs 93, 144 democratic welfare state 176 Dickens, Charles 129–130 Dilthey, Wilhelm 25, 26–27, 29–30, 37 Dinnseanchas texts 73, 78 Disney World and place 66 do-it-yourself (DIY) 1 domesticity 3, 21, 153–156, 176 domovik house spirit 124 Douglas, Mary 53, 134, 151 Dreaming stories, by Aboriginals 56 dualism 26 Durkheim, Emile 36 Duyvendak, Jan 9, 101–102 dwelling, defined 33–34, 61–62

Gaia 8 Ganesh statue significance 143 Geertz, Clifford 30, 43 Gennep, Arnold van 29 Giddens, Anthony 14–15, 92–93, 147 Gieryn, Thomas 55, 57 gift exchange and recognition: gift relations 131–135; identity with 135–138; introduction to 14, 129–131; summary of 138–140 globalisation: Antaeus and Hercules myth 9–12; collective memory and 86–87, 89; communications networks 87; overview of 1, 16–17; as permanent liminality 31; place-making 51–52, 60, 66–67; rationalised institutions 175; social relations 19–20; social theory and 14; synchronicity and displacement 15; weakening of localisation processes 169–173 glocalisation 5 grand narratives 43 Greek city state 3 Grimm, Jacob 123 group ethos 80

Eisenstein, Charles 12, 131, 135 Eliade, Mircea 3, 10, 12, 63, 142, 162 Elias, Norbert 60 environmentalism 2, 39 epistemology 26–27 ethics considerations 79, 139 ethos, defined 79–80 etiquette of eating 117 Etruscan rite 141 existential realities 37–38, 175, 178 experience: as cumulative 35–36; as fragmented 46; meaning-making and 25–29; place-making and 52 face-to-face interaction: collective memory and 83; introduction to 14, 15, 17; localising processes 170; place-making

habitus concept 92, 98–99, 102 Halbwachs, Maurice 58, 72, 79, 83 Harari, Yuval 25 Harvey, David 64 hearth and home 110–114 hearth fire 112–113 Heidegger, Martin 32–33, 34–35, 52 Hercules see Antaeus and Hercules myth history and memory 70–72

Index Holocaust, shared memories 87–88 home: displacement from 101; flight of time 161; future of 174–179; global networks 16–17; hearth and 110–114; introduction to 1–7; localisation process and 12–16; objectification of habitus 15–16; place-making and 61, 65–66; quest for 20–22; refuge/retreat of 152–157; summary of 157–158 homeness idea 34–35 home page online 9 homescape 139 home-schooling 177 homey environments 154–155 homogenisation of consumer capitalism 89 hooks, bell 3, 155–156, 178 house burials 121–122 household traditions: commensal bond 124–128; hearth and home 110–114; introduction to 108–110; shared meals 115–119; veneration of ancestors 119–124 house spirits 122–124 human biological cycles 34 Husserl, Edmund 32 Hyde, Lewis 132–133 identity: community identity 65–66, 156; familial past and 108; with gift exchange 135–138; mutual recognition of 137–138; place and 56, 63; social identity 13; unity of purpose with 126; validity of 163 illud tempus 97 imagination, as a faculty 37 immanent meaning 32–39 immigrant communities 156 India: Ganesh statue significance 143; meal rituals 116–117; rituals against epidemics 145; threshold designs 143–144 Indonesian attic shrines 119 industrialization 64, 106, 142 information technology (IT) 9, 60 institutionalisation of non-places 85 integrative meaning 44 integrity of tradition 96 intersecting spirals 19–20 intimate familiarity 100 intramural burial rituals 121 Inyan Ska (Whitestone) Massacre (1863) 81–82 Irish Republican Army (IRA) 69–70

195

Irish storytelling 73–74 Italian New Age community 94 Jackson, Michael D. 18, 56 Jacobsen, Kirsten 100–101, 152 James, Henry 77 Joisten, Karen 156 Kant, Immanuel 26 Kantianism 25–26, 27 Karakaitags of Daghestan 116 Kavanagh, Patrick 177 Keane, John B. 62 Kingsnorth, Paul 177 Kumar, Krishan 157 Kung bushmen of the Kalahari Desert 100–101 Kwakiutl Indians 120, 133 Leroi-Gourhan, André 151 Levy, Daniel 87 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien 14–15 lifeways and traditions 12 liminality 17–19, 95, 171 lived experience concept 27–29 local food movement 177 localisation processes: boundaries of home 150; future of 179; globalisation impact on 169–173; introduction to 12–16, 160–161; mathematical time and space 164–169; overview of 161–164, 175; parochial provincialism 161–164; placemaking 60; social relations 19–20 local social involvements 53–54 logic of signification 41 logico-meaningful integration 48 logocentric tradition of Western thought 40 London’s docklands 58 longhouse of Papua New Guinea 3 love locks tradition 91–93 MacIntyre, Alasdair 42 Madagascar, ancestor cult 119 Maffesoli, Michael 98 Máire Bhuí Ní Laeire 95–96 Marcus, Claire Cooper 75 marriage and threshold rituals 144, 148 Marx, Karl 176 Marxist conception of the proletariat 43 Massey, Doreen 58–60, 149 mathematical time and space 164–169 Mauss, Marcel 64, 135 McCracken, Grant 75, 154–155

196

Index

meaning-making: boundaries of home 149–152; experiences and 25–29; immanent meaning 32–39; introduction to 24–25; overview of 29–32; transcendent meaning 39–43; transformations of 43–49 Mecca community 82 mediated relations 12 medieval guilds and confraternities 3 Melanesian ancestor offerings 119 memories by association 56 memory-making: communicative memory 88; cosmopolitan memory 87–88; Holocaust, shared memories 87–88; introduction to 69–70; tradition and 93–100; see also collective memory metropolitan elite 172 migratory displacement 101 mnemonic property 75 modern housing, characterization 11–12 modernity/modernisation: ecological underpinnings of 176; meaning-making 48–49; of tradition 102–106 money transfers 133 Mother Earth and home 112 moving centre 100–102 mutual recognition of identity 137–138 My Fight for Irish Freedom (Breen) 69 mythological outlook on meaning 44–45, 48 naming processes 62, 170–171 national identity and flag symbology 24 nationalism 1, 56, 177 nation-state 5, 88 Navajo legend of underworld 10 new domesticity 21, 176 Ni Shíocháin, Triona 95–96 non-places concept 33, 84–85 Nora, Pierre 71, 86 Norse culture 93–94 Nowicka, Magdalena 101–102 objectification of habitus 15–16 oikos, defined 110 Old Testament, gift relations 133–134 ontological security 146–149 original nature concept 34 Paiwanese, ancestral house 120 Paiwan house spirits 120 persistence of place 64–67 phantasmagoric notion of home 157 physical context of place 34 physicality of place 60 Pierre, DBC 118

piety (pietas) 139 Pizzorno, Alessandro 136–137 place-making: appropriation of place 61–64; boundaries and 150–151; figuration and 57–61; introduction to 13, 51–53; persistence of place 64–67; place, as chronoscope 53–55; primordial depth of place 76–79, 95; tradition and 93–100; value of 55–57 place memory 76–79 pluralisation 46–47 political philosophy 98 Porphyry (philosopher) 143 positivism 25, 29 possession of land, as appropriation 63 primitive mentality 14 primordial depth of place 76–79, 95 problem of meaning 42 progressive sense of place 59 progressivist liberalism 21 Purity and Danger (Douglas) 151 Purum of Vietnam 119 Putnam, Tim 157 quest for home 20–22 Raglan, Lord 111 rational choice theory 174 rationalised theology 45–46, 48 rationalization of action 103 reactionary sense of place 59 Real England: The Battle Against the Bland (Kingsnorth) 177 reality symbolisations 28 redundancy in gifting 132 refuge/retreat of home 152–157 relationships and gift exchange 131–135 religious beliefs/myths 6, 44, 55 Relph, Edward 65, 82 rituals: Bealtine festival 146; burial rituals 120–121; child burial rituals 121–122; demarcation of boundaries 156; of eating 118; intramural burial rituals 121; Slavic rituals against epidemics 145; of threshold and boundary 143–146; see also tradition Roman Etruscan rite 141 Roman state, ethos of 80–81 Roman threshold rituals 145 Russian holy corner of house 119 Rykwert, Joseph 111–112, 141, 152 Sacred and the Profane, The (Eliade) 142 sacred geometry 162–163 Sahlin, Marshall 126

Index

197

San Bushmen 59 Sanders, Scott Russell 6 Saussure, Ferdinand de 40–41 Schama, Simon 153 Scheper-Hughes, Nancy 74 Scruton, Roger 32, 62, 139, 156 Seamon, David 147, 162 seasonal patterns of nature 34 secular religions 45 selfhood theory 136–137 self-preservation desire 136 sense of place 66–67 shared identities 5, 6 shared meals 115–119 shared memories 87–88 Shils, Edward 93, 95, 97, 105–106 Shintoism 143 Simmel, Georg 55, 56 Slavic rituals against epidemics 145 social ethos 79–82 social groups/life: cohesion in 174; collective memory and 103; as conscious 36; face-to-face interaction 30, 38–39; frameworks of memory 86; at home 12–14; introduction to 9; localisation processes 19–20; power of eating 117; relationships and place 56 social identity 13 social phenomenon 26 social reality 18, 135 solitary contractuality 84 sparing idea 34–35 spatial immovability 55 Standing Rock tribe 81–82 symbolism: of boundaries 14, 149, 151–152; in love locks tradition 91–93; in placemaking 54–55; in self-narrative 42 synchronicity and displacement 15 Szakolczai, Arpad 25, 26 Sznaider, Natan 87

Thomassen, Bjorn 147 threshold rituals 143–146 tight-knit matrix of relationship 13 topography and memory 72–75 traditio, defined 133 tradition: habitus concept 98–99, 102; introduction to 91–93; memory and place 93–100; modernity and endurance of 102–106; moving centre 100–102; summary of 106–107; see also household traditions; rituals traditional peoples: house in Madagascar 10; houses of 3–4; meaning of home 162; sacred geometry 162–163; topography and memory 72–75 transcendentalism 26 transcendent meaning-making 39–43 transport infrastructure 17 Trobriand Islands gift exchange 133 Turner, Victor 25, 43–44 tyranny of meaning 40

technical infrastructures 157 temporal continuity and place 58

Zafimaniry of Madagascar 112, 114 Zukin, Sharon 66

umaqan (guardian spirit) 120 urbs, boundaries 141–142 van Gennep, Arnold 145, 148 veneration of ancestors 119–124 Vernon God Little (Pierre) 118 Victorian cult of domesticity 3 Weber, Max 42, 92, 125 west room traditions 108–109 women’s domestic role 153, 156 working-class sense of place 67 workplace ethos 80 workplace meaning 47 World War I 91 Yi-fu Tuan 57, 163 Young, Iris Marion 3, 156