HOME: STRUCTURES REAL AND IMAGINED

Ellen Rovner, Ph.D. and Hillary Waterman, Ph.D.

“Home is a place, when you return, they have to take you in.” Robert Frost

BUT IS IT???

attachment

loss

control

Western Modernity

Where? Who? How?

• “I love Chelsea; it’s in my kishkes. What can I say?”• “It’s like one, big family in Chelsea.”• “I feel comfortable here in a way I don’t feel in other places.”

Home is...a Jersey Girl

“She’s everything I remember about being in New York, which is reminding me, day by day, of everything I remember about myself...It works out pretty good.”

I do...Do you?

“The house is my only asset!”

“We’re going to get so financially entangled that there will be no question of ever getting a divorce!”

Evelyn-- Frank--

Naked Absence (Jonathan Boyarin 1995)

Will my car be safe there?

Whose Home is it, anyway?

“Yeah, these Rednecks took it from the Indians and we’re taking it from them...so fuck ‘em.”

Vs.

“It’s getting so you can walk from one end of this island to the other stepping on nothing but ‘No Trespassing’ signs.”

Lourdes

Political Action

“Neighbors might be nice people, but you don’t know who they are.”“If you try here in America, you can make it.”

Conclusion

• Home is both individual and collective—more than geography or a particular locus

• Ongoing process of construction and deconstruction of meanings and associations

• Extension of the self--manifested in memory (individual and collective), food, discourses of class and ethnicity and the opposition of Home vs. Non-home