Between roots and rhizomes: Towards a post‐phenomenology of home

“Home and at-homeness” is the theme of essays in the spring 2012 issue of Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology. In the first essay, interior designer Jane Barry tells the story of her California family home. She describes family routines in the house and her father’s increasing inability to live comfortably at home during the last few years of his life. Though he became steadily more disabled, he would not move from the house or accept design modifications to make his life there easier. In the second essay, health sociologist Andrew Moore and nursing researcher Bernie Carter consider the impact of life-saving assistive technology (AT) that many children with complex health needs depend on in their homes. In author interviews, parents of these children explained how this equipment intrudes into the home yet is absolutely necessary if the child is to remain alive. Moore and Carter offer no easy way to reconcile this tension between technological essentials and lived qualities of at-homeness, but their essay perceptively illustrates how properties of the material and technological environment can play both a supportive and undermining role in domestic wellbeing. In the third essay, philosopher Janet Donohoe overviews home and at-homeness. She draws on the phenomenological ideas of Gaston Bachelard, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, but gives particular emphasis to Edmund Husserl’s concepts of homeworld and alienworld. Husserl interpreted homeworld as the tacit, taken-for-granted sphere of experiences and situations typically not called into question. Though unique for each person, the homeworld is always in some mode of lived mutuality with the alienworld—a world of difference and otherness but only brought forward to awareness because of the always already givenness of the homeworld. One of phenomenology’s major contributions to contemporary thinking is recognition that human beings and their worlds are existentially intertwined and that an integral aspect of this interconnectedness is how particular physical, environmental, and spatial qualities of a world make that world one way rather than another. In referring to environmental features like dwelling layout, technological devices, landscapes, and geographical worlds, these essays illustrate how materiality, spatiality, and environmental embodiment contribute to specific domestic lifeworlds. Directly or indirectly, the essays suggest how such understanding might facilitate more life-grounded theories, designs, and policies.

2017

2011

The basis of phenomenology is the belief that experience is the source of all knowledge. Central to Merleau-Ponty's elaborations is the central role of the body in experience based on the notion that we perceive the world through our bodies and are thus embodied subjects. This way of thinking about experience and the body blurs the fundamental distinction between subject and object, suggesting that we ambiguously exist as both.

2002

Qualitative Housing Analysis: An International Perspective (Studies in Qualitative Analysis, Volume 10), 2008

In this chapter we examine the application and utility of qualitative social research methods in the study of house and home. Our focus will be on how intensive interviews with householders; video and audio recorded house and garden interpretative tours with residents, interviews with city planners and managers and the analysis of real estate advertising and the narratives in lifestyle magazines and DIY literature can be used to interpret the ways individuals and households develop their senses of home, place and identity. We will attend to the methodological issues associated with the study of everyday life in and around the home set within the broader context of neighbourhoods and the economy and society of the wider urban area. Our exposition of these issues will be supported with references to our ongoing study of house and home in which we have found ourselves dealing with debates about the importance of place-based social relationships in what some commentators are positing as an increasingly mobile social world.

This article studies the western bourgeois home, and argues that its social construction as a familiar, autonomous, safe, private haven is predicated not only upon the exclusion of undesired social elements (anomie, homelessness, social conflict, etc.) but also upon the exclusion of undesired natural elements (cold, dirt, pollution, sewage, etc.). Using the domestication of water in the western world as a vehicle, the article analyses the historical-geographical process through which nature became scripted as ‘the other’ to the bourgeois home, and explains the contribution of this separation to the conceptual construction of the home as a distinct and autonomous ‘space envelope’, supposedly untouched by socio-natural processes. This analysis identifies an inherent contradiction: despite the intense efforts at ‘othering’ and excluding nature from the premises of the home, the function and familiarity of this space is increasingly dependent upon the production of nature. Although the complex set of socio-natural networks, pipes and cables that carry clean, produced, commodified nature inside and pump bad, metabolized nature outside the bourgeois home remain visually excluded, it is this same excluded socio-nature that constitutes the material basis upon which the familiarity of the home is constructed. Thus, in a simultaneous act of need and denial, the bourgeois home remains the host of the elements that it tries to exclude. This contradiction surfaces at moments of crisis (such as power cuts, burst mains and water shortage) when familiar objects acquire uncanny properties. At such moments, the continuity of the social and material processes that produce the domestic space is unexpectedly foregrounded, bringing the dweller face to face with his/her alienation, within his/her most familiar environment. Cet article montre comment la construction sociale de la maison bourgeoise occidentale, en tant que refuge privé, sécurisé, autonome et familier, s'appuie sur l'exclusion d'éléments indésirables, tant sociaux (anomie, sans-abri, lutte sociale, etc.) que naturels (froid, saleté, pollution, effluents, etc.). Comme véhicule, ce travail utilise la domestication de l'eau dans le monde occidental, et analyse le processus historico-géographique par lequel la nature est devenue ‘l'autre’ pour la maison bourgeoise, tout en expliquant l'apport de cette séparation dans l'élaboration conceptuelle de la maison comme ‘enveloppe spatiale’ distincte et autonome, censée être préservée des processus sociaux-naturels. Ainsi apparaît une contradiction intrinsèque: malgré d'intenses efforts visant à‘l'altérité’ et l'exclusion de la nature dans le principe, la fonction et la familiarité de la maison dépendent de plus en plus de la production de nature. L'ensemble complexe de réseaux sociaux-naturels, tuyaux et câbles qui amènent une nature nettoyée, fabriquée, banalisée à l'intérieur et expulsent la nature mauvaise, métabolisée à l'extérieur de la maison bourgeoise, restent éliminés visuellement. Pourtant, c'est cette même socio-nature exclue qui constitue la base matérielle sur laquelle se construit l'intimité de cet espace. Donc, dans un acte simultané de besoin et rejet, la maison bourgeoise continue d'héberger les éléments qu'elle essaie d'exclure. Cette contradiction émerge lors des crises (coupures de courant, explosion de canalisations et pénuries d'eau, par exemple) quand les objets familiers revêtent des qualités surnaturelles. Alors, la continuité des processus sociaux et matériels qui génèrent l'espace domestique est subitement mise en lumière, l'occupant se trouvant confrontéà son aliénation, au sein de son environnement le plus intime.

Home: Ethnographic Encounters (Lenhard, J. and F. Samanani eds), 2019

Qualitative Sociology Review

2019