Identities in Transition

The Enkidu Summer Conference 2007

June 1 - 5, 2007

Mexico City

in:

Interior and Exterior Wilderness: Localizing Identity in Everyday “Homes”

Jaime Yard

Department of Social Anthropology

York University, Toronto

Canada

In this paper I will discuss some of the complications of the idea(l) of the house-as-home as a grounding for identity in everyday life. I argue the there is a fundamental, although not necessarily mutually exclusive, difference between a house and a home. 

A house is, as Heidegger argues “a material construction, an edifice,” while a home is something much more complicated, a recursive place, a marked point of meeting and unstable pause between interior and exterior worlds. John Berger argues that a home is the centre of the world because it marks a crucial intersection between cosmological explanations of being and our most profound experiences of death and finite temporality on the vertical axes, and all past and hopefully future journeys on the horizontal one. 

A home has a “centrifugal quality,” a stabilizing effect upon both individuals and societies, but, this stabilization is ideologically and affectively overdetermined. Tuan (1990:93) argues that the feelings we have towards our homes are both “more permanent and less easy to express” than our relation to any other place. 

The settling into a permanent material structure as a home, presents one of the most complicated and rich sites for the study of everyday life. In the house-as-home we are confronted with liminal territory between the public and the private, nature and culture, and fervent debates regarding the social demarcation and valuing of feminine and masculine space. 

The house-as-home is an attempt to link inner experience with external form, and for many, it contains profound ambivalences regarding relations to the external physical world. McKay and Tuan both use the metaphor of “wilderness” as a way to discuss the intervention of a home into states of mind and nature, the interplay between secure states and sites of identity and their continual flux. "We might try to sum up the paradox of home-making by saying that inner life takes place: it both claims place and acts to become a place among others. It turns wilderness into an interior and presents interiority to the wilderness" (McKay 2002:23 emphasis in original). In this framework, the house-as-home can be taken as a starting place for all of our relations to external natural and social worlds, but potentially also, our exploitation of them. 

Interpolations into social and natural landscapes by way of the construction of houses presents a danger, that the desire to have a place of one’s own, to hold a place or moment, will dissolve into possessive ownership and violent love. Heidegger, Martin 1971 Building Dwelling Thinking. In Poetry, Language, Thought. Pp. 145-161. New York: Harper and Row. McKay, Don 2001 Field Notes on Poetry and Wilderness. Wolfville: Gaspereau Press. Tuan, Yi-Fu 1990 Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. New York: Columbia University Press.

About Jaime Yard

Jaime Yard is a doctoral student at York University in Toronto, Canada. Her research interests include narrative and landscape, everyday life, and transitioning resource-based communities in British Columbia.