Home Is Other People — The Relational Home

Abstract

We live ‘home’ on a daily basis through a series of interactions, negotiations, intimacies and exchanges with close kin, extended family, acquaintances and strangers. The relational home consists of social networks, as well as the habitual social practices that make us feel at home and the accumulated resources that arise from social networking. Home is constructed when people interact with the spaces around them, through the repetition of banal activities and the enactment of important life events. Activities such as buying a newspaper from the same shop every day, sharing a glut of home grown vegetables with neighbours, collecting a relative’s children from school, gathering family to celebrate a grandparent’s birthday and coming together for a village festival all demonstrate the ways in which webs of connections are established, and how people construct relationships not just with each other, but also with place and time through an embodied enactment of home. These systems of communality and reciprocity characterise society and provide the everyday texture of home. As Turton (2005) reminds us, place ‘is not just a stage upon which social activity is carried out’ but is ‘a product of social activity — and a fragile one at that’ (Turton 2005: 275). Through social activity, connections are made between ourselves, our predecessors and places — connections which are often fiercely defended. As Zetter (1998), states, home is ‘not just physically bounded space, but a living organism of relationships and traditions stretching back into the past’ (Zetter 1998: 310).