The Dictionary of Human Geography

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belonging. Home is lived as well as

imagined. What home means and how it

is materially manifest are continually cre-

ated and re-created through everyday

home-making practices, which are them-

selves tied to spatial imaginaries of home’

(p. 254). The materialities of home – in-

cluding domestic architecture, interior de-

sign, material cultures and home-making

practices – are themselves shaped by, and

interpreted through, a wide range of ideas

about home.

 Home, power and identity are intimately

linked. ‘Home as a place and as a spatial

imaginary helps to constitute identity,

whereby people’s senses of themselves are

related to and produced through lived and

metaphorical experiences of home. These

identities and homes are, in turn, produced

and articulated through relations of power’

(p. 256). Rather than view the home as a

fixed and bounded site, grounding and

containing identity, geographers have un-

settled both home and identity to reflect

their mutual locatedness and porosity,

rootedness and mobility. The home has

become an important site for studying in-

clusions, exclusions and inequalities in

terms ofgender,class, age,sexuality

and ‘race’.

 Geographies of home are multi-scalar. ‘Home

is a socially constructedscalethat extends

beyond the house and household. ...

[T]he relations of domesticity, intimacy

and belonging that construct home not

only extend beyond, but also help toproduce

scales far beyond the household’ (p. 257;

also see Marston, 2004a). Ideas and lived

experiences of home are located within,

travel across and help to produce scales

from the body to the globe, as shown by

the political significance of embodied do-

mesticity in reproducing and resisting na-

tions and empires; the bungalow and the

high-rise as transnational domestic forms;

migratory transformations of home; and the

employment of domestic workers in the

global economy (including Pratt, 2004).

A wide range of research across the human-

ities and social sciences interrogates normative

ideas of home as a private, bounded, autono-

mous, safe and comfortable place. The emo-

tive power of home is not only evident in

feelings of attachment, belonging and familiar-

ity and their material manifestations, but also

in feelings and experiences of loss, alienation

and exclusion, as shown by research on do-

mestic violence, homelessness and displace-

ment. The term domicide, for example, has

been coined by Douglas Porteous and Sandra

Smith (2001) to refer to ‘the deliberate de-

struction of home by human agency in pursuit

of specified goals, which causes suffering to

the victims’ (p. 12). Distinguishing between

its ‘everyday’ forms – through, for example,

urban redevelopment and economic restruc-

turing – and its ‘extreme’ forms – including

war and the forced resettlement of indigenous

people – Porteous and Smith estimate that at

least 30 million people across the world are

victims of domicide (cf.urbicide). ab

Suggested reading

Bachelard (1994 [1958]); Blunt (2005); Bunksˇe

(2004); Duncan and Lambert (2004); hooks

(1991); Kaika (2004); Marston (2004a); Pratt

(2004); Tolia-Kelly (2004); Young (1997a).

homeland An area to which a people or a

political community is closely attached.

‘Attachment’ has a profoundly cultural and

political meaning in all major uses of the

term. In much of European geography, ‘home-

land’ carries resonances of the German

Heimat, a spiritual, even mystical and often

romanticized attachment to a native land, the

place to which a person is tied by blood that is

also the space of thenation. In the first half of

the twentieth century, ‘homeland’ in this sense

became infused with ideologies of racial purity

and patriotism in the veneration of the

Fatherland that was central to the rise offas-

cismin general and the Third Reich in par-

ticular. For others, and particularly for the

peoples of thediaspora, ‘homeland’ became

an object of nostalgia, desire and identifica-

tion, most viscerally so for those displaced

and without a home of their own: hence, for

example, the project of a ‘Jewish Homeland’

that gained momentum after the First World

War and culminated in the formation of the

State of Israel in 1948. In the 1960s and

1970s, the term was cynically invoked to se-

cure the system ofapartheidin South Africa

through the creation of ‘black homelands’

(Transkei was the first). These were purely

instrumental attempts to confine black

Africans to scattered rural areas whose delimi-

tation bore little relation to their own cultural

geographies (Butler, Rotberg and Adams,

1977).

In Americancultural geography, ‘home-

land’ became a term of art in the second half of

the twentieth century. It too implied an histor-

ically sedimented sense of identity that

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HOMELAND