Making Home

In both anthropology and sociology, many scholars have dealt with shifting boundaries between the formal and informal, the private and the public, and the domestic and the extra-domestic. And more often than not, they did not deal with these dichotomies just descriptively; they used them in a highly normative way. The complex and ambiguous interplay between the private and the public can be helpfully revisited, in view, through the notions of home and homing. Sociologically, home stands not only for one or more distinctive places but also for a meaningful social relationship being enacted with(in) them, with all of the aggregate consequences in inter-group relations and societally. As a social experience, however, home is not fundamentally defined by any particular location. It is rather based on a tentative and emplaced attribution of special emotions to specific socio-spatial settings.