Adjunct Prof. Michael Fox
In a new book in the popular Oxford University Press Very Short Introductions series, Adjunct Professor Michael Fox (School of Humanities, UNE) takes up a topic of importance to everyone: home.
“This investigation takes a somewhat philosophical approach,” says Fox, “asking what ingredients go into the concept of home and trying to identify the many attached assumptions and associations that cluster around it.”
A citizen of three countries, Fox was naturally drawn to the subject in an effort to define the sense of belonging, but quickly realized there is a vast set of sub-issues to be considered as well.
Expressions like “Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home” or “Home is where the heart is” indicate that home is somewhere desirable, but also that it exists in the mind’s eye as much as in a particular physical location. Across cultures and centuries people of varied means have made homes for themselves and those they care about.
“Humans have clearly evolved to be homebuilders, homemakers, and home-nesters,” Fox notes. “Dwellings recognizable as homes have been found everywhere archaeologists and anthropologists have looked, representing every era of history and prehistory.”
Home has always been a gathering place, shelter, and sanctuary, providing escape from the busy-ness and intrusiveness of the world. As an anchor of our existence, home has been the subject of abundant written works and other cultural products. One might reasonably suppose, then, that home is a readily understood concept and a source of universally positive feelings.
But Fox points out that on closer investigation, neither of these assumptions is found to be true. “Home is an exceptionally complex notion with emotional and symbolic meanings specific to different languages and cultures.”
Sections of Fox’s book are devoted to positive and negative attitudes toward home; the importance of place; what “dwelling” signifies and the types of dwelling there are and have been; the psychology and politics of home; the social and material environments of home; homelessness in its many forms; refugees and immigrants; and the future of home.
Why is home so important to us? Fox argues that “It’s because, for better or worse, by presence or absence, home is a crucial point of reference—in memory, feeling, and imagination—for inventing the story of ourselves, our life-narrative, for understanding where we’re situated in space and time. But it is also a vital link through which we connect with others past and present, and with the world and the universe at large.”
Michael Allen Fox, Home: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). Available in early December in the UK and early February 2017 worldwide.