BookPDF Available

The Politics of Home. Nostalgia and Belonging in Western Europe and the United States

May 2011

May 2011

DOI:10.1057/9780230305076

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 978–0–230–29399–1

Authors:

Jan Willem Duyvendak

University of Amsterdam

We have witnessed the rise of nationalisms in many parts of Europe since 1989. The dismantling of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact gave rise to wars between states, civil wars (the one in the former Yugoslavia being the most well known) and the birth of new states. In all of these conflicts, nationalist sentiments played a pivotal role. The new millennium has also witnessed a second wave of nationalism, this time sweeping over Western Europe. Although less acknowledged, it is a remarkable development: even in those countries that have long been seen as the most progressive – such as Denmark and the Netherlands – the most heated social and political debates all revolve around questions of national identity, national values, the national canon, citizenship exams for newcomers, etc. The framing of the nation itself as ‘home’ is a notable character- istic of the debates raging in Western Europe. While this is nothing new in the history of nationalism, the longing for a homogeneous national home is a novel development in those European countries that had so assiduously distanced themselves from traditions of ‘Boden’, ‘soil’ and ‘Heimat’ in the postwar years. Observers may be surprised by the timing of this surge in national feelings in societies that have for decades considered themselves to be ‘post-national’. Western European societies have never been so diverse in terms of ethnicity, religion, and culture as they are today. But it is precisely this increased diversity that largely explains the renewed popularity of the nation-as-home ideal. Almost all politicians in Western Europe today – from across the political spectrum – apparently believe that some people are more entitled to inhabit particular places than others. Their belief is usually based on a form of ‘primordial reasoning’, where places are owned by ‘native’ groups who enjoy specific rights (prominent among them the right to feel at home). Part of the Left’s (often remarkably inconsistent) sympathy for such ‘nativist’ reasoning is to view the nation as ‘home’: a fixed place where people belong, a place which is theirs. Politicians across Western Europe cham- pion the ideal of nation-as-home to ‘support’ native majorities who feel ‘overwhelmed’ by the arrival of ‘strange’ new neighbors with unknown habits speaking in foreign tongues. Many also believe that ‘native’ citizens will feel compensated for the loss of their communities by giving them a stronghold at the national level, where they still form the majority. If we want to understand rising nationalism in Western Europe and its accompanying debates over ‘Britishness’, ‘Dutchness’ and ‘Frenchness’, we need to better under- stand this framing of nations in terms of ‘home’ and the attendant nostalgia for times past. But the often-desperate quest for the nation-as-home has unin- tended consequences: instead of reaffirming ‘Dutchness’ or ‘Danishness’, the culturalization of citizenship has led to endless bickering over identities, loyalties and meanings of the national ‘home’. Many of those who see the reaffirmation of national iden- tity as the solution to the current malaise dig deeper and deeper into the national past, fuelling nostalgia for a time when popula- tions were – supposedly – still homogeneous. Nostalgic nations feel a loss of unity, of collective identity; even the most progressive among them look backwards to find a way out of their national crises.

.2 Strategies to feel at home in a mobile world

…

.1 Reproduction of Table 1.2 Strategies to feel at home in a mobile world

…

.2 Time spent on paid work and housekeeping/childcare, hours per week (2003)

…

Diverging patterns for moral traditionalism and authoritarianism (1970-2000) Source: Houtman et al. 2008.

…

Diverging patterns for moral traditionalism and authoritarianism in Dutch political party programs (fourteen elections years between 1950 and 1998) Source: Houtman et al. 2008.

…

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The Politics of Home

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Also by Jan Willem Duyvendak

THE POWER OF POLITICS: New Social Movements in an Old Polity, France

1965 –1989 (1995)

NEW SOCIAL MOVEMENTS IN WESTERN EUROPE: A Comparative

Analysis (1995) (co-authored )

THE GLOBAL EMERGENCE OF GAY AND LESBIAN POLITICS: National

Imprints of a Worldwide Movement (1999) (co-edited )

LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES: An Introductory, Interdisciplinary Approach

(2000) (co-edited)

POLICY, PEOPLE AND THE NEW PROFESSIONAL: De-professionalisation

and Re-professionalisation in Care and Welfare (20 06) (co-edited)

CITIES IN SIGHT: Dutch Dealings with Urban Change (2009) (co-edited)

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The Politics of Home

Belonging and Nostalgia in Western

Europe and the United States

Jan Willem Duyvendak

University of Amsterdam

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publication may be made without written permission.

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permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,

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in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published 2011 by

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Duyvendak, Jan Willem.

The politics of home : belonging and nostalgia in europe and the united

states / Jan Willem Duyvendak.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 978–0–230–29399–1 (pbk.)

1. Nostalgia – Europe. 2. Homesickness – Europe. 3. Group identity –

Europe. 4. Nostalgia – United States. 5. Homesickness – United States.

6. Group identity – United States. I. Title.

BF575.N6D89 2011

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by

CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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For Menno van Leeuwen

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vii

Contents

List of Tables and Figures ix

Preface and Acknowledgments x

Introduction 1

1 A Homesick World? 7

Introduction 7

The universalists: places without particular

meaning 8

The particularists: places without universal

meaning 10

Place attachments in a globalizing world 11

Sociological attachments 16

The United States: restless and rootless? 18

Western Europe: nostalgia for national

homogeneity 22

2 Why Feeling at Home Matters 26

Introduction 26

Feeling at home in particular places 30

Feeling at home in generic places 33

Beyond the particular and the generic: the symbolic 36

Meanings of home 38

The emotion of feeling at home 39

3 Losing Home at Home: When Men and Women Feel

More at Home at Work 43

Introduction 43

Home as hell; home as haven/heaven? 44

The marginalization of home in the US 45

The Netherlands: the part- time society 48

Scandinavian welfare states 53

Home, what home? 56

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viii Contents

4 New Ways of Home- making: Feeling at Home in the

Community? 62

Introduction 62

From hell to haven: home- making by people with

psychiatric and intellectual disabilities 63

From hell to heaven: moving to the Castro, a gay

neighborhood in the making 74

Conclusion: the promises and pitfalls of communities 82

5 Feeling at Home in the Nation? Understanding Dutch

Nostalgia 84

Introduction 84

A multicultural paradise? 85

The Dutch cultural consensus (and some dissensus) 87

The culturalization of citizenship 92

(Not) feeling at home in the Netherlands 94

America, the homeland? 104

6 Conclusion: Inclusive Ways of Feeling at Home? 106

Introduction 106

Two types of nostalgia: reflective and restorative 107

Four spheres of belonging 110

Feeling at home ‘light’ 122

Notes 125

Bibliography 129

Index 14 5

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Tables and Figures

Table s

1.1 Is attachment to particular places possible and/or

necessary? 12

1.2 Strategies to feel at home in a mobile world 14

2.1 Strategies to feel at home in a mobile world 29

3.1 Time spent on paid work/education and housekeeping/

care by working people with children 51

3.2 Time spent on paid work and housekeeping/childcare,

hours per week (2003) 54

5.1 Feeling at home in the Netherlands, by citizenship

status and ethnic group 102

6.1 The four spheres of ‘home’ 112

6.2 Conceptions of ‘home’ in the four spheres 122

Figures

5.1 Diverging patterns for moral traditionalism and

authoritarianism (1970–2000) 89

5.2 Diverging patterns for moral traditionalism and

authoritarianism in Dutch political party programs 91

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Preface and Acknowledgments

The idea to write this book germinated during my sabbatical at the

University of California, Berkeley, in the autumn of 2006. Coming

from the Netherlands, a country immersed in nostalgia for the ‘good

old days’, I was struck by a comparable nostalgia in the American

public and political debate. There was, however, a big difference: in

Western Europe, nostalgia focuses on the lost nation; American nos-

talgia focuses on lost family life.

At UC Berkeley, it was Arlie Hochschild who convinced me of

the severity of the American ‘crisis at home’. And though I critic-

ally engage with her work in this book, I am very grateful for the

insights she has provided for me (and so many others). Also at UC

Berkeley, Michael Buroway’s advocacy of ‘public sociology’ inspired

me to write a book aiming to reach a broad readership. I further wish

to thank Loïc Wacquant for the invitation to come to Berkeley and

the hospitality extended in sharing an office, and Irene Bloemraad

for our conversations on the integration of immigrants on both sides

of the Atlantic.

In the spring semesters of 2007 and 2009, I had the privilege of

staying at the CUNY Graduate Center, first at the Center for Urban

Research and later at the Department of Sociology. John Mollenkopf

and Philip Kasinitz facilitated my sojourns and deepened my know-

ledge of urban sociology, that of New York City in particular. Silke

Aisenbrey, Mark Blasius, Nancy Foner, Jim Jasper, Setha Low, Deborah

Minkoff, Harvey Molotch, Sarah Rosenfield and Glenn Wharton

have become my NYC-based intellectual companions and friends.

I am grateful to them all for their important lessons regarding both

academic and private life.

Back home, my colleagues at the Department of Sociology and

Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam were very supportive

of the project. The more I traveled, the more I realized that our intel-

lectual community was a rarity to be cherished. I particularly wish

to thank Rineke van Daalen, Annemarie Mol, Rogier van Reekum,

Odile Verhaar and Loes Verplanke, who all commented on draft ver-

sions of this book. It seems a bit odd to call this book a ‘mono-graph’.

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Preface and Acknowledgments xi

Many colleagues profoundly influenced my thinking on this topic,

in particular Christian Bröer, Sean Chabot, Sébastien Chauvin, Ewald

Engelen, Peter Geschiere, Peter van der Graaf, Ido de Haan, Gert

Hekma, Walter Nicholls, Bowen Paulle, Jan Rath, Willem Schinkel,

Olga Sezneva, Evelien Tonkens, Lex Veldboer and Justus Uitermark.

English not being my native language made me depend on the

editorial skills of Takeo David Hymans. His excellent work almost

makes him a co-author of this book. In the final stages, Robert

Davidson’s bibliographical support was very helpful, as was Thijs van

Dooremalen’s updating of the data in Chapter 3. Without my stu-

dent assistants of recent years – Miriam Otto, Fleur Sleegers and Josip

Kesic – it would have been virtually impossible to write this book.

Fleur also contributed more directly with her fine work on the ‘chron-

ically mobile’, as did Melissa Ley-Cervantes (see Chapter 2). Monique

Stavenuiter was involved in the research that is now part of Chapter 3

(Duyvendak and Stavenuiter, 2010); Loes Verplanke and her students

interviewed people with mental handicaps in Chapter 4 (Duyvendak

and Verplanke, 2011). Peter Achterberg, Christophe Bertossi, Elmar

Jansen, Dick Houtman, Menno Hurenkamp, Paul Mepschen, Trees

Pels, Rally Rijkschroeff, Peter Scholten and Evelien Tonkens were my

co-researchers on the themes dealt with in Chapter 5 (see Bertossi

and Duyvendak, 2009; Duyvendak and Scholten, 2009; Duyvendak

et al., 2009; Duyvendak et al., 2010; Houtman et al., 2008; Houtman

and Duyvendak, 2009; Jansen 2008; Mepschen et al., 2010; Tonkens

et al., 2011).

Where did I most feel at home during these years of extensive trav-

eling, research and writing? Alongside most others who make up

the ranks of the chronically mobile, my home was indeed less fixed

than in previous decades. But while my social and intellectual life

stretched further afield, this did not alter my feelings of home. Home

for me is not a place: home is my man.

JAN WILLEM DUYVENDAK

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Introduction

We have witnessed the rise of nationalisms in many parts of Europe

since 1989. The dismantling of the US SR and the Warsaw Pact gave rise

to wars between states, civil wars (the one in the former Yugoslavia

being the most well known) and the birth of new states. In all of

these conflicts, nationalist sentiments played a pivotal role. The new

millennium has also witnessed a second wave of nationalism, this

time sweeping over Western Europe. Although less acknowledged,

it is a remarkable development: even in those countries that have

long been seen as the most progressive – such as Denmark and the

Netherlands – the most heated social and political debates all revolve

around questions of national identity, national values, the national

canon, citizenship exams for newcomers, etc.

The framing of the nation itself as ‘home’ is a notable character-

istic of the debates raging in Western Europe. While this is nothing

new in the history of nationalism, the longing for a homogeneous

national home is a novel development in those European countries

that had so assiduously distanced themselves from traditions of

‘Boden’, ‘soil’ and ‘Heimat’ in the postwar years. Observers may be

surprised by the timing of this surge in national feelings in societies

that have for decades considered themselves to be ‘post- national’.

Western European societies have never been so diverse in terms of

ethnicity, religion, and culture as they are today. But it is precisely

this increased diversity that largely explains the renewed popularity

of the nation- as- home ideal.

Almost all politicians in Western Europe today – from across

the political spectrum – apparently believe that some people are

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2 The Politics of Home

more entitled to inhabit particular places than others. Their belief

is usually based on a form of ‘primordial reasoning’, where places

are owned by ‘native’ groups who enjoy specific rights (prominent

among them the right to feel at home). Part of the Left’s (often

remarkably inconsistent) sympathy for such ‘nativist’ reasoning is

to view the nation as ‘home’: a fixed place where people belong,

a place which is theirs. Politicians across Western Europe cham-

pion the ideal of nation- as- home to ‘support’ native majorities who

feel ‘overwhelmed’ by the arrival of ‘strange’ new neighbors with

unknown habits speaking in foreign tongues. Many also believe

that ‘native’ citizens will feel compensated for the loss of their

communities by giving them a stronghold at the national level,

where they still form the majority. If we want to understand rising

nationalism in Western Europe and its accompanying debates over

‘Britishness’, ‘Dutchness’ and ‘Frenchness’, we need to better under-

stand this framing of nations in terms of ‘home’ and the attendant

nostalgia for times past.

But the often- desperate quest for the nation- as- home has unin-

tended consequences: instead of reaffirming ‘Dutchness’ or

‘Danishness’, the culturalization of citizenship has led to endless

bickering over identities, loyalties and meanings of the national

‘home’. Many of those who see the reaffirmation of national iden-

tity as the solution to the current malaise dig deeper and deeper

into the national past, fuelling nostalgia for a time when popula-

tions were – supposedly – still homogeneous. Nostalgic nations feel a

loss of unity, of collective identity; even the most progressive among

them look backwards to find a way out of their national crises.

* * *

At first sight, developments in the US may look alike. The notion

of ‘homeland’ seemed omnipresent following 9/11. But even within

post- 9/11 American nationalism, notions of a national ‘home’ have

remained much more ambivalent than in Western Europe. For his-

toric reasons, patriotism in the US is rarely based on thick notions

of place (it is hard for white Americans to pretend that their ances-

tors had deep roots in this land). In fact, there is a great deal of ten-

sion between the old ideals of rootlessness and restlessness (‘Go West

young man!’) and the new notion of homeland (security).

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Introduction 3

In the US, the stronghold of ‘home’ remains the dwelling of the

nuclear family, long seen as a haven in a turbulent world. And it

is precisely the embattled family household that is central in the

American crisis of ‘home’. Home at the micro level is in crisis because

the custodians of the traditional home – women – have left its bounds

to enter the paid workforce. In fact, both American men and women

now claim that they feel more at- home- at- work than at home. The

American fixation on ‘family values’ – far from hiding the crisis of

the nuclear family – is testament to it and reinforces feelings of nos-

talgia: while many idealize home in the past as a safe haven (Coontz,

1992), today it is an unstable and overburdened place for parents

working long hours, often combining several jobs and starved for

time to spend with their children. American society is deeply nostal-

gic for better times at home.

* * *

There is a long and rich history of research on marginal groups and

their right to belong, on their home- making practices far from home.

In this important stream of work, where research has been carried

out on transnational bonds, diaspora, exile and the painful experi-

ence of migration, the mainstream is often conspicuously absent. At

best, mainstream society is the context in which migrants arrive –

the context in which they are (not so) welcomed.

This book reverses the perspective. It examines what has happened

to the home feelings of the majority under the influence of the two

major revolutions of our times: the gender revolution and globaliza-

tion. I ‘go native’ by asking the majority on both sides of the Atlantic

how they feel about home.

‘Going native’ in my own ‘home country’ – the Netherlands – was

not necessarily easier than doing research in terra incognito. Though

I have been involved in the debates on integration and multicultural-

ism, I have increas ingly felt mys elf to be an outs ider in my country of

birt h. Estrangement from my fellow cou nt rymen made it an effor t of

empathy to understand their lack of home feelings and their hostile

reactions to newcomers, nowadays framed as ‘Muslims’. I nonetheless

think that there is an urgent need to understand the lack of home

feelings among the native majority in Western Europe – as there is to

understand the home crisis in the US, even if that crisis seems to be

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4 The Politics of Home

of a different and less malicious nature. The gender revolution was a

change from ‘within’ and almost all Americans seem to acknowledge

that the resulting crisis at home has to be solved through common

effort. This is in contrast to Western Europe, where the crisis in home

feelings is blamed on changes from ‘above’ and pits the majority

against a small minority.

The comparative perspective of this book – built upon empirical

data collected on both sides of the Atlantic – should open new hori-

zons for Western European and American debates on themes seem-

ingly as diverse as national identity and nostalgia for times past,

migration and integration, gender relations and ‘caring communi-

ties’. All of these debates – at the most fundamental level – deal with

the right to belong and the ability to feel at home.

* * *

‘Home’ and ‘feeling at home’ are multi- faceted and multi- scalar phe-

nomena. Just as the nation- as- home is called upon in Western Europe

to counterbalance socio- cultural changes at the neighborhood level,

the fact that so many A meric ans feel more at- home- at- work is best seen

as a compensatory strategy in the light of strained feelings at home. As

Morley observes: ‘If the home, the neighborhood and the nation are all

potential spaces of belonging, th is is no si mple matter of disconnected,

parallel processes. Each of the se spaces cond ition s t he others ... because

these spaces are simultaneously tied together by media messages, by

the workings of the real estate market, and by macro factors such as the

immigration policies of the state and the impact of the global economy’

(2001, p. 433). Morley is correct about the inter- relatedness of processes

taking place on various scales. A fine example is given by Collins. As

‘home’ in the US has its deeper meaning at the level of the household,

the new idea of a ‘home country’ had to remain close to the private

notion: ‘The meaningfulness of that compound “homeland” can be

maintained only so long as the values of the home appear reflected in

the laws of the country’ (Collins, 2007, p. 11). But home feelings at one

scale are not necessarily connected to the meanings attached to home

at another scale. One of the aims of this book is to empirically examine

how ‘homes’ on various scales are inter- related.

This book answers the question why ‘feeling at home’ has become

such a dominant theme in public and political debate on both sides

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Introduction 5

of the Atlantic, why the lack of ‘home feelings’ has come to color

these days with such nostalgia. It analyzes how ‘home’ has been

politicized, the risks of this politicization, as well as alternative

home- making strategies that aim to transcend the ‘logic of identities’

where one group’s ability to feel at home comes at the expense of

other groups. In this book I therefore search for new, future- oriented

home- making practices as well – practices often situated between

the levels of the household and the nation – and examine policies

and social movements that aim to make the ‘community’ the new

home.

* * *

This book makes use of both quantitative and qualitative data on

the multi- scalar phenomenon of feeling at home – or more often,

not feeling at home – from both sides of the Atlantic. Though I

address micro phenomena as well, my approach always incorporates

wider structural forces that influence feelings of home; I am con-

vinced that we cannot separate questions of how people inscribe

space with meaning from social struggles involving class, race, gen-

der and sexuality. Contrary to many psychological and culturalist

studies, my analysis of home e xplicit ly foc uses on power: the politics

of home.

These broader contextual factors invite comparison: we can only

explain differences in feelings of home by taking into account vari-

ation in settings. Sentiments of nostalgia in the US and Europe may

have their similarities but have different causes. At the same time,

examining cross- country differences is helpful for better under-

standing our particular ‘crises of home’. Comparing developments

at the same scale (e.g., household, community and nation) in differ-

ent places may also allow us to identify some hopeful trends. At the

national and community levels, most Americans seem to be in less

of a state of moral panic than many of their European counterparts.

Though some Americans worry about losing a national sense of

home (see, for example, the debates around ‘homeland security’ and

illegal immigration), they are generally not as alarmist as Europeans.

Conversely, the (Nordic) European countries seem to have found a

better balance between the demands of paid work and family life,

and have become a source of inspiration for American feminists.

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6 The Politics of Home

Chapter 1 introduces the question why feeling at home has become

so important to many of us: what is the meaning of ‘place attach-

ment’ in a globalizing world? How does feeling at home relate to

places – generic or particular, real or imaginary? How can we better

understand home- making strategies? Chapter 2 examines the many

aspects of ‘feeling at home’. How to define this emotion? What are

its constitutive elements? Chapter 3 focuses on developments in the

US: its ‘crisis of home’ at home. Chapter 4 searches for ‘best practices’

where home- making has not entailed excluding others, but includ-

ing those previously excluded from society. This chapter reports on

new home- making practices among two formerly excluded groups:

gays and the mentally handicapped. Chapter 5 deals with the ‘cri-

sis of home’ on the old continent: nationalism’s renaissance will be

our starting point as we inquire whether greater emotional invest-

ment at the national level should indeed be understood as a reaction

to migration and globalization. Chapter 6 presents the book’s main

conclusions and reflects on strategies to strengthen feeling at home

on both sides of the Atlantic.

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A Homesick World?

Introduction

The current era, it is often claimed, is one of big transformations.

Though the processes commonly associated with ‘globalization’

are not new, the mobility of goods, information and people has

never been so noticeable. This mobility is ‘profoundly transforming

our apprehension of the world: it is provoking a new experience or

orientation and disorientation, new senses of placed and placeless

identity’ (Morley and Robins, 1995, p. 121).

For many sociologists and anthropologists alike, modernity implies

mobility: ‘Exile, emigration, banishment, labor migrancy, tourism,

urbanization and counter- urbanization are the central motifs of

modern culture, while being rootless, displaced between worlds, liv-

ing between a lost past and a fluid present, are perhaps the most fit-

ting metaphors for the journeying modern consciousness’ (Rapport

and Dawson, 1998, p. 23). Rapport and Dawson emphasize that ‘the

image of socio- cultural “places” rests on a conceptualization of time

and space that, it is widely held, contemporary movement in the

world now overwhelms and relativizes’ (1998, p. 5). With John Berger

(1984), they wonder if ‘migration can more and more be portrayed

as the quintessential experience of the age. ... Movement has become

fundamental to modern identity, and an experience of non- place

(beyond “territory” and “society”) an essential component of every-

day life’ (Rapport and Dawson, 1998, pp. 5–6).

Many of our era’s leading sociologists (Bauman, 1998a, 1998b;

Beck, 2000; Calhoun, 1991; Giddens, 1991; Hannerz, 1996; Harvey,

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8 The Politics of Home

1989; Urry, 2000), and in particular Castells (1996), have made

movement (‘flow’) a pivotal concept in their understanding of the

modern world. All claim that the increase in mobility has changed

the meaning of place and space. Several positions can be identified

in this debate, ranging from the total relativization of the mean-

ing of places in our mobile era to its very opposite, that local places

have grown more important due to globalization (‘glocalization’,

Robertson, 1995). In the latter view, geographical mobility does not

relativize the importance of either place or place attachment, but

reinforces both.

The debate at first glance may appear of little (or merely academic)

interest and unnecessarily polarized. But in what follows, I try to

explain the importance of this discussion and why so many sociolo-

gists are correctly concerned (and thus fight) over the meaning of

place and place attachment. Some sociologists (generally mesmer-

ized by the changes) argue that the old categories no longer suffice:

Ulrich Beck even wants to discard notions like class since they have

become ‘zombie categories’ in the globalized world (2002). Others,

like David Harvey (2000), who tend to be more negative about these

changes, stick to neo- Marxist explanations to make sense of them.

Here, instead of passing normative judgment, I propose that we first

try to better understand what the recent changes in ‘place’ and ‘space’

mean and what they imply for our lives, for our feelings of home.

The universalists: places without

particular meaning

Let’s begin with what I label the universalist position, which rela-

tivizes the meaning of specific places. It is aptly summarized by

Gustafson: ‘Today, social scientists are often somewhat skeptical

about the importance of place and space attachment, as people seem

to be increasingly mobile, and their social relations and other every-

day practices are increasingly disembedded from physical locations’

(2001, p. 668). Castells, famous for his claim that we are witness-

ing ‘the historical emergence of the space of flows, superseding the

meaning of the space of places’ (1989, p. 348), argues: ‘The fundamen-

tal fact is that social meaning evaporates from places, and therefore

from society, and becomes diluted and diffused in the reconstructed

logic of a space of flows whose profile, origin, and ultimate purposes

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A Homesick World? 9

are unknown’ (ibid., p. 349). However vague Castells’ claim may be, it

clearly resonates with many people: something fundamental seems

to have changed in the meaning attached to places due to the accel-

erated pace of our times.

Whereas all universalists ascribe a certain ‘homelessness’ to

modern man – ‘Homelessness is coming to be the destiny of the

world’ (Heidegger, 1977 [1947], p. 219) – they differ enormously in

appraising the condition. When Edward Said (1979, p. 18) spoke

of ‘a generalized condition of homelessness’, he had in mind the

fate of those who had been forced to leave their countries of origin

(migrants, asylum seekers and exiles). Peter Berger and his collabo-

rators in The Homeless Mind (1973) were equally critical when they

wrote of the ‘spreading condition of homelessness’ (ibid., p. 138).

Other scholars have causally linked homelessness to nostalgia:

‘This homeless mind is hard to bear, and there is widespread nos-

talgia for a condition of being “at home” in society, with oneself

and with the universe: for homes of the past that were socially

homogeneous, communal, peaceful, safe and secure’ (Rapport and

Dawson, 1998, p. 31). Other universalists are more sanguine about

certain types of homelessness. Braidotti (1994), for instance, sees

postmodern nomadism as a rather positive condition (for criticism,

see Pels, 1999).

Their divergent appraisals notwithstanding, all universalists agree

that the consequence of people’s increased mobility is that they can

no longer develop thick attachments to places. For ‘detached’ people

who have lost their ability to value a specific place, places eventu-

ally become interchangeable. This loss of (appreciation for) specific

places is reinforced by another, related aspect of globalization: the

increased mobility of marketable goods. ‘Starbucks stores seem to

be on every corner of every major city. ... The proliferation of mind-

numbing sameness is an alarming trend. As the march of globaliza-

tion continues, it manifests across the continent in places that look

and feel alike’ (Beatley, 2004, pp. 1–2). ‘Today, the rapidly expanding

and quickening mobility of people combines with the refusal of cul-

tural products to “stay put” to give a profound sense of a loss of ter-

ritorial roots, of an erosion of the cultural distinctiveness of places’

(Gupta and Ferguson, 1992).

With many others, Timothy Beatley deplores detachment and the

loss of home feelings: ‘We need places that provide healthy living

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10 The Politics of Home

environments and also nourish the soul- distinctive places worthy of

our loyalty and commitment, places where we feel at home, places

that inspire and uplift and stimulate us and provide social and envir-

onmental sustenance’ (2004, pp. 2–3). Beatley is deeply worried

about the incapacity of mobile, free- floating people to connect to

places that have become more and more generic, for ‘meaningful

lives require unique and particular places’ (ibid., p. 3).

Universalists agree that people’s attachment to places has declined

due to the increase d mobility of people and goods: places have become

less attachable (since they are less particular and more generic), while

people have become less attaching (since they are more mobile). They

disagree, however, on how to evaluate these developments: cosmo-

politans view them as necessary and positive signs of (post)moderni-

zation (Braidotti, 1994). Others, like Beatley (2004), are nostalgic for

the days when places were particular and ‘attachable’, when people

were able and longing to attach, to settle down.

The particularists: places without

universal meaning

What I label the particularist positions are in clear opposition to

the universalist ones.1 Here the places where people live continue

to matter as they provide a sense of ‘home’ in an increasingly tur-

bulent world. Savage and his coauthors summarize the particularist

point of view as follows: ‘In a mobile, global environment, location

in fixed physical space may be of increasing relative significance

in the generation of social distinction’ (Savage et al., 2005, p. 13).

Perhaps paradoxically, ‘an increase in movement around the world,

and the freeing up of restrictive boundaries to travel, is accom-

panied by an increase in renascent particularisms’ (Rapport and

Dawson, 1998, p. 8).

Many authors explain the rediscovery of the local by referring to

people’s defensive reactions to globalization. According to Anthony

Giddens, ‘globalization and the increasing pace and impersonality

of post- modern life ... have led to a sense of rootlessness and mean-

inglessness. People lack a sense of belonging and a sense of purpose

in their lives, which is leading to a search for a sense of identity and

belonging in the private sphere of the home’ (quoted in Clapham,

2005, p. 137). Since a detached, cosmopolitan position is ‘unlivable’,

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A Homesick World? 11

so the argument runs, people increasingly develop attachments to

particular places.

While Savage et al. share the particularist view (Savage et al., 2010;

Savage et al., 2005; Watt, 2009), they argue that the resurgence of the

local should be understood as more than a defensive reaction:

We do not see local attachments as historical residues, defensively

constructed in opposition to global processes. Rather, we see elec-

tive belonging as embodying attachments that permit various

kinds of global connections to be drawn. Fixed places thus play

crucial roles within globalization processes. They become sites for

new kinds of solidarities among people who chose to live in par-

ticular places. (Savage et al., 2005, p. 53)

They further argue that increased mobility changes how people

relate to places and to other people, for places and feelings of attach-

ment to them are no longer ‘given’: ‘Belonging is not that of an indi-

vidual to a fixed community rooted in place, but rather, one in which

the place becomes valuable to the individual’ (ibid., p. 80). ‘Elective

belonging involves choosing a place to live amongst your own kind,

with the result that having local friends becomes an endorsement of

one’s place of residence’ (ibid., p. 85).

Like the universalists, the particularists disagree among them-

selves: some view the rediscovery of local places as a nostalgic reac-

tion to defend one’s own place against global forces; others see the

rising importance of the local as a victory of ‘choice’ – a choice

made possible by mobility, where new forms of ‘elective belong-

ing’ facilitate ‘living amongst your own kind’.2 Part of this victory

of choice is that – for some of us at least – the choice of home has

become a lifestyle decision: where one would like to live in order to

eat the foods one likes, go to the clubs one wants, have the shops

one enjoys, etc.

Place attachments in a globalizing world

Universalists and particularists disagree over what has happened to

places and place attachment under conditions of increased mobil-

ity. Have places become more or less important? Has attachment to

places become more or less difficult? In Tab le 1.1 , universalists claim

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12 The Politics of Home

people have less capacity (Cell 1) and/or nee d (Cell 2) to re late to par-

ticular places. Particularists see people (re)valuing their attachments

to particular places for defensive reasons (Cell 3) or out of choice

(Cell 4).

The table reveals that scholars have different understandings of

empirical reality, while diverging normative readings among both

universalists and particularists show that they disagree over how

place attachments matter. Only the proponents in Cell 2 are uncon-

vinced of the importance of people to feel attached to particular

places; those in the other three cells consider attachment to particular

places as necessary, though perhaps difficult or impossible to attain.

We also see disagreement over whether place attachment is a defen-

sive reaction to globalization or the result of free choice, and over

current and future possibilities for attachment (Cells 3 versus 4).

All except the chronically mobile understand place attachment to

be attachment to unique places; to feel at home somewhere, ‘some-

whe r e’ ne ed s t o be a s pe ci fic pla ce ab le to a ro us e f ee l in gs of be long in g.

In other words, they adhere to the ‘one- needs- a- particular- place- to-

feel- at- home’ paradigm. The chronically mobile, on the other hand,

don’t think feeling at home is necessarily related to particular places;

their relativization of the importance of particular places is based

on their optimism regarding their ability to feel attached to generic

places.

Assuming for the moment that we need particular places to feel

attached, how should we increase feeling at home in our mobile

Table 1.1 Is attachment to particular places possible and/or necessary?

Mobility seen

negatively

Mobility seen

positively

Univer salists 1. no attachment to

particular places

possible; people lost

in space

2. no attachment to

particular places

necessary; the

chronically mobile

Particularists 3. strong attachment

to particular places

necessary; defensive

localists

4. strong attachment

to particular places

possible; elective

belongers

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A Homesick World? 13

world? The best a mobile person could do is to make the many places

he or she comes across as particular and personal as possible. I call

this the mobile home strategy of trying to particularize one’s material

world (in analogy to the real mobile home, the trailer, where one

travels with as much of one’s home as possible). The idea is that one

can only feel at home by attaching to a specific place that is mean-

ingful to oneself, but not to (many) others.

Imagine, however, that highly mobile people are not as desperately

lost as many authors assume. Might some people not feel more at

home in generic places, for instance in familiar hotel chains? Might

their sense of belonging be facilitated by goods having become more

mobile and generic as well? The ‘generic- places- suffice- to- feel- at-

home’ paradigm would posit that, for highly mobile people, the abil-

ity to feel at home is enhanced when they can stay in the sa me hotel

chain anywhere in the world. Such people (like George Clooney in

the movie Up in the Air) may appreciate the generic characteristics

of a modern hotel: the setting, the expected behavior, the lifestyle

reflected in food, drink, music, movies, etc. In contrast, they may

feel excluded from specific, local places that have little or no signifi-

cance to them.

Though it may sound improbable to some, I think it worthwhile

to examine this possibility: that the most mobile people feel more at

home in a world where goods are also mobile. Some people may actu-

ally prefer the generic to the particular.3 The increased mobility of peo-

ple would then require more generic goods to facilitate their feelings

of belonging, as precisely the generic character of these goods provides

these people with what is necessary to feel at home for us all: predict-

ability, safety and familiarity (for this argument see Chapter 2).

Hotel chains can elicit feeling at home in a de- territorialized

way. This implies a fundamental difference of understanding from

‘one - needs- a- particular- place- to- feel- at- home’, whose proponents

argue that places need to be singular in their spatial manifestations.

Generic places differ from particular ones in another way as well:

in relation to time. For particularists, it is in and through their spe-

cific pasts that places become meaningful homes, whereas for mobile

people the history of a place is irrelevant: generic places look the

same anywhere, at any time, as if they have no past. When Doreen

Massey writes that ‘In trying to understand the identity of places

we cannot – or, perhaps, should not – separate space from time,

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14 The Politics of Home

or geography from history’ (Massey, 1995, p. 187), she is right for

particular places. However, for the hotel chain strategy, history and

geography matter little: generic places can be anywhere and are, in a

certain sense, purposefully ‘timeless’.

I will summarize all of this in another table ( Ta ble 1.2 ), building

on Table 1.1. It starts with the similarities between the positions:

all acknowledge that people as well as goods have become more

mobile. The main difference between Cells 1 and 3, on the one hand,

and Cells 2 and 4, on the other, is their understanding of how this

increased mobility has affected our ability to develop place attach-

ments. Those who feel lost in space because all particular places have

disappeared (Cell 1) no longer have any strategies to feel at home in a

mobile world. ‘It is not only the displaced who experience a displace-

ment ... For even people remaining in familiar and ancestral places

find the nature of their relation to place ineluctably changed, and the

illusion of a natural and essential connection between the place and

culture broken’ (Gupta and Ferguson, 1992, p. 10). Others who share

the negative evaluation of increased mobility still see opportunities

to withdraw into a safe haven of particular goods and special people.

These ‘defensive localists’ long for the good old days when goods and

markets were local and people were rooted (Cell 3). Defensive localists

are also pessimistic about their future chances to feel at home: they

believe, alongside the protagonists of Cell 1, that mobile – and thus

generic – goods undermine feelings of home for local communities.

The chain has for years been resisted. There were a number of rea-

sons for this resistance; among them was clearly a sense that this

would be an alien importation. Many local residents conducted a

vociferous and highly articulate campaign against the bringing

into their ‘village’ of what they saw as an icon of a certain ty pe of

the brasher sort of Americanism. It just wouldn’t fit; it would be

completely out of place; it would spoil the character of the area.

(Massey and Jess, 2003, p. 47)

On the other hand, the proponents of Cells 2 and 4 see the

increased mobility of both people and goods as positive develop-

ments. The proponents of Cell 4, however, believe this mobility

needs to be counterbalanced by attempts to attach to meaningful,

specific places. They try to avoid generic places (like hotel chains)

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A Homesick World? 15

and search for or try to create particular ones. The best way to do

this is to ‘familiarize’ new places by bringing aspects of one’s own

home – as many mobile people do on their holidays (think of the

camper and the caravan). The proponents of Cell 2 have a different

appreciation of generic goods and the capacity of mobile people to

relate to places. Here, the claim is that it is precisely the generic, de-

contextualized character of goods that allow mobile people to feel at

home: the hotel chain strategy.

For many people, the chronically mobile position seems like the

definitive loss of the ability to feel at home. If everybody can be

anywhere, one loses the ability to feel at home; one permanently

feels ‘out of place’. If everything can likewise be everywhere, things

never really ‘belong’ and will be ‘out of place’ as well. Taken together,

thes e trends make it more dif fic ult to ex per ie nc e attach me nt be cause

‘rooted’ people – so proponents of Cells 1, 3 and 4 claim – can only

attach to specific, historically significant places. Then, and only

then, can they really feel at home.

It is here, I think, t hat the debate becomes truly interesting: changes in

mobility have evidently had an enormous impact on place attachment,

on what places mean and on perceptions of who ‘belongs’ where. As the

following chapters will show, much is at stake. It is not just another aca-

demic debate on how to label our times; it touches upon fundamental

questions of ‘belonging’ and ‘feeling at home’. Whereas the protagonists

of Cells 1 and 3 worry ‘Who can feel at home today, where and with

whom?’, the protagonists of Cells 2 and 4 have a much more positive

reading of this mobile era, including its possibilities for feeling at home

and belonging in multiple places at various times (though they disagree

on whether this will be in particular or generic places).

Table 1.2 Strategies to feel at home in a mobile world

Mobility seen

negatively

Mobility seen

positively

Generic places 1. People lost in space:

No strategies available

2. Chronically mobile:

The hotel chain strategy

Particular places 3. Defensive localists:

My house is my home

strategy

4. Elective belongers: The

mobile home strategy

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16 The Politics of Home

It is important to note that the proponents of all four cells in Table

1.2 agree on the importance, for all of us, of feeling at home in one

way or another. It is thus hardly surprising that ‘belonging’ (hooks,

2009) and ‘feeling at home’ are burning issues in political and public

debate. We urgently need to better understand these debates raging

in Western Europe and, albeit in a different form, in the US as well.

There are many reasons for this urgency, ranging from the import-

ance of ‘belonging’ to almost all of us, to the fact that today perhaps

more than before, the inclusion of some seems to go hand in hand

with the exclusion of others. In this context, the term ‘strategies’

used in Table 1.2 should not be misunderstood. Some people obvi-

ously have more strategic options than others. These options, more-

over, depend on the strategic choices made by others (multinational

hotel chains, restaurants, stores, travel lines, etc.).

Sociological attachments

How, t hen, to approach iss ues of belong ing? T hough one may e xpec t

some guidance from sociology, the discipline itself is no neutral

observer. Sociologists have historically sided with cosmopolitan ide-

als, while sociology’s development as an academic discipline has

often been intertwined with modernization’s ambitions of freeing

people from localism and particularism. While the founding fathers

of sociology were worried by the melting of tradition, most welcomed

the new freedoms of the modern world, including the freedom to

migrate. No wonder, the n, that in ma ny sociological w ritings on glo-

balization, ‘mobility and cosmopolitanism appear to be the norm,

whereas local attachment is rather regarded as a deficiency and devi-

ation from this norm’ (Gustafson, 2001, p. 668). Morley, discussing

the field of Cultural Studies, writes:

The critique of various forms of supposed essentialism has, on

occasion, led to a rather uncritical celebration of all notions of

mobility, fluidity and hybridity, as themselves intrinsically pro-

gressive. In that celebratory writing the focus is usually on people’s

ability to remake and refashion their identities in empowering

ways. However ... insufficient attention is often paid both to the

processes through which the forms of cultural capital with which

people can refashion their identities are unequally distributed,

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A Homesick World? 17

and to the extent to which many people are still forced to live

through the identities ascribed to them by others, rather than

through the identities they might choose for themselves. (Morley,

2001, p. 427)

Numerous sociologists have argued that, as particular places

fade away, the possibility to connect to these places will disap-

pear as well. In their view, this is not necessarily a development

to deplore.

Sociologist James Jasper, critical of the cosmopolitan a prioris of

many social scientists, traces the assumptions of his colleagues to

their habitus:

Academics are notoriously rootless, beginning with college and

graduate school but often continuing later, as the most successful

are happy to move from one university to another, every few years,

in pursuit of higher salaries and prestige. As a result, perhaps, they

have spun elaborate theories about the importance of meritocracy

(from which they think they benefit), but few about the benefits

of staying put. They would claim that their real community is

that of colleagues scattered around the globe. ... Their ideal is the

cosmopol ita n equally at home in Chicago or Frank furt; but is this

person really at home anywhere? Ever since academics took over

American intellectual life in the 1950s and 1960s, they have sup-

pressed any voices arguing for allegiance to place. (Jasper, 2000,

p. 248)

But it is not only sociologists who embrace the idea of the chronic-

ally mobile that home and home feelings can be attached to generic

as wel l as to p ar tic ular places; nu mer ous Amer ica ns, for whom m obi l-

ity has always been culturally important, also embrace this idea. To

better understand the current ‘crisis of home’, we first examine this

American debate. As we will see, there is more to American history

than just idealization of the ‘wanderer’: fear of the unbounded, the

restless and the overly mobile has a long tradition as well. ‘The long-

ing for familiarity, for a community, that is home, is a central theme

in American history’ (Stein, 2001, p. 215). As it turns out, there are

quite a few Americans who use ‘the positive language of “home

truths”, of the virtues of the “home- made” – and of the idea of

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18 The Politics of Home

“settling down” as itself an index of maturity. This is a terminology

in which to be (too?) mobile is implicitly a moral failing’ (Morley,

2001, p. 430).

The United States: restless and rootless?

Mobility and modernity are closely related. It comes as no surprise,

then, that the most ‘modern’ of all countries sees itself as a ‘ “rest-

less nation” ... The story about America is a story about movement’

(Jasper, 2000, p. xii). The idea of restlessness reaches back to historian

Frederick Jackson Turner, whose influential 1893 ‘Frontier Thesis’

argued that the key to American vitality could be found in relentless

movement. In his wonderful book, Jasper shows how constitutive

elements of the American dream – the opportunity to move, to move

up, to escape, to change identities, to be free of government, to value

immigration – are all bound to the positive appraisal of mobility.

Few Americans feel tied to their geographical location, and those

who do often seem old- fashioned or misguided to the rest of us;

the farmer resisting the encroachment of the suburbs, the mem-

bers of inner- city gangs whose territoriality makes them loyal to

their ‘hood’, the old lady who has lived in the same peeling house

all her life. The educated, the powerful, the energetic Americans,

those with a future, are ready to move in pursuit of that future.

They wonder why the rooted ones don’t exclaim, ‘I’ve got to get

out of here and make something of myself.’ Millions of immi-

grants worldwide are ready to risk everything they have for a

chance to come here and do just that, and millions of native-

born Americans move and start over each year. This is the mod-

ern dream, a utopia in which individuals control their destinies.

(Jasper, 2000, p. 242)

For many Americans, there is an intimate connection between

moving and moving up. ‘Americans ... try to define their identity

by their lack of place: we see ourselves as people who are ready to

move anywhere to take advantage of new opportunities. For us

the road itself is a place, in fact our favorite place’ (ibid., p. 246).

It is indeed true that Americans are more mobile than Europeans.

Whereas Americans move on average at least every five years,

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A Homesick World? 19

Europeans do so, at most, every ten years (and often not as far

away as Americans). However, the greater physical mobility of

Americans – which has been declining somewhat over the past

decades (Fischer, 2010) – does not imply greater social mobility;

in many (West) European countries, the opportunity to move up

turns out to be at least as great as in the US (Alesina and Glaeser,

2004).

While overestimating the effects of (social) mobility does not dis-

turb the self- understanding of the US as a society where people are

permanently on the move, the value placed on restlessness seems

to be changing. An example may elucidate: recent commentary

on Barack Obama as the ultimate ‘wanderer’ reveals ambivalence

towards the alleged American ideal of the rootless and restless man.

On the one hand,

There is to Mr Obama’s story a Steinbeck quality, like so many

migratory American tales: the mother who flickers in and out;

the absent and iconic father; the grandfather, raised in the

rough- neck Kansas oil town of El Dorado, who moves the family,

restlessly, ceaselessly westward. The American DNA encodes wan-

derlust ambition, and a romance clings to Mr Obama’s story. The

roamer who would make himself and his land anew is a familiar

archetype. (Powell, 2008, pp. 6–7)

On the other hand, ‘There is, too, the sneaking suspicion that

describing Mr Obama, multiracial and multiethnic, as rootless could

become a surrogate for something darker. In American history, whites

accused Indians of rootlessness before dispossessing them’ (ibid.).

Obama’s self- presentation during his 2008 presidential bid and

early presidency actually seems to be the opposite of pride in having

been on the move for much of his life. Perhaps in response to allega-

tions of being a wanderer, and aware of his countrymen’s ambiva-

lence towards restlessness, he emphasizes that his ‘roots’ and ‘routes’

are all part and parcel of the all- embracing identity of a real American.

It seems that his patriotism is at least partly a way to deal with his

own pluri- identity and, more generally, with the enormous diversity

within the US population. He seems to realize that feeling at home in

an immigrant society is not only a challenge for new arrivals, but also

for the native- born who see their world changing every day.

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20 The Politics of Home

In my understanding, the very ideals of restlessness and root-

lessness have in the long run helped Americans to feel at home in

their country since these notions have become patriotic emblems.

The ‘self- made man’, the American dream, the Western frontier,

the melting pot and the classless society are all ideals held nation-

wide. The integration of these mobile and rather generic ideals into

a coherent national discourse provides common ground, stability

and coherence to all (potential) Americans. The ideals are, moreover,

infused by mobility (mostly within the US) and equal opportunity,

and are future- oriented – more based on ‘routes’ than ‘roots’. This is

the chronically mobile position where people feel connected to the

world thanks to generic, overarching, nonspecific places and goods.

American ideals transcend particular places and groups of people

and therefore potentially include them all, offering an opportunity

to identify and attach.

This, however, may be changing. Critics argue that the post- 9/11

discourse on the need to secure ‘the homeland’ implies a funda-

mental change in the self- understanding of the country. ‘The term

homeland – with its connotations of native origins, of birthplace

and birthright ... – stands in stark contrast to traditional images of

American nationhood as boundless and mobile’ (Blunt and Dowling,

2006, p. 171). Amy Kaplan (2003), for one, sees this new notion of

home as rather u n- American. Has the War on Terror transformed the

American understanding of itself as a restless and rootless nation?

Has a thick(er) notion of home gained ground at the expense of

older ideals? In Chapter 5, I will discuss the consequences of these

changes in the meaning of home for newcomers as well as for old-

term immigrants.

Nostalgia for the family: have the home- makers gone?

‘Homeland’ today seems to be conceptualized as the national exten-

sion of the old ideal of the secure, private home. But this is not the

only recent change in the American idea of ‘home’. How stable is the

private home itself? This is a serious question, not just in the light of

the waves of foreclosures and the ongoing crisis in the housing mar-

ket, but in light of the long- term changes in the meaning of ‘home’

for American men and women. The nation’s celebration of itself as

restless and rootless was made possible by ‘traditional’, deeply rooted

gender roles. Men could be restless and seemingly rootless because

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A Homesick World? 21

there was a real home back home; it was the conditio sine qua non of

the American dream.4

Jasper claims that women in particular have embodied resistance

against the restlessness of male- dominated American society:

Some attachment to place may be a universal need, but it seems

to vary a lot by gender. Throughout our history, women have

usually missed the community the most and tried to sustain it

when they could. For some of them, this meant separation from

restless husbands. And when they went, they tried to establish

connections with friends and neighbors, tried to domesticate

the land as a habitat, tried to maintain some connection to their

previous lives. They have tempered some of the worst aspects of

restlessness ... It is women’s tastes, preferences, and habits which

have ... the greatest potential as a balm for our motion sickness.

Women’s traditions appeal to a sense of place, community, and

family that most Americans share but have usually repressed as

an interference with their movement. It is no wonder restless men

fear women. (2000, p. 237)

Though Jasper’s description may be right in so far as it concerns

America’s past, women have also become more mobile and restless

since the 1960s. I think that this change is crucial to understand-

ing many Americans’ anxieties about ‘home’. Women’s emancipa-

tion plays an enormous and underestimated role in the strongly felt

sentiment that American society has become even more rootless and

restless than before. Numerous feminist scholars have shown that

the private sphere is rapidly losing its secure and protective charac-

ter. The importance of paid work has drastically increased for both

sexes, placing great stress on family life at home – particularly on

women who still remain the primary home- makers.

In sharp contrast to all the theorizing about globalization and

migration, the sociological impact of the (uneven outcomes of the)

gender revolution on meanings of contemporary ‘belonging’ is rarely

acknowledged. Chapter 3 will discuss the contributions of those rare

sociologists like Arlie Hochschild who have done so in their work.

Both American men and women now report feeling more at home-

at- work than at home (Hochschild, 1997). In light of this, I read the

recent emphasis on ‘home’, ‘family’ and ‘family values’ primarily

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22 The Politics of Home

as evidence of the deep crisis in American home feelings at home.

Nostalgia is rife for safe, secure and stable places – places of refuge

in a rough and tumble world. Nevertheless, the crisis at home is not

only due to changing gender relations. Recent financial, economic

and housing crises have caused great anxiety over the stability of

‘home’ at home, particularly in a country where private home own-

ership has such importance.

The search for a safe haven at home has been reinforced by devel-

opments at other – national and international – levels. On the one

hand, ‘homeland’ today is conceptualized as the national exten-

sion of the old ideal of the secure, private home. On the other hand,

themes associated with ‘homeland’ – security, anxiety, terror – are

creeping into the private domain of ‘home’. Anthropologist Setha

Low has shown how the notion of ‘home’ plays a pivotal role in

local fears (in her case, of the residents of Battery Park City, close

to Ground Zero), due to its literal overlap with national ‘homeland’

discourse:

Residents’ fear, worry, and anxiety is constructed out of a dis-

course that is salient at both local and national scales with home

as a key metaphor for the nation/state. ... Residents’ fear of outsid-

ers and foreigners entering their homes and neighborhoods reso-

nates with political discussions of the penetration of the nation

and homeland by illegal immigrants, foreign nationals, and

potential terrorists. The threatened security of home becomes a

psychological substitute for the vulnerability of the nation/state

at war, compounded by the menace of unknown terrorists. Thus,

the powerful icon of home symbolically transforms the insecur-

ity felt about the nation- state, relocating it in the domestic realm.

(2008, p. 242)

Western Europe: nostalgia for

national homogeneity

Heated debates over ‘belonging’ and (not) ‘feeling at home’ in

Western Europe partly overlap with debates in the US and partly

have their own specific characteristics. In Western Europe, being

restless or rootless has never had the positive connotations it

enjoyed in the US, mainly because European countries – at least

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A Homesick World? 23

until very recently – did not see themselves as immigration

societies. Nevertheless, mass migration to Western Europe since the

1960s has led to enormous changes in Europe’s population, at such

a pace that it was not paralleled by changes in these countries’ self-

understanding. Whereas all West European countries have de facto

become multicultural societies, the very term ‘multicultural’ has

become deeply unpopular (Duyvendak et al., 2009; Entzinger and

Dourleijn, 2008; Joppke, 2004). Uneasiness with the newly arrived

neighbors and powerlessness in the face of rapidly changing neigh-

borhoods has become grist for the mill of populist politicians. Even

in countries such as the Netherlands, which were previously ‘light’

on nationalism, we now see a rather desperate search for shared

national symbols, canons, icons, practices and stories. The native

Dutch are literally invited by politicians to feel proud of their

‘national home’.

As in the US, public discourse in Western Europe is dominated by

nostalgic sentiment. The nostalgic wave in Europe, however, is dis-

cursively linked to globalization and immigration and not so much

to changing gender relations. To be sure, the gender revolution has

swept over Europe as well. I argue, however, that it has caused less

fear over disappearing ‘homes’ than it has in the US. This is largely

due to many West European countries having developed welfare

state arrangements that mitigate the loss of stability at home. The

weakness of the gender revolution as an explanation for nostalgia is

particularly evident in the Netherlands, where women remain more

prominent as home- makers than as paid laborers.

In Western Europe, the ‘crisis of home’ relates primarily to the

changing composition of populations and the meanings attached

to these developments by (populist) politicians. The raging debate

around the integration of immigrants (see Chapter 5) is increasingly

framed in terms of ‘Who belongs here?’, thereby polarizing natives

and newcomers. Though William Walters developed his concept of

‘domopolitics’ for the US in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, it

aptly describes recent developments in Western Europe as well:

The home as hearth, a refuge or sanctuary in a heartless world;

the home as our place, where we belong naturally, and where,

by definition, others do not; international order as a space of

homes – every people should have (at least) one; home as a place

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24 The Politics of Home

we must protect. We may invite guests into our home, but they

come at our invitation; they don’t stay indefinitely. Others are,

by definition, uninvited. Illegal immigrants and bogus refu-

gees should be returned to ‘their homes.’ Home is a place to

be secured because its contents (our property) are valuable and

envied by others. Home as a safe, reassuring place, a place of

intimacy, togetherness and even unity, trust and familiarity.

(Walters, 2004, p. 241)

In Western Europe, the epicenter of the crisis of home is at the

national level, though in a very peculiar way since the nation itself

is conceptualized as one large home. Many Dutch have become

‘defensive localists’ in that they claim their ground, their terri-

tory, as their own. As I will show, in the Dutch debate ‘home’ is a

multi- scalar phenomenon (Brenner, 2004; Morley, 2001) with sig-

nificant links between the micro, meso and macro levels. Many of

the country’s politicians believe that bolstering ‘Dutchness’ at the

national level – the 2010 coalition agreement speaks about ‘mak-

ing the Netherlands more Dutch’ – will help the natives to feel

at home in their mixed neighborhoods, to feel less displaced and

nostalgic.

Until now I have used the term ‘nostalgia’ quite loosely to describe

the prevailing mood on both sides of the Atlantic. By nostalgia I do

not mean homesickness in the sense of longing for another place, but

mourning over changes that have taken place in situ. As Rubenstein

aptly explains: ‘Nostalgia encompasses something more than a

yearning for literal places or actual individuals. While homesickness

refers to a spatial/geographical separation, nostalgia more accurately

refers to a temporal one. Even if one is able to return to the literal

edifice where s/he grew up, one can never truly return to the ori-

ginal home of childhood, since it exists mostly as a place in the

imagination’ (2001, p. 4). Regret over changes that have taken place,

expressed as a longing for the past, relates directly to the meaning of

places and those feelings attached to them: ‘The identity of places is

very much bound up with the histories which are told of them, how

these histories are told, and which history turns out to be dominant’

(Massey, 1995, p. 186).

Feeling nostalgic is often considered a characteristic of people on

the move, particularly those who have been forced to move. This,

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A Homesick World? 25

of course, is often true. But those who stay put in a mobile world

can feel nostalgic as well. They have to deal with both mobile goods

(Starbucks and McDonald’s) and mobile people, and often not out

of choice. In rapidly changing neighborhoods, both newcomers and

long- term residents can feel ‘out of place’. In such neighborhoods,

new immigrants often become homesick for their places of origin,

while native residents become nostalgic for the good old days.

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Why Feeling at Home Matters

Introduction

‘In contemporary social theory, images abound of exile, diaspora,

time- space compression, migrancy and “nomadology”. However,

the concept of home – the obverse of all this hyper- mobility – often

remains un- interrogated’ (Morley, 2001, pp. 427–8). Though Morley

is surely right when he states that ‘home’ is often under- theorized

(we will come across some disturbingly unreflective uses of ‘home’

in the coming chapters), the quote above overstates the case if we

read it as a general indictment of the research on ‘home’. Particularly

over the past few years, many books, special issues and articles have

appeared on ‘home’, ‘feeling at home’ and ‘belonging’ that not

only provide excellent overviews of the research to date but also set

the research agenda for years to come (Blunt and Dowling, 2006;

Bozkurt, 2009; Després, 1991; Gieryn, 2000; Holloway, 2008; hooks,

2009; Mack, 1993; Massey and Jess, 2003; Moore, 2000; Porteous

and Smith, 2001; Rybczynski, 1986; Saunders, 1989; Saunders and

Williams, 1988; Somerville, 1997; Tuan, 1975, 1977, 1980).1 There are

also several journals publishing articles on themes around ‘home’

and ‘belonging’, such as the Journal of Housing Research, Housing

Studies, Home Cultures and Housing, Theory, and Society.

Morley is right, however, that not all social scientists, let alone

members of the public, make use of ‘home’ in a very reflective way.

One problem with home is its very familiarity; people speak in terms

of ‘belonging’ and ‘feeling at home’ all the time. For sociological

understanding, this is both an advantage and a disadvantage. On the

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Why Feeling at Home Matters 27

one hand, everybody can participate in the debate on ‘home’; on the

other, many already claim to know what ‘home’ is and how it feels.

Curiosity becomes rare.

This familiarity does not necessarily produce articulate ideas about

what ‘feeling at home’ is. This is due to a peculiar aspect of ‘home’

and ‘feeling at home’: while everyone initially agrees that we know

what it is to feel at home, the moment we have to describe what it

means to us, we begin to stutter. Feeling at home, then, is one of

those emotions that eludes words. People may reveal, when urged to

do so, that they feel ‘at ease’ when they feel at home, that they feel

‘safe’, ‘secure’ and ‘comfortable’, at ‘one with their surroundings’. If

one feels at home, one is at peace – a rather passive state where things

are self- evident because they are so familiar.2

In other words, feeling at home is not only a familiar sentiment to

us all; familiarity itself is one of its key defining aspects. Particularly

environmental psychologists, who have carried out much of this

research, stress the importance of ‘familiarity’ in their definition of

home. From their phenomenological point of view, home is perceived

as a safe and familiar space, be it a haven or shelter, where people

can relax, retreat and care. Following the Indo- European notion of

kei, meaning ‘something precious’ – from which the German word

for home (Heim) is derived (Hollander, 1991; cited in Mallet, 2004,

p. 65) – attachment to a home place is seen as a primordial senti-

ment (Fried, 2000) created by familiar daily routines and regular

settings for activities and interactions. According to these environ-

mental psychologists, ‘place attachment is thus conceptualized as a

positive place- bound affection by which people maintain closeness

to a place’ (Hidalgo and Hernandez, 2001, p. 274). Home then is an

inclusive and distinctive sort of place with which people have strong

social, psychological and emotional attachments (Easthope, 2004,

p. 136).

Soc iolo gi st P ie rre Bo urdie u ackno wle dges the im portanc e of fa mil-

iarity in ‘feeling at home’ as well. Whereas the unfamiliar is ‘out of

place’, home is the place ‘to be’ – a place so familiar that it feels

almost like a ‘natural’ place. Bourdieu writes: ‘The agent engaged

in practice knows the world ... He knows it, in a sense, too well ...,

takes it for granted, precisely because he is caught up in it, bound

up with it; he inhabits it like a garment or a familiar habitat’ (1999,

pp. 142–3).

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28 The Politics of Home

For Bourdieu, however, this ‘naturalness’ of feeling at home is not

natural at all: it is culturally created. Bourdieu wants to understand

why people experience places as natural – as ‘home’ – and criticizes

scholars who fail to reflect on this ‘naturalizing’ effect of the famil-

iar. Indeed, many environmental psychologists employ natural

metaphors, in particular botanical ones: one is home where one is

‘rooted’. ‘Such commonplace ideas of soils, roots, and territory are

built into everyday language and often also into scholarly work,

but their very obviousness makes them elusive as objects of study’

(Malkki, 1992, p. 26). In a wonderful article, Malkki points out

that many ‘spatial’ metaphors carry this air of naturalness as well:

‘Metaphors of kinship (motherland, fatherland, Vate rlan d, patria, ...)

and of home (homeland, Heimat, ...) are also territorializing in this

same sense; for these metaphors are thought to denote something to

which one is naturally tied’ (ibid., pp. 27–8). Even ‘culture’ becomes

‘natural’ in this territorializing perspective since it seems to be natu-

rally connected to a specific place: ‘Terms like “native”, “indigenous”,

and “autochthonous” have all served to root cultures in soils; and it

is, of course, a well- worn observation that the term culture derives

from the Latin for cultivation’ (ibid., p. 29).

The phenomenological perspective on home – where home rep-

resents familiarity, order, permanency, comfort and place- bound

culture – has long been dominant. Home here is fixed and rooted,

impervious to change – the last stronghold, in fact, against change.

In our mobile era, this paradigm (which we have labeled ‘one- needs-

a- particular- place- to- feel- at- home’) has not necessarily weakened. As

we saw in Chapter 1, all particularists and even some universalists

agree on this point. While the former claim that the significance of

places today has increased, the latter argue that feeling at home has

become more difficult due to the demise of ‘attachable’ places. This

perspective, however, is not shared by those who claim that peo-

ple can also feel at home in generic places. But even this last group

shares the a priori assumption that feeling at home is important for

everybody; they only disagree over what kind of places qualify as

‘home’. ‘Feeling at home’ is – with great variety, so in a non- essentialist

sense – an essential, even existential, feeling for all.

Let’s look again at Table 1.2 from Chapter 1 (shown below as

Table 2.1 ): all four cells share the idea that ‘home’ is important,

even and perhaps especially in our mobile days. Protagonists of

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Why Feeling at Home Matters 29

three cells (1, 3 and 4) agree that one needs a particular place to

feel at home. Cell 3 represents the ‘traditional’ situation: people are

rooted in particular places surrounded by specific goods (my house is

home). Many particularists, including environmental psychologists,

take this as the ‘natural’ situation. Cell 1 is problematic from this

‘rooted’ perspective: people feel threatened by chain stores (mobile

goods) taking over their neighborhoods. However – and this is often

overlooked in the literature – mobile goods can, to a certain extent,

become rooted in local communities (this is the ambition of, for

instance, the Starbucks chain). Cell 4 shows another particulariz-

ing strategy: mobile people surrounding themselves with familiar,

specific goods (the mobile home strategy). From the perspective of

environmental psychologists, this is an impossible mission: how

could people feel at home ‘en route’? As we will see, this particular-

izing strategy is quite common and of great importance to those ‘on

the move’, who want to feel at home as well.

In the following section, we first examine the position shared by

the protagonists of the three cells which claim that feeling at home is

dependent on particular, ‘thick’ places (including mobile places). But

why would feeling at home depend on particular places? Consider

the situation in Cell 2. Here people are mobile and surrounded by

generic goods. Both particularists and some universalists would

claim that this equates to ‘not feeling at home’. I propose, however, a

different understanding. The ‘chronically mobile’ have developed an

effective new home- making strategy – the hotel chain strategy – which

enables them to feel at home in generic, ‘thin’ places. How does it

work? What does it tell us about the many ways in which people can

feel at home today?

Table 2.1 Reproduction of Table 1.2 Strategies to feel at home in a mobile

world

Mobility seen

negatively

Mobility seen

positively

Generic places 1. People lost in space:

No strategies available

2. Chronically mobile:

The hotel chain

strategy

Particular places 3. Defensive localists: My

house is my home strategy

4. Elective belongers: The

mobile home strateg y

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30 The Politics of Home

Feeling at home in particular places

For people who are immobile, the idea that feeling at home is con-

nected with a particular place seems obvious (Cell 3). Here the par-

ticular place (‘home’) feels like ‘one’s family’, familiarity being the

self- evident element within ‘belonging’. But due to the mobility of

goods and other people, the native inhabitants realize that familiar-

ity is no longer su ffic ient to make them feel at home in their particu-

lar place. On the basis of empirical research in British neighborhoods

that have undergone huge transformations, Savage et al. observe:

‘However, ... this kind of familiarity, is often not enough to convey

a full and assertive sense of belonging. Rather, people felt “their

place” had been transformed so that they were no longer fully at

home. ... There was a general sense ... that reporting a sense of famili-

arity was not enough to stop you feeling an outsider’ (2005, p. 48).

In a rapidly changing world, ‘feeling at home’ increasingly comes

to depend on the behavior of others who move into what was until

then a familiar neighborhood. In our days, (not) feeling at home is

increasingly the result of interactions with many others: it devel-

ops in a relational field. People can, to a certain extent, ‘familiarize’

themselves with new neighbors and shops. But such ‘public famili-

arity’ (Blokland, 2003; Fischer, 1982) is not enough to truly feel at

home. When people feel marginalized or threatened, they begin

to view their own place in relation to other groups and their places,

emphasizing its exclusive identity. ‘Home’ thus becomes a distinc-

tive, particular and ‘thick’ place. In our mobile era, a fortified idea

of home is appealing to many people (cf. Giddens, 1991). Whereas

cosmopolitans embrace ‘nomadism’ and consider the de- placement

of home as a positive development, many others struggle to belong

in an increasingly pluriform and mobile society. They deplore the

loss of a familiar home.

Feeling at home, then, risks becoming a zero- sum game: ‘We can

only be insiders if others remain outsiders.’ Those with sufficient

resources can guarantee their security by living with like- minded

people behind gates and walls (Low, 2004). The less privileged have

to deal with these changes in situ – for them, the arrival of ‘strange’

shops and ‘exotic’ people changes the familiar, ‘natural’ order of

things, depriving them of the ‘assumed naturalness of their taken

for granted identities’ (Morley, 2001, p. 439). Defensively, they seek

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Why Feeling at Home Matters 31

to re- establish the broken link between ‘culture’ and ‘place’: ‘Their

“homely racism” (should be understood) as a fearful response to the

destabilization, through new patterns of migration, of the privileged

link between habit and habitat’ (ibid.). What is felt as home, then,

develops out of a dialectic between what belongs to the place and

what does not; what is mentally near and what is far; what feels like

‘inside’ and what does not; who are considered ‘we’ and who are

labeled ‘others’.

Especially Chapter 5, dealing with Western Europe, will address

how immobile people can (not) feel at home in a mobile world. As

we will see, it turns out to be quite difficult, often leading to nostalgia

for the good old days. Many policy- makers are aware of the ‘hunker-

ing down’ effect that increased heterogeneity can produce (Putnam,

2007). They therefore encourage long- term inhabitants and immi-

grants to get to know one another and practice what Kwame Appiah

has called ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’: ‘Attached to a home of his or her

own, with its own cultural particularities, but taking pleasure from

the presence of other, different places that are home to other, dif-

ferent people’ (Appiah, 1998, p. 91). Appiah argues that while being

rooted is important for everybody, it need not entail a negative view

of other(s’) places. As we will see, this is more easily said than done.

Is there space (also literally) for a positive sum perspective on feeling

at home for immobile people in a mobile world – for them to feel at

home and enjoy the ability of ‘others’ to feel at home as well?

Many mobile people eventually settle down and create particular

places; in some contexts and depending on their reasons for mov-

ing, newcomers may even try to assimilate. Many immigrants, how-

ever, do not immediately relate to their new surroundings. They are

not acquainted with the particularities of the places they have come

to live in, and are not necessarily interested in them for they do

not help them feel at home. When they establish homes away from

home, immigrants often recreate places that look and smell, at least

to a certain extent, like the places they left behind. One might say

that while their native neighbors often become nostalgic for times

when they were among their ‘own’, immigrants often become home-

sick for more familiar places. Immigrants, however, bring goods from

their country of origin not only for nostalgic reasons; these goods

can foster home- making and feeling at home in new places as well.

As discussed in Chapter 1, I label this the mobile home strategy. It is

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not only used by migrants, but also by people on the move within

their own countries for work or pleasure (Andrews, 2005), as in the

case of the caravan and camper.

Alongside poorer migrants who have always moved and still move

from one country to another, we see today a new category of ‘chroni-

cally mobile persons’: CEOs, workers in the transport sector, academ-

ics, people working for international NGOs and many others. Quite a

few recent studies have addressed their sense of belonging and their

home- making strategies (Nowicka, 2007; Tandogan and Incirlioglu,

2004). Many of these studies have found that these people can enjoy

their mobility because ‘one dwells not only in a place but also in

travel. Thus, home should be seen as something that individuals can

take along as they move through time and space ... For a world of

travelers, home comes to be found in a routine set of practices, in

a repetition of habitual social interactions’ (Nowicka, 2007, p. 72).

They employ ‘domesticating’ strategies to feel at home in ‘strange’

places: they enjoy the generic places they come across (such as hotel

rooms) by acting out certain habits and connecting to people like

themselves (Ley- Cervantes, 2008; Sleegers, 2008). ‘The very pres-

ence of familiar features from the home world of newspapers, TV

programs and food serve to provide the cultural context of action

and repeat the everyday’ (Andrews, 2005, p. 263).

Magdalena Nowicka’s article ‘Mobile locations’ is a wonderful

example of scholarship that ‘de- roots’ the notion of home. She con-

vincingly argues against the ‘roots’ view where the place to feel at

home is a fixed place:

Home [was] regarded as a stable, unmoving centre from which the

world around can be perceived, conceived and experienced, and

thanks to which ethnic and national identities can develop ... It is

considered to be a fixed environment: being at home means sta-

tionary, centered, bounded, fitted, engaged and grounded ... Social

science would thus choose a spatially fixed home and investigate

how its particularity and atmosphere is created. (Nowicka, 2007,

p. 72)

The roots paradigm (Malkki, 1992) thus needs to be supplemented

with a routes paradigm to comprehend the experience of numer-

ous people the world over. For mobile people, new places may feel

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Why Feeling at Home Matters 33

like home – or become home – meaning that feelings of home can

be attached to several places, even simultaneously (Anderson, 1991

[1983]; Gustafson, 2001; Hannerz, 1996). ‘Rather than view home

as rooted, located, and bounded, and often closely tied to a remem-

bered or imagined homeland, an emphasis on “routes” invokes more

mobile, and often de- territorialized, geographies of home that reflect

transnational connections and networks’ (Blunt and Dowling, 2006,

p. 199).

Nowicka’s perspective on home as part of ‘globally stretching

networks’ (2007, p. 83) builds on Massey’s notion of place ‘as

formed out of numerous social relationships stretched over space’

(Massey, 2003, p. 69). For Nowicka, this implies that homes for the

extremely mobile are more socially than territorially defined: they

are more about the people one interacts with, the familiar faces, etc.

In this way, her work transcends the ‘one- needs- a- particular- place-

to- feel- at- home’ paradigm. Nowicka says little, however, about the

nature of the people and objects that make the highly mobile feel

at home; she only notes that ‘home is being established around

particular relationships to people and objects’ (2007, p. 81). I pro-

pose that for the very mobile, this ‘particular relationship’ is often

determined by the generic quality of places, and that home can

therefore be even more radically de- territorialized than Nowicka

suggests.3 Let’s now consider the issue of generic places before

turning to non- territorialized homes and ways of feeling at home.

Feeling at home in generic places

In the literature, it is often suggested that mobile people – like their

non- mobile brethren – look for particular places to connect with.

The findings of my research team (see also Ley- Cervantes, 2008;

Sleegers, 2008), however, point in a different direction: for the very

mobile, particular places matter little. They don’t consider them very

‘attachable’ and prefer more generic places. While some researchers

consider the increasing mobility of people and goods to be under-

mining our ability to feel at home, the opposite seems to be true

for the most mobile: it is precisely the spread of generic goods that

enables them to feel at home in various places.

All people – t he very mobile inc luded – stil l can and want to ‘attach’,

even if the very mobile are often painted as ‘rootless’ individuals. To

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34 The Politics of Home

feel at home they need, like everyone else, ‘attachable’ goods. For

the highly mobile, these goods are necessarily of a generic nature

as local goods will have little significance for them (local commu-

nities may even be experienced as intimidating). While worldwide

hotel chains may be considered ‘alien’ by many locals, they resem-

ble ‘home’ for the mobile rich. In fact it would be a risky strategy

for these hotel chains to become ‘rooted’: if they were to reach out

to the community – to ‘go native’ – they would lose their generic

characteristics and ability to provide a home- like context for the

most mobile.

The generic nature of these places around the globe provides a

familiar context for a specific, highly mobile group of people. They

can feel at home, not because of the particularity of the place – its

history, rootedness or local meaning – but because of its general,

a- historical and, indeed, ‘light’ nature. Whereas most scholars claim

that people need ‘thick’, particular places to feel at home, for some

groups the ‘thin’ character of generic places aids home- making.

Their ‘homes’ are interchangeable places, almost ‘non- places’; their

hotels, airports and business centers are ‘footloose’. The very fact

that these spaces are ‘thin’ on particular traits makes it easier for the

chronically mobile to ‘lightly’ particularize them: ‘I bring books and

magazines as well as candles to have a familiar scent from home’

(Sleegers, 2008, p. 71).

While the most mobile and the most immobile differ on the

importance they attach to particular places, what makes them feel

at home is the same. For both, familiarity is a necessary, though not

a sufficient, condition to feel at home. In the privileged case of the

rich and highly mobile, familiarity is guaranteed in the ‘non- places’

we have described. But there is more to these places than just famili-

arity. These ‘footloose’ spots are also predictable, secure, and often

segregated.

All these aspects reinforce feeling at home, of being among one’s

own kind (in this case often among businessmen, journalists, col-

leagues from academia, etc.): ‘Besides my friends, the people I get

attached to are global travelers, people who have traveled and lived

in other countries and have experienced the same lifestyles – they

are the ones whom I can more readily relate to’ (ibid., p. 65). Highly

mobile people feel at home with others like themselves in recogniz-

able spaces of a generic character.

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While immobile people are basically seeking the same things (pre-

dictability, safety and protected places), they often feel they must

defend the particularity of their own places against the threat posed

by mobile people and goods (de Gruijter et al., 2010). ‘Foreigners

ruin the neighborhood’, said an older woman we interviewed in

The Hague. Especially elderly long- term residents tend to view new

arrivals as threats. The latter are held responsible for reduced social

contact in the neighborhood, the disappearance of local shops, an

increased sense of insecurity and even the district’s ‘degradation’. The

presence of ‘criminal immigrants’ undermines the ability to feel at

home in the neighborhood. Such feelings, however, often go beyond

the facts. The woman in question could not mention any specific

instances of ‘aggressiveness’ on the streets: ‘Actually, everything still

went well, but you sometimes hear and see things’ (Tonkens et al.,

forthcoming).

Whereas the immobile withdraw to feel at home (Cell 3), the

mobile rich have more options (Cell 2, though the number of places

with generic characteristics is still limited). Crucially, the rich- and-

mobile can financially secure their feeling at home; they also have

the option to move on. This exit option is in itself a for m of security,

which the immobile lack.

All this shows that there are important differences between the

places where more and less mobile people feel at home: whereas the

former need particular, historic and context- specific places, the lat-

ter long for generic places that could be anywhere. This is not to

say that the latter feel at home everywhere – that ‘the world is their

home’, as the cosmopolitans would have it. The very mobile feel at

home in generic places that are still quite rare in the world. Generic

places, moreover, do not mean neutral places: the hotels, airports

and car rental centers cater to specific groups of (mostly) privileged

Western men who may well keep ‘particular’ goods and people at

arms length as they threaten their sense of comfort. In this sense,

I tend to disagree with authors who claim that the very mobile are

able to integrate the ‘alien’ into their feelings of home – that they

can accept home experienced as ‘strange’. But such is the claim by

Ahmed (1999), who rejects the idea that home and away are oppos-

itional concepts and experiences. For her, ‘home encompasses both

movement and strangers. Home can be experienced as strange and/

or familiar’ (paraphrased in Mallet, 2004, p. 78).

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36 The Politics of Home

The differences between the more and less mobile often run par-

allel with class; their divergent ways of feeling at home often have

class- specific consequences. First, the spread of the generic places of

the rich- and- mobile may threaten the poor, who may be displaced to

create space for ‘generic development’. Second, it is not only generic

goods for the rich- and- mobile (like hotel chains) that are spreading

around the world. Starbucks and McDonald’s do so as well, catering

to many less mobile inhabitants. Third, clashes between the more

and less mobile are not always clashes between rich and poor. As we

all know, poor people are themselves often highly mobile, as victims

of wars or pushed by poverty and lack of opportunities in their own

villages, cities and countries. For these people, migration is often

a disturbing experience, particularly for their feelings of home. In

cities and neighborhoods in their countries of arrival, they can unin-

tentionally upset the jealously guarded places of the (often relatively

disadvantaged) native population. Mobility in the form of migration

of the poor tends to disproportionately affect disadvantaged groups

in countries of arrival. Next to inter- class relations, intra- class rela-

tions become tense as well.

The coming chapters will deal with numerous aspects of mobility.

We will pay attention to relations between groups, since one group’s

feeling at home often depends on that of others. The chronically

mobile – although small in number – are interesting as they point

to new ways of feeling at home that have largely been neglected in

the literature thus far. At the same time, we will retain our focus

on those who are considered the ‘losers’ of globalization since their

home feelings are the most seriously threatened.

Beyond the particular and the generic: the symbolic

In order to map the possible aspects of ‘feeling at home’, we have

to deal with yet another element. Both particular and generic per-

spectives still relate feeling at home to concrete dwellings and places.

Even when home is conceptualized as being on the move, most

scholars still link feeling at home to a material place. But ‘home’, I

argue, does not need to be a material, geographical place. Feelings

of home can also be attached to a virtual space (Mallet, 2004): since

the ICT revolution, more and more people feel at home in the virtual

world s of thei r l ap tops . Ot he rs locate ‘home’ w it hin sa cred s tru ctures

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Why Feeling at Home Matters 37

(M anz o, 20 03): many Musli ms, for in st ance, fee l most at home in the

Umma. In the coming chapters we will come across several examples

of such non- territorialized homes. We thus need to go beyond the

four positions in Table 2.1, all based on the idea that we are dealing

with a feeling that, in one way or another, is directly related to a

physical place.

We shou ld, howev er, be w ary o f st retc hing the a rgume nt too far. The

fact that symbolic, non- material homes exist is no reason to claim that

home is only or always imagined. The immaterial home will often be

linked to concrete manifestations of ‘home’ in the past or present, or

be a project ion of a concrete home in the f uture.4 We ra re ly find e xam-

ples of home that are purely symbolic: ‘Home [as] a spatial imaginary:

a set of intersecting and variable ideas and feelings, ... are related to

context, and ... construct places, extend across spaces and scales, and

connect places’ (Blunt and Dowling, 2006, p. 2).

Perhaps the most relevant way to think about the symbolic charac-

ter of home is not as detached from the material world but as signifier

of this world, since the material world has no meaning in itself. As

Easthope puts it: ‘While homes may be located, it is not the location

that is “home” ’ (2004, p. 136). He correctly distinguishes between

‘home’ and ‘house’, showing that a house only becomes a home as

meanings and feelings – in other words, a certain symbolic value –

become attached to it. This implies that the material world in itself

has no real ‘home value’; for this it needs meanings and feelings

to be attached. ‘Home is grounded less in a place and more in the

activity that occurs in the place’ (Jackson, 1995, p. 148). ‘Home’,

then, is more the result of home- making than the effect of the place

itself. Places do not intrinsically have home- like characteristics (safe,

secure, welcoming, etc.); we develop these feelings for places over

time. This is evident when we look at ‘familiarity’ – so fundamental

to feeling at home. Familiarity takes time.

The constructionist critique that ‘objective’ places do not in and of

themselves evoke self- evident, ‘natural’ feelings of belonging ques-

tions a priori distinctions between more or less home- like places.

Much of the literature, however, seems to have set ideas about where

home belongs; it does not expect people to feel at home outside

their houses, in hotels, at their workplaces, or in anonymous envir-

onments. Instead of starting from a normative idea of what ‘home’

should be, I propose to listen to what people say regarding where

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38 The Politics of Home

and when they feel at home, and what feeling at home means to

them.

Meanings of home

For now, the only thing we know for sure is that ‘home’ matters to

all. But what is it to ‘feel at home’? In my research, I came across

many meanings of home for various people. This multiplicity is itself

meaningful: to ‘feel at home’ is not a singular feeling but a plural and

layered sentiment that travels from the individual household via the

neighborhood to the nation, and from the house to the workplace.

Nevertheless, we can draw some tentative conclusions regarding the

possible meanings of home. First, ‘familiarity’ is a necessary but often

insufficient condition for feeling at home. Other factors that may

play a role resemble those aspects Rybczynski lists in Home: A Short

History of an Idea (1986) that make a house feel like home: intimacy

and privacy, domesticity, commodity and delight, ease, light and air,

efficiency, style and substance, austerity and comfort and well- being.

If we leave out the material, house- bound elements, we have a list that

resembles those of many other authors as well. In their intriguing

Domicide: The Global Destruction of Home (2001), Porteous and Smith

discuss the classifications of scholars who have been struggling with

the many possible meanings of home. Summarizing their findings as

well as the meanings I came across in numerous articles and books, I

come to the following basic classification of the ‘elements of home’:

I. Familiarity

‘Knowing the place’

I I . Haven: secure, safe, comfortable, private and exclusive

Physical/material safety; mentally safe/predictable

Place for retreat, relaxation, intimacy and domesticity

III. Heaven: public identity and exclusivity

A public place where one can collectively be, express and realize

oneself; where one feels publicly free and independent. Home

here embodies shared histories; a material and/or symbolic place

with one’s own people and activities

This, to be sure, is a rudimentary typology (Setha Low [2004]

speaks along similar lines of a ‘fort’ and a ‘castle’), but it will prove

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Why Feeling at Home Matters 39

helpful in my quest to better understand what people mean when

they say they do (not) feel at home. The first aspect – familiarity –

has already been discussed at length: it is the precondition for the

other two. ‘Haven’ covers aspects of home that pertain to feelings

of safety, security and privacy, which most often relate to the micro

level of the house. Those aspects of home that come under the head-

ing of ‘heaven’ (Porteous and Smith, 2001, p. 44) are more outward-

oriented and/or symbolic: they help individuals to ‘be’, develop and

express themselves collectively, and to connect with others, often

through the creation of intentional communities. In terms of Table

2.1, the haven concept of home always relates to particular places:

either in the form of defensive localism (Cell 3) or elective belonging

(Cell 4). Home- as- heaven can be a particular place (a neighborhood,

a city or even a nation) but can also develop in rather generic places

(see the example of gay neighborhoods discussed in Chapter 4).

But whether experienced as haven or heaven, feeling at home is

a highly selective emotion: we don’t feel at home everywhere, or

with everybody. Feeling at home seems to entail including some and

excluding many.

The emotion of feeling at home

Social scientists who write about emotions largely overlook ‘feeling

at home’ and ‘belonging’. The reverse is true as well: those who write

about ‘home’ usually focus on the physical ‘home’ rather than on the

‘feeling’, and rarely consider ‘feeling at home’ from the perspective

of theories of emotion. How can this mutual neglect be explained?

Let’s begin with those who study emotions. First, the scant atten-

tion paid to ‘feeling at home’ – by social psychologists and sociolo-

gists alike – may be related to the idea that they deal with ‘emotions’

and not ‘feelings’. But if we look at the definitional confusion that

characterizes the literature on ‘feelings’, ‘emotions’ and ‘affects’, this

argument is difficult to sustain. Some authors assert that the main

difference between emotions and feelings lies in the subjective and

conscious character of feelings versus the physical, unreflective char-

acter of emotions. Others assert that the difference between af fects

and emotions is that affects are physical while emotions are con-

scious phenomena. Turner and Stets write that ‘most theorists and

researchers in sociology would define feelings as emotional states

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40 The Politics of Home

about which a person is consciously aware’ (Turner and Stets, 2005,

p. 286), implying that emotions as such lie outside conscious experi-

ence. This resonates with Damasio’s differentiation of ‘emotions’

and ‘feelings’, where emotions are ‘objectively observable organic

processes whilst “feelings” are the subjective experience of emo-

tions’ (in Greco and Stenner, 2008, p. 12; see also Damasio, 1999).

However, Greco and Stenner in their recent book argue that ‘affects’

constitute a new and necessary field for sociological research; due

to the ‘textual turn’ in the social sciences, emotions have become

‘discursive, dialogical phenomena’ (Greco and Stenner, 2008, p. 9).

They argue that the ‘affective turn’ is informed by the difference

between affects and emotions, where ‘emotion is a more superficial

and conscious affair, whilst affect refers to deep and often uncon-

scious organismic processes’ (ibid., p. 10). We have thus come full

circle: here ‘emotions’ mirror ‘feelings’ as defined by Turner and

Stets (2005). Whatever the ‘correct’ definition, there is no longer an

excuse for social psychologists and sociologists dealing with emo-

tions/feelings/affects to overlook the importance of ‘belonging’ and

‘feeling at home’.

A second reason why specialists on emotions (and feelings and

affects) don’t deal with ‘feeling at home’ might be the emotion’s

grab- bag character. We have seen that feeling at home is a multi-

layered, multi- scalar phenomenon. Moreover, familiarity in itself

is insufficient to feel at home. To really feel at home, many other

emotions – which differ for individuals, situations and time peri-

ods – enter the fray: the haven emotions that go with a safe, comfort-

able and predictable place, the heaven emotions where one is able to

be ‘oneself’ in public and feel connected. Has perhaps the grab- bag

quality of ‘feeling at home’ deterred sociologists and social psycholo-

gists from seriously investigating it?

Another possible explanation is that ‘feeling at home’ does not lend

itself to easy investigation. As already mentioned, for many people

the feeling itself is difficult to describe, in contrast to the many stor-

ies that they can tell about how they got to know a place:

Sense of place is rarely acquired in passing. To know a place well

requires long residence and deep involvement. It is possible to

appreciate the visual qualities of a place with one short visit, but

not how it smells on a frosty morning, how city sounds reverberate

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Why Feeling at Home Matters 41

across narrow streets to expire over the broad square, or how the

pavement burns through gym shoe soles and melts bicycle tires in

August. (Tuan, 1975, p. 164; see also Tuan, 1980)

Moreover, most people know very well when and where they do

not feel at home. Then it becomes a powerful emotion – people want

to feel at home somewhere, and will do anything to keep or regain

that feeling. It then also becomes a very ‘telling’ emotion: people

can tell long stories about when and where and why they do not feel

at home. But though one takes action to feel at home (again), once

achieved the feeling becomes passive and inactive. This may offer

a fourth explanation for social science’s scant interest in ‘feeling

at home’: most of the time, it does not lead to vigorous action and

thus sits uneasily with the claim of the famous psychologist of emo-

tions Nico Frijda that ‘emotions exist for the sake of action’ (2004,

p. 170).

Though this remains a plausible reason to exclude ‘feeling at home’

from textbooks on emotions and feelings, the absence is strange. Not

feeling at home is a powerful emotion – perhaps not a primary one,

but, as both American and West European politics have revealed in

recent years, connected to primordial sentiments of who ‘belongs’

where: in one’s house, neighborhood, city or country. ‘Home’ and

‘feeling at home’ are central within the emotionalization of politics

and the culturalization of citizenship (hooks, 2009; Isin et al., 2008;

Schinkel, 2008) and now stand at the heart of public and political

debate. This last development should be sufficient reason for social

scientists to take ‘feeling at home’ seriously.

Why, on the other hand, have authors who write about ‘home’

paid relatively little attention to its emotional side? This is not easy

to answer either. One possible reason is that the sociology of emo-

tions has until very recently been an underdeveloped area within

the discipline. It had little to offer to the sociologists of ‘home’ (van

der Graaf, 2009).

Sociologists wishing to explore ‘feeling at home’ thus needed

mainstream support to buttress the legitimacy of their research.

Were not ‘home’ and ‘feeling at home’ too pedestrian, too vague for

serious investigation? If these subjects were already being discussed

on the street, in the cafes, at dinner tables, in the newspapers and

in parliament, what more could social scientists hope to contribute?

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42 The Politics of Home

In response to the reproach that they were investigating an all- too-

familiar subject, social scientists sought a sturdier foundation for

their research: attention now turned, not to the ‘soft’ world of emo-

tions, but to the ‘harder’ context of place. But while concepts such

as ‘place attachment’ were well received, the emotion of ‘feeling at

home’ attracted less interest than the object of the feeling, the place

qua place. This neglect of the emotion- as- emotion appeared to sug-

gest that ‘feeling at home’ meant and was experienced by everybody

as the same thing. Moreover, the research focused on the material

objects through which people felt at home in given places, effectively

sidelining those symbolic and imaginary aspects that also inform

the feeling. Transnational ‘belonging’ in the Umma, for example,

appeared exotic, outside the investigative scope of sociologists in

general as well as of scholars researching ‘feeling at home’.

There were, of course, inspiring exceptions. Arlie Hochschild, one

of the pioneers in the sociology of emotions, sought to earn for emo-

tions a legitimate place within sociology; emotions, after all, were

social phenomena through and through. But while ‘home’ has a

prominent place in Hochschild’s work, it seems that even she did

not really think it through as an emotion. This we will see in the

coming chapter.

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Losing Home at Home: When

Men and Women Feel More at

Home at Work

Introduction

Home – here understood as the place where people live and sleep –

has always been highly gendered. Women have historically been

associated with ‘home’ and remain until our day the primary

‘home- makers’ (Fuwa, 2004; Hareven, 1983; Jasper, 2000, p. 235;

Mallet, 2004; Perrot, 1990; Simmel, 1984). The growing incidence

of women working outside the home in many Western countries has

thus altered the situation at home. Particularly in the US, numerous

authors (Gerson, 2004a, 2004b; Gerson and Jacobs, 2004; Gornick

and Meyers, 2003; Jacobs and Gerson, 2004b; Schor, 1991) describe

the consequences of the gender revolution in highly alarmist tones:

Americans suffer from a ‘time squeeze’, feel overworked and have

little time for home.

This marginalization of family life in the US is the result of many

factors, such as the lack of welfare state provisions and the grow-

ing importance of paid work for all Americans – for both men and

women. This has been accompanied by the blurring of boundaries

between ‘home’ and ‘work’ (Epstein and Kalleberg, 2004): home has

become work (Conley, 2009) and work has become home (Hochschi ld,

1997).

The promise of the service economy to create more leisure time

(Epstein and Kalleberg, 2004; Jacobs and Gerson, 2004b; Robinson

and Goodbey, 1997) has simply not materialized for most Americans,

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44 The Politics of Home

neither for those at the top of the job ladder nor for those at the

bottom. As we will see, many Western heterosexual couples – and

not only Americans – spend more time at work today, largely due to

women’s greater participation in the labor market.

Home as hell; home as haven/heaven?

In most Western countries, the women’s liberation movement of the

1960s and 1970s aimed to decouple women and home: women, its

proponents argued, should be welcomed onto the labor market while

men should take up their fair share of housework and child- rearing

(Friedan, 1963; Hochschild, 1989; Pateman, 1989). For many women,

paid work was indeed an important step into the outside world.

‘Home’ had negative connotations for the early women’s move-

ment. The American feminist Betty Friedan famously described the

home as an oppressive place for women, a place that confines them

to the domestic sphere. Home was a trap (Weintraub and Kumar,

1997) and sometimes even hell: ‘As a symbolic representation, home

serves to remove women from the “real” world of politics and busi-

ness. ... As lived experience, home can be similarly oppressive. ... For

many women, home is a space of violence, alienation and emotional

turmoil’ (Blunt and Dowling, 2006, p. 15).

Though home in its gendered version has been heavily criticized,

‘home’ has surv ived as an ideal. The new dreams were based on homes

with men and women sharing equally in housekeeping, child- rearing

and paid labor. Home no longer needed to be a ‘haven in a heartless

world’. The new home beyond stereotypical gender roles promised

‘heaven’ – a place for self- realization and self- expression open to the

world, embedded in shared services provided by the neighborhood

community (Hayden, 2002).

But this dream never materialized. While women entered the labor

market in impressive numbers, men didn’t take over household tasks

to a comparable degree. Households in many Western countries were

thus confronted with a crisis at home – one which has been particu-

larly acute in countries such as the US where women began working

full time without the benefits of a welfare state.

Prominent feminists of the 1960s and 1970s like Arlie Hochschild

were shocked by this unintended consequence of the gender revo-

lution: their idea had been to transform home, not to abolish it.

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In their view, the demise of home was now the main problem –

for women and men alike. In her work through to Global Woman

(together with Ehrenreich, 2003),1 Hochschild largely holds men

responsible for the crisis at home. She addresses the necessity of

men to contribute more to care tasks in order to unburden women

of the second shift of housekeeping, to create more harmonious het-

erosexual relationships and to let Third World women care for their

own children instead of working as nannies in the US. Nevertheless,

the emphasis of Hochschild’s work has clearly changed. Whereas

her famous The Second Shift (1989) focused on the fairer distribu-

tion of housework between men and women in joint households,

The Time Bind (1997) focused on the distorted relationship between

‘work’ and ‘home’. Rather than emphasizing the unfair differences in

men and women’s contributions, she now points to the similarities

in their hard- working lives. Whereas capitalism in the 1970s was

blamed for trapping women in the home – and profiting from their

unpaid ‘reproductive’ housework – capitalism today is blamed for

trapping women (and men) at work and not providing enough time

to be at home.

Below I reconstruct what the gender revolution has meant for

American men and women and their ‘crisis at home’ and compare

the situation in the US to that of Western Europe, where households

have been less affected by market forces. This reconstruction largely

draws on the work of Arlie Hochschild, who has written on home

and work for the better part of three decades. In the second part of

the chapter, I analyze underlying notions of ‘home’ in the work of

the main protagonists in the debate on the future of the work–care

balance. What is their understanding of home? Where do they situ-

ate ‘home’? And last but not least: is the market the main threat to

the real ‘home’ or the new place for people to feel at home?

The marginalization of home in the US

A new political fervor has emerged among American women who

toil under the double burden of housekeeping and a full- time job.

Groups such as MomsRising in the Motherhood Manifesto stress that

women today are much too busy. They point out that the US and

Australia are the only industrialized countries with no paid mater-

nity leave, poor childcare facilities and few days of paid vacation.

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46 The Politics of Home

The situation is dire enough to encourage (higher class) women to

stay at home (Yang and Rodriguez, 2009).

The sense is that Americans are overworked and time- squeezed.

‘Basic social changes are placing increasing pressures on workers and

their families. ... Family time is squeezed because more household

members are employed. The rise of dual- earning couples has con-

tributed to a large increase in the combined working time of married

couples’ (Jacobs and Gerson, 2004b, pp. 41–2). The same criticism

is heard repeatedly within public, political and academic debate –

at issue is ‘the legitimacy of time demands at work, the sacrifice of

other values to the ever- faster production of goods and services, and

the resulting burden placed on the family and the health of citizens’

(Epstein and Kalleberg, 20 04, p. 2).

This new situation causes real anxiety among Americans, and not

just among those with the most precarious jobs: ‘The increasingly

important role that women play in the economic life of a family

forms the bedrock of the real story of middle- class anxiety. That’s

because household labor – most notably child care – has not gotten

any easier in the meantime. Blending work and home responsibilities

is no easy feat, especially in a 24/7 service economy that allows many

of us to work from home at all hours’ (Conley, 2009, p. 13).

Hochschild emphasizes that women – due to their increased

participation in the labor market and the ‘squeeze’ at home – are

becoming similar to men in the values they ascribe to home and

work. Whereas men have always claimed that they belonged more at

work than around the house, many women have recently begun to

state the same thing: ‘In a previous era, men regularly escaped the

house for the bar, the fishing hole, the golf course, the pool hall, or,

often enough, the sweet joy of work. Today ... women, ... overloaded

and feeling unfairly treated at home, [are] escaping to work, too’

(Hochschild, 1997, p. 39). Hochschild’s leading concern is the mar-

ginalization of life at home, where children must be content with

something as strange as ‘quality time’ and where as many tasks as

possible are outsourced.

In her early work, Hochschild appeared in favor of a certain mix-

ing of the worlds of work and home, for permeability between the

‘masculine’ outside world and the ‘all- too- feminine’ inside world. In

The Managed Heart (1983), for example, she criticized the pressure

placed on stewardesses to present themselves as something different

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from what they ‘really’ were. But in her later work, she argues for a

radical separation of work and home, and is extremely ambivalent

about the ‘feminization of the workplace’ ushered in by ‘a manage-

ment philosophy that stressed trust, team building, and courtesy to

the internal customer’ (Hochschild, 1997, p. 168).

In the United States, where the feminist ambition for women to

take an equal part in paid labor is as good as achieved, the problem

is that work outside the home has come to dominate the lives of all

Americans, men and women alike. The emphasis placed on family

values in political rhetoric says something about how far removed

the ideal has become from the daily reality. Alongside low- paid

blue- collar workers, particularly professionals and managers are

much too busy (Jacobs and Gerson, 2004a) and family life pays the

price.

This is the context in which sociologists such as Hochschild,

Gornick and Meyers, and Jacobs and Gerson look to Western Europe

for solutions. ‘Many European countries have adopted programs,

such as shorter workweeks, widely available childcare, and generous

parental leave policies, that reflect a concern for family welfare

and women’s rights’ (Gerson, 2004b, p. 178). The Netherlands is

a good example of the shorter workweek (nowhere in the world

do so many men and women have part- time jobs, SCP [2010]),

while Norway’s highly developed welfare state, with its parental

leave schemes for both women and men, is Hochschild’s envy: ‘In

Norway ... all employed men are eligible for a year’s paternity leave

at 90 percent pay. Some 80 percent of Norwegian men now take

over a month of parental leave. In this way, Norway is a model to

the world’ (Hochschild, 2006, p. 219). In Families that Work: Policies

for Reconciling Parenthood and Employment (2003), sociologists Janet

Gornick and Marcia Meyers also look to European countries as

models:

Many of the problems besetting American families are less acute

in other industrialized countries that have more extensive pub-

lic policies that help families manage competing demands from

the home and the workplace without sacrificing gender equality.

Although none of the countries ... can be characterized as having

achieved a fully egalitarian, dual- earner- dual- carer society, some

provide useful examples of the ways in which government can

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48 The Politics of Home

support families in their efforts to share earning and caring work.

(2003, p. 5)

Gornick and Meyers are also fairly optimistic that gender

inequality in the performance of household chores will diminish

as European policies are introduced in the US: ‘Family policies in

several European countries ... provide models of what government

can do to help families resolve the tensions between workplace and

caring responsibilities while promoting greater gender equality’

(20 03, p. 15).

This undervaluation of caring responsibilities and private life is at

the center of the American debate on the ‘crisis of home’, in which

the main culprits are business, the market and the lack of effective

public policy. The assumption is that as part- time work and effective

policy ease outside pressures on the family, men will begin to assume

their fair share of household and childcare tasks, while women will

be able to fulfill their career ambitions. By blaming the state and the

market, the attitudes of men largely escape critical attention.2

It is from this perspective that Europe, or more precisely certain

countries in Northern Europe, appear idyllic. But how accurate is this

perception? How equal is the distribution of paid work and caring

responsibilities in the lauded European countries of the Netherlands,

Sweden and Norway? Do better childcare schemes deliver the prom-

ised benefits, and even eliminate the time bind? Do men become

better fathers, carers and housekeepers? Do Europeans enjoy a ‘true’

home?

The Netherlands: the part- time society

The marginalization of family life can be expressed in quantitative

terms. The working week of many Americans is long – much longer

than the average working week in many European countries, even

when we ignore the overtime that many committed employees in

the US ‘take for granted’. The difference with the Netherlands, the

leader in part- time work, is the greatest. It is much more common for

Dutch women to work part- time than for American women (75% and

26% respectively) (SCP, 2010; US Department of Labor, 2009): 44.5

percent of Dutch women have a part- time job of 20–34 hours, 15.4

percent work 12–20 hours and 14.6 percent work less than 12 hours

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a week. Among working Dutch men, 77.1 percent work full time and

22.9 percent part time (12.2% work 20–35 hours a week while 10.8%

work less than 20 hours a week) (SCP, 2010).3

We would expect that Dutch couples are less likely to suffer from

the time bind as they work, on average, considerably fewer hours

than their American counterparts. Indeed, for dual-income couples

with children, mean joint hours worked per week is 80 in the US and

only 61 in the Netherlands (Gornick and Meyers, 2003, p. 61). Of the

Dutch couples with children under 18, both men and women worked

full time in only 8 percent of cases, one parent worked full time and

the other part time in 56 percent, both partners worked part time in

7 percent, and one parent worked full time while the partner had no

job in 24 percent of cases. There were also couples where one parent

worked part time and one had no job (3%), and others where neither

parent had a job (2%). Where one partner worked full time and the

second partner had no job, the man was almost always the working

parent (SCP, 2010).4

It is more difficult to find good data on how Dutch and Americans

perceive the time bind. An indication of the more modest domin-

ance of work over home in the Netherlands, however, emerges from

interviews among a representative random sample where respond-

ents identify their ambitions and what is most important in their

lives. The results suggest that Dutch people are generally unambi-

tious in their work and do not give paid labor a particularly import-

ant place in their lives. Only 10 percent of the population considers

more than three days of work a week to be ideal for a mother with

small children (SCP, 2010). A majority of parents of school- age chil-

dren consider a two- or three- day working week to be ideal (ibid.). To

provide some context to this statistic, note that there is less need to

demonstrate ambition in the Netherlands by putting in long working

hours; almost all households with one and a half incomes can quite

easily make ends meet. Data for the US are more ambivalent: ‘Some

observers ... argue Americans work longer hours because they like to

work long hours, relative to Europeans’ (Gornick and Meyers, 2003,

p. 80). Many studies, however, show that the ‘choice’ to work longer

hours is mainly motivated by higher income (Evans et al., 2001).

Bell and Freeman conclude that ‘in the United States we work hard

because we face a good “carrot” for putting out time and effort, and

because we also face a substantial “stick” if we do not’ (2001, p. 96).

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As Gerson puts it: ‘The rise of overwork does not reflect worker pref-

erences. ... Instead, it represents a growing mismatch between job

demands and reward structures, which equate work commitment

with time spent at the workplace’ (2004a, p. 55).

‘Home’ may be more highly valued in the Netherlands than in

the United States, but this is mainly because Dutch women make

work of home and put private life ahead of their part- time jobs.

Some Dutch women do in fac t want to work longer hours, but only

if certain conditions are met: the most commonly mentioned ones

are compatibility of working hours with private life, the ability to

take time off for a sick child or family member, and compatibil-

ity of working hours with their children’s school schedules (SCP,

2010).5

Dutch men do little at home compared to women, whether house-

hold chores or childcare tasks. Of parents with children up to six

years of age, women in 2005 spent 23.7 and 20.7 hours, respectively,

on housekeeping and care for children or other household members.

The corresponding figures for men were 9.2 and 10 hours. The care

tasks of parents with children between six and 14 decline, for both

women and men. But there remain significant differences between

the sexes: women now spend 24.5 hours per week on housework and

9.4 hours on care, while men spend 9.8 and 3.6 hours respectively

(SCP, 2006, p. 106). The fact that women have part- time jobs thus

takes the pressure off men to participate at home. In 1995, the total

contribution of men to care tasks was 34.9 percent. Ten years later,

the situation was virtually unchanged (35.7%). One of the objectives

of Dutch emancipation policy – men shouldering at least 40 percent

of care obligations by 2010 – has not been achieved.

Dutch men contribute more to housekeeping only when women

have more demanding paid jobs. This is interesting, if only because

Hochschild appears to follow Harriet Presser in concluding that

men’s involvement at home does not depend on the demands of a

woman’s paid job: ‘when wives go to work outside the home, a third

of husbands do more housework and childcare to compensate; a

third don’t change; and a third actually do less’ (Hochschild, 1997,

p. 184). While Dutch figures show men assuming more tasks at home

as women work more outside (see Tab le s 3.1 and 3.2), this mecha-

nism mainly operates when men are at home alone with their chil-

dren: they then have no escape.

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Table 3.1 Time spent on paid work/education and housekeeping/care by

working people with children (hours per week and percent of time spent on

respective tasks)

Youngest child 0–6 years Youngest child 7–17 years

Women Men Women Men

Hours

per

week %

Hours

per

week %

Hours

per

week %

Hours

per

week %

The

Netherla nds

Paid work/

education

17.7 32 40.7 70 27.8 55 40.7 82

Housekeeping/

care

38.2 68 17.1 30 22.9 45 9.2 18

Total 55.9 100 57.8 100 50.7 100 49.9 100

Sweden

Paid work/

education

20.0 35 36.9 61 30.7 53 38.1 68

Housekeeping/

care

37.4 65 23.2 39 27.6 47 17.8 38

Total 57.4 100 60.1 100 58.3 100 55.9 100

France

Paid work/

education

26.6 44 38.5 70 29.5 50 40.4 74

Housekeeping/

care

33.6 56 16.6 30 29.5 50 14.2 26

Total 60.2 100 55.1 100 59.0 100 54.6 100

United States

Paid work/

education

29.9 47 43.6 69 31.3 54 42.7 74

Housekeeping/

care

34.2 53 19.2 31 26.6 46 14.7 26

Tot al 64.1 100 62.8 100 57.9 100 57.4 100

Source: SCP (2006).

Table 3.1 below shows that the American hope for a ‘more

relaxed life’ is a reality in the Netherlands, certainly for men.

Surveys reveal that Dutch men with children between seven and

17 years of age spend strikingly few hours on housekeeping and

care tasks.

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52 The Politics of Home

At first glance, then, part- time work looks like a good way for

households to escape from the time bind. But a closer look at the

figures shows that the main reason for this is that Dutch women

do little outside the home and much inside. Nowhere else is the

proportion of hours spent on housekeeping and childcare as high

as it is for Dutch women; nowhere else do men spend so little time

on the household and children. In other words, encouraging part-

time work when men and women have unequal earning power and

sense of ‘home responsibility’ leads to women spending more time

at home – precisely the situation second- wave feminism set out to

change.

The Netherlands also shows that while part- time work can bring

peace to the home front, it is at the expense of women’s careers and

economic independence. There is a conspicuous correlation between

the proportion of women working part time in the Netherlands and

the extremely low proportion of women in more highly qualified

jobs. Whereas girls on average are more highly educated than boys,

women are greatly under- represented in middle and higher posi-

tions. The Netherlands compares poorly in this regard with all other

European countries, and certainly with the United States. Only 4.3

percent of board members in the 5,000 largest companies in the

Netherlands were women in 2009 (SCP, 2010), compared to more

than 15 percent in the US (Catalyst, 2009). Furthermore, only 42

percent of Dutch women between 15 and 64 were considered eco-

nomically independent in 2008 (CBS, 2010).6

Given the situation in the US where around 60 percent of women

are financially self- sufficient (Bell, 2010; Bell et al., 2007, p. 17; US

Census Bureau, 2010) and more women make it to the top, some

American scholars give less weight to the problem of the glass ceiling

than to the marginalization of private life. Hochschild writes:

In the early stages of the women’s movement many feminists,

myself included, pushed for a restructuring of work life to allow

for shorter- hour, flexible jobs and a restructuring of home life

so that men would get in on the action. But over the years, this

part of the women’s movement seems to have surrendered the

initiative to feminists more concerned with helping women break

through the corporate glass ceiling into long- hours careers. A time

movement would have to bring us all back to the question of how

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women can become men’s equals in a more child- oriented and

civic- minded society. (1997, p. 250)

It seems to be one or the other: economic independence and

breaking the glass ceiling seem incompatible with a strategy ori-

ented towards part- time work and a more ‘child- oriented and civic-

minded’ lifestyle. A growing number of women have reached the top

in the US, where there are few part- time jobs. In the Netherlands,

where women in particular work part time, they hit the glass ceiling

with a thump (other factors also contribute to Dutch backwardness

regarding women at the top, but part- time work certainly plays a sig-

nificant role). Opting for part- time work has consequences for wom-

en’s careers. To be more precise, encou raging part- time work without

men changing their views on the relative importance of work and

home leads to women shouldering (or in the case of the Netherlands,

retaining) the lion’s share of responsibility for the second shift.

Note that this is not necessarily a case against part- time work,

but a warning against encouraging part- time work in a context of

gender inequality. Where this inequality does not exist, such as in

homosexua l r elation sh ips, Hoc hs ch ild’s dr ea m appears to be com ing

true: homosexual couples in the Netherlands where both partners

work part time enjoy an egalitarian ideology and also share most

household and childcare tasks. But here we need to add a qualify-

ing remark: the group concerned is relatively privileged and highly

qualified, and is able to escape the time bind because two part- time

incomes are more than sufficient for the household.

Scandinavian welfare states

Hochschild and many other Americans see the Scandinavian coun-

tries’ generous schemes for leaves of absence (for pregnancy, parent-

hood and holidays) as the solution for the time bind. As some of these

schemes explicitly encourage men to take responsibility at home

(Sainsbury, 1999), they should also reduce the double load borne by

women. Let us look at the practical consequences of these schemes,

starting with their impact on men’s participation in childcare and

housekeeping in Sweden and Denmark. When we compare their con-

tribution to that of men in other European countries, it indeed seems

that Scandinavian men are more involved in childcare ( Ta bl e 3 .2 ).7

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54 The Politics of Home

However, if we look at Scandinavian men’s involvement in

housekeeping, we see that their contribution is not large, and no

greater than that of men in other countries such as the United

States. This is more surprising if we consider that they have more

time (particularly during periods when they are at home more).

Scandinavian men do respond to appeals to their fatherhood, and

often enjoy caring for their children. However, this does not mean

that they also identify with the other aspects of ‘home’. Research

has shown that Scandinavian men, despite being less affected by

the time bind, put their work at the center of their lives just as

much as other European and American men. We see no funda-

mental shift in gender attitudes in the Scandinavian countries

(Ellingsaeter, 1999).

The above is not to deny that Scandinavian families suffer less

from the time bind than their American counterparts – certainly

when the children are young, in life’s rush hour (see Table 3.1). But

here as well, it is mainly women who spend more time at home.

When leave schemes are ‘gender neutral’, it is mainly women who

make use of them; only when regulations specifically and exclusively

target men do we see some degree of emancipation. For example, two

months of the parental leave in Sweden are exclusively for the father

(‘use or lose’) (Koopmans and Schippers, 2006). But as Seward et al.

conclude: ‘Despite years of encouragement, the most generous paid

leave program available, and growing societal support, only in the

1990s did a slight majority of Swedish fathers take at least some of

the regular paternal leave’ (ibid., 2002, p. 396).

Table 3.2 Time spent on paid work and housekeeping/childcare, hours per

week (2003)

Women Men

Paid

work

Housekeeping

and childcare

Paid

work

Housekeeping

and childcare

Denmark 36.5 22.4 40.8 13.3

Sweden 37.0 18.9 40.4 13.6

Netherlands 27.4 23.8 39.8 11.6

France 35.9 18. 2 40.0 10.4

Source: SCP (2006).

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Losing Home at Home 55

The home- orientation of Scandinavian women does not improve

their career prospects (Aisenbrey et al., 2009). Research has shown

that generous leave schemes negatively impact on their chances for

promotion, if only because women returning to work after a career

break gravitate to the public sector (Mandel and Semyonov, 2005,

p. 952; Pet tit and Hook, 2 002). ‘The quest ion of gen der equ alit y ra ises

vexing concerns in the design of leave policies. Women’s dispropor-

tionate use of long leaves can result in extended absences from the

workplace, exacerbating gender inequality in the home, and gender

differentials in paid and unpaid work’ (Gornick and Meyers, 2003,

p. 101). Indeed, Sweden’s labor market is one of the most gender-

segregated in the world; women and men occupy jobs traditionally

associated with their sex, with women seldom in positions of power

(Haas and Hwang, 2007, p. 58).

Both the Dutch solution to the time bind (part- time work) and the

Scandinavian one (paid leave) lead to less time pressures because it

is women who are more often at home and assume – or continue to

accept – the lion’s share of both childcare and housekeeping. This is

no reason to oppose part- time work or generous leave arrangements.

But we may ask whether it is not possible to design schemes for part-

time work and leaves of absence such that men, too, can make max i-

mum use of them.

However, European experience points to something more fun-

damental, unrelated to the quantitative lac k of ti me . E ve n if men –

thanks to policy measures American feminist scholars can only

dream of – have more time and spend more of it at home, they

are reluctant to perform certain tasks. This qualitative problem

disappears from view in most American analyses as the pressures

of the time bind focus attention on both men and women being

overburdened by work outside the home. As valuable as this per-

spective may be, it should not blind us to the fact that women

everywhere still assume the lion’s share of care tasks, true not

only in the US but even more so in part- time paradises like the

Netherlands. This is largely because men still do not identify

with ‘home’.

The greatest merit of the recent work by American sociologists

is that it shows how the emancipation of women has taken place

on ‘male’ terms: women have entered the world of paid labor in

droves, but this has not been accompanied by the necessary changes

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56 The Politics of Home

that would enable work and care to be combined. Neither have

men changed their attitudes towards ‘home’. Life at home is thus

threatened with marginalization, with many men and women now

reporting that they enjoy being at work more than being at home.

‘Sadly, many workers felt more appreciated for what they were doing

at work than for what they were doing at home’ (Hochschild, 2003,

p. 207).

Given this situation, Hochschild’s strategy to re- evaluate ‘home’

appears apt. Nevertheless, the European cases show that striving

for a more relaxed distribution of work and care through part- time

work, more generous leave arrangements and child day care may

entail women returning to their former position as the primary

home- makers. As necessary as it might be to put the market in its

place and make paid labor less dominant in the lives of men and

women, progressive social policies by themselves will not usher in

the ‘new home’. There remains the need for men to re- appreciate

‘home’. Otherwise, women will again find themselves confined to

the world of ‘home’ while men continue to identify with the world

of ‘work’.

Home, what home?

What do people who are so worried about the marginalization of

family life in the US really mean by ‘home’? We saw in Chapter 2

that ‘home’ has various meanings, depending on the person, the

time and the situation. The question is thus pertinent: according to

the authors under discussion here, what kind of ‘home’ is in crisis?

Whereas second- wave feminists gave some gruesome accounts

of the darker sides of ‘home as hell’, Hochschild in her recent work

attaches positive value to home (and to the importance of feeling at

home). Precisely because Hochschild sympathizes with many of the

ideals of second- wave feminism – so aptly described in The Second

Shift (1989) as de- romanticizing ‘home’ – it is interesting to examine

her more recent writings, what she means by ‘home’ and why one

should (again) appreciate it.

Hochschild, in her recent writings, stresses the dangers of the

decline of home- at- home. She argues that ‘one has to feel home at

home’ and that feelings of home should not become part of ‘work’ –

thus reinstating boundaries she wished to blur in earlier days. Her

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analysis relies on a rather ‘thick’ and rosy notion of home – of home-

as- haven:

[I assume], as many of us do, that compared to the workplace,

home is a more pleasant place to be. ... If the purpose and nature

of family and work differ so drastically in our minds, it seemed

reasonable to assume that people’s emotional experience of the

two spheres would differ profoundly, too. In Haven in a Heartless

World, the social historian Christopher Lasch drew a picture of

family as a ‘haven’ where workers sought refuge after the cruel

world of work. (Hochschild, 2003, p. 205)

In ‘Emotional Geography and the Flight Plan of Capitalism’,

Hochs child cl aims t hat th is p osi ti ve idea of ho me appl ie s t o b ot h m en

and women (whereas Lasch’s earlier portrait of home- as- haven was

taken to task by feminists for its gender bias). Hochschild writes:

I assumed that working parents would want more time at home.

I imagined that they experienced home as a place where they

could relax, feel emotionally sheltered and appreciated for who

they ‘really are.’ I imagined home to feel to the weary worker like

the place where he or she could take off a uniform, put on a bath-

robe, have a beer, exhale ... To be sure, home life has its emergen-

cies and strains, but I imagined that home was the place people

thought about when they thought about rest, safety, and appreci-

ation. ... The model of family- as- haven led me to assume that the

individual would feel most known and appreciated at home and

least so at work. (Ibid., pp. 205 and 207)

Hochschild initially seems reluctant to formulate her own ideas

about home; instead she elaborates on what she expects to hear from

the subjects of her research (‘I assumed ...’, ‘I imagined ...’). Over the

course of her research, however, it turns out that many working men

and women feel more at home- at- work than at home; home was ‘not

a haven, a zone of relief and relaxation. It was a workplace’ (ibid.,

p. 206). Somewhat surprisingly, Hochschild is taken aback by women

complaining about home in a language reminiscent of second- wave

feminism. Even more surprising is Hochschild’s criticism of those

who feel at home- at- work, on the basis of her idea that people should

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58 The Politics of Home

feel more relaxed, sheltered and appreciated at home. Home- as- haven

thus turns out to be more her own idea than that of the workers she

interviews.

If many people feel unappreciated for what they are doing at home,

this may indicate a serious social problem. Indeed, the poor qual-

ity of family life as described by Hochschild and many other soci-

ologists indicates severe problems in the lives of American citizens.

But why take issue with the trend to make ‘work’ more like ‘home’?

Must ‘feeling at home’ be confined to what we consider the ‘private

sphere’? Hochschild does not convincingly explain why it is a prob-

lem if feelings of home travel, if our homely needs are (also) satisfied

in other ways and in other places.

I suppose Hochschild would answer that the undermining of

home- at- home is causally related to developments at work: people

have to invest more hours at work and are willing to do so because

work gives them the feeling of being at home. In this way, (post)

modern capitalism fuels a vicious circle: due to their jobs, people

have less time for their ‘real’ homes. The situation at home further

deteriorates, and people are happy to escape to work where they can

finally experience the feeling of home. Hochschild claims that this is

against the will of both women and men. If they could choose to feel

at home at home, they would. For Hochschild, unrestrained market

capitalism is the root cause of the American crisis of home. The mar-

ket is for her the most improbable sphere for feeling at home.

I fully agree with Hochschild that the US is experiencing a much

more serious crisis of home- at- home than most West European coun-

tries. Placing restrictions on the free market, improving welfare state

entitlements and encouraging part- time work would indeed reduce

the pressure American households experience today. But note what,

for Hochschild, constitutes a ‘good’ home when she writes: ‘Four-

year- old Cassie, waiting to be picked up at the Spotted Deer Childcare

Center, will have passed through a childhood of long waits for absent

parents’ (Hochschild, 1997, pp. 258–9). Is a four- year- old attending

day care here seen as a problem? Cassie is missing her parents, miss-

ing a real home, implying that even the Scandinavian solution falls

short. The point here is not whether Hochschild is right regarding

what children need. The point is that the ‘thicker’ one’s notion of

home – of what must be done to provide a ‘real’ one – the more it

wi ll burden women. Even under Scandin av ia n conditions, most men

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refuse to identify with home; the main reason family life is faring

better in countries like the Netherlands is because women continue

to do the unpaid work.

Dalton Conley in his book on home and work, Elsewhere, USA

(2009), proposes a radically different solution. His is a very thin

notion of home:

Successful companies ... in the coming years will be the ones who –

like Google – blend and bend rather than build walls between the

domains of life. For example, rather than drop- off day care, a new

model called ‘Two rooms’ offers office space for working parents

separated only by glass from their toddlers, who explore a play

space in the next room. The kinder are supervised by an adult,

but the parents and the children can wave, signal each other, and

cross the divide as often as they want in between their respective

block- towers and e- mail messages. ... The professional parents will

be the ones who manage to blend the child- rearing duties with

their professional ones, making their children comfortable in

high- pressure, high- status work environments where big vocabu-

lary words fly back and forth and the kids get used to the ‘family

business,’ so to speak. (p. 183)

For Conley, the crisis of home in the United States will be solved

when work and home ultimately fuse:

It’s that the once disparate spheres have now collided and inter-

penetrated each other, creating a sense of ‘elsewhere’ at all times.

I’m not just talking about the increase in travel and telecommuni-

cations, I am talking about the more subtle changes that they have

rendered: the fact that home is more like work and work is more

like home and that the private and public spheres are increasingly

indistinguishable from each other. (Ibid., p. 33)

Conley further argues that ‘we shouldn’t try to swim against the

tides of history in our own lives’ (ibid., p. 183) – implying that the

dissolution of the private ‘home- at- home’ is inevitable.

That the ‘tides of history’ have put an end to the idea of home- as-

haven can be questioned on both empirical and normative grounds.

Would Conley’s way out really solve the crisis of home in America?

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60 The Politics of Home

And for whom? Would it address the problems of people with (very)

low- paid jobs, who now often combine two or more of them? Conley,

in his book, does not elaborate on the many consequences of his

radical proposal.

Conley’s argument, however, has the benefit of showing that

there are more possible answers to the American crisis of home than

Hochschild’s home- as- haven (a place that needs to be protected from

the world). Yet another strategy is sketched by Dolores Hayden in

Redesigning the American Dream: Gender, Housing, and Family Life: the

‘neighborhood’ strategy of home- making where ‘home’ is no longer

a trap as better designed houses and shared services ‘overcome the

isolation of housewives’ (2002, p. 108).

When thinking about possibilities for the future, we need to

realize that both the old and new ideals of home are deeply inter-

twined with notions of gender. The very idea of home–as- haven was

based on a new role for women, at least for middle- class women.

Tamara Hareven, the late family historian, has shown that the

‘concept of the home as the family’s haven and domestic retreat

emerged ... about one hundred fifty years ago, and was, initially, lim-

ited to the urban middle classes’ (1993, p. 228). In earlier days – as

has also been shown by French historian Philip Aries – the notion

of ‘privacy’ did not apply to ‘home’: ‘In preindustrial society the

family conducted its work and public affairs inside the household’

(ibid., p. 230). Industrialization and urbanization fueled the idea of

the home- as- haven in high ly gendered terms (Chapman and Hockey,

1999; Massey, 2007):

The view of the home as the family’s private retreat was closely

linked to the new definition of woman’s separate sphere, which

glorified the role of the wife as a homemaker and full- time mother.

In American society, the cult of domesticity that characterized

this transformation in women’s roles placed women on a pedes-

tal as the custodians of the home and segregated them in their

domestic sphere, while the public sphere was allotted exclusively

to men. (Massey, 2007, pp. 237–8)

All this implies that ‘the division between domestic and work-

spaces and relations bet ween the private and public realms, wa s never

as neat as the home as haven idea implies’ (Mallet, 2004, p. 72). An

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Losing Home at Home 61

invention of the nineteenth century, the strict boundary between

‘home’ and ‘work’ – and between the ‘private’ and ‘public’ – was

in the second half of the twentieth century criticized particularly

by women for its unfair gender implications. This led to new ideas

about home, more in line with what I have called home- as- heaven.

No longer a refuge from the outside world, the new home would

aid self- actualization and reaching out to the world. The boundar-

ies between private and public were blurred, not least because ‘the

public’ became a place where people could feel at home as well.

‘While the idea of home, as a retreat or withdrawal from public

spaces, continues to be appealing, it is now matched by a move in

the other direction: taking the home into the public sphere, domes-

ticating the public sphere’ (Kumar and Makarova, 2008, p. 332).

To be fair, Hochschild recognizes the importance of home’s

outward- orientation when she emphasizes the importance of civic-

mindedness. Her defense of home- as- haven is primarily meant to

defend it from the market, not civil society. On the other hand,

Conley stretches home’s outward- orientation to its limits: his book

can be read as a radical plea for the incorporation of ‘home’ in the

economic sphere.

The authors cited here all agree that a new relationship is devel-

oping between the public and private spheres (mostly understood

here in terms of ‘work’ and ‘home’). All also agree that family life

is under siege in the US. The crisis of home will be the subject of

heated debate for years to come: at stake is the role of government,

employers, employees, citizens and members of households. Should

we swim with ‘the tide of history’ or try to turn it? Conley swims

(and sinks ‘home’ as a meaningful ideal): in his book he promises

his wife that he will no longer shout at her for trying to involve the

kids in her professional life, or to turn off her cell phone during ‘fam-

ily time’ (Conley, 2009, p. 206). Hochschild’s agenda is much more

ambitious: it includes a more prominent government role in social

welfare and a fundamental change in men’s attitudes towards home.

As long as these two don’t happen, the American crisis at home will

continue.

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New Ways of Home- making:

Feeling at Home in the

Community?

Introduction

On the basis of the last chapter, one may wonder if ‘home’ is nothing

more than a topos loaded with nostalgia. But though there is, in the US,

a strong longing for the past regarding home- at- home, there is more

to home today than nostalgia; we also see conscious efforts at home-

making for a better future. This chapter focuses on two social move-

ments explicitly striving for new homes at the community level.

The first is the movement fighting for the interests of people with

psychiatric and intellectual disabilities. Its participants favor commu-

nity care where patients can find their place among ‘normal’ people

rather than being isolated in institutions. Societal discrimination –

resulting in people living as outcasts – should, in their view, be coun-

tered by caring communities.

The second example concerns gays and lesbians. As their family

members often rejected their sexual identity, gays and lesbians had

to look for places that would feel more like home. In their quest,

they often gravitated to the big cities where anonymity allowed

invisibility and where they could meet other gays and lesbians for

relationships, sexual excitement and safe social lives. Metropolitan

conditions favored the gathering of like- minded individuals, creat-

ing possibilities for public gay communities.

For both gays and lesbians and people with psychiatric and intel-

lectual disabilities, home often resembled ‘hell’: discrimination

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New Ways of Home- making 63

either pushed them out of their family homes (gays and lesbians)

or locked them in ‘total institutions’ (people with intellectual dis-

abilities). Social movements thus began to campaign for new places

that would feel like home. This chapter examines these new home-

making practices in which a warm and connecting community was

to replace the coldness and/or isolation of their former homes.

While the previous chapter dealt with developments at the level

of the household, this chapter explicitly focuses on the meso level

of communities, defined as ‘dense, multiplex, relatively autono-

mous networks of social relationships. Community, thus, is not a

place or simply a small- scale population aggregate, but a mode of

relating, variable in extent’ (Calhoun, 1998, p. 391). As we will see,

new home- making practices at the community level were less suc-

cessful for the mentally handicapped than for gays. As it turned out,

people with psychiatric and intellectual disabilities did not move

from institutions into welcoming communities (‘heaven’, where

they could lead public or semi- public lives); they instead moved into

small, independent housing units (‘havenly’ places that were safe,

secure, comfortable and private). While independent housing was

an improvement, it was not the type of new home that the caring

community movement had aspired to. The home- making practices

of gays, in contrast, were more communal: they organized public

places that had elements of ‘heaven’, thus providing identity and vis-

ibility to their community.

From hell to haven: home- making by people with

psychiatric and intellectual disabilities

In many Western countries, the past 25 years have witnessed a policy

of de- institutionalization for psychiatric patients and people with

intellectual disabilities. No longer banished to countryside institu-

tions, de- institutionalization posited that it would be better for these

people to once again be a part of society, to live in ordinary neigh-

borhoods in towns and villages. While there would be additional

support, the idea was that individuals would live in their own houses

as autonomously as possible. Since the late 1990s, this policy has

broadly been referred to as community care.

Prior to the 1970s, psychiatric patients and people with intellec-

tual disabilities were viewed as people in need of conti nuous nursing

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64 The Politics of Home

and tucked away in countryside institutions. The therapeutic ideal

prescribed that the best place to care for them was in large institu-

tions far away from their former daily environments. Patients could

be cared for and supervised 24 hours a day; here they would find

peace and quiet, ample space and a well- regulated life. In the 1970s,

patient organizations as well as professionals and academics began to

criticize this ‘medical regime’, asserting that remote institutions only

served to isolate people from ‘normal’ communities. Institutions

were not only deemed discriminatory; they failed to make people

less ill or disturbed.

Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other

Inmates (1961), the iconic work by the American sociologist Erving

Goffman, was a source of inspiration for the critics of institutionali-

zation. Goffman compared psychiatric hospitals to other ‘total insti-

tutions’ such as prisons, barracks, convents and even concentration

camps. Their ‘total’ nature was embodied in barriers such as locked

doors, high walls, electric fences, water and woodland that pre-

cluded contact with the outside world. For Goffman, another feature

of the total institution was that work, sleep and leisure were group

events – in the same location, regulated by a strict schedule, and

under the same bureaucratic regime. The worst feature of the asylum

was that the inmate’s ‘self is systematically, if often unintentionally,

mortified’ (Goffman, 1961, p. 15).

Goffman and other influential critics, including the psychiatrists

Ronald Laing (1960) and Thomas Szasz (1961), argued that it was

not so much institutionalized inmates who were ill or mad, as soci-

ety itself. It was society that made people ill. And to make society

healthy, psychiatric patients and people with intellectual disabilities

had a role to play. Their presence would confront ‘normal’ people

with the vulnerable aspects of their own existence and make society

more humane (Tonkens, 1999).

The Swedish social scientist Bengt Nirjé was one of the first to

argue that people with intellectual disabilities should lead ‘normal

lives’: ‘The normalization principle means making available to all

mentally ret arded people patterns of life a nd cond itions of everyday

living which are as close as possible to the regular circumstances

and ways of life of society’ (Nirjé, 1969, p. 179). It entailed partici-

pating in education, housing, work and having social contacts in

society.

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New Ways of Home- making 65

In the Netherlands this new thinking was encapsulated in the

policies of Nieuw Dennendal, an institution for people with intellec-

tual disabilities which became famous in the 1970s for its progressive

approach. The spontaneous development of the self was central to its

philosophy of care: clients were free to discover their own talents and

potential, while society merely had the task of supporting this. The

policies of the Nieuw Dennendal reflected the ideal of the late 1970s

that not only tolerated deviant behavior, but saw it as a healthy reac-

tion to a sick society (Duyvendak, 1999). It was therefore also in the

interests of society that psychiatric patients and people with mental

disabilities would come to feel at home in society.

The era of de- institutionalization

Policy- makers were surprisingly responsive to the criticism

embodied in the new thinking: they introduced a policy of de-

institutionalization, offering extramural support and treatment for

patients who needed long- term care but who no longer lived in resi-

dential institutions (Kwekkeboom, 2004; Means and Smith, 1998;

Overkamp, 2000; Welshman, 2006). Several Western countries (the

UK, Italy and the Scandinavian countries) closed down many psychi-

atric hospitals and institutions, replacing them with small facilities

in ordinary communities providing local extramural care. Norway

and Sweden introduced legislation that entitled anyone with any

kind of disability to live in a house in an ordinary neighborhood; in

fact, patients had no choice as these countries no longer maintained

residential institutions. In the US, financial considerations prevailed:

when state governments realized that de- institutionalization could

save money, they embraced the idea. But as they often did not pro-

vide sufficient funding for smaller facilities, large numbers of the

mentally ill ended up homeless on the streets.

In the Netherlands, policy- makers interpreted the criticism of

institutions mainly as one of scale and type of housing: the size and

imper sonal nature of the in st itution s were thus con si gne d to the p ast

as ‘small’ became the maxim of the 1980s and 1990s. Small- scale

sheltered living units were established, first in the grounds of institu-

tions, and later, beyond the institutions’ confines in residential neigh-

borhoods in towns and villages (Means and Smith, 1998; Overkamp,

200 0; Welshman, 20 06). The 1984 ‘New Memorandum on the Mental

Health Service’ explicitly stated that the closed, large- scale approach

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66 The Politics of Home

to instit ut ional menta l he alt hc are was to be r eplaced by a car e sy stem

‘in which the client can be helped close to his home, maintaining his

social contacts as far as possible’ (Dutch Parliament [Tweede Kamer],

198 3/1984, p. 53). The number of be ds in psych iatric i nstitut ions wa s

to be reduced, while some of the released funds were to be spent on

extramural care for these patients in the form of ambulatory care and

sheltered living schemes. While these policy changes were responses

to criticisms, they were also prompted by the need to restrain men-

tal healthcare expenditure. Other Dutch policy documents in the

1990s expanded on the theme of de- institutionalization. The maxim

of the memorandum ‘In the Community: Mental Health and Mental

Healthcare in a Social Perspective’ was ‘mental healthcare (back) in

the community where possible’ (Dutch Parliament [Tweede Kamer],

1992/1993, p. 76). A ‘community- based concept of care’ was central

to this approach, to be achieved by mental healthcare serv ices coop-

erating at the local level with social services, homeless centers, legal

services and employment and social rehabilitation projects.

Dutch care policies for people with intellectual disabilities evolved

in a similar fashion. The new policy stated: ‘First and foremost, the

disabled must be given more freedom to make their own choices

about how they lead their lives’ (VWS, 1995, p. 16). ‘Living in an

ordinary house in an ordinary neighborhood’ (ibid., p. 43) became

the guiding principle. Once again – as was the case with the men-

tal health service – the need to curb expenditure was an additional

argument in favor of de- institutionalization.

However, policy documents from the late 1990s (Dutch Parliament

[Tweede Kamer], 1996/1997, 1998/1999) indicate that the switch to

community care did not develop according to plan. Although nor-

malizing the position of psychiatric patients and people with intel-

lectual disabilities remained the aim, there were indications that

the process of de- institutionalization was not fulfilling its goals.

According to the Minister of Health, Welfare and Sport, Els Borst,

there were signs that community care was negatively influencing the

quality of life of those handicapped people who had begun living

on their own. The minister also observed that care institutions were

still not investing enough in extramural help and support, and that

cooperation with local partners was unsatisfactory. Reducing levels

of institutional care could only be justified if it was replaced by social

support functions in the community. ‘Experience in other countries

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New Ways of Home- making 67

has demonstrated that without this support, the move to mental

healthcare in the community can lead to the exclusion, decline and

increasing isolation of patients’ (Dutch Parliament [Tweede Kamer],

1996/1997, p. 10).

Although politicians maintained reservations about the effects of

community care, they only strengthened their policy that people

with handicaps should not rely on services and amenities for their

specific disabilities, but should – where possible – use those available

to the general public. In 2007 this policy was explicitly formulated

in a new law on social support, the central concept of which was

‘part icipation’. Everyone was supposed to pa rticipate in society; those

who for whatever reason were unable to participate on their own were

entitled to the support of their social networks, neighbors, volunteers

and, in the last resort, professionals. The new law applied to psychi-

atric patients and the intellectually disabled as well, people for whom

being a part of the ‘normal’ community entailed a great deal of spe-

cial help and support. The question thus became poignant: are all

neighbors and neighborhoods willing and able to provide this help?

Having your own home

My research team interviewed about 100 people with psychiatric

problems or intellectual disabilities living on their own in ‘normal’

Dutch neighborhoods. Most of the interviewed psychiatric patients

had spent considerable periods of their lives in psychiatric hospitals.

Of the respondents with intellectual disabilities, half had previously

lived in institutions run by professionals; the others had lived with

their parents. Respondents all stated that they had chosen to live on

their own; none felt obliged or forced by relatives or professionals to

choose this option. Most received a house in the town where they

had grown up. About half had a lease in their own name; others

leased via the care organization that supported them. Respondents

had no explicit expectations about how it would be to live on their

own, nor any definite expectations about their new neighborhoods –

for instance, whether they would feel welcome or if their neighbors

would help them settle in.

Respondents unanimously appreciated having their own houses

where they could do what they wanted: ‘Once you are free in your

own house, that’s really terrific. ... Even when the weather is bad, it

still seems as if the sun is shining. That’s my feeling here’ (man with

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68 The Politics of Home

intellectual disabilities, 30). They mentioned advantages such as not

being constantly disturbed by others, being in control of what and

whe n t hey eat, their bedtimes, pet s i n t he house, hav ing more auton-

omy, etc.: ‘Finally I am in control over the remote control.’ No one

wanted to return to their former living condition.

I decided that it was enough with all those non- stop intakes in

hospital. I really wanted to have a life in a place of my own. And

here I am now: I am really calmer now that I am not continuously

in and out of the institution and don’t have to live in a group any-

more. I have the tendency to adjust myself always to other people

around me and I’m happy now that it’s not necessary anymore.

(Woman, 45, psychiatric patient)

For many years I lived in institutions with a lot of people constantly

around me. But it is no good for me to be with so many people all

the time, because my head becomes too busy then. Maybe I get mad

one day. That’s why I have asked for a home of my own. And finally

that worked out fine, because now I live here on my own and I like

that very much. (Man with intellectual disabilities, 33)

Other researchers (e.g., Kwekkeboom, 2006; Kwekkeboom and van

Weert, 2008; Overkamp, 2000) have also concluded that most indi-

viduals with psychiatric problems or intellectual disabilities prefer

to have their own accommodation, due to the privacy and auton-

omy this allows. They opt for homes that have ‘haven’ qualities:

secure, safe, comfortable and private. In this respect, their lives have

undoubtedly improved.

At home in the community?

In general, our interviewees had very little, if any, contact with

neighbors or other locals in their new neighborhoods. Most did not

introduce themselves after they moved in; nor did supporting profes-

sionals suggest they do so. Only one respondent, a 60- year old man

with psychiatric problems, explicitly told us about his attempt to

make contact with his neighbors:

Shortly after I moved in I called on the neighbors around ten in

the evening. I said I’d just wanted to pop in for a drink, but they

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said: ‘Sorry, it’s far too late, not now’. Next day those neighbors

complained to the care institution that I was a nuisance. So my

contact with the neighbors was not much of a success.

Contact with neighbors was usually limited to saying hello and, at

best, to brief chats on the street. There was very little deeper con-

tact – for example, drinking coffee together or helping each other

with small tasks. Some interviewees mentioned unpleasant experi-

ences with neighbors. A 31- year- old woman with intellectual disabil-

ities told us that, not long after her move, she found bits of food

on her doormat that had been stuffed through the letterbox. This

happened at least five times. She was quite sure that it was one of her

neighbors.

Those who visited our interviewees in their homes were mainly

relatives and personal carers. Respondents looked forward to their

daily or weekly visits when they could talk about what was going

on in their lives. In many cases the carer was often called ‘the most

important person in my life’. Beyond this, contact was generally

limited to people in similar positions as themselves. They met each

other at work (most often for people with handicaps), in the activ-

ity center (most often for people with the same handicap), or at the

meeting place of the care organization. For many interviewees the

latter functioned as a living room, a place to easily chat with others.

In this sense, these places were, like their homes, ‘safe havens’.

Few respondents enjoyed friendly contacts with ‘normal’ people.

Several interviewees mentioned feelings like shyness, uncertainty

and even fear:

I feel more secure when I am with people like myself. Everywhere

else I don’t feel at eas e. People look at you as if they thi nk: W hat is

he doing here? (Man with intellectual disabilities, 30)

Most normal people think you’re not right in the head, so they

don’t want to have anything to do w ith you. I suppose that is dis-

crimination. Or maybe not discrimination, but prejudice. Or even

fear, maybe they’re just scared. (Woman, 48, psychiatric patient)

Look here, I’m someone with slight intellectual disabilities. I can

stand up for myself, but you’re never sure if normal people make a

fool of you. (Woman with intellectual disabilities, 39)

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The same fears of not being able to keep up with ‘normal’ people,

and of being nagged or stigmatized, meant most interviewees didn’t

visit the community center or attend other public activities in their

neighborhoods.

Two or three times I visited the community center here, but I

didn’t feel happy there. There’s more distance and coolness than

in the DAC [the activity center for people with psychiatric prob-

lems]. Everyone comes there, maybe even your neighbors, you

never know. That’s a real threshold for me. That’s why I prefer to

go to the DAC. There I feel at home and there I’m not the only

one who is seen as mad, because there are others who have also

experienced a psychosis. (Woman, 52, psychiatric patient)

Although respondents’ social networks were generally small, this

did not necessarily mean that they were dissatisfied with them. About

65 percent of interviewees thought their networks were sufficient.

This applied mainly to those who still lived in the neighborhood

or in the part of town where they had grown up, with nearby rela-

tives frequently dropping in to help with small tasks. Some respond-

ents even mentioned incidental contacts with one or more former

classmates. The subgroup of respondents satisfied with their social

networks also included individuals, mainly those with psychiatric

problems, who hardly saw other people. This 44- year- old woman was

typical:

I live here quietly; the heath is nearby. I like it here, the trees too.

Because of my psychiatric problems I’m not allowed to work. My

days have a simple structure: in the morning I take out my dog,

make some coffee and after that I watch TV with a cigarette. Well,

at those moments I sit like a prince in my chair. In the afternoon I

take a nap and after that I take the dog out again. And in the even-

ing I go with the dog for the third time. I don’t cook anymore, I

don’t like it. I just eat bread every day. My family is far away; only

my mother lives nearby. She is already 90 years old. Every Saturday

evening we visit each other; one week I go to her place, the other

week she comes to me. Once in two weeks someone from the care

organization comes along. I barely go outdoors, only for the shop-

ping and with the dog. When I take the dog out I often see a man

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with another dog. We have a short chat now and then. Apart from

my mother, the carer and the man with the dog, I don’t see other

people. I’m a bit like a hermit, but that’s what I want. Sometimes I

feel lonely, then I listen to a nice CD and that helps a bit. I’m just

not someone who gets really involved in things. A few years ago

I tried fitness and I also had a buddy, but I can’t commit myself.

After a while I just want to be at home: in my chair, with my dog

and a cigarette. Then I’m fine.

Most respondents belonging to the 35 percent who were dissatisfied

with their social networks lived in environments that were relatively

new to them, without family or former acquaintances in the neigh-

borhood. They longed for more contacts but were simply unable

to make or maintain them. For these people, personal carers were

crucial. The story of a 46- year- old man with intellectual disabilities

was illustrative: he told us he never had visitors apart from his carer

and mother. This was why he was willing to be interviewed – he

would have a visitor! He often felt lonely; each time he did he would

count to ten and back several times, which helped him calm down.

Though he is pleased with his own home and independence, he

misses a ‘friendly, sociable atmosphere’ in his neighborhood. When

asked if he had ever initiated a conversation with anyone, he replied

that he would be unlikely to do so because his immediate neighbors

had gossiped about him.

Individuals with intellectual disabilities tended more often than

people with psychiatric disorders to have structured daily routines

they are happy with: four or five days a week they go to the sheltered

employment service or to other day- care centers in the neighborhood

where they can meet their peers. Psychiatric patients generally found

it more difficult to stick to a structured daily or weekly routine. The

very nature of their disorder means they tend to be more emotion-

ally unstable; they may suffer mood swings or feel inactive due to

medication, making it difficult to maintain social contacts. One

woman, when asked if she would like to get to know more people in

the neighborhood, replied:

No, not at the moment. It’s my head – having to cope with lots of

different people is very, very tiring. It’s not that I don’t like it, it’s

just that I find things really difficult. My head makes me feel like

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a stranger in my own body, so I don’t really feel at ease anywhere.

Not even in my own home. I can’t get to the real me, can you under-

stand that? Things wouldn’t be OK for me even if I lived in heaven,

simply because it’s a feeling I have inside me. (Woman with psychi-

atric problems, 37)

Feeling at home

We asked our interviewees where and to what extent they felt at

home, and whether they felt they belonged in their new neighbor-

hoods. Many immediately began to point around them, indicating

that they felt at home in their own houses. Here they had rediscov-

ered a place for themselves, free of disturbances, after having lived

in groups for many years in different types of institutions. As for the

neighborhood, most respondents did not mention definite feelings

of attachment. For the reasons outlined above, the neighborhood for

most of them had little meaning. They did not know their neigh-

bors; nor did they participate in the life of the neighborhood. Only

in cases where they were born and raised in the immediate area did

respondents experience an attachment to their environment that

resembled a sense of belonging.

The people we interviewed clearly saw their home as a haven, a

place associated with safety, security, comfort, domesticity and inti-

macy. Whereas policy- makers tend to privilege the view of home- as-

heaven – the community as a warm bath where psychiatric patients

and people with intellectual disabilities can publicly be themselves –

many members of these groups only experience a feeling of belong-

ing when they feel safe and secure, when they are with people like

themselves, and when they are in familiar surroundings. It is this

last aspect they have difficulty achieving, as they do not manage to

establish meaningful contacts with neighbors and other locals.

Conclusion

The majority of the psychiatric patients and people with intellec-

tual disabilities we interviewed live as solitary individuals in their

communities (or on isolated ‘islands’ in the case of clustered accom-

modation). Pleased with their newfound autonomy, our respondents

felt at home in their own houses. In terms of Table 1.2, they belong

to the group of relatively immobile people for whom their ‘house is

home’ – ‘defensive localists’ surrounded by their own, specific goods

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but out of touch with the outside world. The location of their houses

is of limited relevance as they have little or no contact with other

locals. To put it bluntly, their neighbors don’t care for them and they

don’t care for the neighborhood. The outside world penetrates their

houses almost exclusively via television, for here they can control

the remote control – the outside world at a distance.

In retrospect, it is surprising that in the planning of

de- institutionalization, so little attention was paid to the social con-

text in which former inmates would end up living. In the 1970s, the

idealistic critics of total institutions assumed that society as a whole

would benefit from the arrival in local communities of psychiatric

patients and people with intellectual disabilities, and vice versa.

While policy- makers in the 1980s and 1990s rated highly the ben-

efits of living in a normal house in a normal area, they failed to per-

ceive what this would entail for the everyday lives of those involved.

They failed to question whether society as a whole, and more specifi-

cally neighborhoods, would show sufficient tolerance and solidarity

for vulnerable people; living independently in the community had

become an indisputable principle. Professionals and policy- makers

have only recently realized that a social network in the immediate

neighborhood is crucial for individuals with limited mobility. Policy-

makers thus envisioned new communal homes for the handicapped

(home- as- heaven) without thinking about the conditions that had

to be fulfilled to lead such lives. But if the handicapped are to truly

feel at home in the community – being and expressing themselves in

public, etc. – mainstream communities will have to change signifi-

cantly to accommodate this minority.

Recent research in the Netherlands has examined how local com-

munities experience psychiatric patients and people with intellectual

disabilities coming to live among them (Kwekkeboom, 1999, 2001;

Overkamp, 2000). While reactions to their arrival are at first fairly

positive, residents, when questioned further, tend to be less open-

minded. Many think there should always be a carer on hand ‘just

in case’, and are reluctant to allow the newcomers into their private

lives. This reluctance to include was found among all social strata;

psychiatric patients and people with intellectual disabilities were

just not considered ‘normal’ neighbors, contradicting the optimism

of both movement activists and policy- makers. No wonder that, in

practice, home- as- haven has prevailed over home- as- heaven.

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From hell to heaven: moving to the Castro, a gay

neighborhood in the making

In homophobic societies, many adolescents who develop same- sex

preferences want to leave their ‘hometowns’ in order to escape from

fights with their families. Especially when they enter same- sex rela-

tionships, young gays are quite often literally pushed away from

the house and community of origin and drawn to inner- city areas

(Rosenfeld and Byung- Soo, 2005, p. 559). As they leave the places of

their birth and childhood in search of new homes, many gays and

lesbians experience a strong sense of uprootedness. In the United

States, where negative views of homosexuality were rampant until

the late 1990s, gay men and lesbians born in the Mid- West often

escaped to cities considered safe havens, such as New York and San

Francisco. Forced to leave their hometowns in order to feel free,

to find their true selves and to meet others with the same sexual

preference, their move to these cities often had, in those days, a

non- voluntary character. Since home was not home to them, their

‘coming out’ in the Castro was often framed in terms of ‘coming

home’. Traveling to a new place finally provided the opportunity to

act out their sexual selves.

Since gay places are almost never starting points but places

of arrival, the question arises how these places are valued. Most

research shows that gay men and lesbian women often embraced

their newfound places; the Castro, San Francisco’s gay neighbor-

hood, was often described as a Mecca. ‘In San Francisco, we’re the

world, as much as anybody is. ... You get up in the morning and go

out and live in it. Stores, papers, billboards, people on the street,

everywhere you fucking look. ... Bite down: It’s there. ... Hey: It’s

home’ (Tate, 1991, p. 276). But some, although they preferred the

Castro to the places they had left, felt trapped, homesick and angry

at having had to leave. Living in the gay Mecca thus turned out

to be an ambivalent experience that didn’t live up to all expecta-

tions (Preston, 1991, p. xiv). And while many gays and lesbians

expressed affection for their new place of residence, it was not an

easy love; the Castro was also celebrated because there were few

alternatives. But the fact that the number of possible destinations

was extremely limited did not temper the sense of belonging; in

fact it strengthened it.

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Put differently, attachments to gay neighborhoods are the result

of complex relations between social marginality and geographical

(im)mobility. Below, after reconstructing how these places came into

being, I examine the changing meanings gay men ascribe to the

Castro, the extent to which they consider the neighborhood their

home, and how they discursively construct and visually display their

public, ‘heavenly’ sense of home to the outside world. I most often

refer to gay men – and less to lesbian women – since my own research

has mainly focused on gay men and their feelings of belonging.

Mobility and marginality: where do they come from,

where do they go?

The process of gay men moving from traditional rural communities

to inner- city neighborhoods is informed by both push and pull fac-

tors. ‘There was no way for a gay man to have a hometown and still

be honest with himself,’ Preston writes. ‘He had to hide his social

and sexual proclivities, or else he had to give up communal life in

pursuit of them’ (ibid., p. xii). Preston’s claim has been corroborated.

In their analysis of geographical mobility among gays in the US,

Rosenfeld and Bryung- Soo (2005) show that interracial gay couples

are the most mobile social group, followed by same- race same- sex

couples, interracial heterosexual couples and, finally, same- race het-

erosexual couples. Individuals within transgressive types of sexual

union are thus geographically more mobile than ‘traditional’ cou-

ples (ibid., p. 559). ‘While the majority of young adults in traditional

unions are more likely to settle near their communities of origin, the

small but rising number of young US- born adults in non- traditional

unions have been using educational opportunities and open labor

markets to put physical and social distance between themselves and

their communities of origin’ (ibid., p. 549). The research has shown

that these patterns of geographical mobility can be seen everywhere

in the Mid- West (ibid., p. 555).

Historians have reconstructed how San Francisco developed

into a Mecca for gay men and lesbians. The city’s reputation as an

open frontier, dating from the early twentieth century but find-

ing contemporary embodiment in its bohemian and queer quar-

ters, attracted adventurous pleasure seekers as well as individuals

and families looking for a better life. Especially during the 1950s

and 1960s, San Francisco’s reputation as a place for nonconformist

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sexual lifestyles fueled its image as a gay capital (Boyd, 1997, pp.

88–9). The media played an important role in this, perpetuat-

ing the image of gay life as a geographically fixed phenomenon

(Meeker, 2006, pp. 190–1). Books played a similar role (ibid., p. 67).

‘I’ve decided that I must remove myself to another environment

where I would have ample opportunity to meet other homosexu-

als and lead a new life as I want to lead it,’ wrote a gay man in

a 1964 letter. ‘Accordingly to an article in the June 26th issue of

Life Magazine, titled “Homosexuality in America,” the city of San

Francisco is the “gay capital” of this country. I feel that this is the

place for me’ (cited in ibid., p. 181).

San Francisco’s emergence as a Mecca for gays and lesbians, both to

live in and to visit as tourists, does not mean that they were the sole

carriers of this development. Boyd (2003), for example, stresses the

role of the tourist economy. A leading source of income for the city,

tourism to San Francisco in large part depended on the city’s liber-

tine image (Boyd, 1997, p. 85). ‘Although gay and gender- transgressive

bars and taverns emerged in San Francisco’s post- Prohibition era as

vulnerable and highly contested public spaces, they continued to

function visibly as part of an urban economy of highly trafficked sex

tourism’ (ibid.). The mainstream media’s growing attention to homo-

sexual life further enabled many gay men and lesbians to imagine a

place that could become home.

Although this is not the place for a detailed history of the Castro

(for this see Armstrong, 2002; Leyland, 2002; Stryker and van

Buskirk, 1996), I can point out that as the Castro turned into a gay

community in the late 1960s, many gays and lesbians expressed a

pronounced sense of neighborhood pride. It was the home of the

yearly Gay Parade, the Castro Fair, Halloween and other public events

that showcased how gays and lesbians loved to live in the Castro.

Gay men’s and lesbians’ identification with the Castro- as- home was

reinforced by the naming of distinctive restaurants and cafes such

as Home and Welcome Home (see pictures). Many gays and lesbians,

indeed considered the Castro as an ideal place to live – in a word

heaven. They experienced moving to the Castro as an escape from

hell, and felt they could now stop dreaming about a better place.

The public visibility of homosexuality marked the quintessence of

the Castro as a nonconformist place to live and work. Since hiding

one’s sexuality was what almost all gay men and lesbian women had

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done before coming to the Castro, to ‘come out’ – both to each other

and to the homophobic outside world – became the cornerstone of

a newly acquired identity. ‘Being oneself’ was not something to be

lived individually or to be confined to the private sphere: their new

home was not a haven, but heaven.

The Castro: resisting the generic, becoming the symbolic?

In a sense, the Castro became a new home because it embodied the

very opposite of the places gays and lesbians had left behind. By

proudly affirming their identity, they challenged the norms and

family values of the ‘other’ America. The social mobilization of gay

men (here I focus mostly on gay men) in the Castro centered around

the burning wish to feel, be and act differently – and to be respected.

In terms of Chapter 1, gay men considered the Castro a particular

place to be defended against invasions of the generic. For example, in

October 1999 an initiative called ‘Save the Castro’ mobilized against

the arrival of a Starbucks and the extension of the cable car F- line

to the neighborhood. Protests against these developments revealed

a distinctive line of argumentation, as can be seen in the following

statement titled ‘A Kind of War’:

There is a war going on in our neighborhood. It is a war for your

dollars and businesses. Every time you shop at one of the new

Chains stores, you take away business from local merchant owned

shops and restaurants. Starbucks is symbolic of the kind of mega-

corporation that buys up other chains and squeezes out competi-

tion. They are the McDonalds of coffee and are a part of anyplace USA.

The Castro is unique in the world. (Save the Castro, emphasis in

original)

The consequences of the cable car extension were depicted in the

same way:

It is possible that millions of people will be coming to this district

ve ry sh or tl y, o n t hese ‘ hi st or ic ca rs ’, de si gn ed we t hi nk to lu re to ur-

ists onto them. ... The problem is that this is the only neighborhood like

it in the world. The Castro has a kind of ‘mythic regard’ overseas,

and we are the ‘guardians’ of this place for future generations.

(Save the Castro, emphasis in original)

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The above makes it clear that for some gay residents, the outside

world was to remain outside. Interestingly, the author appeals to an

ethos of solidarity among gay men in San Francisco, not by emphasiz-

ing the local and rooted character of the Castro but by putting their

struggle in a universal perspective. Only if the Castro remains theirs

will gay men worldwide be able to consider the district as their home.

Ron Wiggin, organizer of the ‘Save the Castro’ project, warns in a let-

ter to his critics that this sense of home could easily disappear:

And if the Castro fades under the throngs of tourists from the not

needed historic trolley car ... and the rents go up more and the con-

demning attitudes of the out- of- towners coming walking down our

streets, and the stores change to sell to them, and we don’t want to

go there anymore because we don’t feel comfortable. (1991)

The nonconformism was colored by a romanticization of life on the

margins, a sense of being different and special, even better than the

straight world. However, a close reading shows that – as is often

the case – the norms of the margins betray the margins of normal-

ity (Duyvendak, 1997). Mobilization on behalf of a ‘special’ gay com-

munity sometimes echoed the tight- knit, rural communities most gay

men came from; the small, safe, homogeneous world they wanted to

protect in a way reflected the world of their own pasts. Their rejection

of mainstream and generic America was at least partly due to their

deep desire to be rooted, a longing gay men shared with many others.

One of the critics of the ‘Save the Castro’ initiative, Vince

Quackenbush, attacked this desire to keep others out. Proclaiming

the need to ‘save the Castro from saving the Castro’, he warned gays

against barricading themselves in a safe haven for themselves, an

unwelcoming community for others. ‘The Castro Neighborhood

Council is a self- appointed rump group which views change in the

Castro as threatening. Instead of seeing the Castro as a base from

which queer liberation can flow, “Save the Castro” views our neigh-

borhood as a cocoon- like ghetto that achieved perfection in 1979’

(Quackenbush, 1999). Similar critiques were directed against gay

activists embracing a ‘ghettoized consciousness’:

There are many things wrong with the Castro ... They have a shtetl

consciousness – you know, like the Jewish ghetto. They patronize

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Castro Street businesses; in fact, they seldom leave the area. It’s

like the man who went to the local Jewish tailor and later reported,

‘You get a bad suit but lots of conversation’ (Cited in White, 1980,

p. 38)

Core elements of the critique address the inward- orientation of

the gay community and the uniformity of its members. The desire to

be the antithesis of mainstream society, to create a communal front,

has given birth to ‘the Castro clone’ (cf. the ‘Chelsea boy’ in New

York). ‘Having been thrown out of one tribe, they created their own

new tribe,’ Preston writes. ‘While the new tribe offered an option

richer than ever dreamed of before, it seldom allowed the gay man

any compromise’ (Preston, 1991, p. xii).

Sociologist James Jasper calls this the ‘stigmatized identity’

dilemma: an oppressed group wants to mobilize to fight stereotypes

and to fit in, to appear respectable. But by doing so, by integrat-

ing within mainstream society, they undermine their own basis

(and reason for existence), which is based on a distinctive identity.

Paradoxically, it is hard to maintain the latter without some oppres-

sion from the mainstream, often in the form of legal discrimination

(see also Duyvendak and Nederland, 2006; Jasper, 2006).

Although the Castro subculture witnessed much collective identity-

building, subtle forms of identity specialization occurred as well.

This coding and symbolic play often took place in relation to the

most contested aspects of gay experience: the body and sexuality. Gay

men developed their own sexual codes, dress preferences and norms

regarding physical appearance, thereby distinguishing themselves

to the outside world and creating a familiar, recognizable ‘we’. And

while these codes developed in neighborhoods like the Castro, they

rapidly spread all over the (Western) world (Chabot and Duyvendak,

2002). The diffusion of these codes facilitated the growth of inter-

national solidarity, sustaining the idea of being part of a worldwide

movement (Adam et al., 1999). The Castro shows how home- making

practices in a very particular place facilitated the worldwide diffusion

of an imaginary gay home. The Castro became a symbolic place, a

symbolic home for gays and lesbians around the world (Howe, 2001).

And as subcultural codes began to travel, the local sense of familiar-

ity became detached from geography: processes of cultural diffusion

allowed feeling at home with others far away instead of with those

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New Ways of Home- making 81

next door. In a sense, the worldwide imitation of the subcultural

codes of the Castro – a gay generic style – made the San Francisco

neighborhood a less unique and particular place.

Valuing communities

San Francisco policy- makers did not hinder the development of a

gay neighborhood, not only out of respect for the housing market (in

which the government is not expected to intervene) but also because

the existence of place- bound communities affirmed the city govern-

ment’s desired image of ‘a city of many neighborhoods’ (Godfroy,

1988; Pamuk, 2004). Although homosexuals were not protected from

harassment and persecution for many years (Beemyn, 1997, p. 87),

gays and lesbians in San Francisco have, since the 1960s, become one

among many ‘ethnic minorities’ (Gamson, 1995). During elections,

territoriality plays an important role as council members elected by

districts and neighborhoods favor residentially concentrated com-

munities. When, in the 1970s, the Castro gained its first homosexual

representative, the famous late Harvey Milk, gays and lesbians were

able to fully enter politics to further their social emancipation. The

gay community thus seized on an existing opening in the political

system – district voting – to promote its interests and to protect its

members, especially during the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.

San Francisco’s support of the Castro was further shown by the

city’s $100,000 grant towards a project to keep the area’s gay iden-

tity intact. The project was fueled by fears of the disintegration of

this famous gay and lesbian neighborhood (Buchanan, 2007) due

to the migration of straight couples into the Castro and the flight

of gay couples to suburban (and less expensive) neighborhoods in

the Bay Area. These developments reveal a blurring of lines between

heterosexuals and homosexuals as well as less antagonistic rela-

tions between the mainstream and marginal segments of society.

Fu rthermore, the number of gays and l esbi ans living in the M id- Wes t

who feel compelled to move to the big cities has declined sharply:

while in 1990 same- sex couples had an average geographic mobility

more than twice that of same- race heterosexual married couples, this

is no longer the case (Rosenfeld and Byung- Soo, 2005, p. 552). The

growing acceptance of homosexuality is, moreover, not limited to

larger urban areas; gays and lesbians in rural areas benefit from this

trend as well. Whereas in 1990 same- sex couples often lived in city

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82 The Politics of Home

centers, during the 1990s the number of non- traditional couples liv-

ing in cities actually declined (ibid., p. 554). Though research on this

development is st ill i n it s infancy, we can assu me that gays and lesbi-

ans can feel more at home in their hometowns than ever before.

Conclusion: the promises and pitfalls of communities

In both the cases discussed above, movement activists entertained

high hopes for caring communities – particularly for the role they

would play in the ‘coming out’ of their respective constituencies.

The mentally handicapped and psychiatric patients would exit from

institutions to live ‘normal’ lives among ‘normal’ people in welcom-

ing communities; gays and lesbians would live according to their

sexual preferences in places of their own choosing.

What actually happened was quite different. Though people

with intellectual disabilities indeed left their ‘total institutions’, for

many their place of arrival was not a warm, welcoming community.

Depending on the circumstances, some ended up on the street (this

occurred in many US cities). In welfare states such as the Netherlands,

individuals received their own housing but did not meaningfully inte-

grate within communities or society at large. ‘Normal’ communities

proved to be far from receptive. Our research also revealed that the

new arrivals were themselves often reluctant to integrate: their home-

making practices focused on the creation of safe havens for them-

selves, not on ‘heavenly’ places to publicly live out their identities.

This inward- orientation was in part a fear of social rejection; it also

had to do with their handicaps and the sincere wish to be on their

own in dealing with their special situation. In other words, the idea of

‘normalization’ in, by and through communities seems questionable.

The specific nature of communities revealed itself in the case of

the Castro as well, where the creation of a public gay home came

at the price of tendencies towards homogenization and exclusion.

After establishing their own place, gays began to protect their homes

from outside invaders, be they Starbucks, the cable car or straight

families. Deviant (read: straight) newcomers were not welcome in

the self- defined gay community, creating the uneasy situation where

those who had been excluded for so long were now excluding others.

It was argued that this was necessary to protect the area for gays and

lesbians – not only for those who lived in the Castro, but for gays and

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New Ways of Home- making 83

lesbians around the world, for whom this particular San Francisco

neighborhood had become a symbol for the right to have your own

place, the right to belong.

Compared to the crisis of home at the household level in the US,

the example of the Castro shows vibrant feelings of belonging at the

community level. This, however, came at a price: to be a public, ‘heav-

enly’ home, the community had to be quite homogeneous. As we

wi ll see in the ne xt chapter, communities t hu s u nder stood pose even

larger problems at the national level: communities defined in terms

of a shared home inevitably produce insiders and outsiders.

What could the community level realistically contribute to ease

the crisis of home-at-home in the US? While community organi-

zations could play a role to better balance care and paid work (for

example by providing childcare and other social services), the pro-

found changes necessary to overcome the inability to feel- at- home-

at- home – for example less traditional male gender roles – are not

likely to be found in communities.

Few people will dispute other people’s right to feel at home with

fellow citizens who share their interests, affinities, longings, his-

tories, hobbies, etc. Feeling at home as an exclusive and selective

emotion is hardly a problem when home is lived as a ‘haven’ – in

private. But living home- as- heaven – the public manifestation of

home feelings by an exclusive group on a territory claimed as their

own – can be much more problematic. The Castro in this sense is an

interesting but extreme case: most neighborhoods where gays and

lesbians live are far more mixed in terms of sexual preference. But

it was precisely the Castro’s homogeneous character that brought

its inhabitants political power (particularly in an electoral system

based on territorial entities). The Castro’s representatives could

pursue a politics of home that fit into the larger narrative of San

Francisco as a ‘city of communities’, allowing gays and lesbians

to connect to the broader political world in order to protect their

interests. This was in sharp contrast to the other social movement

analyzed in this chapter. Without a clear idea of what their new

communal home would be, home for the mentally handicapped

remained, at best, a haven.

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Feeling at Home in the Nation?

Understanding Dutch Nostalgia

Introduction

If we want to better understand the political and social crisis engulf-

ing many West European countries, we have to examine the feelings

of alienation among native- born citizens who claim to no longer feel

at home in their ‘own’ country. The ir alienation is invariably blamed

on the increasing number of immigrants in their midst. Rightwing

populist parties, on the rise in many countries, see the presence of

immigrants as a threat to social cohesion and to ‘their’ national

‘homes’. The cultural ‘deviance’ of immigrants is considered incom-

patible with being Dutch, Danish, British, French, German, etc.

The debate over ‘the stolen home’ is deeply nostalgic. The past is

portrayed as a closed and conflict- free whole, carried by citizens who

all basically shared the same beliefs, norms and traditions. On the

basis of this closed conception of culture, the invective focuses on

the actual or potential harmful influences of in particular minorities

with Muslim backgrounds, who form the majority of the immigrant

population in Western Europe.

This closed conception of culture is prominent in the Dutch

debate and is embraced by many native Dutch, who increasingly

tend to fear Islam (Duyvendak et al., 2010; Entzinger and Dourleijn,

2008; EUMC, 2002; Scheepers et al., 2 002). The building of mosques,

the call to prayer, the use of religious symbols such as the head-

scarf, gender inequality, anti- integration pronouncements by ultra-

orthodox imams and Islam- inspired political extremism are all

popular subjects in the media and are often portrayed as corroding

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Dutch culture (e.g., Mepschen et al., 2010; Uitermark et al., 2005;

Verhaar and Saharso, 2004). In the Netherlands, the Islamophobic

List Pim Fortuyn (LPF) party came second in the 2002 elections.

Since then, the idea that Islam is alien to Dutch culture has gained

currency. The religion’s visible manifestations – the ‘Islamization of

the Netherlands’ – are definitely considered ‘out of place’ by the most

vocal voices in the public and political debate (Uitermark, 2010).

While we saw in Chapter 3 that the uneven outcomes of the gender

revolution is largely behind the crisis of home in the US, the crisis of

home in Western Europe can be traced back to the mobility revolu-

tion of goods and, especially, people. Whereas the embattled home

in the US is experienced most acutely at the level of households, in

Western Europe the crisis is framed at the level of nations and their

putatively lost homelands. The current chapter examines how a cer-

tain perception of immigration articulated in the political and pub-

lic debate has fueled feelings of alienation among the native- born

in the Netherlands. I first analyze the alleged causes of the crisis. Of

particular interest here is the Dutch ‘retreat from multiculturalism’

since the Netherlands was supposedly one of its standard- bearers

in Europe. In the second half of the chapter, I focus on the vari-

ous meanings attached to ‘home’ in the public and political debate,

especially those that frame the nation- as- home. I will show that the

conceptualization of the nation as a ‘private home’ is particularly

problematic: when ‘haven’ and ‘heaven’ are conflated, little room

is left for minorities. Uitermark (ibid.) has recently argued that the

prominence of ‘culturalists’ in the public debate does not equal

the silencing of more pragmatist, less populist voices. While this may

be true, his study also convincingly shows that those who frame the

nation as home are leading the public and political debate.

A multicultural paradise?

What caused the social and political crisis around the ‘integration’ of

immigrants in the Netherlands, a country often jealously described

as an oasis of tolerance? According to Joppke (2004, p. 248), allowing

designated minority groups to ‘emancipate’ themselves within their

own parallel institutions fuelled segregation. Other scholars also

claim that Dutch ‘multiculturalist’ policies had pernicious effects on

the cultural (and economic) integration of immigrants (Ireland, 2004;

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86 The Politics of Home

Koopmans, 2002; Koopmans and Statham, 2000; Koopmans et al.,

2005). Sniderma n and Hagendoorn write: ‘In the Netherla nds, as much

as can be done on behalf of multiculturalism has been done. ... It pro-

moted the most ambitious program of multiculturalism in Western

Europe. ... The politics of the Netherlands since the assassination of

Fortuyn has been the politics of multiculturalism in extremis’ (2006,

pp. 15–20). In their view, radical multiculturalism caused enormous

tensions in the Netherlands: ‘The whole thrust of multiculturalism

is to accentuate, even exaggerate, differences between majority and

minority and insist on their importance. ... Sharing a common iden-

tity builds support for inclusion; bringing differences of ethnic and

religious identity to the fore evokes the very exclusionary reactions it

is meant to avoid’ (ibid., pp. 15, 135).

In the above perspective, multiculturalist policies created feelings

of ‘homelessness’, estrangement and alienation among the native

Dutch, who were taught to respect migrants as ‘others’ in their

‘own’ country. To understand the Dutch crisis of home, we first

have to answer the question whether it was indeed multicultural-

ism that undermined feelings of home. Were Dutch policies really

multiculturalist?

The entire idea of the Dutch being (radical) multiculturalists is

an inaccurate picture of what really happened and happens in the

Netherlands (Duyvendak et al., 2009; Duyvendak and Scholten,

2009). Policies that focused on the socio- cultural position of immi-

grants were much more various than the accounts of, for instance,

Sniderman and Hagendoorn suggest. The 1970s policy on cultural

identity can easily be misunderstood as multiculturalist, for its cen-

tral tenet was that ‘guest workers’ should maintain their identities.

The reason for this, however, was not to accommodate pluralism in

the Netherlands, but to facilitate guest workers’ return after they

had fulfilled their function as unskilled laborers in the Netherlands

(Ghorashi, 2003). In the early 1980s, when it became clear that most

migrants were going to stay, policies turned to the ideal of group

empowerment as a means towards their ‘emancipation’. While these

policies initially built on the legacy of ‘pillarization’1 that charac-

terized Dutch social structure well into the 1960s, the emphasis

on group empowerment faded over the 1980s as the objectives of

individual socio- economic integration and participation took center

stage (Duyvendak and Scholten, 2009).

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Feeling at Home in the Nation? 87

While Koopmans et al., like Sniderman and Hagendoorn, label

the Dutch situation ‘culturally pluralist’ – even increasingly plural-

ist (2005, p. 73) – this gives a misleading picture of what govern-

ment policies were promoting. Tolerance for immigrants’ religious

practices had little to do with national integration policies, let alone

radical multiculturalism. Migrants’ use of group- specific provisions

was made possible by the Dutch institutional framework of ‘pillars’;

to the extent that this provided a basis for creating migrant religious

and cultural institutions, it had nothing to do with ‘pluralist’ inte-

gration policies (Duyvendak et al., 2004; Rath et al., 1999). Most poli-

ticians were reluctant to support the development of a new (Islamic)

religious ‘pillar’. From the 1970s onwards, local governments, in fact,

tr ie d to proh ibit i mmigr ants from clai ming their rights as Dutch citi-

zens to set up Muslim schools (Feirabend and Rath, 1996). What may

have appeared as a multicultural model to the outside world was, in

reality, an amalgamation of ever- changing measures formulated by

pragmatist policy- makers with little enthusiasm for group policies

(Bertossi and Duyvendak, 2009). The ‘long 1960s’ did not produce

multiculturalism in the Netherlands, but a rather homogeneous pro-

gressive moral majority.

If the ‘multicultural model’ did not fuel the recent political and

social polarization in the Netherlands, then what did? What makes

politicians claim that the native Dutch feel less at home in their coun-

try? I argue that a culturalized notion of citizenship has come to domi-

nate the Dutch debate on the integration of immigrants, in which

the Dutch ‘progressive’ culture is increasingly depicted as a product of

timeless consensus. To guard against harmful external influences, this

culture has to be restored and protected. Immigrants have to prove

their loyalty to it, prove that they feel at home in their country of

settlement by subscribing to its dominant ideas, convictions, habits

and emotions (Geschiere, 2009). If they don’t, politicians claim, the

native- born will no longer feel at home in their ‘own’ country.

The Dutch cultural consensus (and some dissensus)

Contrary to popular wisdom, the current crisis of home in the

Netherlands is not the result of ‘failed’ multiculturalism. Over the

past decades, Dutch policy- makers have not pursued full- fledged

multiculturalist policies promoting the pluralist religious and

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88 The Politics of Home

cultural identities of all minority groups (Duyvendak and Scholten,

2009). They instead focused on socio- economically disadvantaged

ethnic minorities (Uitermark, 2010). While the tradition of pillariza-

tion gave leeway to some Islamic institutions, integration policies

never straightforwardly promoted immigrant cultural and/or reli-

gious identities.

Another, related, misunderstanding is that the Netherlands has

developed into a pluralist, highly diverse society. In fact, since the

1970s, the majority population has rapidly become more cultur-

ally homogeneous. Whereas in many countries, including the US,

majority opinion is divided on issues of gender, family and sexuality,

almost the entire political spectrum of the Dutch majority popula-

tion supports progressive values on these matters. After a period of

intense cultural polarization during the ‘long 1960s’, the majority

has developed rather uniform, progressive ideals according to the

Euro- barometer, European Social Survey, European Values Study,

International Social Survey Program and the Continuous Tracking

Survey (as recapitulated in Arts et al., 2003; Duyvendak et al., 20 04;

Halman et al., 2005; Jansen, 2008; SCP, 1998; Uitterhoeve, 2000).

More than anywhere else, the majority population in the Netherlands

believes that divorce is acceptable and homosexuality nothing out of

the ordinary. More than most other Europeans (let alone Americans),

the Dutch disagree with conservative propositions such as ‘women

must have children to be happy’, ‘a child should respect its parents’,

or ‘we would be better off were we to return to a traditional way of

life’; the Dutch are among the most ardent supporters of secular, non-

traditional values and rights to freedom of speech and expression

(Inglehart and Baker, 2000; Inglehart and Welzel, 2005). Differences

in values between more and less highly educated people, moreover,

are slight; the Netherlands is now among the three least culturally

polarized countries in Europe (Achterberg, 2006, p. 55).

As traditional values around family, marriage and sexuality lost

ground, the Netherlands became less preoccupied with the Christian

tradition – and vice versa (de Koster et al., 2010). Fig ure 5.1 (Houtman

et al., 2008) shows that polarization over these values has declined

since 1970 (increasing standard deviations point to growing differ-

ences of understanding and cultural polarization; decreasing stand-

ard deviations point to growing agreement; for authoritarianism see

below).2

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Feeling at Home in the Nation? 89

This decline in cultural polarization was largely due to the new pro-

gressive moral consensus that distanced itself from moral (i.e., sex-

ual, family and gender) traditionalism (Duyvendak, 2004; Houtman

and Duyvendak, 2009).

The increasing polarization around authoritarianism

The Dutch majority tends to demand that migrants share their ‘mod-

ern’ and ‘progressive’ values. This in part reflects the strength of

the consensus within the majority population. In this respect, the

Netherlands is similar to Denmark, which also has a clearly ‘enlight-

ened’ moral majority. It may come as a surprise that a progressive

and ‘tolerant’ country demands conformity from those whose

views are not progressive. When it comes to values, liberal coun-

tries evidently need not esteem diversity in opinions (e.g., Lægaard,

2007; Wikan, 2002). The cultural consensus among the Dutch goes

0.4

0.5

0.6

0.7

0.8

0.9

1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000

Sexual traditionalism (Pearson’s r = −0.87, p<0.05)

Authoritarianism (Pearson’s r = +0.67, p<0.05)

Family traditionalism (Pearson’s r = −0.95, p<0.01)

Gender traditionalism (Pearson’s r = −0.73, p<0.01)

Figure 5.1 Diverging patterns for moral traditionalism and authoritarianism

(1970–2000)

Source: Houtman et al. 200 8.

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90 The Politics of Home

hand in hand with the dismissal of other values. As Buruma has

observed: ‘Tolerance, then, has its limits even for Dutch progressives.

It is easy to be tolerant of those who are much like us. ... It is much

harder to extend the same principle to the strangers in our midst,

who find our ways as disturbing as we do theirs’ (2006, p. 128).

Pillarization may once have accommodated pluralism in the

Netherlands. But pluralism today is a weak shadow; the growing

consensus around progressive values has created a wider values

gap between the native majority and Muslim immigrants than in

countries with less progressive majority cultures. As Van der Veer

puts it:

For the Dutch, Muslims stand for theft of enjoyment. Their strict

sexual morals remind the Dutch too much of what they have so

recently left behind ... In a society where consumption and espe-

cially the public performance of sexual identity have become so

important, the strict clothing habits of observant Muslims are an

eyesore. (2006, pp. 119–20)

However, survey results show increasing support for so- called

‘Western values’ among immigrants and their offspring; propor-

tionately more immigrants in the Netherlands have come to share

this progressive culture than anywhere else (Dagevos et al., 2003;

Dagevos et al., 2007; Entzinger and Dourleijn, 2008). This progressive

cultural consensus has also provided opportunities for (ex)Muslims –

including famous ex- politician Hirsi Ali, who fervently objected to

sexism in the Koran – to protest against sexism, homophobia and

the lack of freedom of speech within Islamic texts and Muslim tra-

ditions (Mepschen et al., 2010). On the other hand, the values gap

between Muslim groups and the majority population is wider in

the Netherlands than in most other countries. It is wider than in

Germany on issues such as adherence to community and conserva-

tive values (Demant, 2005).

All in all, it is clear that the Dutch majority population increas-

ingly sees cultural differences as a problem (Entzinger and Dourleijn,

2008). In the political debate, populist and rightwing parties reveal

their allergy to cultural differences and believe immigrants should

be forced to assimilate or ‘go home’.

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Feeling at Home in the Nation? 91

Hence the advancement of progressive values – embraced now by

both the political Left and Right – goes hand in hand with the belief,

trumpeted by vocal politicians, that everyone has to adhere to them.

Debate in Dutch politics no longer focuses on substantial topics; it is

the procedural question of how to deal with those who don’t share

‘modern’ values that polarizes the political spectrum as nothing

else. So whereas cultural polarization on moral traditionalism has

declined since 1970, polarization on authoritarianism (defending

the social order, ethnocentrism, how to deal with cultural differ-

ences) has grown (compare de Koster and van der Waal, 2006) (see

Figures 5.1 and 5.2 , both based on Houtman et al., 2008).

This is also apparent in the programs of Dutch political parties

over the period 1950–98. Figure 5.2 shows that over this period,

polarization over moral traditionalism (regarding all sorts of moral

issues) declined, while polarization over authoritarianism (how to

deal with those who buck the consensus) grew. Figure 5.2 is based on

so- called Party Manifesto Data (Budge et al., 2001), which quantifies

0.5

1.5

2.5

3.5

4.5

1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000

Moral traditionalism (Pearson’s r = −0.80, p<0.001)

Authoritarianism (Pearson’s r = +0.62, p<0.05)

Figure 5.2 Diverging patterns for moral traditionalism and authoritarianism

in Dutch political party programs (fourteen elections years between 1950

and 1998)

Source: Houtman et al. 200 8.

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92 The Politics of Home

the attention political party programs give to a comprehensive list of

policy priorities (for analysis of this data see Achterberg, 2006).3 The

data make it clear that the decline of support for traditional moral

values has fueled a new cultural polarization over the importance

of individual freedom and cultural pluralism. Among the support-

ers of authoritarianism we see the desire for uniformity and com-

munity, and preference for ethnocentrism and a shared ‘home’.

Deviation from dominant norms and values – even though these

values have become unabashedly liberal – is not tolerated. Liberal

values have become national values: ‘If it is possible for social actors

to present liberal values in public discourse in a way that makes them

the symbolic basis for a socially effective distinction between “us”

(the nation) and “others”, then the characterization of the values as

national values makes sense’ (Lægaard, 2007, p. 45).

The culturalization of citizenship

The rise of authoritarianism has fueled the culturalization of citizen-

ship: a process in which emotions, feelings, norms and values, sym-

bols and traditions (including religion) come to play a pivotal role in

defining what can be expected of a Dutch citizen.

While its recent manifestations are unique, the culturalization

of citizenship is not a new phenomenon. Citizenship has long

been defined by the nation’s dominant culture and ethnic group.

Nevertheless, the idea of national and mono- cultural citizenship has

been questioned over the past decades. First, it became increasingly

difficult to conceive of national citizenship as strictly mono- cultural

because citizens of the same country have increasingly diverse cul-

tural and ethnic backgrounds: their roots are transnational while

their loyalties and feelings of belonging are often pluri- national.

Second, as has been argued in the communitarian tradition, citizen-

ship is more often experienced at the local rather than national level

(Sandel, 1982; Walzer, 1983).

It is in the context of these ‘glocalizing’ tendencies that the cul-

turalization of national citizenship is taking place. Here the ‘native’

culture is seen as under threat, leading to the normative project of

defining and protecting ‘traditional’ cultural heritage (for instance,

in the form of a ‘canon’ and teaching it to newcomers in citizen-

ship courses). This process underscores the emotional aspects of

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Feeling at Home in the Nation? 93

citizenship, which has evolved from a status or practice into a deep

sentiment. Citizens are subjected to new ‘feeling rules’ (Hochschild,

2003, p. 82). Belonging – feeling at home – has become a require-

ment (Morley, 2001). Particularly at the national level, new ‘feeling

rules’ are applied to immigrants who are increasingly expected to

demonstrate feelings of attachment, belonging, connectedness and

loyalty to their new country. Because feelings as such cannot eas-

ily be perceived, certain actions become their symbolic stand- ins

(Verkaaik, 2010). For example, having dual nationality has come to

represent lack of loyalty to Dutch culture in the eyes of a majority of

Dutch politicians.

Emotive culturalization thus stresses the need for loyalty to the

nation- state and demands proof of such feelings from immigrants.

It includes the warning that immigrants who do not manage to

feel at home should go ‘home’ – that is, disappear altogether from

their ‘country of arrival’ – even when they are born and raised in

the Netherlands (Duyvendak, 2007). To quote Jan Marijnissen, at the

time the Chairman of the leftwing Socialist Party:

The Muslim community must understand that there is a col-

lective responsibility to combat excesses such as political Islam.

Educators, teachers and imams must choose for our Constitution

and bring up children in its spirit. If one is not prepared to con-

form to our values and obey our laws, the pressing advice is: seek

a country where you feel at home. (Marijnissen, 2004)

If immigrants want to stay in the Netherlands, they have to

adapt to ‘Dutch’ norms, values and emotions. ‘The idea seems to

be, indeed, that Dutch identity must “cannibalize” other identities

in order to turn immigrants into reliable citizens’ (Geschiere, 2009,

p. 166).

The Marijnissen quote shows that the culturalization of citizenship

has a different but equally heavy influence on both leftwing and

rightwing political parties. While the latter were pushed to embrace

‘substantial’ progressive values – an overall move of the political

spectrum towards the left – the leftwing parties became far less tol-

erant towards immigrants who allegedly did not conform to Dutch

‘norms and values’. Marijnissen literally frames the ‘solution’ for the

assumed ‘non- fit’ between immigrants (with Muslim backgrounds)

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94 The Politics of Home

and ‘the Dutch’ in terms of another home: ‘Seek a country where you

feel at home’. What does this imply? Immigrants report in surveys

that they do feel at home in the Netherlands (see below); what is

lacking – in Marijnissen’s view – are the deep feelings of attachment

and loyalty to the Netherlands on the basis of a fit between one’s

personal norms and values and those of the country. In other words,

Marijnissen assumes that a normative and cognitive fit regarding

values is a precondition for truly feeling at home: immigrants have

to share in his rather uniform public ‘heaven’ conception of home.

That immigrants report feeling at home in the Netherlands while

allegedly disagreeing with (some of) its dominant norms and values

implies their adherence to a more private, haven- like conception of

home – a type of home unacceptable to the leader of the Socialist

Party.

(Not) feeling at home in the Netherlands

Most of the elements that ignite the debate in the Netherlands – and

in other West European countries – can be traced to the emotion-

alization of what it means to be a citizen. In debates over dual citi-

zenship, spokespersons of various political parties emphasize that

citizenship is more than a ‘formality’: ‘To have Dutch nationality

is more than having a Dutch passport. It is an expression of feel-

ing at home in Dutch society, in her democratic legal order, her

values, norms and mentality. You must, in other words, fully focus

on Dutch society’ (Jacques Niederer (VVD), in Dutch Parliament

[Tweede Kamer], 2000a, p. 3640). ‘People must feel connected

to our society if they want to be naturalized, they have to feel at

home in it. It is necessary to feel Dutch’ (Maxime Verhagen (CDA),

in Dutch Parliament [Tweede Kamer], 2000a, p. 3635). Politicians

thus tell immigrants how to feel – above all, to feel at home in the

Netherlands.

But as we will see, many immigrants claim that they already

feel at home in the Netherlands – data show that some immigrant

groups even feel more at home than the native Dutch (see Table 5.1

on p. 102). Why, then, this strong and widely held suspicion that

immigrants don’t feel at home in the country? For some Dutch politi-

cians, it may simply be unimaginable that (Muslim) immigrants can

feel at home in the Netherlands. Others don’t accept the manner in

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which immigrants feel at home: they see an enormous gap with how

they think a ‘real’ Dutch citizen should behave, dress, think and feel.

A veiled woman simply cannot feel Dutch, or at home in a country

that – at least discursively – embraces gender equality.

This assumed incompatibility between ‘us’ and ‘them’ not only

fuels suspicions that immigrants don’t really feel at home in the

Netherlands; the corollary is the claim that the native Dutch feel

less at home as well: they cannot imagine sharing their ‘home’ with

people who have such alien norms and values (de Gruijter et al.,

2010). Hence on the basis of a certain conception of ‘home’ – every-

body shares the same norms, values, practices, habits – Muslim immi-

grants are suspected of d isloya lty. Or even worse, of terrorism. As the

former leader of the Labor Party Wouter Bos put it recently: ‘Take the

ordinary, law- abiding citizen faced with the arrival of terrorism from

other countries and cultures, who wonders why terrorists call them-

selves true Muslims and what this says about the next- door neigh-

bor, who happens to be a Muslim too’ (Bos, 2008, p. 2).

My analysis of parliamentary debates shows that, over time, the

crisis in ‘feeling at home’ has indeed become primarily a problem

for the native- born. In the 1990s, and around 2000, ‘not feeling at

home’ was still mostly discussed as a problem for immigrants, which

Dutch society should help overcome – for instance by adding ‘send-

ing country’ elements to Dutch architecture (Lucy Kortram (PvdA),

in Dutch Parliament [Tweede Kamer], 2000b, p. 882). After 2002 (the

murder of Pim Fortuyn), and even more after 2004 (the murder of

Theo van Gogh, see Buruma, 2006), discussions about the loss of

home feelings have almost invariably concerned the native Dutch,

whom politicians increasingly paint as ‘foreigners’ in their own

country, cities and neighborhoods.

The alleged ‘homelessness’ of the native Dutch

A recent official government report gives the following reason why

native Dutch today would feel less at home:

Feelings about what is ‘normal’ and self- evident determine whether

or not people feel at home or accepted in their environment. For this

reason alone, the influx of immigrants – in the district, the school,

the association, the working environment – go hand in hand with

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feelings of unease, loss and even insecurity. These feelings become

stronger as the behavior of newcomers more strongly deviates from

what is considered normal, especially in the case of criminal or

other beyond- the- pale behavior. (Dutch Cabinet, 2008, p. 6)

In response to reproaches that it has long overlooked the inter-

ests and feelings of its working- class constituency, the Dutch Labor

Party has recently begun paying great attention to how immigra-

tion has undermined ‘feeling at home’ among the native- born. I

present here three rather long quotes from spokespersons of this

party to illustrate the pivotal role of feelings of alienation within

Dutch politics. In the first quote, the leader of the party in parlia-

ment in 2007 reflects upon developments in disadvantaged neigh-

borhoods. Jacques Tichelaar:

The PvdA is very awa re that it is always the p eople with the lowest

incomes living in disadvantaged neighborhoods who are the first

to be confronted with the coming of foreigners. On top of their

own problems, they are now saddled with the problems that the

newcomers bring with them. We ask much of the inhabitants of

these areas. ... We have great admiration for them, their forbear-

ance, their support for newcomers and their contribution to a bet-

ter Netherlands and we understand that sometimes it is also just

too much. (Dutch Parliament, 2007, p. 2666).

His sympathy is all for the native- born who are ‘fed up’ with the

(problems allegedly caused by) ‘foreigners’ (a rather a- typical word in

the Dutch debate, out of use since the late 1970s as it ‘others’ immi-

grants, including those born and raised in the Netherlands and/or

those who have Dutch nationality). It shows that the Labor Party

shares in the dominant framing of the issue: a minority of ‘aliens’

has caused the majority’s feelings of alienation.

The second quote expresses the idea that it is patently unjust that

those who have been ‘rooted’ in the Netherlands for generations are

now suffering from such feelings of alienation. As it reads in a recent

Labor Party white paper on migration and integration:

These feelings of loss and uneasiness we also know in the

Netherlands. Not only among residents of working class city

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districts, but broadly in society. Neighborhoods built for workers

and the middle class have become migrant districts. Well- known

social customs have disappeared. Shared codes of conduct are

no longer self- evident. The continuous influx of new residents

requires a great deal from the residents, as well as from the school,

the general practitioner and the district agent. But also in places

in our country where apparently nothing has changed, people

have experienced feelings of unease. Their country is changing

and they feel alienated. They feel that the changes have been

foisted upon them – and that is a nasty feeling when it comes

to the country where you were born and raised, which you, your

parents and their parents built up. (PvdA, 2009)

The native Dutch, it is implied in the above quote, have more

rights to the neighborhood since they were born and raised there – a

rather odd argument since the same is true for all second- generation

immigrants. Note also that teachers, general practitioners and dis-

trict agents seem, almost by definition, to be native- born Dutch.

But more significant is the idea of ‘home’ underlying this thinking:

people can only feel at home with those who have been part of that

home for a long time and who share the same norms and values.

In the third quote, the ‘foreigners’ turn out to be Muslims: cul-

tural and religious elements are interwoven in the discourse oppos-

ing Muslims and Dutch society. As the leader of the Labor Party in

parliament, Mariëtte Hamer, put it in 2008:

Integration causes pain. Pain for the native who feels that his

neighborhood has been taken over by foreigners. Pain for the Turk

who has done his best to build up a life in the Netherlands, but is

blocked by a lot of incomprehension. And yes, also pain for the

countryside resident who has never seen a foreigner in his town,

but truly feels that the Netherlands is no longer as it was. Dutch

society has taken in large groups of foreigners over the past dec-

ades. For a large number of Dutchmen, confrontation with other

cultures, customs and beliefs is an uncomfortable everyday real-

ity. I have experienced at close hand how drastic this can be. My

mother saw her district ... change dramatically within 20 years.

What was once the hopeful new Amsterdam has degenerated

into a district where one no longer feels at home. Concerns over

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changes in society are reinforced by radical Muslims committing

terrorist acts in the name of Islam. Fatwas have been proclaimed.

On the Linnaeusstraat in Amsterdam East, Theo van Gogh was

murdered in a horrible manner. This was all directed against our

open, Western society, against everything we stand for. (Dutch

Parliament [Tweede Kamer], 2008a, p. 4884).

The discourse is constructed in such a way that an opposition

develops between ‘we’ (native- born, modern, Western, not feeling

at home anymore) and ‘them’ (coming from a different ‘culture’, of

whom the most radical randomly kill). The obvious intention here

is to take the feelings of the native Dutch (‘my mother’) seriously:

‘we’ empathize with those who no longer feel at home in what was

once their hopeful neighborhood and country. The native Dutch,

it is argued, have become like foreigners in their own country, feel-

ing what foreigners should allegedly feel: not at home. But as many

‘foreigners’ now report that they do feel at home, the world for the

native- born has truly been turned upside down: foreigners are expe-

riencing feelings that should belong to the native- born while the

native- born feel like foreigners. Politicians suggest that the native

Dutch feel estranged and besieged by immigrants, and are therefore

in a legitimate position ‘to claim their country back’.

There is a way to ‘reclaim the country’. This is to (further) develop

a ‘thick’ notion of what it is to be Dutch. This will make it impos-

sible for foreigners to claim ‘Dutchness’ and/or to feel at home since

they can’t know their new home, its history, traditions, customs and

feelings as well as the native- born (allegedly) do. Foreigners aren’t

part of this history; they have no roots here. By embracing the ‘roots

paradigm’, feeling at home is denied to immigrants. ‘Being rooted’

not only ensures knowledge of what it is to be authentically Dutch

but the historical right to define what that is as well. Let’s see how

this works.

A thick notion of ‘home’

Dutch politicians from both the Left and Right plead for new forms of

‘nationalism’ and ‘patriotism’, claiming that the Dutch to date have

had a very ‘thin’ notion of national identity. Another quote from

the former leader of the leftwing Socialist Party, Jan Marijnissen, is

illustrative:

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In the Netherlands we have not sufficiently appreciated our own

history and what gives us the feeling of being at home. It has to

do with the making of the physical environment, but also the

cultural and moral environment. And also parliamentary democ-

racy, all that gives us the feeling: ‘we are at home here’. ... My argu-

ment is ... that our view of the world has a lot to do with the land

on which we stand. And that land on which we stand is what I

would call the Heimat (I borrow it from the Germans because it

is such a fine word). But also to indicate that it is not only ... the

physical home, it is the knowledge that if you send your child to

school he will get a good education. (2008)

Who is ‘us’ in these passages? ‘Us’ identifies with the ‘soil’: to

feel at home is to be rooted, a quality apparently more common

among the native- born than among immigrants. But not only the

soil: moral, cultural, social and educational aspects of life are all

part of what makes the Netherlands home for ‘us’. Taken together,

it implies a very thick notion of what is necessary to feel at home in

the Netherlands.

Mobilizing a thick notion of home runs the risk that instead of

including (what might have been Marijnissen’s intention), one

excludes those who don’t (want to) share this notion of home. Such

exclusion is already taking place as the Dutch have a much thicker

national identity than most of them are aware of. As Halle Ghorashi

concludes on the basis of her research on exiled Iranian women in

the US and the Netherlands:

In contradiction to the United States, the Dutch notion of national

identity is exclusive and thick. By the thickness of national iden-

tity, I mean that there is a common understanding of Dutchness

based on color, ‘roots’, and certain codes of behavior that excludes

difference. These codes of behavior are in many ways related to

a Calvinist background with expectations expressing certain

behavior. This thick notion of national identity leads to a process

of exclusion and sets up a dichotomous relationship between us

and them. ... The consequence is that people from different back-

grounds who are born in the Netherlands, or who have lived most

of their lives there and have Dutch nationality are not included as

‘one of us’. (2003, p. 255)

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100 The Politics of Home

Knowledge of this historically rooted national identity – though

presented as something to aid immigrants’ integration – on balance

works as a balm for those ‘dispossessed’ native Dutch who hope

to regain their former position. The historicization of citizenship

favors those who have ‘always’ been here: not due to any cognitive

considerations (since everybody can learn Dutch history), but due to

its ‘ontological’ implications: native Dutch are indisputably part of

it all, whereas immigrants are by definition not part of this specific

history. The native position is not in question, along with their views

on what is re qu ire d t o f eel at home i n the Net herl ands. The following

quote from the spokesman of the small conservative Christian party

illustrates the demand for unconditional emotional investment in

the new country. It implies that only one conception of feeling at

home is acceptable for immigrants: warm feelings for the ‘home

country’ (a more private, haven- like conception of home is out of

the question):

In order to express loyalty to the Netherlands, the ChristenUnie

(CU) party is in favor of prospective Dutchmen, at the time of

naturalization, to make explicitly clear their inner commitment

to their new ‘home’ country. It could take the form of a declaration

of loyalty. In any case, an explicit proclamation of loyalty to the

Dutch society of which the newcomer is now a permanent part

is crucial. (Tineke Huizinga- Heringa (CU) in: Dutch Parliament

[Tweede Kamer], 2004)

The majority thus uses its power of definition to proclaim how

things are done (or are allowed and tolerated) in the Netherlands,

while recent proposals to establish historical canons and a national

historic museum are further examples of attempts to define the

nation’s character. All of this is justified by the idea, expressed by

among others the publicist Paul Scheffer (2007), that newcomers will

only be able to ‘feel at home’ when ‘the Dutch’ can more clearly for-

mulate where ‘we’ stand. So that ‘they’ will be able to comprehend,

‘we’ – the natives – must define who ‘we’ are. At first sight, this may

appear as acceptance of responsibility by the dominant group: only

when ‘we’ clarify who we are, can ‘they’ be held accountable for their

(un)willingness to integrate.

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But are the politicians of the progressive majority failing to define

what it stands for? No, there is little evidence of immigrants left in

the dark by a country unwilling to reveal itself. Instead, we witness

a dominant narrative that tells immigrants – and in particular those

with Muslim backgrounds – that how they lead their lives is improper

and maladapted, and that they therefore spoil the home feelings of

the natives. The Netherlands has shown quite clearly what it stands

for over these past years. The native Dutch identity has hardened,

with paradoxical consequences. On the one hand, migrants are forced

to identify with the Dutch nation more then ever before (other loy-

alties are not permitted, as feeling at home means feeling at home in

the nation). On the other hand, the thickening and historical rooting

of Dutch identity makes it much harder for newcomers to identify

with.

In other words, the marginalization of immigrants has only been

exacerbated by the historical roots attached to Dutch ‘cultural’

identity in recent years. Creating a canon more likely hinders than

promotes citizenship. To begin with, familiarity with a canonical

national past is poor preparation for citizenship in current society.

Canonizing not only makes a mockery of the past; it ignores the

malleability of the present. If the ticket into Dutch society can only

be obtained by being part of a longer national history, people with

different backgrounds are confronted with insurmountable obsta-

cles. Dutch society then only becomes accessible to people with deep

roots in Dutch soil. Citizenship is reduced to a property one has by

birth, one that is unchanged through agency. What one does, what

one contributes, one’s readiness to become a part of the society in

which one lives then no longer matter: immigrants (originally) come

from elsewhere, have not experienced ‘our’ history and will there-

fore never really be ‘one of us’.

The thick, historically rooted idea of ‘home’ thus has highly

ambivalent and paradoxical effects. Though presented to ‘support’

immigrants, in reality it blocks their integration; obliged to feel at

home in their country of residence, this ‘home’ is constructed in such

a way that they can never really feel a part of it. Even when policy-

makers wish to be inclusive, they seem to believe historical ‘rooting’

is the best way to stimulate belonging. The City of Amsterdam, for

example, claims that ‘too many residents ... do not identify with the

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102 The Politics of Home

city and do not know its history’. Under the slogan ‘A Shared Vision

of History and the Future’, the aim of policy is for ‘all residents of

Amsterdam to feel themselves Amsterdammers: the number of resi-

dents who feel at home in Amsterdam should grow annually’. The

way to attain such identification, the City Hall claims, is to teach

residents about the city’s history (City of Amsterdam, 2006).

Local and national politicians not only consider it their job to

influence the deep feelings of belonging among their citizenry; they

also claim to know what actually determines feeling at home and

what role history plays in it. But is this true? This question is pertin-

ent since data show (see below) that most immigrants feel quite at

home in the Netherlands, and even more so at the local level. This,

again, shows that policy- makers’ assumptions about immigrants not

feeling at home in the Netherlands don’t hold. The alleged nexus

between feeling at home and historical knowledge thus becomes

even more questionable: since most immigrants claim that they feel

at home in the country, this either implies that they are well versed

in the history of the Netherlands or that historical knowledge is not

a necessary condition for developing such feelings (which seems to

me the more plausible case).

Since promoting a sense of belonging in the Netherlands is an offi-

cial policy goal – ‘The goal must be a society where everybody can

feel at home’ (Dutch Cabinet, 2008)4 – it should come as no surprise

that data on ‘feeling at home’ are collected by the main governmen-

tal social science research institute. These data show some correl-

ation between juridical (citizenship) status and ‘feeling at home’. But

the most striking finding is the overall picture: around 70 percent of

all immigrants feel at home in the Netherlands.

Table 5.1 Feeling at home in the Netherlands, by citizenship status and

ethnic group (%)

Tur k s Moroccans

Dual nationality 68 74

Dutch nationality 78 80

Nationality of land of origin 61 51

Source: Advisory Comm ittee for Refuge e Affai rs (2008)

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As Chapters 1 and 2 revealed many possible meanings of ‘feeling

at home’, the question is what these data tell us. We have to ask this

as well since, in the qualitative research we carried out, most immi-

grants did not spontaneously express strong emotions regarding the

Netherlands. Their responses suggested that there was not much for

them to gain by identifying with the country, that it was difficult

to relate their daily lives to a structure that has relatively little emo-

tional meaning to them. Responses were generally of three kinds:

that the issue was not of great concern; that it was not necessary to

belong to only one country; and questioning the meaning of nation-

ality itself. All avoided entering into deeper discussions about Dutch

identity (Tonkens et al., forthcoming).

Though the data show that this does not imply immigrants don’t

feel at home, their affirmation of belonging may be a response to

their loyalty constantly being questioned. Recent research among

Moroccans residing in different Western European countries seems

to corroborate this interpretation. Dutch- Moroccans stand out for

feeling at home in their country of residence; they are also highly

aware of the negative labeling within the Dutch public and political

debate (NRC correspondent, 2010). Hence exactly what their affirm-

ation entails is an interesting question. In my understanding – given

the various meanings of feeling at home, and in light of our quali-

tative data – Dutch- Moroccan home feelings do not seem to be con-

nected to the nation. They know that Dutch politicians expect them

to feel at home. But since the Dutch nation has exclusive connota-

tions, they attach their home feelings to other objects, territories and

people. Moreover, their notion of feeling at home may further shrink

towards that of a safe haven since the culturalization of citizenship

does not make it any easier for immigrants to feel a part of Dutch

society. As Peter Geschiere points out: ‘The central question raised

by the Dutch experience, and by developments elsewhere in Europe,

is whether giving greater substance to the national culture ... makes

integration of migrants easier. In practice, this seems rather to work

toward a deepening of the divide and make integration all the more

difficult’ (Geschiere, 2009, p. 167).

In this deepening of the divide, some native- born are losers as

well – losers in terms of not feeling at home, even though they blame

others for not sufficiently belonging to the Netherlands.

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104 The Politics of Home

America, the homeland?

The enormous popularity of the term ‘homeland’ in the US after 9/11

is, in fact, quite surprising; before then, the term was rarely heard.

‘ “Home” has a narrower meaning in American English than in British

English. In Br itain, the “home secretar y”, for exa mple, attends to domes-

tic (as distinct form foreign) affairs, and “home counties” means those

shires bordering London. The American word “home”, however, has as

its primary meaning the house in which one lives’ (Collins, 2007, p. 1).

Collins explains that the new term ‘homeland’ could nonetheless reso-

nate among (parts of the) American public because its protagonists – a

coalition of secular conservatives and the religious Right – made stra-

tegic use of well- known biblical narratives. The idea of the US as ‘God’s

own nation’, the continuous use of the phrase ‘God bless America’, and

the popular idea that Americans are ‘chosen’ all feed into the idea that

this is a very special country, home to a very special people.

The rise of ‘homeland’ discourse has had an exclusionary effect

on some immigrant groups, in particular Muslims immediately after

9/11. As for the situation of migrants more generally, homeland dis-

course seems to have had a permanent impact on those who want to

enter the country. The moral panic is fueled by the (perceived) situ-

ation at the American–Mexican border. In public debate, Mexican

migrants without papers are labeled illegal ‘aliens’ – a term that

comes close to the imaginary surrounding migrants with Muslim

backgrounds in Europe.

But for those migrants who are legally in, the situation seems to be

back to normal. In the US – one of the most religious countries in the

world – it is unimaginable to attack Muslims because of their religion

in the way this is happening in some Western European countries, in

particular those which are highly secularized such as Denmark and

the Netherlands.

In the wake of 9/11, discourse in Western European countries turned

to the need for greater social cohesion and patriotism (also because

the perpetrators of 9/11 and the London and Madrid attacks were

‘home- grown’ Muslim Europeans). Many political leaders in Europe

looked jealously to the US: 9/11 had united that country in patriot-

ism. But public opinion in Europe misunderstood (and still misun-

derstands) the nature of this American nationalism – what I would

term ‘nationalism light’. Under the general heading of American

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Feeling at Home in the Nation? 105

citizenship, diversity is still very much welcomed. A rather ‘thin’

notion of national identity thus continues to prevail in the US,

in which there is room for thick particularities. American national

discourse allows thick cultural differences within its understand-

ing of a thin notion of national identity. It is possible to be con-

sidered American – both by oneself as well as by others – within

the diversity of physical appearances, languages, and cultural

backgrounds. Thus, the notion of American identity is like an

umbrella that includes different particularities. (Ghorashi, 2003,

pp. 221–2)

Nevertheless, 9/11 had an impact since citizens – and in par-

ticular new immigrants – were expected to demonstrate loyalty to

the nation, while the introduction of a Department of Homeland

Security strengthened the idea of the nation as a ‘home’. All this does

not imply, however, that the transformations described for Europe

above (as witnessed in the Netherlands) took place in the US as well,

where the culturalization of citizenship remains rather weak.

Compared to Europe, the ‘crisis of home’ in the US is less acute

at the national level, though some politicians mobilize feelings of

insecurity and fear that ‘overwhelm proactive aspects of home as a

friendly place where residents feel safe and comfortable’ (Low 2004,

pp. 7–8). Here we can add that the post- 9/11 moral panic concerning

the vulnerable ‘homeland’ has only increased the sense of crisis at

the household level: home as a ‘safe haven’ – one of the two funda-

mental meanings of home as we saw in Chapter 2 – is perhaps not

so safe after all.

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106

Conclusion: Inclusive Ways of

Feeling at Home?

Introduction

As I have argued in this book – and many others have shown in

their work – we need to take emotions related to ‘feeling at home’

very seriously. ‘Belonging’ is an existential need – even for the most

chronically mobile among us (Gustafson, 2009; Nowicka, 2007). And

while ‘home- making’ strategies may differ, ‘home’ is meaningful to

everyone in one way or another. Being threatened in one’s home

feelings is one of the main reasons for all kinds of struggle and vio-

lence (Stein, 2001). As the vast literature on nationalism (Appadurai,

1990; Calhoun, 1999; Hearn, 2007; Holy, 1998; Scheff, 2006) shows,

(the lack of) home feelings has been crucial for both those who want

to create a ‘pure’ homeland and for those excluded from the nation,

wandering in diaspora and longing to return (Abdelhandy, 2008;

Marshall- Fratani, 2006; Rose, 2005; Thiranagama, 2007).

While feeling at home is an important emotion for all, it is at the

same time a discriminating phenomenon: nobody feels at home eve-

rywhere and with everybody. The cosmopolitan dream thus ignores

the sociological reality that feeling at home is a differentiating emo-

tion: it necessarily divides those with whom we feel at home from

the rest. If home is everywhere and we feel at home with everyone,

‘home’ tends to lose its meaning.

This book therefore examined where and when people (do not)

feel at home and with what inclusionary or exclusionary effects. As

it turned out, we have to disting uish between feeling at home in the

private and public spheres. The crisis of home in the US – mostly

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experienced at the level of individual households – is of a different

character than the ‘national’ crisis of home in Western European

countries. This divergence also reveals itself in the two types of nos-

talgia it produces. Below, I discuss these two types of nostalgia as they

relate to their respective crises of home. I then proceed to discuss

two other spheres that proved to be important for home feelings: the

workplace and the community. Comparing these four spheres will

help to better grasp the various forms of belonging, particularly their

differences in terms of inclusion and exclusion.

Two types of nostalgia: reflective and restorative

Our days are full of nostalgia. Even the discourse of the current presi-

dent of the United States about change is not unequivocally future-

oriented. Far from it: Barack Obama’s speeches are often about

restoring peace at home and rebuilding harmonious relationships

within neighborhoods. Nostalgia is not necessarily problematic, so

long as we understand that nostalgia says more about contemporary

society than it does about the past (see Coontz’s The Way We Never

Wer e, 1992). Here, I will examine two different types of nostalgia as

they prevail in the US and Western Europe, the societal and political

cleavages that produce them, and their inclusionary and exclusion-

ary effects. As it turns out, not feeling at home has far more per-

nicious effects in Western Europe than in the US. The revanchist

version of nostalgia dominant in the old world has a strong exclu-

sionary dynamic, whereas the more constructive nostalgia we see in

the US has the potential to include all.

Both the gender revolution and globalization have transformed

the world we live in. Women are no longer cloistered within home

and hearth; their world has expanded enormously from working

outside the house. Planned and unplanned migration have like-

wise changed the world, for migrants and receiving societies alike.

Even if only 3 percent of the world’s population is living outside

their country of birth, intra- nationa l mobil it y for many p eople has

increased significantly while goods and images now circulate at

an ever- faster rate (Urry, 2010). We can broadly understand these

changes as an enlargement of the world: of more people identify-

ing with more people in more places, and changing places more

often.

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108 The Politics of Home

It is noteworthy, though, that these spatial transformations have

largely been interpreted as temporal developments. This is the case

among social scientists, who witness modern societies transforming

into postmodern ones, and within public and political debates more

generally, where there is a fixation on identifying who is ‘progres-

sive’ and who is ‘backward’. Paradoxically, the Dutch belief in their

own progressiveness goes together with an unprecedentedly strong

desire to hang on to the past. The revolutions of our time have not

made us more forward- looking, but more nostalgic. History is popu-

lar as never before; nostalgia for the Heimat is widespread. Home is no

longer what it was: not for individuals (due to the uneven outcomes

of the gender revolution) or for neighborhoods, let alone for nations

(due to problems linked to migration and globalization). Politicians,

furthermore, feed the nostalgic perspective. Many politicians – and

not just the populists – feel that we can only address ‘our uprooted-

ness’ by looking to the past.

In The Future of Nostalgia (2001), Svetlana Boym distinguishes

between ‘restorative’ and ‘reflective’ nostalgia. Restorative nostalgia

is a seemingly desperate longing for former times when things were

allegedly real, original and authentic. Reflective nostalgia reflects

upon the value of the (remembered) past for present purposes. For

the former, the past must be reconquered at the cost of the present;

for the latter, the question is how (more) continuity can be created

between the past and present. When we compare nostalgia in the

Netherlands and the US, the Dutch version seems primarily restora-

tive, while in America nostalgia tends more towards the reflective

form. Both, however, focus on loss: loss of the familiar nation in

the Netherlands, loss of the familiar nuclear household in America.

Familiarity, as we saw in Chapter 2, forms the basis of ‘feeling at

home’; it is a necessary aspect (but no guarantee) of it. But in both

the Netherlands and the US today, the family (etymologically related

to familiarity) can no longer be taken for granted. American fam-

ily life is imploding under time pressure, while the Netherlands no

longer feels itself to be a single national family. A feeling that a famil-

iar home has been lost is widely felt in both countries.

But here the similarities stop and the differences begin. Home

in the US is primarily a protected, private place (home- as- haven),

whereas in the Netherlands the nation as a whole is seen as home,

a public space where shared ‘modern’ conceptions concerning the

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‘good life’ are nourished (home- as- heaven). The crisis of home in the

Netherlands is so severe partly because it is such a public and collect-

ive matter, in which feeling at home for the native Dutch population

seems to have become conditional upon the behavior, attitudes and

feelings of others. Politicians from the right to the left claim that,

as long as (Muslim) immigrants do not behave like respectful guests

or fully assimilate, this compromises the native Dutch population’s

ability to feel at home. As discussed in Chapter 5, the Netherlands is

one of the most culturally homogeneous countries in Europe. This

homogeneity sits very well with Dutch politicians who want their

country to be a home for a single, large, harmonious and progres-

sive family. In such a household, the behavior of each family mem-

ber affects everyone else’s sense of belonging. Feeling at home thus

comes to be seen in zero- sum terms: ‘their’ arrival has correspond-

ingly reduced ‘our’ ability to feel at home. In the Netherlands, the

individual, private home has become the conceptual framework for

the nation, thus denying the heterogeneity of its citizens. The Dutch

nation becomes ‘a collective representation that invokes the com-

mon identity of the whole as a trump card against the internal dif-

ferentiation of identities and interests’ (Calhoun, 1999, p. 223). Or,

as Massey and Jess put it: ‘The effort ... to actually make “culture”

and “place” correspond with one another turns out to be a hope-

less, expensive and sometimes violent and dangerous illusion’ (2003,

p. 186).

In the US, while the familiar/familial home is missed, the eman-

cipation of women is seen by most Americans as an achievement

and as the result of their own, individual choices. Americans (and

certainly American women) supported the change; it did not just

happen to them (a sentiment that dominates sensibilities in the

Netherlands regarding immigration). Most Americans thus do not

feel they have to blame others; ‘if we want to have better homes’,

Americans tell each other endlessly in public and political debate,

‘we have to become better parents’. The reflective nostalgia prom-

inent in the US thus recognizes that something has indeed been

lost, but that much has also been gained – and that though what

has been lost is gone, better family lives may return under new

conditions.

Of course the US knows less reflective forms of nostalgia as well:

witness the culture wars surrounding abortion, homosexuality, gun

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110 The Politics of Home

ownership, etc. In these conflicts, some groups – for example, sup-

porters of the Tea Party movement – clearly have revanchist agendas

based on the opposition between ‘the people’ and the Democratic

‘elite’ in Washington. Though this may resemble the divide in

Western Europe between the new populist parties and the ‘leftwing

elites’, the Tea Party’s ideas about national identity and minorities

are radically different from their European counterparts. Due to the

particular history of the US, the idea of a homogeneous country is

politically untenable, at least since the civil rights movement. While

political polarization can create gridlock, this is still preferable to the

dangerous majority–minority split in Western Europe.

In contrast, nostalgia in the Netherlands has a strongly restora-

tive character. In the public and political debate, many claim that

all recent social change has been for the worse. ‘Some people’ (the

accusing finger is often pointed at ‘the left church’) have made the

wrong collective decisions, which have affected the entire Dutch

public. The revanchist nostalgia is, moreover, based on a notion

of territorial rights: ‘we were here first’. Chronology then becomes

hierarchy: it gives the native Dutch the right to prescribe to new

immigrants how they must behave. But this move from chronology

to hierarchy is, for various reasons, not possible in the US. Even the

recent controversy over Latino immigrants centers on the economic

effects of immigration (taking ‘our’ jobs) and not so much on the loss

of cultural or national integrity.

The restoration of the ‘old’ Netherlands entails appreciating its

national history, which all must learn. It is often claimed that immi-

grants in particular would benefit from a greater knowledge of Dutch

history, facilitated by a shared canon or a national historical museum

(Scheffer, 2007). But in the current political climate, it is the native

Dutch who most value the orientation provided by a clearly spelled-

out national past. It gives them the opportunity to defend their

locale against newcomers, who don’t share its past.

Four spheres of belonging

People in our days of heightened mobility and more fluid gender

roles have responded in different ways to what they experience as

their ‘crisis of home’. Some have retreated into their private worlds,

a version of defensive localism that fits the idea of home- as- haven

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(a common response to rapid social change in the US). In Europe,

globalization has elicited other kinds of defensive localism. In the

Netherlands, ‘feeling at home’ has transcended the private realm

to become a public category: immigrants are forced to choose the

Dutch identity, to give up old loyalties (Connor, 2007), habits, norms

and values, to feel at home in their country of residence and to pub-

licly prove it. The Dutch nation, rooted in the imaginary past, is

constructed in opposition to the outside world of migration and

mobility.

But there was and is more to feelings of home than being attached

to either the individual home or the nation. In Chapter 1, I intro-

duced a three- level scheme: the micro level of the household, the

meso level of the community and the macro level of the nation.

However, reality is more complex than this three- layered model. First

of all, the three levels are inter- related. To give just two examples:

in the US, the idea of a besieged ‘private’ home is increasingly con-

structed in the context of threats posed by the outside world (from

the financial crisis to terrorism, see Low, 2008). In the Netherlands,

the nation is constructed as a family home where migrants are the

disobedient children spoiling the home feelings of ‘rooted’ genera-

tions. The three- level model also overlooks the place where more and

more Americans feel at home: the workplace. We may thus be better

off distinguishing between four spheres: the sphere of the individual

household, the economic sphere of the workplace, the associational

sphere of the community and, finally, the politico- cultural sphere of

the nation- state.

What, then, are the characteristics of ‘feeling at home’ in these

four spheres? Although we encountered various meanings of feeling

at home, we saw that familiarit y with places and people was extremely

important for all those longing to belong. As the many examples in

this book have shown, most of us are able, over time, to cultivate

bonds of familiarity with different places and people. Nevertheless,

familiarity is not enough. To truly feel at home, homogeneity (of both

people and places) plays a key role. Within individual households,

and to a lesser extent within communities, a certain homogeneity

already prevails: one feels at home with one’s own people (however

defined) in one’s own place (be it particular, generic and/or sym-

bolic). But in the workplace, and even more so in the nation- state,

one has to deal with heterogeneity. In private life and in associations

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112 The Politics of Home

one can usually choose with whom to socialize; in the economic and

politico- cultural spheres one necessarily encounters pluriformity.

There is a further structuring aspect to these four spheres. Whereas

the associational and the political spheres are by their nature public

and collective, the economic and household spheres are more individ-

ual and private. Employees generally do not publicly or collectively

feel at home in their workplaces, while the significance of associ-

ations often lies in their public visibility and collective character.

Table 6.1 summarizes these aspects in broad strokes.

At home in the US? Feeling at home in the private and

economic spheres

We saw in Chapter 1 that Americans have long been a mobile people:

on average they move twice as often as Europeans and over greater

distances. While the need to feel at home somewhere is as real for

Americans as it is for their more sedentary European counterparts,

what this home means has been greatly influenced by the history of

mobility within the United States and the experience of migration

to the new world. Though the rate of mobility seems to be decreas-

ing (Fischer, 2010) as Americans finally settle down (Pew Research

Center, 2008), restlessness and rootlessness are deeply rooted in

the American psyche (Jasper, 2000). Feeling at home – recalling

Christopher Lasch’s well- known dictum ‘Home is as a haven in a

heartless world’ – is experienced primarily in one’s own house, an

oasis in a turbulent and volatile world.

In practice, this house can be in different places – home can move

several times over the course of one’s life. To feel at home is thus not

about being rooted in a specific spot or to be attached to a certain

neighborhood. Home is rather a stop on a life route which promises

Table 6.1 The four spheres of ‘home’

Individual/private Collective/public

Homogeneous Household Community

Private sphere Associational sphere

Heterogeneous Workplace Nation- State

Economic sphere Politico -cultural sphere

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constant change (Anderson, 1991 [1983]; Gustafson, 2001; Hannerz,

1996). Familiar, particular people and goods can aid this process of

feeling at home, as can familiar, generic chains like Starbucks and

McDonalds.

The ability to move repeatedly and to feel at home in new places

has become part of the American identity. It fits with this adaptabil-

ity that new immigrants to the US do not remain outsiders for long;

they quickly become fellow Americans (Ghorashi, 2003, pp. 221–2).

Although a certain exclusion of Muslim immigrants occurred after

9/11, the negative politicization of Islam in the form and intensity

it took in the Netherlands and other highly secularized Western

European countries did not take place. This is not to say that nothing

has changed. After 9/11 the US experienced a wave of intense patriot-

ism in which the connection was made between ‘home’ and ‘nation’.

Suddenly there was much talk of the ‘homeland’ (materializing in

the Department of Homeland Security). Prior to 9/11, ‘home’ had not

been associated with the nation; ‘home’ was at home.

The hyper- mobile American society was built on the foundation

of traditional gender roles. If people moved, it was because the man

had found a new job. American women (and certainly white middle-

class women) were, until the 1950s, the primary home- makers. This

has, of course, changed, and the American crisis of home has every-

thing to do with (the uneven outcomes of) this gender revolution.

American women, certainly in comparison to their Dutch counter-

parts, entered the labor force en masse. But as men did not become

equal partners in the household, the emancipation of women put life

at home under great stress. As elaborated in Chapter 3, the American

sociologist Arlie Hochschild has described this process in a number

of books, including The Second Shift (1989) and The Time Bind: When

Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work (1997). Americans today

live under permanent time pressure: they not only combine full-

time jobs and family responsibilities (especially women), but also, in

the lower segment of the labor market, often combine several jobs.

Many Americans endure long commutes and couples are sometimes

forced to live apart due to their work. For many children there is at

best something curious called ‘quality time’.

The uneven outcomes of the gender revolution – resulting in a

destabilization of the nuclear family unsupported by welfare state

provisions such as public childcare – has created a chronic time

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114 The Politics of Home

bind at home which strongly colors the American public and pol-

itical debate. The crisis at home also fuels the nostalgia discussed

above: in the not- too- distant past, there seemed to be much more

time. ‘Family values’ are so popular in America today precisely

because family life is under siege. In this sense, America is a nostal-

gic nation, a country wrestling with a revolution that has already

taken place.

As we saw in Chapter 3, some Americans look to examples in

Northwestern Europe for solutions to their crisis at home. Especially

in the Scandinavian countries, the time bind appears less daunting

due to quality public childcare and a better balance between the

cost of living and the number of hours households must work. The

American work- and- care debate shows that a certain type of nostal-

gia need not be at odds with innovation; visions for the future can

grow out of appreciation for aspects of the past, as well as for how

things are done in other societies. There appear to be better ways to

combine work and care, and places where people have more time.

There is a world to be won.

But what kind of world would that be? And what would ‘home’

be within it? American sociologists have been seeking to regain,

where possible, some of the former aspects of home without throw-

ing out the achievements of women’s emancipation. As discussed

in Chapter 3, incompatible views compete here. At one end of

the spectrum, ‘home’ for Arlie Hochschild is a haven in a hostile,

commercialized world; her view is rather nostalgic for feeling at

home is to be exclusively experienced at home. At the other end

of the spectrum, Dalton Conley’s conception of home stretches

it from the private into the economic sphere. Conley advocates a

world where the barriers between the worlds of care and work no

longer exist, where people will be parents at work and workers at

home.

In other words, while both Hochschild and Conley acknowledge

the importance of ‘home’, they draw disparate conclusions regarding

where it should be. Whereas Hochschild claims that the only way

to save home is by protecting households from the market, Conley

argues that home will need to thrive in a world globalized by the

internet, laptops, cell phones and other technological innovations

that do not respect the old boundaries between the private sphere

and the market. Home- making practices, for Conley, can take place

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everywhere, particularly at work. Private enterprises like Google

embody the future of home.

In answering the question ‘How should we balance the strong feel-

ings of belonging many Americans have developed at work and the

decline of such feelings at home?’, it would be fruitful to examine

other alternatives that honor the divergent preferences of people of

different ages, household situations, classes and incomes, cultural

backgrounds and sexualities (Coontz, 1997). Hochschild, however,

seems to suggest that feeling at home- at- work and at home is a zero-

sum game. But why must this be so? Her finding that for some men

and women, home- at- work has replaced home- at- home does not

mean that all people are unable to experience a sense of belonging in

both. Perhaps surprisingly, Conley shares the same assumption: for

him, feeling at home- at- work will eventually replace feeling at home-

at- home – a comparable zero- sum perspective on home feelings that

does scant justice to the variety of home feelings we encountered in

this book.

In terms of the Table 6.1, both Hochschild and Conley focus on the

shift from home- at- home to home- at- work within the ‘individual/

private’ pillar (that people may also feel at home within communi-

ties or within the nation is not their primary concern). An import-

ant difference is that Hochschild locates ‘real’ home feelings in the

homogeneous environment of the individual household: home is a

private haven located in a particular place, with strong boundaries from

the economic sphere of work.1 Note that, for Conley as well, feeling

at home is an exclusive emotion (not really public, let alone collect-

ive). Home is a safe haven (parents can look after their children all

day) though not a place for retreat or domesticity. And since Conley

cl aim s t hat w e c an fee l at home i n the work plac e, ‘home’ is no t a ve ry

particular place. Interestingly, Conley combines the idea of a private

haven with a generic place as embodied in offices (though workers

may try to ‘particularize’ their office spaces by bringing pictures of

their loved ones, plants, etc.).

In this discussion of the pros and cons of these two types of ‘pri-

vate’ homes, I propose being particularly mindful of the possible

exclusionary consequences of where one locates home. If we prefer

private- sphere homes to be safe havens, we know from experience

that we will select ‘people like us’. In the workplace we necessar-

ily have to deal with more diversity, a significant fact in countries

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116 The Politics of Home

such as the US, where other spheres such as housing and education

are highly segregated. This heterogeneity also explains why home-

making at work is no easy task. In this sense, it is quite an achieve-

ment that some Americans do feel at home- at- work: it either shows

that workplaces are, in fact, quite segregated or (a more optimistic

reading) that some people can feel at home with others, even when

they are quite different. While feeling at home, for Conley, may be a

less intense emotion than it is for Hochschild, it shows the capacity

of some people to attach to generic places and relative strangers.

At home in the Netherlands? Feeling at home in the

politico-cultural sphere

As sketched above, the Netherlands is also experiencing nostalgic

times; politicians and public opinion leaders claim a crisis in ‘feeling

at home’ so strong that the government has made it a national policy

objective: ‘The goal must be to establish a society in which everybody

can feel at home’ (Dutch Cabinet, 2008). This crisis of home feelings

in the Netherlands, and more broadly in Western Europe, has little

to do with the emancipation of women (or the lack of men’s eman-

cipation), but with that other major transformation of our times: the

increased global mobility of goods and, especially, people.

When Dutch politicians speak of a crisis in ‘feeling at home’, they

are referring to increasingly immigrant neighborhoods, the lack of

uniformity in social conventions, and public expressions of religios-

ity in a predominantly secular society. The Netherlands, imagined as

a single house, ‘is being taken over by foreigners’. In response, many

native Dutch long for a time when it was still ‘just us’. The leader

of the rightwing populist party in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders,

formulates his revanchism as follows: ‘Millions of Dutchmen want

change. They want to be proud of their country. They want to feel

safe in their country again. They want another Netherlands. They

want to feel at home in their own country. They want a decent

and social Netherlands. They want their Netherlands back’ (Dutch

Parliament [Tweede Kamer], 2008b).

Wilders’ is not an isolated voice in Western Europe, where the

public discussion on ‘feeling at home’ has grown increasingly exclu-

sionary. As ‘thick’, historically rooted national identities are invoked

to increase cohesion within societies, the obligation to feel at home

becomes particularly problematic for immigrants. The historical

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obsession not only requires the past to be rewritten to project all

kinds of valued ‘national’ characteristics; it marginalizes new immi-

grants. The historical rooting of contemporary citizenship also

encourages the belief among native populations that they naturally

have the most right to feel at home.

In his book The Perils of Belonging: Autochthony, Citizenship, and

Exclusion in Africa and Europe (2009), the anthropologist Peter

Geschiere examines how ‘autochthony’ is used to deny (or worse,

rescind) equal rights to newcomers and immigrants. The constructed

primordial right to belong has an appeal of naturalness to many

people (Geschiere, 2004; Geschiere and Ceuppens, 2005; Geschiere

and Nyamnjoh, 2000). Note that this ‘nativism’ is not only alive on

the political right. Many leftwing parties also have positive under-

standings of ‘rootedness’, as was evident among spokespersons of the

Dutch Labor party quoted in Chapter 5. Historically, this may be

understandable: the left sympathized with native populations dis-

placed at the time of colonization by white Westerners. Progressive

circles tend to have solidarity with the ‘indigenous people’ – prob-

lematic, however, when this solidarity is based on the idea that

natives have territorial rights solely due to their status as the first

inhabitants ( Jackson, 1995).

The Left, at least in Western Europe, seems deeply divided on

whether such historical claims to territory are justified. Does it

make sense in the face of globalization to stick to such notions of

entitlement and the idea that one ‘belongs’ in only one place? At

the same time, the mobility of others strengthens historical claims

among non- mobile populations. Numerous studies have shown

how districts change through the influx of immigrants and the

resulting assertion by native populations of ‘primordial bonds’ and

‘rights to the ground’ (Avila, 2004; Kasinitz and Hillyard, 1995;

Rieder, 1985; Seligman, 2005). I fully agree with David Harvey that

we need to take these ‘defensive’ sentiments seriously: ‘The depic-

tion of others’ geographical loyalties as banal and irrational ... helps

foster ignorance of and disinterest in the lives of those others’

(2000, p. 556).

In the culturalist conceptualization of the Dutch nation

(Duyvendak et al., 2010; Schinkel, 2008, 2010; Uitermark, 2010),

however, the national ‘home’ should be closed to newcomers who

bring heterogeneity, loss of cohesion and feelings of alienation.

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118 The Politics of Home

‘Home’ here is a very particular understanding of the nation, as if

(in terms of the table) the politico-cultural sphere can be equated

with the sphere of the homogeneous and private individual house-

hold. But this is exactly what populist politicians want: they oppose

supranational entities (like the EU) and want the Netherlands to

be a ‘gated community’ rather than a place connected to other

places in countless ways. In their rhetoric, there is no place for

such inconvenient facts such as there are few countries in the

world where so many goods flow in and out; where such a large

part of the population keeps in touch with the world online; where

so many share solidarity with so many others elsewhere in the

world; where so many holidays are spent overseas; where almost all

citizens master two or more languages; where science is so inter-

nationally oriented; and, indeed, where so many immigrants have

recently come to live. Populist politicians – so central in the debate

in the Netherlands and more generally in Western Europe – fail to

understand that the politico- cultural sphere is not only collective

and public in nature but must also be open to a heterogeneous

citizenry.

There are, to be sure, many ways to deal with this diversity in the

public sphere. Some countries have tried to banish from it all particu-

larities. This French Jacobin ‘model’ holds that only neutral public

spaces can guarantee social peace and that deeply ingrained feelings

of belonging have to remain restricted to private life. Nevertheless,

such quasi- neutral spaces often bear the hallmarks of the domin-

ant culture. The recent debates on national identity in France once

more show, like earlier discussions on the headscarf, that what is

presented as ‘neutral’ is an expression of the norms, values, attitudes

and behavior of the native majority (Akan, 2009; Bertossi, 2009;

Bertossi and Duyvendak, 2009; Butler, 2008). From this perspective,

the secular French and Dutch anti- multicultural positions are, in

fact, quite similar, though in France the secular elite still claims to

be ‘neutral’.

Another way of dealing with diversity in the politico- cultural

sphere is to give different groups certain rights. This can come in

various forms, ranging from ‘thin’ to ‘thick’ versions of multicul-

turalism. However, all versions of multiculturalism share a funda-

mental problem: if people develop thick public notions of home by

celebrating their identities, they risk jeopardizing the home feelings

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of other s. Put differ ently, the w ish to feel completely at home in pub-

lic may eventually lead to clashes between groups whose expressions

of feeling at home are not (fully) compatible.

Populist nationalism is the thickest variant of the public and col-

lective version of home: the majority claims the nation- state as its

property and demands from the minority that it adapts (or disap-

pears). This ‘heaven’ concept of the nation is a de facto negation

of the heterogeneity of the politico- cultural sphere – and as such

the end of democratic politics. Before introducing a more plural

notion of ‘home’ befitting the politico- cultural sphere – home as

a hybrid place – we turn to the nature of home in the associational

sphere.

At home in the community? Feeling at home in the

associational sphere

Communities often thrive on the basis of deep- seated feelings and

historically rooted experiences. Not all communities, however, feel

the same regarding their ‘rights to the ground’. Many residents of

smaller villages may (still) find it self- evident that they morally own

the ground; in the big cities, similar claims of ‘moral property’ often

seem out of place. This is not to say that urban communities – people

who have resided in urban neighborhoods for generations – don’t

have claims based on place attachment (van der Graaf, 2009). But

they know that these claims are necessarily relative in an urban con-

text of constant change.

How relative such claims should be is a central motif within urban

contestation. In Chapter 1, I showed that the home- making strat-

egies of ‘rooted’ people often rely on attachments to particular places

and goods. As their living environments are irrevocably affected by

globalization, people seek home- making strategies that particularize

their surroundings, thereby helping them to feel publicly and col-

lectively at home (in ‘heaven’). It is precisely those groups who feel

socially marginalized – such as residents of disadvantaged neighbor-

hoods or gays and lesbians – who have the greatest need for particu-

lar public places to feel at home.

But as we saw in the two examples of ‘positive’ home- making in

Chapter 4, the search for more inclusive neighborhoods is no easy

task. For the disabled, the indifference of ‘normal’ society meant that

they ended up living isolated in their own homes (an extreme form

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120 The Politics of Home

of home- as- haven). In the case of the Castro, gays and lesbians were

able to create their own particular gay district (home- as- heaven). But,

as is often the case with such publicly expressed homes, the profiled

identity left little room for other identities. Heterosexuals, Starbucks

and the cable car were not welcome – or at least their arrival was

heavily contested.

Alongside the question of how to deal with diversity within com-

munities and neighborhoods, there is the further question of how

relatively homogeneous communities relate to the broader urban

context. Research by Kasinitz et al. (2008) has shown that second-

generation immigrants in New York City do well partly because they

live in environments that value diversity. They show that a certain

homogeneity in the residential environment – in terms of ethnicity,

class, age, lifestyles or sexuality – need not obstruct exchanges with

others elsewhere in the city, for example in schools, in public spaces

or at work. Contact with relative strangers need not diminish one’s

sense of belonging to the extent that one feels supported ‘at home’

by a rather homogeneous and nurturing community.

Such is the idea behind San Francisco’s self- understanding as a

‘city of communities’. It shows that getting everyone to feel at home

is also a question of scale – of balancing feelings of belonging that

require familiar surroundings with openness towards others living

elsewhere in the city. Neighborhoods inhabited primarily by mem-

bers of a single ethnic (or sexual, age or class) group can aid residents’

sense of belonging.2 The question is whether such particular places

can also help their residents to live with diversity in the rest of the

city, or whether they are destined to be ‘defensive’ places set up to

keep others out.

A certain visibility of one’s own group in public space can make it

easier to bridge the distance with other groups. This happens most

easily, for example in New York City, where everyone is a minor-

ity and power differences between groups are relatively limited.

But active pluriformity to allow everyone to feel at home in pub-

lic remains a delicate balancing act as manifestations of one group’s

feelings of home may be met by hostility from other groups.

How much space different groups should enjoy to collectively

manifest their sense of belonging – on streets and squares, in schools

and other public spaces, in their neighborhoods or in the city at

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large – remains a burning issue. Because different groups express feel-

ings of home differently, it is idle to demand that everyone behave

in the same way. Space for the public expression of feeling at home

by different groups, however, only emerges when citizens empathize

with the desire of others to belong. This empathy can only arise in

situations where everybody’s right to feel at home is respected; in

order to really be able to belong somewhere, others have to agree

that you belong. The basis of a harmonious society is therefore not

forced assimilation into one notion of ‘home’ but recognition that

everybody wishes to belong.

People will withdraw into their private homes if this acknowledg-

ment is lacking (Putnam, 2007). Some may applaud such a devel-

opment as it reduces public confrontations over ‘who belongs’.

Nevertheless, the my house is my home strategy (as discussed in

Chapter 1) will eventually fail. The blurring of the private and public

spheres will not cease by declaring public home feelings to be out of

place. Home feelings for many people are neither private nor indi-

vidual: they want to collectively and publicly express and experience

‘home’. This need not be problematic so long as citizens do not claim

the entire street, neighborhood, city or nation as their own. People

can publicly and collectively express their home feelings in so far

as they acknowledge that their experience of particular, generic or

symbolic places as home is just one and not the only possible way.

Moreover, their ‘right’ to feel at home – not a formal but a moral

right – comes with a corresponding duty: to help others to feel at

home as well.

In other words, the public sphere has to be plural. In a democratic

and diverse society, the ‘home’ of the public sphere is necessarily

hybrid; neither a haven nor a heaven, but a place one has to share

with many others. And it is precisely because ‘home feelings’ are no

longer limited to the private and individual sphere that we need this

hybrid conceptualization of the public and collective home. That

said, the breadth of nationalist policies in Western Europe leave little

space for such hybridity. The politico- cultural sphere is equated to a

thick notion of home for a particular group, instead of being open to

all citizens. Ideal- typically, however, the nation- state should include

all of its citizens. If we want to retain the idea of the nation- as- home,

it needs to be a house with many rooms.

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122 The Politics of Home

Feeling at home ‘light’

Sociologists have long attempted to comprehend the importance of

belonging. While many sociologists have nurtured inborn sympa-

thies for the ‘rootless’ and ‘restless’ (see Chapter 1), others have crit-

ically analyzed the struggle between Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft

(Tönnies) and the effects of modernization (Weber’s anomie). But

overall, sociological studies have examined social change as a norma-

tive phenomenon. In broad strokes, the discipline has been future-

oriented, optimistic and progressive (and hence often partisan).

However, if we want to better understand the great changes of our

time and the ‘liquidity’ of the societies (Bauman, 2007) in which we

live, we as sociologists have to reconsider our repertoires. We indeed

need to better comprehend the gender and migration revolutions, for

they now seem to be inciting nostalgia rather than propelling us for-

wards. The present volume has shown that the old questions of social

cohesion, of Gemeinschaft, and of ‘home’ remain current in our post-

modern days of change, mobility and migration. I fully agree with

Rapport and Dawson that ‘while it may sometimes come laden with

reactionary resonances, “home” should not be ceded to the political

Right’ (1998, p. 8). Or in the words of Ir is Marion Young: ‘The appro-

priate response ... is not to reject the values of home, but instead to

claim those values for everyone’ (2005, p. 151).

One of my main conclusions concerns the political role of nostal-

gia. The nostalgic mood sweeping Western Europe frames the past –

the national past – as the ‘rooted’ basis for national identity. The

historical rooting of contemporary citizenship encourages the belief

among native populations that they naturally have the most right to

feel at home while marginalizing new immigrants who were never

Table 6.2 Conceptions of ‘home’ in the four spheres

Individual/Private Collective/Public

Household Community

Homogeneous Private Sphere Associational Sphere

Haven/Particular place Heaven/Particular place

Work place Nat ion- State

Heterogeneous Economic Sphere Politico- Cultural Sphere

Haven/Generic place Hybrid/Symbolic place

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part of that history. ‘Nostalgia’ is part and parcel of the current pol-

itics of home.

Other social scientists, including anthropologists, historians and

social geographers, have addressed the power of nostalgia. Urban

sociology has long paid attention to feelings of ‘expropriation’ and

‘loss’ through gentrification and urban renewal – think of the well-

known article by Marc Fried (1963), ‘Grieving for a Lost Home’.

From a more general sociological perspective, Fred Davis’s Yea rnin g

for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia (1979) remains of interest,

while Pickering and Keightley have argued that nostalgia – beau-

tifully described as ‘the composite feeling of loss, lack, and long-

ing’ (Pickering and Keightley, 2006, p. 921) – tells a story about the

present as much as it does about the past. Here they come close to

the works of Svetlana Boym, who does not ask what the ‘real’ past

was (let alone the past that the nostalgics wish to reveal); instead,

she examines how depictions of the past are used for the present.

We need to further develop a sociology of nostalgia that under-

stands grief for what has been lost, but also what drives this nostal-

gia, whom it includes and excludes, and what kinds of shared future

may emerge – an empathic sociology that understands why people

need to belong while showing the conditions under which they can

peacefully do so.

Doreen Massey sketches the contours of a perspective on (urban)

space that honors people’s existing feelings of attachment without

excluding newcomers:

In this interpretation, what gives a place its specificity is not some

long internalized history but the fact that it is constructed out of

a particular constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving

together at a particular locus. ... Instead then of thinking about

places as areas with boundaries around them, they can be imag-

ined as articulated moments in networks of social relations and

understandings. ... And this in turn allows a sense of place which

is extroverted, which includes a consciousness of its links with the

wider world, which integrate in a positive way the global and the

local. (Massey, 2007, pp. 154–5)

This switch from a temporal to an open, spatial perspective is very

welcome in today’s Western Europe. Nationalist conceptions of

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124 The Politics of Home

space, however, are not only exclusionary due to their historical

rooting; their thick notions of home produce many ‘others’ as well.

Nationalists – even when their nationalism is based on demanding

adherence to liberal, progressive values (Lægaard, 2007; van Reekum,

2010) – leave no space for ‘others’ to publicly and collectively feel at

home in the politico-cultural sphere.

Feeling at home is a sentiment that has its appropriate and even

necessary place in the politico- cultural sphere. To be inclusive, this

‘home’ needs to be open and hybrid in its symbols – necessary to

peacefully accommodate different feelings of home in the public

arena. Moreover, the politico- cultural sphere needs to balance the

shadow sides of exclusionary individual, private and homogeneous

form s of b elon ging. In this sen se, the household, econom ic and a sso -

ciational spheres rely on the political sphere, the only sphere that

can truly be inclusive in terms of collectively and publicly feeling

at home in a heterogeneous setting. Feeling at home in the nation-

state, then, is the capacity to experience comfort among relative

strangers. This does not equal the footloose cosmopolitan dream – it

is the daily reality of an ever- growing group of grounded people liv-

ing their home feelings ‘lightly’.

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125

Notes

1 A Homesick World?

1. Like the universalist position, this label is used to describe an empirical

rather than normative position. Particularists disagree among each other,

as do universalists.

2. Others, while agreeing with the latter claim, would emphasize that

this longing for homogeneous space will lead to something akin to

apartheid.

3. At which point the generic becomes the particular.

4. As Doreen Massey (1995) has argued, this is pertinent to many cos-

mopolitans: they can have their f ree- f loating lifestyles because others

are there to take care of their particular places. One of her most telling

examples comes from her study of a group of highly successf ul male sci-

entists at Cambridge University. ‘These men are able to counterbalance

the intense, virtual and actual forms of mobility of their professional

lives (in which they daily communicate with colleagues internationally

and regularly travel to conferences abroad) with the quieter delights of

their secluded domestic lifestyles, in their houses in the Cambridgeshire

country side – which are, of course, ma intained for them, in t heir absenc e,

by their wives. Certainly, one of the other dimensions of differences

involved here involves the way in which the burden of Heimat is often

carried by the female “home- maker”, in so far as relations to mobil-

ity and sedentarism are commonly gendered in one way or another’

(pp. 190–1).

2 Why Feeling at Home Matters

1. See also annotated surveys such as Perkins and Thorns (2003).

2. Methodologically, the way to proceed is to ask when, why and where peo-

ple do not feel at home.

3. Nowicka seems hesitant to draw the radical conclusion that ‘home’

can be completely de- territorialized since she – in line with the

actor–network tradition she is sympathetic to – wants to empha-

size the material side of ‘home- making’. If home can be completely

‘de- territorialized’, how then to understand home- making practices

which need to take place somewhere? While examining the mate-

rial side of such an elusive concept as ‘home’ is laudable, it does not

follow that people cannot also feel at home in non- material, non-

terr itorialized ‘worlds’.

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126 Notes

4. This fits with Heidegger’s thinking about home: ‘W hat is it to feel a sense

of belonging rather than alienation? In his answer, [Heidegger] suggested

th at it is a p ro ce ss of c om mu nication. Ea ch gener at ion le aves s ymbols an d

stories, rooted in time and space. Those of us in subsequent generations

learn to belong by receiving and reinterpreting those stories, as well as

adding our own’ (Atkins, 2003, p. 10).

3 Losing Home at Home: When Men and Women Feel

More at Home at Work

1. In which she writes: ‘One excellent way to raise the value of care is to

involve fathers in it. If men shared the care of family members worldwide,

care would spread laterally instead of being passed down a social class lad-

der. ... For indeed it is men who have for the most part stepped aside from

caring work, and it is with them that the “care drain” truly begins’ (2003,

p. 29).

2. This is also evident in Chris Carrington’s (1999) book No Place Like Home:

Relationships and Family Life Among Lesbians and Gay Men. Carrington

writes that the unequal distribution of tasks inside and outside the home,

which he also encounters among lesbian and gay male couples, has noth-

ing to do wit h ge nder (since b oth partners ar e of the same sex). He shows

that extremely egalitarian ideals exist in homosexual relationships

regarding the distribution of household chores and, increasingly often,

ch ildcare task s, with both p art ners att ac hed to li fe at home, to ‘domestic-

ity’. Nevertheless, the two partners often contribute unequally. How is

this possible? Carrington agrees with Hochschild, Gornick and Meyers,

and Jacobs and Gerson, that pressure from outside – as expressed in the

overpowering need for (more) money – leads to the unequal distribution

of the second shift, which is performed mainly by the partner with lower

income: ‘Paid employment exerts the greatest inf luence upon the divi-

sion of domesticity in most lesbigay families. The number of hours paid

work requires, where the work takes place, the length of the commute

to work, the pay, the prestige, and difficulty of the work all conflate to

encourage a pattern of specialization. The relative resources that each

person brings to the relationship from paid work influence the division

of labor. In most cases, the person with less earning capacities, or with

less occupational prestige, picks up a disproportionate share of domestic

labor’ (p. 188).

3. These figures are for 2009.

4. These figures are for 2005.

5. Some American women begin to work part time after the birth of

their first child. According to Gerson and Jacobs: ‘The reduced time

among working parents is not gender neutral, however. Indeed, hus-

bands work more hours when they have children at home, and their

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working hours increase along with the number of children’ (2004a,

p. 49).

6. A person is deemed to be economically independent in the Netherlands if

he or she earns 70 percent of the net minimum wage.

7. On the other hand, the situation for women is even worse in South

European countries. Women in Greece and Spain, for example, spend

69.8 and 67.9 hours, respectively, on work and care, which is consider-

ably more t han women in North Eu ropean cou ntrie s. Th is is b ec ause t hey

both work more (poor leave arrangements) and care more (poor child day

care).

5 Feeling at Home in the Nation? Understanding Dutch

Nostalgia

1. Pillarization refers to the division of Dutch society into religious and

ideological groups during the first half of the twentieth century. There

was a Roman Catholic ‘pillar’, a Protestant pillar that was further divided

internally and a neutral or secular pillar. Each had its own schools, socie-

ties, political parties, broadcasting organizations, newspapers, hospitals,

etc. This vertical split ran through all social classes.

2. The standard deviation of a series of numbers can be understood as their

average distance from the average. For example, if the average result of

two examinations is five, this can mean that a five was obtained in both

examinations or that the respective scores were one and nine. In the first

case the standard deviation is zero; in the second it is four.

3. In any election year, sentences and phrases within party programs are

coded for 56 separate issues. The space devoted to each is expressed as a

percentage. Polarization over authoritarianism is measured by determin-

ing the space allotted by each party to the maintenance of law and order,

and then subtracting that devoted to minority groups of a non- economic

and non- demographic nature. This gives each party a score reflecting

how strongly it stresses authoritarianism over libertarianism. We then

calculate the polarization between the parties for each election year using

the standard deviation. We measure polarization over moral traditional-

ism by determining the space allotted to negative comments on tradi-

tional moral themes such as family, religion and immoral behavior, and

then subtracting that devoted to positive comments on these issues. The

resulting scores show the extent to which parties value traditional moral

values. The standard deviation for each election year reflects the degree

of polarization.

4. In response to the Scientific Council for Government Policy’s report

‘Identification with the Netherlands’ (for analysis of this data, see

Scientific Council for Government Policy [Wetenschappelijke Raad voor

het Regeringsbeleid], 2007).

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128 Notes

6 Conclusion: Inclusive Ways of Feeling at Home?

1. See, on negotiating these boundaries between home and work, the beauti-

ful book by Nippert- Eng (1996).

2. While American readers may wonder why it is even necessary to point

this out (see Abra hamson, 20 05 [1996]), in Wester n Eu rope ‘mi xed neigh-

borhoods’ have become something of a policy dogma.

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145

Index

affects, 39, 40

Ahmed, S., 35

alienation

among native-born citizens, 84–6,

96– 8, 117

of women, 44

American dream, 18, 20

American identity, 19, 113

Appiah, K., 31

Aries, P., 60

assimilation, 31, 121

associational sphere, 111, 119–21

asylum seekers, 9

authoritarianism, 89–92, 127n3

autochthony, 117

Beatley, T., 9–10

Beck, U., 8

belonging, 11, 12, 15–16, 93, 106,

122, 124

elective, 11

spheres of, 110–21

Berger, J., 7

Berger, P., 9

Bos, W., 95

Bourdieu, P., 27–8

Boym, S., 108, 123

Braidotti, R., 9

Buruma, I., 90

capitalism, 45, 58

caring responsibilities, 48, 51–2

Carrington, C., 126n2

Castells, M., 8–9

Castro neighborhood, 74–83, 120

childcare, 46, 50, 114

men and, 53–4

time spent on, 51, 52, 54

chronically mobile (persons), 12–15,

29, 32, 36

citizenship

culturalization of, 2, 41, 87, 92–4,

101

dual, 93, 94

class differences, 36

collective identity, 2, 80

Collins, C., 4, 104

communities

definition of, 63

feeling at home in, 83, 119–21

gay, 74 –83, 119–20

promises and pitfalls of, 82–3

psychiatric patients in, 68 –73

community care, for people with

disabilities, 62–73

Conley, D., 59, 60, 114–15

cosmopolitanism, 10, 16, 106,

125n4

‘crisis of home’, 3–4, 6, 17, 20–2

in Europe, 23 –4, 107

gender revolution and, 44 –5

in Netherlands, 86–8

in US, 3–4, 20 –2, 44 –5, 48,

58– 60, 105–7, 113–14

cultural consensus, in Netherlands,

87–92

cultural identity, 86, 101

culturalization of citizenship, 2, 41,

87, 92–4, 101

culture

closed conception of, 84–5

Dutch, 84–5

Damasio, A.R., 40

Davis, F., 123

Dawson, A., 7, 9

defensive localists, 24, 72–3, 110–11

de-institutionalization, 63–73

Department of Homeland Security,

105, 113

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146 Index

discrimination, 62–3

diversity

within communities, 120

in Western Europe, 1

dual citizenship, 93, 94

Dutch culture, 84 –5

Dutch identity, 93, 98–103

Dutchness, 24

Dutch women, par t-time work by,

49, 50, 52–3

Easthope, H., 37

economic sphere, 111–16, 122

elective belonging, 11, 12, 15, 29, 39

emotions, 39– 42

employment

The Politics of Home. Nostalgia and Belonging in Western Europe and the United States

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