Home: The Foundations of Belonging

This book offers an anthropological and historical perspective on home. Beginning with a vision of modernity as characterised by both spiralling liminality and an ongoing quest for belonging, it plumbs the roots of western civilisation and assembles a wide body of comparative evidence to illuminate the foundations of a sense of home. Home is theorised as a stable centre around which we organise routines and perspectives on reality, bringing order to a chaotic world and overcoming liminality. It thus occupies the position of a foundational sociological and anthropological concept at a moment when the crisis of globalisation has opened the way to a cultural revaluation of the local.