This document analyzes the concept of home. It discusses how home provides a sense of identity, security and belonging for individuals. Home shapes one's perspective and movement through the world. However, definitions of home can vary between individuals, even within the same home environment, based on their unique experiences. The document also explores how one's sense of home can change and evolve when moving to a new environment, with their original home still influencing their identity but a new home potentially providing a new sense of belonging and peace.

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Rida Ilyas
Architecture Design Studio
November 7th’2013
The Place of Home by Janet Donohoe
An Analysis
“Before any choice, there is this place which we have not chosen, where the very foundation of
our earthly existence and human condition establishes itself. We can change places, move, but
this is still to look for a place, for this we need as a base to set down Being and to realize our
possibilities—a here from which the world discloses itself, a there to which we can go” (Relph,
1976)
Home is a place where a daughter’s first touch is when her palm meets her mother’s palm, where
her mother holds her hand in hers, a place that echoes with the sound of her brother’s laughter, a
place that smells with the scent of her father. She knows she is home. She feels loved and secure
and there is no place on earth she’d rather be. This is the place of home for her.
When a child is born, her existence begins from the place where her family is. She adapts to what
they are, she becomes what they are, she starts doing what they do and she follows what she is
taught. She perceives this as the language of her home world. A perfect set of ideas, behavior,
beliefs, culture, and etiquettes which stylize her lifestyle. She becomes aware of the place where
she belongs and the place where she does not. As she steps out of her home world, she starts
seeing the world that surrounds her, begins to observe and interact with that world with her five
senses and this unity of senses enables her to constitute the norm based on the structure of her

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home world, by which she would judge the worlds outside it. She would not be attentive to it all
the time, but back in her head, somewhere in her sub consciousness, she would engage with it as
she lives and breathes. This designs her perspective towards the world and its people and hence
reflects her movement through the world.
Now all this, is just how one person might put together his simple definition of home. But there
is more to it. Every human has their own different way of defining home. They will not
constitute the world in the same way. Even if they belong to the same home world, they will
have different perspectives of looking at the world. Some might see the world in the calm and
warm light of the sky. Others might see it as dipped into a dark sea of chaos. Our bodily
encounters in the world are stylized according to the home’s normative bodily stylizing. The
writer has thereby emphasized on the fact that home has a normative power that encounters with
places other than home itself. Public places or other homes are all measured according to one’s
own place of home. This doesn’t mean that home is always a positive and peaceful place. Hence,
home plays a normative role for each of us in a different way.
For a person whose home is a place of fear, abuse and negative energy will approach the world
with a perspective of insecurity. Even the safer places will be approached with a sense of fear,
self-doubt and hesitancy. Once she is persuaded that the place is otherwise, she might reconsider
her definition of home. For her, the new home would be the place where she longs to be and
where she might find the peace that her heart and mind seeks. Now this new approach might
bring a change in her bodily language with which she encounters the world since the home world
serves as ‘ground’ in conjunction with our approach to the environment.
“A here from which the world discloses itself, a there to which we can go”

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The new definition of home revolves around the “inhabited space” and the “space of protected
intimacy”. Our bodies are not contained by the world and places that are inhabited by us but they
are interconnected with the world. They allow us to move in the world and respond to the gravity
of things that fascinate us. According to Eva Simms (2008, 42),
“The body as mine is given to me not in itself and through the recognition of the boundedness of
its skin but as an element in the equation of action space... The body becomes predictable in
encounters with the things and people of its action space, and particular gestures and
experiences repeat and sediment in the flesh.”
The body is how we make a place our own, and the central place occupied by our bodies
eventually becomes our home. The desire for home calls us to be observant to how our
surroundings and thinking belongs to our dwelling and how we have the power to overcome that
or change that according to our suitability. What is actually happening when we move to a new
home world? Are we claiming that our alien world becomes our home world? Are we losing our
initial home world? And does that also mean that our previous home world is our new alien
world? This is just where it gets interesting. I would see this as metamorphosis. We move to new
surroundings, new thinking, and new environment. This doesn’t mean we let go of who we
initially were. We can never lose that. I am not sure but I can categorize this as evolution by
expanding our home world. Our new home world must have some relation to the old one. Hence,
our transformation is not final or absolute. It can never be complete. This is possible only if we
say we are experiencing both the worlds simultaneously. So we might be experiencing the alien
while ‘feeling at home’ somewhere outside the home itself. We find ourselves to belong to this
new place only under two scenarios. Either the new home world is ‘home-like’ or it might be the

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converse of the initial home world. Undergoing a change does not only involve a change from
mind to heart, we also have to consider the cultural, physical and bodily changes that we have to
adapt to. The changes in surroundings involve change in land we walk on, change in air we
breathe, change in nature we live with, change in people we encounter everyday and vice versa.
We experience landscape changes which might compel us to believe that our aesthetic taste is
partly dictated by the landscape and environment we are initially associated with, where we grew
up, which is enriched in our traditions and now we have to adapt to the norms associated with the
new landscape and the new environment. We start moving our bodies as dictated by the
normative power of the new home world. We become observant to how the space we choose to
inhabit can affect the way we dwell in, how we can shape our surroundings (buildings) to adapt
with the new culture, tradition, landscape and our thinking. Hence, we move to a new home
world. Defining and shaping up an entirely new home, taking on the old one with us as we move
on. We might stop right there or we might just keep moving until we seek what we long for, the
place of our home.
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