Contemporary trends of globalization in economic, political and social life have resulted in increasing cultural penetration and interaction from the global to the local levels, in the co-existence in a given social space of several cultures, and in a more vivid interpenetration of cultural experiences and practices.  Modern media and transportation technologies, travel and tourism have accentuated and accelerated processes that have been in motion through history, while distinctive counter-currents, as in increasing cultural diversity and creativity, have brought about a growing diversity of local patterns in handling and informing globalization.  The impression of growing uniformity may, therefore, be misleading as people turn more and more to culture as a means of self-definitiion and mobilization (World Culture Report 1998).

 

In the fluidity of this newly developing world order, it is lifeworld frames and the geographies of everyday life at their intersection surfaces and at their boundaries that become the most pervasive and enduring milieux in the individual and cultural production of difference.  Humans, individually or in groups, tend, to a large extent, to select spatial knowledge and behavior and thus to become spatially defined and to create identity boundaries, reinforced by time and «tradition».  Moreover, in the process of self-determination, humans also tend to push these figurative and metaphorical boundaries outward into the world, both in order to inform the world and in order to take it in.  Obviously, these boundaries are not just spatial, and they are not, more importantly, just cultural: they are also psychological, perceptual, social, moral, aesthetic, and so on[i].  In the face of a changing world geography, various types of cultural contact experienced and sought at an intensifying rate in contemporary urban settings reaffirm difference and distinctiveness, while globalizing processes are threatening to eliminate them.  The historical role of Western cities as places of interculturalism, diversity and creativity is, thus, in the process of being greatly enhanced, while boundaries of intelligibility between cultures are redrawn through much more fluid processes of articulation.

 

This paper, then, puts forth some thoughts on new formulations of the role of everyday life in a fast-changing world, in order to argue for re-embodied, context-specific geographies of everyday life as sources of cultural change and difference.  In practice, cultural difference, enriched by various social actors, either individuals or social wholes, informs culture at the global level and contributes to its definition. The emphasis here lies in the displacing of attention from the supposed passive consumption of received products, norms and values to anonymous creation, born of the unconventional (and conventional, my addition) practice of these products’ use, a refutation, of sorts, of the commonplace theses on the passivity of consumers of culture and on mass behavior (de Certeau et al 1998).  This does not, in any kind of way, imply neither a blindness to political realities and economic constraints, nor to the weight of spatiality and temporality, everywhere interwoven into common,  everyday  life.  

 

The paper engages in a bottom-up exploration of the «place» of everyday life geographies in a globalizing world in terms of a) their changing internal articulation, that is the re-articulation of relationships among realms of everyday life and b) processes of construction, transformation or preservation of cultural difference in the larger context of a globalizing world.  It draws from various sources of empirical work and suggests that it is mainly at the intersections or the boundaries of contexts of everyday life with other realms of life or contexts of meaning at various scales --from the individual to the social or trans-national-- that cultural processes take new shapes and, in turn, inform and enrich global culture.  Zones of such contact appear at all scales as the most dynamic loci of cultural potential or conflict, where the cultural cannot be conceived in any kind of way as independent of the economic, the political, the social and all other facets of life.  Zones of contact especially proliferate in the contemporary urban setting and have become especially critical as such loci of cultural difference in today’s European cities, where they become the locus, par excellence, of on-going cultural negotiation[ii].

 

I borrow de Certeau’s usage of the term everyday life from his theory of everyday practices, his social history of making do based on microhistories and microgeographies --my addition-- that move from the private sphere (of dwelling, cooking, and homemaking) to the public (the experience of living in a neighborhood). I adopt here the definition of everyday life given by de Certeau et al, as follows:

             Everyday life is what we are given every day (or what is willed to us), what    presses us, even oppresses us, because there does exist an oppression of      the present.... Everyday life is what holds us intimately, from the inside.... We   have our hearts set on such a world, a world of olfactory memory, memory of      childhood places, of the body, of childhood gestures, of pleasures.  We should perhaps underline the importance of the domain of this «irrational»      history, or this «nonhistory», according to Alphonse Dupront.  What interests             the historian of everyday life is the invisible (de Certeau et al 1998).

Of great relevance to this study is his emphasis on ordinary practices, the truant freedom of practices, and the discursiveness that combines the elements of the quotidien, whose analysis is doomed to an incessant coming and going from the theoretical to the concrete and then from the particular and the circumstantial to the general (de Certeau et al 1998) --which I loosely emulate in this paper.  Home, I define here as a cyclically experienced, personally or collectively ordered and edited version of real, perceived or imaginary geographical space.  The key elements of home are a)cyclical time or habits and b)order or control/power relations.  This definition of home, I think, encapsulates both a specific contextualization of power relations in the everyday realm and the specification of the role of place and time in the construction of social relations in everyday life geography.  Theorized in such perspective, the home and the everyday converge in essential ways. 

 

Nonetheless, whereas the broader focus of the paper is on the geographies of everyday life, I will be mostly drawing for my purposes from my work with geographies of home rather than from geographies of the everyday, a newly-emerging area of academic interest in geography, and one that is currently still in the process of interdisciplinary articulation and dynamic formulation.  I use the terms geographies of home and everyday life geographies in this essay often in parallel ways, in order to benefit from insights gained from both of these concepts into generative cultural processes --in contradistinction to homogenizing and globalizing processes of cultural diffusion.  Arguably, in practice there is much in common between them, although the concept of everyday life is much broader than that of home.  In one framework of analysis, for instance, and in addition to the realm of home, it includes the realms of work and leisure (Terkenli 1998, Urry 1994).  The confluence of the two concepts, home and the everyday, however, generally depends on the analytical perspective, as for example in bi-polar juxtapositions such as public--private and global--local, which home and the everyday may seem to inform in similar ways.

 

 

 

 

THE INTERNAL RE-ARTICULATION OF THE EVERYDAY OR THE CHANGING RELATIONSHIPS AMONG REALMS OF EVERYDAY LIFE

It is  often argued that homes have been changing in ways concurrent with the articulation of space in modernity --fragmentation, dissociation, differentiation, disembedding.  My position, further, is that the new homes of changing global geographies do not simply represent a material experience or connection to place, they also constitute symbolic regions of feeling, self or social reference and attachment, as they have always had.  If home no longer connotes a certain type of place but rather a way of life centered around the individual and around new lifestyle particularities, the basic distinguishing characteristics of home from other types of place have not changed.  It is simply their relative significance, as well as contemporary homes’ spatial, temporal and social organization that has been changing.  In fact, if home-places were not to be conceptualized as singular and bounded even in the past (Massey 1994), they certainly are much less so today.  Their distinctiveness as contexts characterized by temporal cyclicity and under personal or collective control, has not in any way diminished.  Rather, their spatial organization has become more open, fluid, and free of spatial constraints.  Accordingly, today’s homes are certainly products and media of new emerging social relationships of power, as they have always been, but on a much more socially and geographically equitable and unbounded basis.   The penetration of localities, writes Giddens (1991), and of the individual’s phenomenal world by distanciated influences, becomes accepted as a routine part of social life, thus sustaining a maintenance of ontological security.  These transformations are in part linked to an expanding area of individual self-determination in recent history, a line of thought which will not be further pursued in this occasion for purposes of economy.

 

The segregation of home life from other realms the everyday (leisure, work) that the Industrial Revolution wrought and subsequent modernization processes entrenched in the Western World  (Vance 1977) seems to be in the process of being reversed in our lifetime.  While the present age is about the commodification and individualization of what home should mean, it is more possible now than ever to dwell «authentically» anywhere, even though one may live and work in no particular place at all (Day 1977).  At the same time, the distinction within geographies of everyday life of what is now home life, work place and domain of leisure is becoming increasingly blurred, as specific pleasures are not place-bound, as work infiltrates the realm of home and as the collective sense of place is based on transcending the geographical barriers of distance and of place.  The advent of the new century, then,  witnesses a certain fusion of the lifeworld spheres of home, work and leisure in ways that are both culturally contingent and distinctive to ecumenical cultural processes.  

 

On the one hand, home life, the essential antipode to the work and the leisure realms in the Western world, has been losing its physical distinctiveness and geographical associations.  In contemporary Western societies, the weakening identification of personal or collective homes with place and social group seems to be reducing the sphere of home into patterns of routine habits.  Home in the United States, for instance, is no longer considered primarily a place.  It is rather becoming a state of being, constructed, reinforced and transformed through the everyday cyclical repetition of behavioral patterns, thoughts and feelings that make one at home (Terkenli 1993).  If the frontiers between home and the non-home, traditionally based on the private-public dichotomy, have become sharper in the last three centuries, today public life relentlessly invades our homes with the proliferation of mass media and other channels of communication, inverting these processes.  On the other hand, more and more people spend most of their waking hours in the public domain, which comes to feel like home, imbued with homelike qualities, and replacing some of the functions previously carried out at home, in private (nutrition, personal grooming, recreation, care of the elderly and so on).  While the present age is about the commodification and politicization of what home should mean, transcultural ecumenical processes have vastly expanded the boundaries and definitions of home, so as to enable one to be away from home and at home at the same time: to be at home most everywhere, provided one has the inclination and the cash to do so.  The old home-towns and home-steads of the past have given way to new frontiers in space and cyberspace (Day 1997).  While generations were once born and buried in the same community, in today’s global postmodern society, the formation of identity on the exclusive basis of a broader home has become increasingly untenable.  The telephone, TV, and PC join the world at large with our most private premises, by breaking down the boundaries between home, work and public realm.

 

The functions of the work realm, on the other hand, are too often transported home.  In the United States, the remarkable boom in home-based business has involved 41 million people working from home in some capacity, already since 1993.  This amounts to one in three Americans[iii] (Russell 1996).  In 1994, Find/SVP’s American Information User survey reported that 9.1 million people spent at least one or two days per month of the normal work schedule at home, up from 7.6 million in 1993, a 20% gain in a year.  What is more significant for our purposes, however, is that people reportedly yearn for more personal relations, and this is currently leading to changes in the ways we work (Prost 1991).  Not only is the contemporary office space customarily designed to feel «homey» and embellished with assorted home icons and other paraphernalia of the most intimate significance.  Private values have been infiltrating the work sphere, just as they have been penetrating, in one way or another, all realms of public life.  The French historian Antoine Prost writes that, as twentieth-century workers sought to reestablish warm personal relations within the cold and impersonal workplace setting, the effects spilled over beyond the cafeteria, the lunchroom and break period and affected all aspects of the organization of work.  For the younger workers of today there is no such thing as work relations, only human relations (Prost 1991).  Signs of the impact of private values on work life are not only to be found in the area of evolving concepts and strategies of business organization, but also when it comes to blending work and play.  In contemporary corporate America, business that used to be conducted over «power lunches» is now conducted while golfing in-between working hours.

 

Moreover, the boundaries between home life and leisure/ recreation are breaking down as well.  In the past, there was always something about the geographical properties or the historical or even literary associations of a place that used to distinguish it from others.  Now this distinctiveness is often staged and advertised for tourist consumption purposes.  The relevance of place and locality is thus obfuscated, if, for example, every tourist attraction can be found or created almost everywhere, and if leisure and recreation are ever and in every way present in the course of our everyday lives, as in the case, for example, of new shopping centers resembling more and more holiday resorts with amusement parks, restaurants, movie theaters and so on (Terkenli 1998).  This trend is coupled with greater home-centredness in leisure, as a result of its long-term privatization; it is linked to the decline of traditional community, to greater individual mobility and to the expansion of the leisure market in sound and vision equipment, computers and technology (Shaw and Williams 1994). 

 

The result is that place experiences in which the insider-outsider dichotomy is both conspicuous and essential are harder to find and take up less and less of our daily life and experience (Riley 1992).  This process also affects the nature of public space which is now much more privately owned, more controlled and policed than before.  But because spaces and situations --public as well as private-- have become more and more specialized, the social norms and codes in use in the two spheres have become increasingly similar. 

            Situations and places are no longer specified by public or private codes, it is          the other way around.  A new equilibrium has been established, writes Prost.     We are moving towards a more relaxed society, with the attenuation of social          roles, whereby the private self is able to flourish in a public setting.  This           transformation can be largely traced to the abolishment of social and status differences, and the proliferation of lifestyles revolving around leisure and   sports (Prost 1991).  

What ensues is societies of consumption in an increasingly globalizing world, characterized by a new collective sense of place based on transcending the geographical barrier of distance, of place and of home.  It expresses a de-differentiation in space of leisure, tourism, shopping, art, education, eating and so on regarding many other activities that used to be closely associated with a distinctive life domain or other.  According to David Harvey, it is now possible to experience the world’s geography vicariously, as a simulacrum (1989).    

 

 

 

 

PROCESSES OF CONSTRUCTION, TRANSFORMATION AND PRESERVATION OF CULTURAL DIFFERENCE IN A GLOBALIZING CONTEXT: THE CASE STUDY OF TOURISM

This new world geography, however, also depends both for its articulation and for its development on the various everyday life geographies it feeds on.  It requires them for its global character, if not for its mere existence, in order to be defined as such in contradistinction to its opposites: the geography of the particular, the local, the everyday, the inside, the home. 

 

In the past, it was the commoditization of the printed world that made it more possible for rapidly growing numbers of people to recognize the existence of other people much like themselves beyond the face-to-face community (Anderson 1983).  Conversely, active involvement in symbolic modes other than language, such as art, body language and others, tended to be mainly confined to local, physical communities.  With the current proliferation of media technology, increasingly able to deal with symbolic modes other than language, new social and symbolic communities are being formed.  The global ecumene, points out the Swedish anthropologist Ulf Hannertz (1996) is for one thing, a place of music video and of simultaneous news images everywhere... [T]he various symbolic modes which are now medialized probably entail their own literacies, and perhaps belong to differently distributed communities of intelligibility with regard to different kinds of meaningful form.  Image is significantly substituting language in the formulation of contemporary communities, whether contact is achieved through mass media and the computer or face-to-face, as is the case with tourism or migration.  It is precisely its high level of transferability and broad-based intelligibility that renders image the most effective medium and context of contemporary culture, increasingly shared around the world.  Much has already been written on the collapse of communication and mass-media barriers and about cyberspace communities that inform the global which then, in turn, invades the local.  The changing social relationships and roles of various sorts of contemporary face-to-face communication have also been increasingly explored.  The line of investigation that we assume in this study, however, is a bottom-up exploration of processes of infiltration and enrichment by the everyday of the world realm at large.  One possible venue in the exploration of such processes and relationships would be through the study of new hybridities, the various geographies of diaspora.  Another would be through the study of international tourism, which I have chosen here in order to illustrate these processes.

 

At the tourist location, comprehended both as a tourist attraction and as a reflection of «local place identity», come together everyday (home and work) realms for the locals on the one hand and leisure sites for the tourist on the other.  Due especially to its experiential and visual character, the tourist landscape or location, for instance, becomes a social interface where local and global perspectives and other dimensions of tourism come together in the ready construction and consumption of place identity.  On the one hand, tourism marketing managers reproduce discourses about places through representations of cultural signs of difference and uniqueness.  The tourist, then, through a process of experiential re-interpretation of these signs, may assess the authenticity of the sights and validate their meaning within the discourse.  Since all meaning, however, is an interpretation of phenomena, it begins and ends in the context of one’s home in its broader sense.  In other words, what is of value to one --what strikes home-- is connected to what one values in his or her home life (Day 1977), the personal frame of reference.  Thus the meaning invested by the tourist in the whole tourist experience refers back to his or her own lifeworld and to life at large at the context of tourist origin. 

 

Moreover, there is a certain particularity to tourism which reflects the cultural interchange between the cosmos and the hearth more generally.  It is that, though it is external to the larger sphere of life at the destination place, yet it is dependent on that for its definition, --no matter whether the relationship between these two domains (the tourist and the local, or the cosmos and the home) is organically constructed or staged and borrowed out of context.  As external to local life, tourism «feeds» on it for novelty, spectacle and other pleasures, and when such attractions are no longer obtainable there, it moves on to somewhere else.  All the while, it «borrows» from the local context, in both positive and negative terms and with both positive and negative consequences for the latter.  A recent interdisciplinary research project on tourism and sustainable development in Crete[iv] revealed a substantial cultural flow from Crete back to the origin country of its visitors, in terms of house decoration and interior design details, in terms of local cuisine and in terms of everyday life behavior patterns, such as the afternoon siesta.  John Towner (1996) describes in his Historical Geography of Recreation and Tourism in the Western World 1540-1940 how visitor experience in the destination areas helped shape environments back in the generation areas, as for example, at the end of the last century, idealized Italian classical landscapes were transplanted into the English rural scene so that the landed estates of the aristocracy and gentry both reflected and stimulated the Grand Tour of Europe (Towner 1996). 

 

This borrowing process is not only inevitable, but also intrinsic to the definition, to the consuming nature and to the social significance of tourism itself --as it is inevitable and vital to the development of the global, the cosmos made out of hearths.  The ensuing cultural convergence between these two spheres of meaning is, to a degree, obvious and also inevitable.  Meanwhile, the contact between the global and the local, unpacks this contradistinction, by encouraging self-awareness and opening up new possibilities for the locals.  Cosmopolitanism instilled in local communities through their contact with the outside, whether through tourism, immigration or the mass media, often renews the sense of belonging and of cultural distinctiveness in the indigenous group (Terkenli 1999).  It fuels not only architectural and site preservation efforts and reinforces local cultural schemata, albeit often in the form of cheap imitations or artificial representations of «the real thing» --but also safeguards and projects local identity claims.  It may thus encourage the commodification of local everyday life, but also greatly contributes to popular or vernacular culture, to be re-exported or re-borrowed by the outside world, but often, and more importantly, to be eventually ingrained into local ways of life, as in the case of Greek Zorba music and dance («hasaposerviko»).  The long-term outcome is that the distinction between what may now be considered local and what global or globally-induced may thus be in the process of becoming increasingly irrelevant.

 

 

 

 

PROCESSES OF CONSTRUCTION, TRANSFORMATION AND PRESERVATION OF CULTURAL DIFFERENCE IN A GLOBALIZING CONTEXT: A GENERAL THEORETICAL INVESTIGATION

Bottom-up processes of production, reproduction and practice of cultural difference are manifest in all realms of life.  The preceding example brings us, by way of a brief introduction to such processes, first to the subject of popular culture, defined by de Certeau as one realm of culture as it is practiced, one which feeds on oral traditions, practical creativity and the actions of everyday life (1998).  Ordinary life, argues de Certeau, has been made into a vast territory offered to the media’s colonization.  Yet, the elements that were thought to have been eliminated continue to determine social exchanges and to organize the way of «receiving» cultural messages, that is, transforming them through the use made of them.  On this basis, he advocates a practical science of the singular, born out of the inventive proliferation of everyday practices, a science built on a fundamental diversity of situations, interests, and contexts under the apparent repetition of objects that it uses.  ‘Pluralization’ is born from ordinary usage, from this immense reserve that the number and multiple of differences constitute (de Certeau et al 1998).  The Chicano muralist art in the United States, for example, and the Indian theater experience are examples of the creative use of elements of «traditional» cultures to fashion new meaning, a pattern that is becoming common, especially in certain urban districts of large cities.  There is a re-territorialization brought about by de-territorialization in the context of the big-city experience for various ethnic or immigrant groups, according to Jelin (1998).  She points out that

            displacement gives rise to new meaning attached to urban territories, and also       to other cultural creations such as movies, theatre and literature.... At the          same time, by providing new contents to artistic forms, [these cultural           dynamics] may become commodified in the form of ethnic restaurants, ethnic    music, attracting investments from the international business community and         international tourism of the new cosmopolitan elite.

Similarly, what begins as an in-group activity, i.e. a fiesta as an affrimation of cultural identity, or a restaurant or grocery as a means of maintaining and carrying on distinctive daily patterns of living, can easily turn into a pole of attraction for outsiders as «customers of ethnic difference», invading other parts of the city to assert more firmly the presence and visibility of the group (Jelin 1998).  

 

Obviously, this creative process and its products that individuals or groups claim through ordinary practices and their cyclical time of repetition refer back to the basic elements of geographies of home.  Questions of particular relevance here and which we can merely attempt to introduce at this point, inviting future investigation, are: How is this number and multiple of differences de Certeau talks about put into use in everyday life; how do they inform the everyday, the private, the local, the home; and furthermore how do they inform the official, the public, the global, the world at large? 

 

From the perspective of communication arts, John Fiske places this process in terms of the playing off of

            bottom-up differences which are socially and historically specific, so they     cannot be explained by psychologically based theories of individual difference,           nor by idealist visions of free will.... Popular differences are not the product of          biological individualism nor of any ultimate freedom of the human spirit.  The   embodied, concrete, context-specific culture of everyday life is the terrain in            which these differences are practiced, and the practice is not just a   performance of difference, but producer of it (Fiske 1992).

Another perspective would be the investigation of processes of cultural production through consumption patterns as a driving force in market changes through consumer demands: a social, economic, cultural and political process with enormous spatial-historical repercussions for all aspects of contemporary everyday life and ordinary practices (The TABLOID Collective 1997, Miller et al 1998, Jackson 1999a, 1999b).  In specific, the TABLOID Collective[v] contend that every act of consumption must be understood as the active participation in a set of generalized codes.  According to the TC, the actual consumer goods are nothing but a single element in a more general economy of self-identification; in such a socioeconomic system individuals can find in commodities meanings that have nothing to do with their uses and functions.  They explicitly suggest that

            a notion of ‘practices’, of determinate activities repeated and redeployed      throughout mass culture, comes closer to describing the peculiar nature of     mass culture than the other more ‘solid’ terms.  The focus of [their] analysis,            then, is the network of interrelated mass cultural practices, not the isolated artifact.  As part of the network that links it to other practices, the artifact         (another unsatisfactory term) is actually a field or space in which diverse           practices --from ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture-- meet  and recombine (The TABLOID             Collective 1997).

  

With time-space compression and powerful trends of globalization, the relationship between, on the one hand, territory or context and, on the other, culture (both as a way of life and as an ideational system) is in the process of reconfiguration.  Social relations which constitute a locality are increasingly freed from containment within specific place boundaries.  Thus, one dimension of these larger transformations affecting home is the break-up of what were once local coherencies and the reconfiguration of social relations of home on a more non-place specific basis.  We are accordingly witnessing a changing geography of the social relations of home, simultaneously changing along various axes, i.e. family make-up and configuration, communal associations, gender relations, realms of self-determination etc.  Moreover, we create and encounter more and more «Others» in and around our contemporary urban lifeworlds, and the critical  issue is about how to live together with them.  Culture, more generally, is increasingly becoming sociocentric, rather than place-centric. It is precisely this reinforcement of the social constitution of culture that renders the role of home in the production and reproduction of culture more and more crucial in its capacity to constitute cultural continuity and enrichment through repeated practices --both locally (at home) and even more importantly, at its various interface surfaces with the non-local or the non-home, however these domains might be articulated.  Pre-existing local ways of life and expression stimulate and are stimulated by new inter-cultural contacts, change and hybridization: cultural flows, that are by no means one-directional, and which increasingly depend on an explosion in the number of interfaces, the zones of contact among individuals and societies, especially in contemporary urban environments that create these conditions and sustain variable cultural contact.  Examples abound in the rise of intercultural marriages,  new forms of recreation, «ethnic» fashion and art and immigrant residential enclaves.

 

If the home as an ideological category may have come to have a less definite and fully specified signification, this is not to say that the area it designates has become less important in emplacement (Putnam 1993).  The significance of home as a cultural site is also developed by Hannerz in his «form-of-life» organizational frame through which meanings and meaningful forms are produced and circulated in social relationships.  In an attempt to deal with the complexity of cultural process, Ulf Hannerz identifies

            four organizational frames which entail different tendencies in the way that   meanings and meaningful forms are produced and circulated in social   relationships.  These frames... allow us to account in at least a preliminary manner for a very large part of the flow of culture in the world today, whether             in any more limited unit or in what we may refer to as the global ecumene.  They are not to be seen in isolation from one another, ...but rather in their                       interplay, with varying respective strengths... to map not least the spatial             ordering of culture today, and in particular, the contexts of creolization (1996).  If we borrow this set of organizational frames for our purposes in order to investigate at a very general level how global culture is informed and how it interrelates with more local forms of culture, we recognize in his first organizational frame, what he calls form-of-life, a very close parallel to the home realm.  He argues further that:

            Cultural flow within this frame is just about always massively present, because        we all contribute to it merely by going about our ordinary everyday lives.  As           we are around each other and observe each other, and listen to each other’s           running commentary on life, we take in the cultural flow of the form-of-life             frame.  It is the characteristic kind of circulation and meaning in households,             work places, neighborhoods, and so forth; often routinized because it results           from practical adaptations to enduring circumstances...  In many of the    classical field sites of anthropology, the form-of-life frame encompasses more       or less the entire cultural process.  But even as in complex societies the latter   becomes more differentiated, it would seem to remain the frame of most             fundamental importance.[vi] 

Similarly, the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman coins the term «habitats of meaning» in which agency operates and which it also produces; where it finds resources and goals as well as its limitations.  Much of the time, he claims, cultural processes will be shaped rather by the way that fairly different habitats of meaning are made to intersect (Bauman1992). 

 

In the transience of today’s newly-diversified urban contemporary societies as regards all matters of human life, traditional frames of reference, like family, culture, ethnicity and everyday practices are becoming sources of new ways to cope.  From the perspective of economic relations, new, multiple, diversified and creative  strategies of ensuring employment, often building on the basis of new political and social relationships, develop, in order to secure daily survival.  As these relationships and processes stem from new, diversified types of poverty, they are often out of necessity rooted in everyday life and life at home: i.e. informal economic schemata, black markets, family businesses, forms of illegal immigrant employment, single-parent home employment, etc.  In these cases, all of the above everyday life and home-based employment networks act as economic safety nets by supporting individuals (Greek family businesses), neighborhoods (Chicano districts in U.S. cities) and entire communities (Latin American shanty towns), by supplying the system at large with much needed labor and creativity and informing it with new alternatives from the bottom-up: processes that are certainly much facilitated and developed in democratic political environments, open to participation and diversity.  A relevant case in point is in human-rights activism and in the impact that the Fair Labor Association, a coalition of groups like the Lawyers Committee, apparel makers and U.S. Colleges, currently seems to be having on U.S. public opinion concerning working conditions at large companies and global corporations. 

 

More specifically, with regard to the political framework of the everyday, the system of power relations embedded in and perpetuated through the lives of those it seeks to dominate, Foucault writes that power permeates our daily lives and routines, even our bodies, with specific material effects that suspend us in a network of forces and counterforces (The TABLOID Collective 1997):

            In short, this power is exercised rather than possessed, it is not the ‘privilege’,          acquired or preserved, of the dominant class, but the overall effect of its          strategic positions --an effect that is manifested and sometimes extended by          the position of those who are dominated (Foucault 1980). 

These positions --the effects of ‘micro-powers’, as Foucault calls the deployed, embodied instances of power-- constrain and fix us in our everyday activities; as Foucault recognizes, however, such positions do not always function reliably, but through contradiction, instability, conflict and temporary inversions of the power relations.  In the home realm, they acquire the critical role of ascertaining a measure of control, power or, more generally speaking, investment in a personal or collective context of reference or association, the realm of home itself.  

 

Admittedly, the study of the geographies of everyday life, as simultaneously real, imaginary and symbolic, equally encompasses various other discursive issues, positions and fields or inquiry, that we will only note here, issues including the body and the self as well as questions of subjectivity and agency.  Forms of subjectivity, for instance, although limited and contingent, can still exert a degree of agency in the construction of everyday life geographies and in the flow of culture through contact and impact (Pile and Thrift 1995).  The co-ordinates of subjectivity are daily reproduced both through discursive practices and through power-laden regulatory practices.  While the self is constituted of layers far from stable, transparent and autonomous, the subject, according to Taylor, is primarily derived in practice: to situate our understandings in practices is to see it as implicit in our activity, and hence as going well beyond what we manage to frame representations... But much of our intelligent action, sensitive as it usually is to our situation and goals, is usually carried on unformulated.  It flows from an understanding which is largely inarticulate (Taylor 1993).

 

 

 

 

CONCLUDING REMARKS

Homes, as geographical contexts, construct and exert control over social identities and social relations through their material specificity, cyclical historical time (structures), and mental and emotional processes of experience.  In their capacity to inform the relationship between inside and outside, the local and the global, the private and the public, as well as in their dynamic re-articulation and adjustment to changing forces in society, everyday life geographies and geographies of home become the terrain on which cultural differences and identities are increasingly produced, reproduced and practiced. Moreover, it is at the boundaries of home geographies, otherwise the geographies of «us» versus «them», the variable zones of contact where this difference is best defined and cultural flows occur, whether these are electronic communication channels, informal contexts of socialization, the daily struggle for survival, a tourist experience, or an expression of art.  Homes, as cultural sites and as contexts of meaning, constructed at a variety of individual or collective scales, both account for and validate difference, and this bottom-up production of difference is likely to be found in the specificities of everyday life.

 

 

 

 

REFERENCES

 

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