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.
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.
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[i] In this way, perhaps it would make more sense to establish some additional variables as part of the general discussion of this seminar besides the economic, the political and the cultural, and to open it up to all other aspects of what it means to be human and to be situated at a particular time-place (es).
[ii] The significance of such zones of contact is emphasized for the European context, as one of the latest frontiers of the world, colonized in a reverse historical way by various «Others», a process that is breaking down the perception or reality of homogeneity in the European nation states.
[iii] This statistic, however, encompasses a very wide range of home-based types of work, like trully «home-based» workers, occasional «telecommuters», travelling workers or «briefcase luggers», self-employed people, and those who run a primary or side business from their home but do not actually work there.
[iv] This research project on sustainable development in the Herssonissos area of Herakleion, Crete, Greece was completed in the early summer of 1999 by an interdisciplinary team from the University of Cincinnati and two greek scholars, including this author.
[v] The TABLOID Collective was a group of contributors to a small but seminal journal that emerged in the early 1980s during the first wave of interest in cultural studies in N. America (Gibian 1997).
[vi]The other three organizational frames that Hannertz suggests are the state, the market and the movement frames. It is particularly, in terms of cultural flow, the assymetries of the market and state frames that create unambiguous center-periphery, or, for our purposes, cosmos-hearth relationships --with the movement frame acting as a checking mechanism of the above processes. But it is the form-of-life frame that fills in their cultural meaning in Hannerz’s shceme. More importantly, for our purposes, whereas his state, market and movement frames account for the entrenchment of trends of homogeneity and globalization, it is the home realm (or Hannerz’s form-of-life) that bears the greatest significance as a source of cultural resilience and innovation in cultural interchange and borrowing --or, as he puts it, «the creolization of the periphery».
The present text was presented
at "Seminars of the Aegean",Towards a cultural
radical agenda for European cities and regions,