The paradox of home: an interview with Les Back

Abstract

How would you approach home in the light of what it means to you? The idea of home, or the sense of home, is compelling because it anchors our experience of social life. One of my great inspirations is the writing of John Berger (1991), And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos. That beautiful book includes a very short and useful passage about the way in which the idea of home foregrounds our sense of being in the world. The idea of home, Berger says, is rich and useful because it can be preyed upon by very different political interests. So, it can be a controlling claim like a male head of a household within the patriarchal family, or a sense of property. The dominant order within the home is about control, ownership and power. The language of home and homeland can also be about proprietorial claims on home and things that belong within it. But the idea of home can also be a place that is remade, reclaimed, opened, assembled and represented differently. I have long been compelled by the idea of home because it connects us to place and people and that sense of being in the social world. That is why I find home a very rich idea sociologically. It has been at the centre of my interest in relationship to city life and the migrant experience in terms of how homes are made, particularly by the displaced and those who are seen either on the fringes of belonging or having to fight for it.