The Home, The

These new writings by leading theorists and empirical researchers offer an interdisciplinary and multi-cultural spectrum of viewpoints on the study of the home concept. Among the disciplines covered are environment-behaviour research, anthropology, geography, archaeology, architecture, political science, and linguistics-place name research. Although its history goes back to the pre-Roman Iron Age, and has been the subject of scholarly study for over three hundred years, the home is still a contentious term, topical now because of civil and military strife over traditional homelands, and central to the debate concerning the environmental impact of settlement vs. domestic comfort, and the contemplation of Ivan lllich's 'shadow work'. The authors in this volume focus on refining our concepts of home, our knowledge of the uses of home, and the relationship of home to the study of cultural interpretation. In so doing, they inspire our thinking on the following themes: the struggle to maintain cultural continuity in the face of socio-political change, and the attempts to humanize the present and future built environment.
This volume will be interesting to all scholars of cultural interpretation, geographers, and architects, and at the same time useful in graduate studies courses in environmental social sciences and environmental design as reference and source of cutting edge case studies.