1st Edition

The Home Words, Interpretations, Meanings and Environments

Edited By David N. Benjamin Copyright 1995
    332 Pages
    by Routledge

    Originally published in 1995, as part of the Ethnoscapes: Current Challenges in the Environmental Social Sciences series, reissued now with a new series introduction, The Home: Words, Interpretations, Meanings and Environments, written by by leading theorists and empirical researchers offers 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.

    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.

    New Series Introduction to the Reissue David Canter and David Stea.  Foreword David Saile.  Acknowledgements.  Introduction David N. Benjamin  Part One – Home: Toward a Definition of the Concept  1. Home: The Term and the Concept from a Linguistic and Settlement-Historical Viewpoint Stefan Brink  2. A Critical Look at the Concept “Home” Amos Rapoport  3. Deciphering Home: An Integrative Historical Perspective Roderick J. Lawrence  4. The Home and Homes Bror Westman  Part Two – Home as a Cultural Interpretation Tool  5. Archaeological Houses, Households, Housework, and the Home Ruth Tringham  6. House and Home in Viking Age Iceland: Cultural Expression in Scandinavian Colonial Architecture Neil S. Price  7. Identity, Intimacy and Domicile – Notes on the Phenomenology of Home Juhani Pallasmaa  Part Three – Home as Reflection of Societal Contention and Change  8. Domicide: The Destruction of Home J. Douglas Porteous  9. Ethnoarchaeology and the Concept of Home: A Cross-Cultural Analysis Susan Kent  10. House and Home: Identity, Dichotomy, or Dialectic? David Stea  11. The Origin of the Hall in Southern Scandinavia Frands Herschend  12. Sustaining a Sense of Home and Personal Identity Majorie Bulos and Waheed Chaker  Part Four – Home and House: Lessons from the Past for the Present  13. Denmark’s Living Housing Tradition Jørn Ørum-Nielsen  14. The Home and Housing Modernization Tomas Wikström  15. What Can We Learn from the Reconstruction of Pre-Historic Buildings? Eje Arén  Part Five  Afterword, or Further Research Issues in Confronting the Home Concept David N. Benjamin.  List of Contributors.

    Biography

    David N. Benjamin received his PhD in Architecture from the Norwegian Institute of Technology in Trondheim, Norway with a study on the ancient Scandinavian home, and at the time of original publication was consultant to architects and research organizations in the US and Europe.

    From the original edition:

    ‘I am very excited by this collection … because it embraces the connections and oppositions inherent in crossing disciplinary boundaries… . This continues the increasingly valuable discussion of gender and multi-cultural aspects of housing in other recent volumes.’ – From the foreword by Professor David Saile, PhD. University of Cincinnati, USA