cultural geographies 2004 11: 3–6

introduction
Geographies of hom e
Alison Blunt
Ann Varley
Department of Geography, Queen Mary, University of London
Department of Geography, University College London

A s a space of belonging and alienation, intimacy and violence, desire and fear, the
home is invested with meanings, emotions, experiences and relationships that lie at
the heart of human life. Geographies of home1 are both material and symbolic and are
located on thresholds between memory and nostalgia for the past, everyday life in the
present, and future dreams and fears. The spatiality of home is important, but often only
implicitly so, in the growing, diverse and interdisciplinary study of home across the
humanities and social sciences. 2 The four papers published in this issue of Cultural
Geographies show not only how and why the home is an important site for geographical
research, but also how a geographical focus can – in conceptual, methodological and
substantive terms – inform much wider attempts to study the home and domesticity.
Moving beyond the separation of public and private spheres, current research on the
home is often concerned with mobile geographies of dwelling, the political significance
of domesticity, intimacy and privacy, and the ways in which ideas of home invoke a sense
of place, belonging or alienation that is intimately tied to a sense of self. Rather than
view the home as a fixed, bounded and confining location, geographies of home traverse
scales from the domestic to the global in both material and symbolic ways. The everyday
practices, material cultures and social relations that shape home on a domestic scale
resonate far beyond the household. Geographical research on subjects as diverse as
imperial domesticity, anti-colonial nationalism, diasporic resettlement, domestic
architecture and design, and work within the global domestic economy, shows how
household geographies are intimately bound up with national and transnational
geographies. Many studies explore the ways in which material and symbolic geographies
of home on such different and coexisting scales are not only gendered – and often
embodied by women – but are also shaped by inclusions, exclusions, and inequalities in
terms of class, age, sexuality and ‘race’. 3

© 2004 Arnold 10.1191/1474474004eu289xx

Alison Blunt and Ann Varley

The papers published here – by Renate Dohmen, Inga Bryden, Mark Llewellyn and
Janet Floyd – address the spatial practices and imaginations that shape cultural
geographies of home on a domestic scale. Each paper considers the interplay of material
and symbolic geographies of home by focusing on the importance of gender and the
family in domestic design and in everyday domestic practices. The authors, though, are
situated within a number of disciplinary traditions, including geography, cultural studies,
visual culture, religious studies, architecture, design history, anthropology and
performance studies. Each paper also adopts different methodological approaches to
study the home. In his paper on kitchen design by and for women in Britain from 1917
to 1946, Mark Llewellyn analyses a range of historical texts and images and explores the
ambiguities of a domestic modernity located within the kitchen and embodied by women.
Writing in the style and language of cultural studies, Janet Floyd also focuses on kitchens,
but reads a range of more contemporary western ‘kitchen texts and contexts’ to argue
that the kitchen is a site of work and imagination, reinterpretation and improvization.
Through her analysis of visual and written texts including television cookery programmes,
recipe books and performance art, Floyd shows that the kitchen is a potent site for the
negotiation of gender, class and national identities, often articulated through
spatial distinctions between upstairs and downstairs, inside and outside. Inga Bryden and
Renate Dohmen also chart the domestic geographies of inside and outside. Bryden
focuses on the architectural and spiritual significance of the ‘haveli’ (traditional
courtyard house) in Jaipur in northern India. She draws on oral history interviews to
consider the haveli as a gendered and inhabited domestic space and shows how the
architectural principle of Vastu Vidya informs the everyday lives of families within a
particular haveli. Renate Dohmen analyses the daily practice of producing ‘kolams,’ or
threshold designs, by women in Tamil Nadu in south India. Dohmen studies the
designs and their daily production through a performative reading of the relation-
ships between the home and the world, and argues that the designs create a space of
belonging not only for individual women and their families, but also for the community
at large.
As this collection of papers shows, the home is a rich and important site for
geographical study. An attention to domestic design and domestic practices deepens
existing discussions of homes and belongings in the broader sense of relations to place,
landscape and material culture. In turn, our understandings of the home are enriched
by a cultural geographic focus that foregrounds both the relations between material
architectures and spatial practices and the mutual constitution of the home and the
world. Geographies of home influence, and are influenced by, social relations not only
within, but also far beyond the household. Globally variegated constitutions of modernity
with their particular fashionings of identity – represented here through cases that range
from Tamil Nadu to Rajasthan, early twentieth century Britain and the spaces of
postmodern Anglo-American media culture – are figured through and performed in
domestic spaces. The domestic is often conceived of as mundane, but as these papers
demonstrate, domestic life and everyday practices of cooking, decorating and other
domestic work have much wider implications. Situated within a range of complex
meanings, emotions, experiences and relationships, geographies of home are

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 Introduction: geographies of home

important in both material and symbolic terms, and on scales from the domestic to the
global.

Notes
1
The four papers published in this issue were first presented at a conference on ‘Geographies
of home’ held at University College London in November 2000. The conference was organized
by Alison Blunt and Ann Varley, and was generously funded by the British Academy, the Royal
Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) and the Friends of UCL. The
conference was also supported by the following research groups of the RGS-IBG: the Developing
Areas Research Group, the History and Philosophy of Geography Research Group, the Social
and Cultural Geography Research Group and the Women and Geography Study Group. As the
involvement of such a wide range of research groups suggests, geographies of home are an
important area of study across the discipline.
2
For a range of recent transdisciplinary research on home, see T. Chapman and J. Hockey, eds,
Ideal homes: social change and domestic life (London, Routledge, 1999); I. Cieraad, ed., At
home: an anthropology of domestic space (Syracuse, NY, Syracuse University Press, 1999); R.
Marangoly George, The politics of home: postcolonial relocations and twentieth-century fiction
(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996); R. Marangoly George, ed., Burning down the
house: recycling domesticity (Boulder, Westview Press, 1998); D. Miller, ed., Home possessions:
material culture behind closed doors (Oxford, Berg, 2001); C. Painter, ed., Contemporary art
and the home (Oxford, Berg, 2002); and I.M. Young, ‘House and home: feminist variations on
a theme’, in Intersecting voices: dilemmas of gender (Princeton, Princeton University Press,
1997). Also see the new journal, Home cultures, published by Berg.
3 Recent geographical research on the home includes A. Blunt, ‘ “Land of our mothers”: home,
identity and nationality for Anglo-Indians in British India, 1919–1947’, History workshop journal
5 4 (2002), pp. 49–72; A. Blunt, Domicile and diaspora: Anglo-Indian women and the spatial
politics of home (Oxford, Blackwell, forthcoming); C. Dwyer, ‘ “Where are you from?” Young
British Muslim women and the making of “home” ’, in A. Blunt and C. McEwan, eds, Postcolonial
geographies (London, Continuum, 2002), pp. 184–99; G. Gowans, ‘Imperial geographies of
home: Memsahibs and Miss-Sahibs in India and Britain, 1915–1947’, Cultural geographies 10
(2003), pp. 424–41; S. Legg, ‘Gendered politics and nationalized homes: women and the anti-
colonial struggle in Delhi, 1930–47’, Gender, place and culture 10 (2003), pp. 7–27; S.A.
Marston, ‘A long way from home: domesticating the social production of scale’, in R. McMaster
and E. Sheppard, eds, Scale and geographic inquiry: nature, society, method (Minneapolis,
University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming); G. Pratt, ‘Geographic metaphors in feminist theory’,
in S. Aiken et al., eds, Making worlds: gender, metaphor, materiality (Tucson, University of
Arizona Press, 1998), pp. 13–30; G. Pratt, ‘From registered nurse to registered nanny: discursive
geographies of Filipina domestic workers in Vancouver, British Columbia’, Economic geography
75 (1999), pp. 215–36; A. Varley, ‘Women and the home in Mexican family law’, in E. Dore and
M. Molyneux, eds, The hidden histories of gender and the state in Latin America (Durham, NC,
Duke University Press, 2000), pp. 238–61; and A. Varley and M. Blasco, ‘Exiled to the home:
masculinity and ageing in urban Mexico’, European journal of development research 12 (2001),
pp. 115–38. Also see a recent issue of Antipode on social reproduction that includes three papers
on ‘domesticity and other homely spaces of modernity ’: M. Fannin, ‘Domesticating birth in the
hospital: “family-centered ” birth and the emergence of “homelike” birthing rooms,’ Antipode 3 5

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Alison Blunt and Ann Varley

(2003), pp. 513–35; M. Hyams, ‘Adolescent Latina bodyspaces: making homegirls, homebodies
and homeplaces’, Antipode 35 (2003), pp. 536–58; and R. Marangoly George, ‘Of fictional cities
and “diasporic” aesthetics’, Antipode 35 (2003), pp. 559–79.

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