Theme 6: Cultural placements: homecircle, borders and bordercrossings

1
Theme 6 Cultural placements home-circle,
borders and border-crossings

• Being at home the home, familiarity,
  togetherness
• Home as a safety place against other spaces
• Home-circle and its dimensions
• Markers of borderlines
• Border-terms divisions, separations
• Crossing borders, connecting boundaries

2
Being at home - home and familiarity

• Home is
• a residence for me and my nearest people
  (family)
• a place of my own
• an everyday space meet my nearest people and to
  live with them
• a familiar area for habitual being (informal
  rules, routines)
• Home life means
• to feel familiar and safe
• practice everyday habits, routines and rituals
  (habituality)
• express and understand to continuation of life
  from generation to generation
• live through my belonging (to somebody, to
  somewhere) and feel membership

3
Habitat, identity, familiarity

• Habitat is a place which is constructed by me and
  which constitutes my identity
• home like the nest
• We are identified
• by being present here and now
• in face-to face contacts
• familiarity is connected to the sense of
  togetherness
• Borders of home walls, windows
• Home door, home street, home district
• Metaphoric expansions of home homeland
  (Fatherland, Heimaat, la Patria)

4
Home as a safety place against strange spaces

• I have the legal rights to stay at home
  domicile as a civil right
• My specific belonging to somewhere is connected
  to home through the membership in a family
  acknowledged parenthood, family name
• Symbolic borderlines between the own and the
  other placements
• Intimacy and anonymity
• Nearness and distance
• Familiarity and strangeness
• Understanding, interpretation, translation
  misunderstanding
• Safety, trust and confidence and the opposite
  feelings

5
Home-circle

• Sameness ?nearness ? mastered distance with
  borders against the others
• Family circle, network of relatives ? ethnic
  tribe ? national community ? internationalism
• Brought up from a common ground ? blood ? skin,
  common ethnic characters based on the principles
  of similarity (metonymy)
• Expected and experienced similarities ?imagined
  communities feeling of togetherness, sense of
  group identity
• Homogenous we-groups consist of same elements
• Safety as based on trust on similarity and
  stabilisation
• internal security guarantees against risks from
  outside (risks of mixing differences)
• cf. heterogeneous groups - consist of different
  elements
• insiders -outsiders we/them
• cf. we-ness, nearness/otherness

6
Markers of borderlines

• Visible (concrete) and invisible (symbolic)
  markers of borderlines between the home and the
  outside world
• Walls - windows, doors, thresholds
• Visible boundaries between the own possession (a
  site, a lot, an own piece of land) and the
  possessions of others
• Hedges, fences, stone walls, bastions gates
• Streets, blocks (named or numbered houses, blocks
  and other built sites)
• Symbolic boundaries - expressions
• Language barrier
• Habitual behaviour (home rituals)
• Traditional markers (signs of membership - like
  the wedding ring, specific buttons, labels)

7
Border-terms divisions

• In Finnish raja border, borderline, bound,
  boundary, limit
• Border the marker of divided spaces
• division of entities
• partition of a wholeness
• differentiation of the parts
• separation of different parties
• cf. barrier, frontier - implies an opposition,
  possible confrontation between different partners
  and need to defend ones own interests against
  the interests of the others
• cf. edge, termination
• cf. liminality, margin, periphery, border-zone -
  related to the centre of the field of action

8
Connecting borders

• Connections between divided entities are needed
  to
• bind divided parts together
• integrate differentiated (separated) elements
• give possibilities for co-operations to the
  partners
• Means of crossing borders for contacts between
  partners
• bridges, gates, doors
• encounters, meetings
• negotiations, agreements, commitments

9
Natural borders and political border-constructions

• Natural geographical borderlines as based on
  natural obstacles
• rivers, lakes, seas, mountains, deserts
• Geopolitical borderlines as based on political
  (man-made) constructions
• agreements on possessions between neighbours
• historical development of regions and nations
  as-if-natural
• reformations of borderlines by means of deals and
  treaties after military confrontations or other
  kinds of political power operations

10
Border guarantees

• Peace agreements (treaties) are demanded
• for stabilizing border-constructions (artefacts)
  as-if- natural
• Guarantees of ever-lasting peace between the
  partners
• e.g. an agreement on Friendship, co-operation and
  mutual assistance between Finland and Soviet
  Union (1948-1991)
• Governmental trust-systems are demanded
• when political confidence between parties or
  those responsible of foreign policy is not
  certain
• Military enforcements are taken into use
• when guarantees are broken

11
Borders as symbolic constructions

• Peace treaties include symbolic guarantees of
  stability of the border
• Border-regions are identified symbolically to
  represent the artefactual elements of political
  divisions
• An example the image of the border between
  Finland and Russia as a mythical representation
  of the opposition between the West and the
  East (according to Paasi 1990)
• The history of border-regions (like Karelia)
  becomes understandable in this light
• as containing symbolic and ideological elements
  of Karelianism and Finnishness

12
The ideology of nationalism

• Defensive national identity
• Ethnicity as taken to serve the ideology of
  nationalism
• The image of enemy those living on the other
  side of the border in conditions of threat of
  offence caused by the political system
• Offensive national ideology
• We (and our allied companions) defend human
  values (freedom, democracy, our cultural
  traditions) against those outside our borders
• Others are outsiders not allowed to be in our
  circles or their incoming is restricted by means
  of official rules
• Enemies are described by having alien-like
  characters as purified from the human essence
  (they are not like us)