The Home

Book excerpt: 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.