ABSTRACT
Today we see the rise of a variety of reactionary particularisms attempting to “salvage centred, bounded and coherent identities – placed identities for placeless times” or to (re)invent “primordial” places, in which a group's culture is held to be historically rooted, for which people are willing to die or kill others. 1 In this context it is sometimes hard to resist the idea that the very idea of home is itself reactionary and should simply be ceded to the political Right. Certainly, as Rapport and Dawson observe, there is a widespread nostalgia for a vision of homeliness which “posits an idyllic past of unified tradition, certainty, stasis and cognitive and behavioural commonality … an ‘original life world’ of traditional absoluteness and fixity, where the individual is … first and ‘truly’ at home”. In this mythical vision the home is “socially homogenous, communal, peaceful, safe and secure” and people can be “reintegrated within all-embracing, meaningful structures and social, physical and metaphysical solidarity”. 2 As we have seen, there is plenty of evidence of those with the necessary resources attempting to reconstruct for themselves (within gated communities and the like) private, enclosed havens which will serve to produce a refuge of exactly this kind.
