House vs. Home

What is the difference between where you live and your home? I started reading this book called Kindred by Octavia Butler. The story is about an African American woman who goes back in time to a slave plantation. She begins to have a connection with the plantation and as she travels through time she begins to question where she calls home, the plantation or her home in 1979. This story made me think about how our society defines home and how I define home. Society defines home by where you live. Your current address, or when someone is a minor the place in which their parents or legal guardian lives. I find home to be very different than this.
I define home as somewhere where I feel safe, where there are people that care about me, and where I have spent a lot of time. I have many different homes, I have the home where I lie with my parents and I have my close friends homes through over the years have turned into a feeling of home for me as well. Although whenever someone asks me where I live I always reply the house that I reside in because there is a cultural understanding that is what they are asking. Some of my peers feel that you can only have one true home because home is where your family is. While this is a matter of opinion, I feel that my kinship chart in an earlier blog shows that I consider friends as family as well. From an etic point of view someone may say that in our society home is where someone sleeps and goes back to everyday when they have completed their tasks for the day. An emic point of view would be much different. I believe that language plays into the meaning of home as well.
When talking about home you have to separate the meaning of home from the physical space of house. “House” can represent many other cultural meaning such as class and social status while home can represent family and meaningful places. Many people can live in a house but not feel as though they live in a home. There is some cultural variability in this concept of one home versus many homes. I feel that this relates to the process of assimilation for immigrants as well. Some of them may feel that they live in America but their home is where they were born. This can be conflicting in situations like this. The choice of words and context of questions has a to do with where we may consider home to be.