Homes from Home: Memories and Projections

This article presents an interpretation of home, in which home is not fixed in time and space, but is reinvented time after time in different locations. Memories and projections are the quintessential links in a lifetime cycle of home inventions. This is the predicament of most urbanites in Western countries for whom a lifetime stay in the natal home or the natal town have become an exception. In concentrating on the material level of homemaking, especially on objects and object-related practices in the reinvention of home, this article addresses the intermediary role of objects, not only in reviving memories of past homes, but also in linking present homes to future homes. The case of Dutch university students is presented to illustrate not only the material conditions of a lifetime cycle of reinventions of home in different locations, but also the psychological conditions of home attachment as mirrored in the discursive transition of home.