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Home:
A Place in the World
Volume 58 No. 1 (Spring 1991) Arien Mack, Editor |
Table of Contents Notes on Contributors Ordering information
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In the fall of 1990, Social Research and the New School for Social Research organized a multi-institutional collaboration around the idea of "Home." This was the second in what we hope to be a continuing series of Social Research projects around critical contemporary issues, the first of which was "In Time of Plague: The History and Consequences of Lethal Epidemic Diseases." Our collaborators in the Home Project were five major New York City museums -- the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Brooklyn Children's Museum, the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the Jewish Museum, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. A series of public programs and exhibits on the theme of "Home: A Place in the World" were presented at the museums and at the New School with the aim of interpreting and focusing attention on key aspects of one of our most fundamental and complex concepts. The timeliness of this project is surely obvious. We live at a time when the idea of home has become problematic. We are confronted each day with painful images and stories about the growing numbers of homeless people, about criminal violence toward children, and about the plights of those exiled from their homelands. And all of this coexists with the persistent images of home as a place of comfort, safety, and refuge. A national conference, "Home: A Place in the World," a central part of the Home Project, was held at the New School in October 1990. It was designed to explore the ideology of home, its meaning as a cnetral human idea as well as the crises engendered by its loss suffered in alienation. The papers from this conference appear in this issue. We hope that the sustained reflections to be found in these papers, which range from "Landscape as Home" and "Alienation and Belonging to Humanity" to "A Curse to Themselves and a Menace and Injury to the City: Homelessness in New York City History" and "The Long March from Hearth to Heart," will begin to unravel the intellectual, the moral, the historic, and the cultural tangles in which the idea of home is embedded. It is our belief that in so doing, we will engender a deeper understanding of what it means not to belong, and not to have a home at a moment when that condition has become so widespread and urgent that it demands an effective and humane response. Many people helped to make the "Home" conference and the larger Home Project possible. I am grateful to them all. I am especially grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Rockefeller Foundation for their extremely generous support. Without their help there would have been no Home Project and no "Home" conference. We are grateful too for the support from the Ford Foundation which allowed us to add one session to the conference devoted exclusively to a panel discussion on problems of "Homelessness Present." This session was done in collaboration with the Columbia University Seminars on Media and Society directed by Fred Friendly. Arien Mack
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Recommended Reading Vol. 66 No. 1 (Spring 1999) Rescue: The Paradoxes of Virtue Vol. 62 No. 1 (Spring 1995) Home: A Place in The World Vol. 58 No. 1 (Spring 1991) In Time Of Plague: The History And Social Consequences Of Lethal Epidemic Disease Vol. 55 No. 3 (Fall 1988) You may also be interested in the other issues in our conference series. |
Table of Contents
The Idea of Home
Notes
on Contributors
(at time of publication)
Breyton Breytenbach a novelist born in South Africa and now living in Paris, wrote True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (1985). His most recent novel is Memory of Snow and of Dust (1989).
David Bromwich professor of English at Yale University, is the author, most recently, of Choice of Inheritance: Self and Community from Edmund Burke to Robert Frost (1989).
Sanford Budick is director of the Center for Literary Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His most recent book is The Dividing Muse: Images of Sacred Disjunction in Milton's Poetry (1985).
Stanley Cavell is Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. His most recent book is Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (1990).
Mary Douglas taught anthropology at the University of London, Northwestern University, and Princeton. Her most recent book is How Institutions Think (1986).
Tamara K. Hareven is Unidel Professor of Family Studies and History at the University of Delaware. Her books include Family Time and Industrial Time (1982).
Eric Hobsbawm Emeritus University Professor of Politics and Society at Cambridge University, is now a member of the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research. His most recent book is The Age of Empire (1989).
John Hollander is A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor of English at Yale University. His most recent books are Melodious Guile (1988), criticism, and Harp Lake (1988), poetry.
Kim Hopper is a research scientist at the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research and visiting professor of anthropology at the New School for Social Research.
George Kateb is professor of politics at Princeton University and author of Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (1984).
Alexander Keyssar associate professor of history at Duke University, wrote Out of Work: The First Century of Unemployment in Massachusetts (1986).
Steven Marcus is George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. His most recent book is Freud and the Culture of Psychoanalysis (1984).
Orlando Patterson is professor of sociology at Harvard University. His most recent book is Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (1991).
Joseph Rykwert is Paul Philippe Cret Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. His books include The First Moderns (1980).
Simon Schama professor of history at Harvard University, is the author of The Embarrassment of the Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (1987) and Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (1989).
Lawrence Stone is emeritus professor of history at Princeton University and author, most recently, of The Road to Divorce: England, 1550-1987 (1990).
Alan Trachtenberg Neil Gray Jr. Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University is the author, most recently, of Reading American Photographs: Images as History from Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (1989).
Gwendolyn Wright is professor of architecture and history at Columbia University and author of Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (1983).
