The Idea of a Home: A Kind of Space

Author(s): MARY DOUGLAS

Source: Social Research , SPRING 1991, Vol. 58, No. 1 (SPRING 1991), pp. 287-307
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40970644

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 The Idea
of a Home:
A Kind of Space/ BY MARY DOUGLAS

Ihe more we reflect on the tyranny of the home, the less

surprising it is that the young wish to be free of its scrutiny and
control. The evident nostalgia in much writing about the idea
of home is more surprising. The mixture of nostalgia and
resistance explains why the topic is so often treated as
humorous. Dylan Thomas left home at an early age. His
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog has a story about two men,
outcasts from seaside suburbia, standing under the pier and
wistfully speculating on what would be happening at home.
Given that it is five o'clock in the evening, they know quite
precisely that curtains are being drawn, the children being
called in to tea, and even what tea will comprise. In Less than
Angels Barbara Pym, that coolly detached recorder of homes,
has an ironic passage about the suburban home of two sisters.
After supper the dishes are cleared and the house made ready
for night; every day before retiring one sister sets the table for
tomorrow's breakfast, then both go up to bed; every night,
before extinguishing the light, the other sister creeps down
again to have one last look at the breakfast table in case
something has been forgotten, and is very relieved if she
manages to avert catastrophe by straightening a fork or adding
a plate that should be there. These are affectionate images of
home as a pattern of regular doings. Other images are frankly
hostile. The very regularity of home's processes is both
inexorable and absurd. It is this regularity that needs focus
and explaining. How does it go on being what it is? And what
is it?

SOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. 58, No. 1 (Spring 1991)

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 288 SOCIAL RESEARCH

Home certainly cannot be defi

Try the idea that home provides
that is what it does best, it is not
hotel could do as well. To say tha
of the infants hardly covers wha
question about whether spec
would not do it better. We will d
the function of the home in m
produce the input into the labor
that the home does something
enriching for the personality, th
that it cripples and stifles. This
approaching the home as an e
sounds platitudinous it is becau
the embryonic community as m
This relic of nineteenth-century
a stumbling block in sociology,
that the survival of a community
not need explaining. On this lin
community are supposed to be
mysterious supply of loyal supp
sources of strength are unana
mystic solidarity home and
supposed to be able to overcome t
larger groups apart.1 This essay w
more pragmatic point of view
question, What makes solidarity
by empirical observations on
when they want to create solidar

What Kind of Space?

We start very positivistically by

1 Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think (Sy

pp. 21-43.

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 A KIND OF SPACE 289

space. Home is "here," or it is

"How?" nor "Who?" nor "When
It is always a localizable idea. Ho
not necessarily a fixed space
mortar, it can be a wagon, a car
not be a large space, but space t
by bringing some space under
having a home, nor is having a
household.2 For a home neith
nances have to be fixed, but the
about the appearance and rea
The bedding in a Japanese h
rolled back, morning and nig
tions; people flow through a
regularities. Happiness is no
possible to be happy in a hotel o
nonhomes. Here is an instanc
that fails the test.

His Knightsbridge home was expensive, but it looked as if he

were in the process of either moving in or moving out, and it
had looked like that for the past sixteen years. . . . Vince was
surrounded by packing cases, half laid carpets and paintings
waiting to be hung. He was sitting in the middle of the floor,
eating fish fingers, drinking whiskey and listening to a
Linguaphone course.3

This nonhome was a fixed and solid building, full of domestic

things, but it was all beginnings and incomplete projects, with
no sign of coming out of the state of confusion that would lead
one day to the regular cycles of home life. So a home is not
only a space, it also has some structure in time; and because it
is for people who are living in that time and space, it has
aesthetic and moral dimensions. Compare the Knightsbridge

2 This may come as a surprise to the judges in divorce courts who try to allot the
custody of children to the spouse who has a home.
" Francis Durbridge, The Geneva Mystery (1982).

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290 SOCIAL RESEARCH

nonhome with the African hom

gists.4 The minimum home has ori
inside-outside boundary; usuall
cardinal points are not mere coor
but "directions of existence."5 Most of the homes we know are
not organized on lateral principles, right and left, but on a
front-back axis. Sometimes the orientation of a home marks all
four axes, back-front, up-down, two sides, and inside-outside.
Why some homes should have more complex orienting and
bounding than others depends on the ideas that persons are
carrying inside their heads about their lives in space and time.
For the home is the realization of ideas.

Virtual Space and Time

A fertile approach to the idea of home comes through the

philosopher Suzanne Langer.6 She reproached philosophy for
separating artistic appreciation from the idea of rational thought.
She herself proposed to unite the various, divided cognitive
faculties under the single rubric of "presentational" thought.
This term she used for the perception of abstract analogies. She
focused on the rational activity of projecting or mapping on the
world analogic structures of bodily and emotional experience.
Since she was writing in the early 1940s, she was a long way
ahead of postmodern structuralism. Linguistics produced both
structuralism and semiotics, and came into anthropology and
literature through language. Langer couched her argument as
a protest against a too heavily language-based approach to ra-
tionality. So though she was actually leading semiotics before it

4 Mary Douglas, "The Body of the World," International Social Science Journal 42
(August 1990): 395-399.
5 James Littlejohn, "The Temne House," Sierra Leone Studies (New Series), no. 14
(December 1960): 63-67.
° Suzanne Langer, Philosophy m a New Key, 3d ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1957); idem, Feeling and Form (New York: Scribner, 1977).

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 A KIND OF SPACE 291

was launched, in some sense when

one kind of linguistics tide, from
guistics tide was flowing in her d
Langer proposed that kinaes
analogic structures from one ex
with music, and following the i
gists, she suggested that the dis
forms was to create their own di
set up analogically and in a limi
other experience. She used the ter
a "semblance of" a commonly kno
as she was at pains to say, sh
distinction between "virtual" an
have nothing to do with her
perception in art were forerunne
on depiction and analogy. For exa
"presentational" thought because
that representation was the artist
art is not a depiction, a copy of s
Art for her is a communicative
projections of the common dim
why art should never be separat
understand rational processes.
Nelson Goodman's work on v
notational schemes in science and art.7
Langer would also agree that analogies are not mere aids to
theory. She would support Mary Hesse's argument against
Duhem that analogies are not adjuncts to reasoning to be
kicked aside by the scientist after the theorizing is complete in
its mathematical form. The theory itself is a model as well as an
elegant mathematical expression.8 For Langer, analogies are
not images; they are logical tools of understanding. She would
be close to Mary Hesse's ideas of analogies in science as

7 Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art, 2d ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976).

8 Mary Hesse, Models and Analogies in Science (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1963).

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292 SOCIAL RESEARCH

working models, and of theories as

theories of representation the
something else that it represent
experience of signs, the semio
identifying the sign as something
whereas it is only relatively stab
Presentational thought, as Lan
open-ended, dynamic, more biol
convention. It includes the maker
one interaction. In human cognitio
a whole scene and its abstract structure.10
To some, Langer's writing on art will seem too mechanical,
dealing as she does first with music, then with pictorial art,
then with sculpture. But the formalism is necessary to an
exposition of how we come to understand the categories of
time and space. When she says "virtual time" or "virtual space,"
translate "virtual" into independent or autonomous. So music
projects a virtual time, its own time, and each piece of music
creates a separate autonomous time pattern of its own. Music
gives a formal sample of the temporal patternings of the body,
and the time patterns of the day; it is a presentation of
patterned time, rife with tension and surprise, rousing and
satisfying expectations of completion and return.11 She invites

9 Mary Hesse, The Structure of Scientific Inference (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1974).
10 She also seems to anticipate much work in anthropology and psychology that
emphasizes the perception of part to whole in physical and social relations: Mary
Catherine Bateson, "Mother-Infant Exchanges: The Epigénesis of Conversational
Interaction," Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 263 (1975): 101-113; S.
Runeson and Frykhol, "Visual Perception of Lifted Weight," Journal of Experimental
Psychology, Human Perception and Performance 7 (1981): 733-740; Colwyn Trevarthen,
"Communication and Cooperation in Early Infancy: A Description of Primary
Intersubjectivity," in M. Bullowa, ed., Before Speech: The Beginnings of Human
Communication (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Colwyn Trevarthen
and P. Hubley, "Secondary Intersubjectivity: Confidence, Confiding and Acts of
Meaning in the First Year," in A. Lock, ed., Action, Gesture and Symbol (New York:
Academic Press, 1978).
11 Leonard Meyer, Emotion and A: aning in Music (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1956).

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 A KIND OF SPACE 293

us to replace ratiocinations abou

work of modeling the experience
Turning from time to space,
project a virtual scene: they make
visual depth and distance, and a
confusion. A picture is a pres
space. Going on from two-dim
space, she says that sculpture pro
presents an independent model
volume, weight, and motor contr
to the relation between dance, m
the work of German musicologist
goes on to architecture, alas, even
is a "virtual ethnic domain." Wha
is the idea of home.

The ethnic domain is the domain of structured domesticity.

It projects the most encompassing set of analogies: like music,
it creates its own time rhythms; like a picture, it contrives its
own spatial effects and its own regulation of vision and
perception of distance; like sculpture it explores volume,
movement, and bodily behavior in the gravitational field. As
Langer says, architecture can also present the largest meta-
phors of society and religion; it can project meanings about life
and death and eschatology into the everyday arrangements
that it covers. In this vein, animal architecture of nests, lairs,
shells, hives, and warrens readily project the ethnic domain.
Hence the powerful attraction of popular zoology and
entymology; hence the beloved fiction about animal homes,
from the Jungle Books through Beatrice Potter's creations,
Salar the Otter to Watership Down and Mickey Mouse; hence
the grander mythic presentations of the ethnic domain under
the water or in the sky, and the peculiar fascination of the
homes of giants and dwarfs. In what follows, Langer's ideas
about presentational thought in the ethnic domain will be
applied to the production and use of a human home.

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294 SOCIAL RESEARCH

A Memory Machine

Langer's notion of virtuality sugg

home as an organization of space
distinctive characteristic of the idea of home. Each kind of
building has a distinctive capacity for memory or anticipation.
Memory institutionalized is capable of anticipating future
events. Music is full of anticipation, with short and long cycles,
but its time structure is independent of outside events.
Everything takes place inside the musical composition. The
home makes its time rhythms in response to outside pressures;
it is in real time. Response to the memory of severe winters is
translated into a capacity for storage, storm windows, and
extra blankets; holding the memory of summer droughts, the
home responds by shade-giving roofs and water tanks. Those
are annual rhythms, but there are longer cycles, as testified by
the standard pair of coffin stools always ready for the funeral
wake in East Anglian houses. And shorter ones: to the onset of
evening, the home responds with lighting; to strong light, with
blinds. Children reading Robinson Crusoe are transfixed by his
work of anticipation: candles, firewood, containers to catch
and hold the rain, planks and other provisions from the wreck.
The squirrel's autumn shopping cache, the storage arrange-
ments of Swiss Family Robinson, the annual autumn shopping
expedition in The Little House in the Big Wood, have the same
essential appeal as the weekly shopping of the Yeoman's family
before World War I:

Tuesday had a special magic for me, when at four o'clock

Mother and Father arrived home from market and unloaded
the groceries from the high trap. Into the kitchen came a smell
spicy as an Indian market. No sterile pre-packed food in plastic
bags, but provisions selected by Mother like a connoisseur:
cheese she had 'tasted', tea to her own blending, dates in large
lumps carved from an even bigger block on the grocer's counter.
I sniffed and guessed at the contents of the dark blue bags of
rice, sago, spices, sultanas and other wonders. Out came biscuits
in seven-pound tins, custard powder, candles, lampwicks, and

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 A KIND OF SPACE 295

elastic for garters and bloomers:

should never want for anything a

Storage implies a capacity t

between now and the future, t
up anticipates a running-dow
continual reallocation, repair,
plan. For the sake of the plan, s
out, allotted to different inten
in a railway station or a hotel. W
a home is the scope of the inten
comprehensive expectation of
expect to give birth or to die in
the management gets upset when they do. Even the
one-occupant home is a general service utility, an institution
whose uses cannot be defined except as a presentation of a
general plan for meeting future needs.

The Commons Dilemma

The well-stocked home presents in small the essential

problem of the commons. Its reserves are going to be a
common resource for the denizens of the home if they can
restrain their impatience. With only one person, the free-rider
problem is essentially the same, as Jon Elster has shown in his
discussion of weakness of will where he transfers the conflict
between persons to the conflict of wants within the person.13 If
the homesteader consumes all his reserves in time of plenty,
the home will be unable to supply his future needs.
Unscheduled dipping into the larder, like the farmer eating
the seed corn, incurs moral judgment on individual weakness
of will. If the homesteader's desire are in conflict, it is the same

12 H. St. G. Cramp, A Yeoman Farmer's Son: A Leicestershire Childhood (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1986), p. 67.
13 Jon Elster, "Weakness of Will and the Free-Rider Problem," Economics and
Philosophy 1 (1985): 275-306.

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 296 SOCIAL RESEARCH

as if, wishing to give up smokin

cannot resist a cigarette, or if wish
resist a cream bun. Opportunism
Stealing from the future prospe
free-rides on his own attempts to
the free-rider is the same person
the good things. This is the beauty
free-rides on the goods of his own
by its destruction. Neatly centraliz
person, Elster opens a way of carry
shows that the unit of analysis
community. If the latter, we ca
strategies the members need to dep
to be a solitary group. There is n
about how they achieve solidar
counted and measured.
The home's capability to allocate space and time and
resources over the long term is a legitimate matter for wonder.
We are not surprised that the cupboard is often bare; what
should amaze us is that it often contains an extraordinary
variety of things that are going to be used through the year,
mentally ticketed for different kinds of expected events. Even
more amazingly, they have been stacked so that they can be
found at the right times. The most precious, to be used on the
grandest occasion, are safely on the highest shelves, out of
reach because they are least frequently wanted, while the most
everyday stuff, hardier and cheaper to replace, stands near at
hand. The spacing of provisions provides another aide-
memoire for the totality of life within the home. In a much
longer essay it would be possible to compare homes on the
basis of how strongly the members are committed to the
production of a collective good, or how much of it they succeed

14 The problem of weakness of will is usually treated as a problem within

rational-choice theory about the possibility of an individual acting against his own
preferred interests. See Russell Hardin, Morality Within the Limits of Reason (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 191ff.

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 A KIND OF SPACE 297

in producing, and to say more ab

which aim to produce spaces for
the idea of the home as a collecti
concentrate only on one kind of
which the members have been wor
time on the common objective.
The budget is the main instru
collective effort. Through the bu
finger on every allocation and q
budget slots make a screen throu
must pass lest individual deman
mentally set aside for the rent,
education, the summer holiday
unformed its goals may be, the h
with mutually adjusted budget sl
has to be scaled to the wife's ho
charge of the common purse. It
have less than they do. Between th
to be respected: if the younger
problems of equity raise their hea
fairness and function.
For these reasons a home is a model for kinds of distributive

justice. The reference to morality points a major difference

between a home and a hotel. Both plan for the future, but the
planning of the hotel follows criteria of cost efficiency. The
reason why the home cannot use market reasoning is, to
extend Suzanne Langer's term, that it is a virtual community.
It is not a monetary economy, though a household could be.
Suppose a group of people sharing the rent of a house, each
with his or her own timed access to the cooker and corner of

the larder, each coming and going independently of the

others, each autonomously making plans and keeping careful
check of requital for services rendered by the others- that
would be a household. They would settle conflicts over scarce
resources by bargaining on semimarket principles. They would
argue about their claims in terms of functional priorities or in

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298 SOCIAL RESEARCH

terms of relative contributions.

against outputs. This is the kin
"human capital" theorists can ana
end of the scale from market to n
its laughably complex, tyrannica
and unpredictably honored, an
rational justification. The question
choice is how a home manages to
from its members, how it creates t
than the sum of parts. In what
treated as a collective good, an
contributions are exacted.

A home is characterized by massive redundancies. As an

institution compared with others, a home is definitely
not-for-profit, and like other nonprofit institutions there are
characteristic difficulties about justifying its operations.
Whereas the charitable or learned foundation does have to
give an account of its expenditures, fortunately a home does
not. Its continuance is its justification. Ask a home owner how
he or she budgets for the home's needs over the years and you
will be answered with a groan or a laugh. Yet the need to make
budgetary allocations is at the heart of the project. If only the
home had very simple objectives, such as running trains
through stations while picking up and delivering passengers, a
budget would be feasible. It is practically impossible to make a
budget for a home with multiple purposes and undefined
goals. A home may be putting resources aside for saving;
certainly, and over and above the scheduled saving it may
make a profit, but it is unusual for it to recognize an annual
profit, because of the very vagueness of its objectives. If there
is an unbudgeted surplus from one year to another, it may be
treated as a windfall, blown or distributed on the spot or put
into the savings account. There are homes that are run for a
particular purpose, as adjuncts to or ancillary to something
else. For example, the Leicestershire yeoman farmer who ran
his home and family for promoting the interests of the farm

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 A KIND OF SPACE 299

made a profit, but this was

inversion of the proper relation
Using Robert Merton's distinctio
no manifest functions and is do
Since these are hidden, it is well to ask how they are
performed, how an institution which is largely latent in its
purposes remains in being, and how the commons dilemma is
resolved.

Coordination

The primary problem of a virtual community is to achieve

enough solidarity to protect the collective good. If solidarity
weakens, individual raids destroy the collective resource base.
Though the home, like other not-for-profit institutions, is
inefficient on market criteria, in another sense it is remarkably
efficient. It does not need specialized administrative personnel
because the claims of fairness diffuse the work of organization.
Members continually make claims on resources, but they are
not going to win a contest of conflicting claims by asking on
their own behalf; the winning claim is made in the name of the
public good and in the name of fairness, which in a home is
reckoned to be a public good. Individual claims are conceded
or rebutted on the same grounds. The theoretical solution of
the distributional problem is fairness, but the practical solution
is to make every member a watchdog on the public behalf, and
to use coordination to do the rest. Coordination facilitates
public monitoring and a high degree of visibility.
Coordination might seem to pose a problem of its own: it is
not so obviously easy to arrange. But the home has an easy
solution: its characteristic method of coordinating is to

15 Cramp, Yeoman Farmer's Son.

lb Robert Merton, "Manifest and Latent Functions," in Social Theory and Social
Structure (New York: Free Press, 1968), pp. 73-138.

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300 SOCIAL RESEARCH

maintain open, constant comm

resources. Like fairness, coordi
good. How can the home be r
coming and who is going? It is not a hotel, goes the
complaining refrain. Coordination is achieved in three ways:
coordinated work is on a functional basis, coordinated access to
the fixed resources is governed by rotation, and distributions
of movables by synchrony, which ensures visibility. As in other
institutions, work tends to get allocated in lumps, according to
space used and periodicity of tasks.17 Someone doing one task,
say in the kitchen, might as well save on transaction costs by
doing others in the same place, say the kitchen, if they occur at
the same time. So the home has a tendency to develop a simple
division of labor, by age and sex.
However, the functional basis only goes a short way to
provide coordination. Rotation is the principle used to control
access to fixed space, the bathroom for example, if there is
one, the outside privy if there is not. Whoever tries to
monopolize that specialized space gets fiercely criticized. The
criticism is in the name of the collective good: what sort of
home is it where one person can hog the bathroom? Who do
they think they are? Have they bought it up? The same attack
is made on other offenses against the collectivity: "Dropping
your sweet papers on the floor . . . who do you think is going to
clean up after you?" "Marching in and out, without so much as
by your leave; do they think this is a hotel?" The idea of the
hotel is the standard "Other," where every comfort has to be
paid for, the mercenary, cold, luxurious counterpart against
which the home is being measured.
The home's technique is to use synchrony and order to
protect fair access to other goods, movables and perishables.
Synchrony and order effectively combine to show up delin-
quency. Round the table each knows where to sit, the order of

17 Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, The World of Goods (New York: Basic Books,
1979), ch. 6.

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 A KIND OF SPACE 301

seating corresponds to other o

chores, the order of privileges
Rankings are scored in spac
fairness of the distribution of
first to take the best food or
fairness. The problems of fa
anticipated by synchronicity,
criticism as a last resort. No o
before the others, because e
present. Charity has to be discr
gifts have to be delivered a
everyone can enjoy the display
Although all distributions are
everyone will tell you that mo
intention. Indeed, when intentio
are primary. Everything that is
multiple purposes. That is why i
of a home why they do anythin
Much of the burden of organ
ous fixed times. The order of d
community. In a home there is
should be possible to work out w
time, that is, if it is function
system, easy to subvert. It is ge
main contribution of member
physically present at its assem
public service.18 Absence is to
subversive attack on the hom
without joining in its mult
erratically, without saying wher
and go upstairs without greet
as spoliation of the commons.
essays Colette describes her m
and calling: Where are the chi

18 See the account of "consumption service

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302 SOCIAL RESEARCH

in the trees, stretched out in the

grass, in the stable, hiding, slee
answer, and her disregarded call be
home shortly to be disbanded.
The time devoted to the common meal is a conclave, used
for coordinating other arrangements, negotiating exemptions,
canvassing for privileges, diffusing information about the
outside world, agreeing on strategies for dealing with it and
making shared evaluations. The conclave invents exceptions to
its rules: permissions to be late, to skip a meal. A home is a
tangle of conventions and totally incommensurable rights and
duties. Not a money economy, the home is the typical gift
economy described by Marcel Mauss.19 Every service and
transfer is part of an ongoing comprehensive system of
exchanges, within and between the generations. The transac-
tions never look like exchanges because the gesture of
reciprocity is delayed and disguised. No one can know the
worth of their own contribution to the home. It is not just that
calculation is too difficult, but more that it suits no one to insist
on a precise offsetting of one service against another. Debts are
remembered well enough, but by keeping them vague there is
the hope that repayment may be more than equivalent. Direct
reciprocity is avoided. In the most extreme, perfectly abstract,
complete instances of a home, there would be no free gifts, no
loose ends, and nothing meaningless at all. Every smallest
gesture would be laden with information, every greeting and
every meal a celebration of the system itself. A virtual
community is in place, from which vantage point clans, tribes,
and phratries can be surveyed- and hotels.
From set times for meals flow further rules about timing.
Not just mealtimes, but throughout the meal even, the
synchronized attack with knives and forks on the plates is
finely tuned. Members of a home eat level, drink level, get

19 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, tr. W.
D. Halls (London: Routledge, 1990).

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 A KIND OF SPACE 303

reproached for eating too

guarantees fair distribution:
until the last slow eater ha
requires apology or explanatio
larder ahead of the mealtime o
was he hungry? Where was h
of synchrony gives a right t
about members' doings.

Tyrannies of the Home

This is how the home works. Even its most altruistic and

successful versions exert a tyrannous control over mind an

body. We need hardly say more to explain why children wa
to leave it and do not mean to reproduce it when they set u
house. When we add the possibilities of subversion, the cas
for rejecting the idea of the home is even stronger. Th
free-rider on the collectivity may be the authoritarian father
or it may be the youngest child, or the mother herself. There
no space here today to talk about the model subverted to a
individual's private self-interest. Nor is it necessary to say muc
about the inadvertent interruptions of the proper flow o
claims and counterclaims which block the perception of th
collective good. For a thousand reasons, the home becomes
inefficient in its own terms. It is rigid: mealtimes cannot b
suddenly changed to accommodate a visitor lest cascadin
disorder overthrow its subsystems. Warmth and friendshi
may take second place in its priorities.
Apart from its tyranny over times, the home tyrannizes ove
tastes. In the name of friendly uniformity, the menus tend t
be designed not to satisfy food preferences but to avoid foo
hates. One person's rooted dislike or medical prohibitio
results in certain foods being totally eliminated even if they ar

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 304 SOCIAL RESEARCH

everyone else's favorite food, so

gets what they are indifferent
favorite dish.20

The home also censors speech. It has slots for different

tones of voice, conversational topics, and even language. In the
name of the community, referred to as "we" or "everyone,"
neither shouting (because it dominates) nor whispering
(because it is secret and exclusive) is allowed, and no private
conversations at meals. The rank order which shows in the
order of seating and the order of serving imposes restrictions
on topics- "Not in front of the children"- or on language-
"Not in front of your mother-in-law."21 "Don't sing at the
table," says the mother in The Little House on the Prairie, and
then, realizing they are sitting by the wagon with no table, she
amends it to a rule against singing at mealtimes.22 Obscenities
and talk about money problems at mealtimes are ruled out for
different reasons. We have already said that though the family
may depend on money coming in, in its internal dealings it is
essentially a nonmonetary arrangement. A truce on money talk
at table is a truce in the name of the home on all the private
struggles that are going on to negotiate a share of the budget
for particular projects. Finding the right time to talk about
something can be quite a problem in a highly coordinated
home.

The idea of the hotel is a perfect opposite of the home, not

only because it uses market principles for its transactions, but

20 G. Mars and V. Mars, unpublished manuscript on cultural theory applied to

London families.
21 An American sociologist commented that this description of the home as a system
of rules and rankings was distinctly elitist. Particularly the control on speech recalls the
family in the American south in which children had to wash their mouths with soap if
they used foul language. It is necessary to say that the details of the rules vary slightly,
but the general concern to make an equitable, structured space for living is reported
for many civilizations. The examples from English autobiographies and children's
stories quoted here are not upper class. In Africa the control on speech takes the form
of prescribing categories of kin who are allowed to joke with one another, thus
defining others before whom obscenity is ruled out.
22 Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House on the Prairie (New York: Harper & Row, 1953).

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 A KIND OF SPACE 305

because it allows it clients to bu

This offends doubly the princi
separations provide some lim
Even when the space is at a pr
averted and speech controlled
home. The home protects a per
intrusive scatology. Whatever t
home's procedures, and for
instituted, one of their eff
incumbency of space. To som
infirmities belie their dignity,
the practice of ranked space an
from parental incest to rules
infringe these boundaries is to
This explains why the hom
obscenity. What forms ar
thresholds of privacy are draw
invades the privacy which t
members, and will be put unde

A Self-Organizing System

On this account, home as a

absurd, and often cruel. We hav
understand community sources
inquest is to show that those
exert continual vigilance in i
upon common presence at fix
the year, on elaborate coord
far-reaching surveillance of
claims. If we were to follow f
about virtual time and virtua
would try to draw a clear seri
and dispersals which pattern di
If we had to choose an index of

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306 SOCIAL RESEARCH

structure of homes, the stron

stoutness of the enclosing w
coordination.23 Complexity is mo
or confusion. From an informati
presence needs to be explaine
vigilance to the maintenance of
that they personally have a lot to
is the point at which biological
care of the young have to be
communities have more trouble a
demanding sacrifice. To this ex
who attribute to primordial pas
and small communities.

We have been contrasting the home explicitly with a hotel,

and contrasting a virtual community with a virtual market. The
type of home that has been taken as exemplary has a lot of
authority at its disposal, but it is not authoritarian or
centralized. Everything happens by mutual consultation.
Mutual adjustment of interlocking rules combines to meet
functional requirements, personal claims on scarce amounts of
time, space, and other resources. That is what makes this home
so complicated, difficult to enter and difficult to change. This
home emerges as the result of individual strategies of control
defended respectively in the name of the home as a public
good. Ideally the mother operates the system, so does the
father, and so, undoubtedly, do the children. It is extremely
coercive, but the coercion is anonymous, the control is
generalized. The pattern of rules continually reforms itself,
becomes more comprehensive and restrictive, and continually
suffers breaches, fission, loss at the fringes.
It is not authoritarian, but it has authority. It is hierarchical,
but it is not centralized. The best name for this type of
organization is a protohierarchy. It is recognizable because it

23 Jonathan Gross, "Measuring Cultural Complexity, in Mary Douglas, ed., Food m

the Social Order (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1984).

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 A KIND OF SPACE 307

springs up, spontaneously, to m

tions of organization. It is a mult
system which we find in villag
empires. Highly efficient for ma
easily subverted and survives on
needs of its members.

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