home-sick (a researchy post)

Where do you feel at home? Do you feel at home in your neighbourhood, in your city, in your province, in your country? Do you feel at home in other places, like at work, in school, at clubs or societies you might belong to? What does home mean to you?

These were some of the kinds of questions I asked during most of the interviews I conducted over the course of my year doing ethnographic research in Amsterdam. I wanted to figure out where people felt comfortable, where they didn't, and how this might contribute to their wider understandings of belonging. Now that I'm back in Canada after a year spent in the Netherlands, I am asking myself my own questions about what 'home' is.

So what does it mean to feel at home? People gave me lots of different answers in my interviews. Some said that they simply felt at home in their house, in their neighbourhood. They knew their neighbours, or their local cafes and markets. Others said that 'home' was less a place than people they knew: their family or friends, wherever they were in the country or world. Still others said that being at home was more about a feeling than anything else. This feeling could mean being surrounded by people with shared or similar interests, or a certain atmosphere, or landscape, or be completely indescribable and only known. Some could, for example, feel at home in Amsterdam, or in one of the other big cities in the Randstad, or in the Netherlands at large, or in Europe. They could even feel more at home in their vacation house in France, than in a small village just outside of Amsterdam. I think that feeling at home can be all of these things. In the Netherlands, I felt an incredible feeling of home whenever I stepped into a NS train and darted across the country. Or when I climbed onto my fiets and cycled through Amsterdam's cobbled streets and red-paved bike paths. Or when I climbed over the dunes to the North Sea and smelled the fresh and salty air (which reminded me taking that first deep breath of Nova Scotia when I leave the airport after flying 'home' from Toronto). In many ways - whether through a sense of place, people, or simply my senses - by the time I left Amsterdam I felt more at home there than I ever had during the three years I lived in Toronto.

But even if home can be a place, people, a feeling, I think that time also has an important role to play. Being home-sick is quite a different thing than being nostalgic, and the major difference is time. When you're home-sick, you're longing for this thing called 'home' only across distance. This can be cured relatively easily by either 'going home', or trying to 'bring home to you' (as in the case of my Dutch Thanksgiving last year). Longing for 'home' across time (and maybe, but not necessarily, across space too) is quite a bit more complicated. There is something to the phrase "you can never go home again" afterall... It makes for a very interesting kind of home-sickness, since you're longing for a place that might not even exist anymore. Yes, the streets might still be the same, the houses and shops and parks might still be unchanged, the same people you came to know, love, be annoyed by or avoid might even yet populate those houses and crowd the streets, but time nonetheless marches ever on, and things may never be the same again.

This is something that people used to discuss now and then when I was in the field, especially when it came to talking about immigration issues. In many conversations about the problems that the Netherlands is facing with integrating (new and old) immigrants and minority ethnic communities (usually called 'allochtonen') into the country, a lot of autochtoon ('native') Dutch people seemed to say that part of the problem came down to nostalgia. Some allochtonen, especially those who moved into the bigger cities like Amsterdam or Rotterdam, just didn't bother letting go of how things were in the mother-country. They said that instead of integrating - learning to and actually speaking Dutch, adopting or at least respecting the 'progressive' social values of the mainstream Dutch - they just set up their own little ethnic neighbourhoods; mirrors of the norms and styles of living that they left when they moved to the Netherlands in the first place. And, the funniest thing about it I was often told, was that now a lot of these practices and values from the mother-country had actually changed there, becoming more liberal, while the immigrants who had come to the Netherlands 30 or 40 years ago were still clinging to the older ways and ideas! Hmmm. I'm not sure if that's entirely true (haven't done my homework here), but it does make for an interesting story about the tensions surrounding ideas of home.

Of course, these same Dutch people aren't immune to the power of nostalgia themselves. In fact, a lot of the momentum behind the new populist, far Right movements in the Netherlands (like the PVV and ToN - and I would say all of Western Europe, and well, in the US too) is spurred on more by a dewy-eyed sense of nostalgia (and anger) than fact. For example, stories about how things used to be better - safer, freer, more equal, more... something - before all these immigrants came really gloss over a lot of important information. One of the most cited 'problems with immigrants' I heard in the news and in general when I was living in the Netherlands, was that they clung to these 'backwards' ideas and practices regarding gender and sexuality. The Netherlands was/ is seen as this sort of bastion of liberalism, progressive values, openness, tolerance, etc. For generations, women have been the equals of men, and everyone, regardless of their sexuality is welcomed, respected, and even celebrated. In reality, it was only a very short time ago when things were quite the opposite. In fact, most of the contemporary values considered ‘typically Dutch’ actually emerged only as pillarization (verzuiling) waned. As the dramatic changes experienced across the West during the 1960s came to the Netherlands, older concerns for family, employment and economic security lost ground to concerns for the self and secularism (Lechner 2008:132). Thus, the characteristically broad threshold of tolerance that has become a ‘distinctively Dutch value’

was very nearly the other way around only a (historically) short time ago. Even after World War II, the Netherlands was characterized by traditional male-female roles; gender segregation in primary schools and in the church on Sundays; fear of nudity and sexuality; physical punishment for children; an ideology of family solidarity over individualism; and immense respect for authority. Paradoxically, the values now taken to be distinctively Dutch clash with traditionally Dutch values. (Sniderman and Hagendoorn 2007:129-130)

While Amsterdam might represent these ideals fairly well today, it's clear that these views aren't necessarily shared by everyone, regardless of how far back they can trace their family history within the Netherlands. Just hearing about people in small villages outside the Randstad or who live in the Dutch Bible Belt who might say they accept homosexuality and act in ways that highlight the limitedness of this acceptance kind of contradicts (or at least complicates) this image of a progressive moral majority. A recent example was the fallout from the election of a gay Carnival king who was refused communion in Brabant. Another example is how one of the political parties that ran in the June 2009 federal elections still wont allow women to be members. The point I'm getting at here, is that since nostalgia is so connected with our memories we often mis-remember, blotting out the bad and exaggerating the good. Nostalgia might even push us past this mis-remembering and convince us to long for something that maybe never was.

So, I guess this brings me back to the question I started with... what is 'home'? But, perhaps more importantly, how can we all live there together?