ENGL 081: Home, Cultural Identity, and Sense of Belonging

This essay delves into the multifaceted concept of home, exploring its significance beyond mere physical location. It emphasizes that home is intrinsically linked to cultural identity, the sense of belonging, and the individual's interaction with their surroundings. The essay highlights how individuals construct their understanding of home through cultural dynamics, sensory experiences, and personal narratives. It examines the trauma associated with displacement and the loss of cultural connection, emphasizing the importance of home as a source of comfort, identity, and stability. The essay concludes by asserting that the narrative of home is a deeply personal and emotional experience, providing an anchor for individuals facing altered circumstances.

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Name of Student:
Name of Professor:
Course Name:
Date:
Home: The Anchorage of Cultural Identity
Home. No other word in the English language has so many meanings and interpretations as
much as this single word does, perhaps because the concept of a home is both transcendental
and personal (Heinämaa 83-103), objective and subjective (Moskal 143-152). Home is not
just where people stay, home is also the place where an individual is in communion with the
culture within which they have grown up and with which they tend to identify and associate
with (Taylor 130-152). Almost everybody knows very well what home for them would be
like or could be like, but it seems that it is complicated to transcribe such thoughts into
words. However, the present essay would attempt to talk about home.
As it has been mentioned in the introductory paragraph, home is not just the place where
someone stays. Human history is replete with instances of individuals or groups of
individuals transmigrating from one location to another, depending on the material benefits
available to them that allows a person to survive. Hence, the sense of belonging has not
always been tied to where a person physically resides, but to any location or to any vicinity
where a person may find themselves connected, and to which they could relate (Szary and
Giraut 1-19). This particular sense of relatability is objectively defined as the identification of
oneself with the culture in which they reside and the reconciliation between their values and
the values promoted by the dominant culture of that region (Roffey 38-49). For all intents and
purposes, this objective definition is also the preface for an individual to declare a specific
location as their home.

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In one of the stories that have been read in the class, the author reflects on the loss of identity
and their loss of cultural communion in the event of them having to leave the city in the
aftermath of a natural disaster (Dungan 41-46). The idea or concept of home can, therefore,
be determined in terms of loss one experiences when they have to leave forever the place or
location with whose physical and cultural environs they could relate with. In order to
understand this trauma of loss and separation, it is necessary to make sense of the cultural
connection that ties an individual to the location which they call home.
A person begins to gather knowledge about, and interact with, the cultural dynamics that have
already been put in place due to historical and sociological factors. An individual begins to
grow up in the context of such a culture, and they begin to form their identity in relation to
the cultural norms and practices that they come to know about, witness, experience and
participate in. Such an association between an individual and the culture with which they
come to identify leads to the creation of a sense of belonging, and it is this specific emotion
of belonging that leads to sn individual considering that a place is their home (Hong 18-38).
Home is, therefore, a place where an individual feels comfortable and experiences a sense of
unity between themselves and the broader cultural dynamic.
However, human experience or identity is not just informed by culture or cultural practices; it
is also informed by that individual’s interaction with other people and their experience of
features or characteristics which are unique to the place to which such individuals feel a sense
of belonging. Since humans get to know about their surrounding environment through the use
of the sensory organs, the sense of belonging gets re-enforced further through the senses, by
identifying particular sights or smells of the physical location and associating it with their
sentiment of belonging with the culture of the location (Teraji 526-540). Hence, cultural
interaction and sensory are two primary sources from which an individual begins to construct
their narrative and conceptualisation of home.

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Hence, when an individual is forced to leave that location or become separated from that
place due to any reason, including abandonment out of safety from the catastrophe of natural
disasters, they tend to experience what is colloquially referred to as a sense of homesickness,
the longing to go back to that location that they have come to call home owing to the sense of
belonging and unity that they have constructed over many years. Removal to a new location
that contains an unfamiliar cultural ethos and values and an entirely new set of sensory inputs
can create discomfort and uneasiness within that individual. Such experiences of discomfort
are quite common in the realm of disaster management and humanitarian crises, where people
often have to leave behind their home and start their lives anew, often having to leave with
the grief and trauma of having to leave behind everything and every token of association with
the place that they called home. The individual has to live with memories and visages of their
old lives, while continuously attempting to adjust themselves with the conditions of their new
life.
Therefore, owing to the factors that go into the construction of the concept of a home, the
notional narrative of having a home to where an individual experience a sense of belonging is
an immensely personal emotion and experience. At the same time, such a sense of belonging
is also intricately tied to a person’s sense of identity and hence, when those connections are
severed, an individual also has to cope with an identity crisis where they have to struggle to
maintain the identity of themselves and preserve it even if they are forced to lead their lives
in altered circumstances.
To conclude, the idea or concept of a home is not necessarily equitable to a permanent
location; rather, it depends on how that individual decides to adopt and assimilate the cultural
dynamics of a location and that location’s sensory inputs to create the narrative of a home, a
place where they can always look back to as a means of reassurance and comfort when the
material conditions of a person’s life gets radically altered and they require an anchor to

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maintain their sense of being, existence and identity. Home is more than just a place where
people stay, home is the place where an individual has the liberty to be themselves.

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Works Cited
Dugan, Bridget. "Loss of identity in disaster: How do you say goodbye to home?."
Perspectives in psychiatric care 43.1 (2007): 41-46.
Heinämaa, Sara. "Transcendental intersubjectivity and normality: Constitution by mortals."
The phenomenology of embodied subjectivity. Springer, Cham, 2013. 83-103.
Hong, Ying-Yi. "A dynamic constructivist approach to culture: Moving from describing
culture to explaining culture." Understanding Culture. Psychology Press, 2013. 18-38.
Moskal, Marta. "‘When I think home I think family here and there’: Translocal and social
ideas of home in narratives of migrant children and young people." Geoforum 58 (2015):
143-152.
Roffey, Sue. "Inclusive and exclusive belonging: The impact on individual and community
wellbeing." Educational and Child Psychology 30.1 (2013): 38-49.
Szary, Anne-Laure Amilhat, and Frédéric Giraut. "Borderities: the politics of contemporary
mobile borders." Borderities and the politics of contemporary mobile borders. Palgrave
Macmillan, London, 2015. 1-19.
Taylor, Helen. "Refugees, the State and the Concept of Home." Refugee Survey Quarterly
32.2 (2013): 130-152.
Teraji, Shinji. "Norms, culture, and cognition." Chapters (2017): 526-540.

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