DWELLING

DWELLING

The process of dwelling (creating a habitat) in a specific place, meaning a permanent or long-term relationship between man and a given place.

The term refers to the way in which people experience the world, including household management practices (eating, moving, building premises, transforming the land, taking possession of land through marking and fencing, animal husbandry, plant breeding, harvesting, hunting, industrial development), creating social norms (ways of communicating, building human- to-human, human-to-place, group-to-individual relations, cultivating certain customs and habits, using a certain language, etc.), creating cultural norms (ways of justifying the actions undertaken by referring to mythology, religion, science). Dwelling requires the creation of permanent relations (including physical, emotional, intellectual) with the place and the physical and social environment.

This phenomenon is sometimes connected with the need to establish someone’s right to live is a given place. Among the factors that make it possible to assert this right are:

1. the right of priority; 2. the right of superiority when, for example, the dwellings built by the indigenous peoples are not stable enough and can be easily demolished while taking over the land (thanks to the military, economic and legal advantage, Indians or Aborigines were displaced); 3. bestowment; 4. religious rights and those founded on mythology (e.g. reference to the idea of the Promised Land); 5. the right of historical justification.

The idea of dwelling as the basis of human existence is particularly strongly present in phenomenological thought. Heidegger emphasises the mutual belonging of the human being and the inhabited place, which provides a context for understanding human actions, brings about a feeling of security. For Relph, an inhabited place becomes home when a person realises their own rootedness and the two-way bond between them and the inhabited space, as well as discovers the temporal dimension of habitation. Dardel emphasises the unique role of the place where we are born, which we do not choose as our place of living, but which is imposed on us. In Ingold’s theory the idea of the “taskscape”, in which the experiences of previous generations are accumulated, imposing a lifestyle on future generations, is tantamount to Heidegger’s idea of dwelling.

Dwelling is also a process that is a source of identity for individuals and social groups (Relph, Jackson), creating love for the place and land of ancestors (Tuan), creating a network of interpersonal relationships (Jackson), in which objective space is transformed into a subjectively experienced and felt place (Morton), dividing into sacrum and profanum and enabling orientation both in physical space and in mythical space (Eliade). By inhabiting, we create places and neighbourhoods, determine their range and content, and the journey becomes a kind of update of this content (Lowenthal). Dwelling also influences the way of experiencing the landscape, which from an aesthetic point of view becomes a place of work and everyday practice; it forces a change of the attitude of the observer (tourist, passer-by) into the attitude of the engaged inhabitant (Jackson, Ingold, Wylie, Tilley, Cresswell).

We participate in the process of dwelling with all our senses: we see, feel touch, smell and taste, we hear. Thanks to this experience we gain a type of cultural competence, on the basis of which we distinguish music from cacophony of sounds, a pleasant smell from odour, tasty from unpalatable (Heidegger, Morton). Sensual activity also contributes to maintaining the continuity of group and individual identity, builds relationships between people, and between individuals and  the place, the group (Tuan, Porteous, Rodaway). Inhabiting becomes a kind of participation in one’s own culture and environment.

By inhabiting (coming from a given place) we have cultural knowledge, which is socially shared and constitutes a component of cultural awareness (de Certeau, Bourdieu, Jackson). Dwelling as a process of building cultural and social norms can be considered in ethnic, national, religious, social and professional terms; it creates centres that become places of domination of some idea (mental formation). It sets the centre of values and can be treated as a mental (mental) construct that binds people and places (Tuan, Heidegger). By inhabiting, we also establish relations of power and knowledge and the associated relations between the centre and the periphery, which are offshoots of the “ours/not ours” relationship: they determine to what extent a given place belongs to us, whether it is managed in a way deemed appropriate, i.e. in accordance with our standards (similarly, a foreign land is sometimes considered as uninhabited or as a territory to be colonised, and foreign customs, attitudes and beliefs are treated as savagery or barbarity). Dwelling understood in terms of “homeliness” brings a sense of security and meaning.

[B.F., M.G.]

Literature:

Cresswell, Tim. Place: a Short Introduction. Malden, USA, Oxford, UK and Carlton, Australia: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.

Heidegger, Martin. Building, Dwelling, Thinking. In Poetry, Language, Thought. New York: Harper Colophon. Books, 1971.

Ingold, Tim. “The temporality of the landscape”, “World Archeology”, 1993, vol. 25, nr 2.

Jackson, John B. Landscape in Sight: looking at America. New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1997.

Frydryczak, Beata, Angutek, Dorota (eds.) Krajobrazy. Antologia tekstów. Poznań: Wydawnictwo PTPN, 2014.

Morton, Timothy. Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2007.

Relph, Edward C. Place and Placelessness. London: Pion Limited, 1976.

Tilley, Christopher. Place, Paths and Monuments: a Phenomenology of Landscape. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1994.

Tuan, Yi-Fu. Topophilia, Englewood Cliffs, New York: Prentice-Hall, 1974.

Wylie, John. Landscape. London and New York: Routledge, 2007.