When Home Is Where You Travel

Having grown up a third culture kid, Ruth Behar considers the cultural impact of “the transient places that the French anthropologist Marc Augé has called ‘non-places’ – airports, shopping malls, hotels, highways, bus terminals, and subways”:

As ‘non-places’ expand from centers to peripheries all around the world, there is renewed pressure to work hard to prevent the home from becoming a long-term hotel room. Sentimental notions of the sanctity of the home are enlisted as a means of challenging the threat of ‘non-places.’ A preponderance of guides, including websites such as Apartment Therapy and Houzz, exist for the sole purpose of assisting us in making our homes uniquely charming and irreplaceable. …

But there is another choice we can make, and that is to give up home altogether and be homeless by choice – not as a result of poverty or broken family ties, but to let go of the weight of the things that prevent us from fully engaging with the world and becoming true cosmopolitans, people at home everywhere.

(Photo by a reader: Charleston, West Virginia, 1 pm)