Psychology of Dwelling and Visual Appropriations—An Anthropological Application

Abstract

We find ourselves situated within a world that can be experienced visually, for the first time, in its wholeness. Using conceptual analysis, we intend to show that notions born within the practice of habitation, such as the sense of place, place attachment, and hearth, can help us evaluate the psychological implications of the images of Earth taken from space. We chose a phenomenological approach to human habitation because it allows concepts pertaining to connected and inherently interdisciplinary fields, for instance environmental psychology or human geography, to be reunited under the umbrella of an anthropological interpretation. The sensory and imaginary connotations of the notion of place may be noticed starting from the distinction between space as mathematical abstraction and concrete places being experienced directly. An analysis of the nature of this connection leads to the finding that we actively imagine and reimagine the surrounding world as an unfolding space in which we are constantly attempting to dwell. What is of particular interest for us is the manner in which technologically-mediated visual experience may inspire cognitive representations or may generate profound emotions, such as the attachment to a particular place. Therefore, the value of imagination for the anthropology of habitation is not rendered by its compensatory role, but by its link to ontogenesis. Familiar places, which continue to attract us, are capable of triggering unique imaginary processes, reveries which refer us to the primordial steps of ontogenesis with outmost intensity. The process of subjective appropriation of the world begins with that privileged space of origin specific to each of us, the space which we identify with most intensely. Thus, the psychological impact of the image of Earth from space: we become intensely aware that this planet is our Place within a hostile universe.

1. Introduction

Theoretical contributions are becoming increasingly necessary for the analysis of human inhabitance in the context of distinctive issues posed by an accelerated environmental degradation, as local and national perspectives on sustainability are gaining global interest. Apollo and Voyager missions have initiated a series of significant changes in the way we perceive and conceptualize the world we live in [1]. The famous photographs that have made their debut in the public space as early as the second half of the previous century, Earthrise and The Blue Marble, were the first ones to be taken from sufficiently large distances so as to enable us to contemplate our own planet. Technology has amplified, in an absolutely spectacular manner, our capacity for visual exploration [2]. We find ourselves situated within a world that can be experienced visually, for the first time, in its wholeness, a world to which, as we are perhaps becoming aware more intensely than ever, we indelibly belong [3].

The fact that we are able to see Earth from outer space had a significant contribution to the rise of environmentalism, initiating changes in our Weltanschauung, and implicitly changing our relationship with the world we inhabit. We intend to pursue a phenomenological approach to human habitation, as it allows concepts pertaining to connected and inherently interdisciplinary fields, for instance, environmental psychology or human geography, closely related to problems regarding human condition, to be reunited under the umbrella of an anthropological interpretation.

Anthropological debate features a new category: that of the global, founded on a new mode of relating to a world that can now not only be conceived, but also experienced sensorially in its totality. This concept invites newfound reflections on our relationship with the place where we belong. The elementary psychological terms which can describe our direct relationship with the surrounding world are those of perception, memory, cognition, and affects. Our aim is to show that notions born in the practice of habitation, such as the sense of place, place attachment, and hearth, can help us evaluate the psychological implications of the images of Earth taken from space.

2. Methods: Applying Anthropological Concepts

2.1. The Notion of Life-World

We will briefly present the epistemological premises of the phenomenological project and its relevance for the social sciences, especially for the anthropology of habitation. As an alternative to the well-known positive approach to reality, instead of redescribing it using logical–mathematical language, phenomenology aims to capture the world around us as closely as possible to the way it presents itself to our subjective consciousnesses [4]. Instead of aligning itself with the imperatives of objectivity, increasingly imposed on the field of social sciences by quantitative approaches, the phenomenological project seeks to describe how things and events are not only perceived, but also understood in the practice of everyday life [5]; hence, its epistemological relevance for anthropological approaches.

The phenomenological project produced a notion relevant to the anthropology of habitation, the notion of life-world. It is that subjective spacetime world of things, as it is given to us through experience, in our prescientific and extrascientific everyday life. It constitutes the ontoepistemological background on which all new knowledge appears, while becoming significant to us [6]. Our life-world is both the ground of all experiences, and their horizon. The phenomenological meaning of the notion of experience is important from an anthropological point of view, since what gains priority is the description of individual thoughts, intentions, and projects related to the world we live in, and not the objective knowledge of it as an abstract world that remains forever outside our subjectivity [5]. It includes experiences of a social and practical nature but, first of all, it includes perceptual experiences. In this world, discovered as being already there, one of nature and culture alike, all events and things will always appear to us in a continuous flow of time and in permanent relationship with our natural environment.

What directly interests us is that the applications of the notion of life-world in anthropological research are directly related to the epistemological value attributed to intuition. Phenomenology describes it primarily as an act of awareness of the world as a whole. The sensorial cannot be separated from the conceptual. Perception, imagination, and memory, as fundamental intuitive acts, are expressions of the irreducible subjective way in which we determine cognitively, in active relation to us, both objects and ideas. Phenomenology relies on the simultaneous existence of both the subject and his external world, a world whose natural objects continuously become the content of the intuitive act, as one of spontaneous appropriation of the perceived object [6].

We are both local and historical beings. Because it is “written” on our body from the beginning [7], the environment with its sights, sounds, colors, smells, etc., influences our way of seeing things, and intimately structures our perspective on the world as a whole. Its intuitive familiarity is most directly related to that particular, unique way in which things tend to behave, on a daily basis, in relation to us.

In conclusion, the notion of life-world manages to connect the localization and historicity of human existence with corporeality as its elementary condition, hence its particular relevance for environmental issues. Humans are beings who, through their corporeality, remain directly affected, both sensorially and conceptually, by that particular environment in which they effectively live. Today, technology leads to the sensory, conceptual, and imaginary expansion of a world in which we continue to remain physically engaged. That is why the way we describe and interpret it continues to depend directly on that subjective particular perception on which our practical way of understanding our everyday world is built [5].

2.2. The Anthropology of Habitation

A phenomenological reading of the practice of habitation starts with the fact that we constantly interact with the natural environment wherein our daily life unfolds. The sensory experience of familiar places or that of newly discovered ones leads to nondiscursive, intuitive knowledge. Memory brings a decisive contribution to the assignment of meanings [8]. We want to demonstrate that the anthropology of habitation can play an important role in the comprehension of the meaning we choose (or not) to attribute to certain places which become, in consequence, important to us. What is of particular interest for us is the manner in which direct or even technologically-mediated visual experience may inspire cognitive representations or may generate profound emotions such as the attachment to a particular place [9]. The phenomenological notions of corporality and situatedness become essential in describing the relationship between the human subject and the spatiotemporal aspects of the objective world wherein he is constantly engaged. This is because, from the point of view of everyday practice, it cannot remain an abstract reality, as long as it is the world which we inhabit per se.

There is a well-known distinction between abstract space and inhabited place, a distinction of phenomenological origins, that has had a remarkable fecundity in anthropological debates. Because the way in which we have come to represent our own world has experienced a process of gradual estrangement from our direct sensory experience, a process caused by an array of forced objectivations, the natural world risks losing its status as the actual frame of reference for our quotidian life [7]. The natural environment is not merely an abstract space wherein we are temporarily situated, but a lived place, a place where we come to belong. The sensory and imaginary connotations of the notion of place may be noticed starting from the distinction between space as mathematical abstraction and concrete places being experienced directly.

Malpas notes that, once it has become ours, the place becomes that complex and unitary natural environment with whose concrete characteristics we have become so sensorially intimate that it always engenders a character of spatial and temporal situatedness in our experience of the surrounding world [10]. Hence, for each of us, the complex process of conceiving and actively imagining the world is founded on the particularities of that unique and unrepeatable experience made possible by virtue of our own being in-place. Subjectively, the world appears to us within that spatiotemporal unfolding of the lived place. This difference between the vague concept of space, which is difficult to use in the practice of everyday life, and the much more specific one of place [11] can also be noticed in that the meanings of those terms which describe our situatedness in the world have their origin in the practice of habitation [12].

Through continuous dwelling, we acquire a sense of belonging to a place. Consider built environments. As an integral part of the life-world of a particular community, natural environments always become part of an intergenerational development. Murgerauer observes the vernacular architecture of the Swiss cantons in close relation to its natural settings. The habitat of rural communities features subtle but recognizable differences regarding both natural and cultural aspects of dwelling, starting with microclimate and ending with settlement patterns and house architecture.

There is a noticeable correspondence between the peculiarities of the local landscape and very specific human ways of interpreting and acting in relation to nature, in everyday practice. Living takes place in an alpine tiered landscape. Dwelling does not appear connected to a singular place, being rather linked to the periodical movements of pastoral life. There are three types of settlements: alpine huts, may villages, and permanent or church villages. The high meadows, inhabited only during summer time, are scarcely populated by shepherds’ huts. There are no visible roads. May villages represent the middle ground, at the foot of the mountains, a fragmented landscape of clearings, haystacks, and small, strictly utilitary cabins. Roads and fences are visible. The permanent villages are in the valleys, the most densely built natural environment.

People come to belong to all these places, but in sensibly different ways. Communities are separated during the summer, when men climb to the alpine pastures, and are reunited during the winter or holidays, when everybody returns into the permanent villages. Moving through these vertical landscapes, people experience nature both in isolation and communion. Specific ways of belonging, intimately linked with daily practice, shape this mountainous landscape as built environment emerges from the relationship between daily work and place [13].

Our immediate living environment can be defined as that space which is part of the sphere of human life. It can be described through the concept of human space, proposed by Bollnow, a concept which designates that proximal area created by deliberate delimitation from the rest of the natural world, an area always meant to remain within the limits of our quotidian experience. It refers to the act of deforestation of a wooded area so as to make it habitable [12]. Initiating a new habitation necessarily presupposes the sustained cutting out of new spaces appropriated from that nonhuman preexisting wilderness. This process of gradual annexation of the surrounding natural world, which has a primordial character in the historical order of existence of human communities, generates a fundamental distinction which gives anthropological structure to the world as a space wherein human activity unfolds. Namely, the distinction between that familiar domain, which is close and known, and that which always remains outside it, being distant, unfamiliar, and unknown to us.

This anthropological dialectic initiated by the perception of places as privileged spaces, as domains of one’s own, makes it so that what are initially mere geographical locations become, by degrees, part of our ongoing biographies as we represent them to ourselves as centers of meaning, as entities incorporating our memory, emotions, and aspirations [14].

2.3. The Concept of Place Attachment

By starting with the same fecund phenomenological distinction between abstract space and inhabited place, Tuan proposes the notion of sense of place. As abstract space, the surrounding world would remain absolutely neutral to us from an emotional standpoint. We would discover it only as a succession of locations. However, any new location, unknown to us in the beginning, transforms into a place on condition that we remain there for long enough so as to infuse it with subjective meanings.

Relph remarks that, through repeated encounters and complex associations, places become ours, they become those spaces of our own which we know corporeally, in an unmediated fashion, and where we come to be known by others. These spaces eventually come to embody affects, passions, and emotions [15].

Let us once again consider the natural built environment. An ethnographic case study documented the efforts of the local community from an Andalusian village in restoring an old water system around which the settlement was gradually built over centuries. As a result of industrial development and extensive irrigations, the natural water source dried out due to sustained exploitation of the subterranean aquifer. Even though the situation did not threaten in any conceivable way the livelihoods of the locals, it did have an obvious impact on their feelings towards a place they identify with outmost intensity. The image of the waterless spring was perceived as a menace to the very existence of their settlement. It triggered deeply shared feelings of attachment and belonging, intimately connected to the place in which they had been living for generations [16].

Places are experienced by subjects who are always situated directly in them while space, as a general concept, can only be understood via abstraction. The place escapes plain scientific analysis, being infused with value and meaning because it can never be separated from us as human beings.

The sense of place is that experience of conscious perception of the unique character of a natural ambience which was initially entirely indifferent to us. Intending to describe the way in which we acquire the sense of place, Tuan makes the observation that, given a certain place, there is, in the beginning, a significant difference between the perceptions of native and newcomer. A native experiences profound attachment to his familiar place, a feeling that is not necessarily registered consciously. At first, a newcomer will apprehend only the sensory evidence coming towards him within what is, for him, only a location that can only be emotionally indifferent to him [17]. If the natural world remained a plain ensemble of locations for us, the sense of place would not be possible. Our point of view on familiar natural ambiences does not remain absolutely detached but is radically transformed.

Scannell and Gifford reach the conclusion that attachment towards a place manifests, on an affective level, through the positive emotions associated with it; on a cognitive level, through the symbolic meanings attributed to it, and on a behavioral level, through the confirmed and constantly renewed desire of not abandoning or of periodically returning to that particular place [18]. By virtue of continuous habitation, that initial location, while being gradually subjectivized, begins to appear more and more frequently on the background of our memory of experienced events. Thus, it becomes our own place in world. Our most long-lived sentiments are those towards that place which is our Home.

2.4. The Experience of the Hearth

Regarding both the cognitive and affective manner in which hearth or home are subjectively experienced, a psychoanalytically-inspired argument can be made, following the process of personal ontogenesis. By virtue of its privileged cognitive and affective status as a fundamental locus of memory, our own home or hearth exists as a space of maximum proximity, deeply infused with early memories [17]. That is why it remains tied to our identity. Memories are associated with certain places, especially childhood memory appears, when explored, as spatially rooted. Because our individual life always commences in a safeguarded place, the experience of outer-world hostility towards us appears much later [19]. Before we become aware of the potential hostility of the surrounding world, we experience first that initial le bien-être, which affectively circumscribes our being in the world. Our hearth becomes a symbolical representation of the initial experience of intimacy with the outer world [19]. Hence, rooted in that original space of our own hearth, in that deeply meaningful place for our ontogenesis, we do not only relate perceptively with the objective world, but interpret it cognitively from the point of view of our everyday practice [19].

We have to remember at this point that, according to the phenomenological account of human condition, we are beings who, through our corporeality, remain directly affected, both sensorially and conceptually, by that particular environment in which we effectively live. That is why the way we describe and interpret it continues to depend directly on that subjective particular perception on which our practical way of understanding is built.

This is why, from our continuous encounter with the surrounding world, a world which we are perpetually trying to inhabit, the image-symbol of the Home can emerge constantly as a subject for reveries. It represents existence as intimacy with the surrounding world [19].

2.5. The Imaginary Appropriation of the Surrounding World

Contemplated through the lens of the initial experience of Home, the world around us appears familiar, in the sense that we perceive it as being our own. Gradually, however, the same world begins to manifest in relation to us as an unfamiliar exteriority, increasingly lacking intimacy. It gradually alienates from us, losing, to a significant extent, its ability to provide us with protection. As we may end up perceiving it as oppressive, we need to separate ourselves from the outside world by recreating a secure space from which, even if the threat of the outside cannot be annihilated, it is still being pushed out. This space evokes that anthropological definitory, initial experience. The more threatening the exterior, the warmer, the more beloved our house will tend to be [19].

The observations above serve to confirm once again that, from a psychological standpoint, the world wherein we live, as surrounding space of our daily life, cannot remain geographically abstract and emotionally neutral. An analysis of the nature of this connection leads to the finding that we actively imagine and reimagine the surrounding world as an unfolding space in which we are constantly attempting to dwell [20]. Therefore, the value of imagination for the anthropology of habitation is not rendered by its compensatory role, but by its link to ontogenesis. Familiar places, which continue to attract us, are capable of triggering imaginary processes, reveries which refer us to the primordial steps of ontogenesis with outmost intensity [20]. It is about a special form of reverie that pertains to our initial corporeal perceptive and cognitive intimacy with the surrounding world, to a period when the objective qualities of the particular ambient we experienced were memorized as distinct and enduring impressions. Those memories can play an important role in the perception of the surrounding world as a multitude of affectively infused spaces which appear interior or, on the contrary, exterior to us, depending on the extent to which they bear the qualities of intimacy [21,22].

Meaningful places are often perceived in a synesthetic manner [23]. Certain places, which we come to contemplate for long enough, can communicate complex states of mind having unique emotional atmospheres. They could make us yearn to be somewhere else or, on the contrary, could make us tremble at the thought that we have to leave [24]. It is possible for us to identify so deeply with them that a profound and extremely durable affective bond may appear between man and place. It is this bond that Tuan names topophilia [17]. The notion is important for the argumentation we shall propose below, as it makes most explicit reference to the emotional connections with that place we have come to call Home, connections which vary in intensity, subtlety, and mode of expression. It can describe even the situation of that astronaut discovering, while in orbit, that Earth is his place within a hostile universe.

2.6. The Sense of Belonging

We have seen that, once under the reign of our active imagination, the surrounding world can no longer remain anthropologically neutral to us, thus becoming, little by little, a lived space. Moreover, in the intensely transformative practice of habitation, natural ambience is conceived and reconceived as a space undergoing humanization, wherefore, the distinction which structures the world as a space of human activity is that between close and familiar space and the more distant one. The surrounding world always appears to us as divided into two complementary domains, that of the interior and that of the exterior [25].

The subjective meaning of the perceived difference between what is inside and what is outside is informed by the initial experience of Home. To dwell means to be at home in your place, to be inside. Once this anthropological realm is demarcated, what remains beyond exists not only as an objective spatial extension, but also as an imagined one. The world around us can never be completely humanized. Most of it will inevitably remain outside that space that can be domesticated. Some things always remain unreachable or unknowable for us. In this sense, “outside” means outside of the inhabited space.

Our practical understanding of the world as surrounding space of everyday actions remains founded upon the effective experience of habitation. The more we identify with a place, the more profound our attachment will be. Within that particular place, the psychosocial order of daily life, made of individual intentions and activities, and its environmental characteristics, tend to fuse together [26]. In consequence, the act of active inhabitation manages to focalize the experience of the surrounding world as the spatial setting of human existence. We represent the world we live in through the lens of the relationship between inside and outside. It is an inherently tense relationship, both emotionally and cognitively, modelled by the active contrast between our prereflexive attachment to our own place and the inevitable reflective detachment from the rest of the world which remains, at least for the moment, exterior and indifferent for us. The relationship between these two poles, within and without, comes to give symbolic structure to the whole experience of world as environment.

This anthropological dynamic is so relevant that the experience of place may be interpreted as being an existential one. Place is a sine qua non event in the spatial and temporal order of human existence: being in the world means existing within that place we know and feel that we belong to, it means experiencing existential interiority within that place [27]. Associated with feelings of belonging, of unity, existential interiority presupposes a prolonged perceptual and emotional immersion in the ambiance of that place which may not be, most often, the subject of our conscious reflection, although it has been, is, and remains infused with familiar meanings. This aspect can be easily underlined if we consider the experience of our natal place, of that geographic area unique for each of us, where we have felt, feel, and will always feel at home [28].

By contrast, in a new location, we initially feel acute cognitive discomfort whose source is the evident unfamiliarity or the subtle strangeness of our surroundings. We feel separated, outside of that natural ambient. Gradually, however, we can come to feel existentially within, and therefore at home, anywhere [15]. Any location can become our home, our unique Place in the world. The more we wish we were there rather than elsewhere, safe rather than threatened, the more deeply we shall identify with that place, albeit our attention is not consciously directed at its natural characteristics. Those become evident only when we leave the place, even if temporarily. In this line of thought, when it is regarded from the outside, temporarily deserted, the planet appears as a Place of ours in the hostile universe which is the world we live in today.

2.7. The Subjective Appropriation of the Surrounding World

Through habitation, human communities draw borders around themselves which they constantly transcend. The process of drawing newer and newer, more and more exterior borders by psychosocial means eventually comes to include the surrounding world. Natural ambience, though initially perceived as a barren, unhumanized, and wild domain, is progressively filled owing to the practice of habitation, thus entering the human order of life. Therefore, the borders of a place exist in order to guard us against the threats of outside chaos. In spite of this, they most often appear to us as permeable. Enclosed by boundaries, our place remains a fundamentally open domain. In this sense, revisiting an idea expressed previously, we also define a place as being ours by distinguishing it from other places which actually exist or which are merely possible, places which are all initially completely foreign to us [29]. This is the starting point of a psychology of the progressive appropriation of the surrounding world. What were originally mere locations become, by gradual degrees, our places. The process of subjective appropriation of the world begins with that privileged space of origin specific to each of us, the space which we identify with most intensely. The house of our childhood is the first place to becomes ours, subsequently followed by our city, region, country, and continent. Today, we have even come to relate to the entire globe, which becomes our planet.

Taking these things into account, let us remember that the contemporary experience of the world as space of quotidian life implies continuous visual appropriations [30]. As it is always contemplated from our center of experience, the world wherein we live effectively appears to us as a hemisphere which gradually extends around us. By means of technology, we can now contemplate the same world, only this time it seems completely estranged from that everyday experience. We can only become aware on an abstract level that we belong to the world which we visualize today as a blue globe on the black background of cosmic space.

An inherent cognitive tension is activated by the contrast between our concrete engagement with a world that is known and recognized sensorially in daily practice and our capacity of detaching ourselves from it so that we may be able to represent it as an abstract totality. Using this observation as a starting point, Ingold proposes the images of globe and sphere as alternative spatial metaphors capturing the way in which we currently achieve that absolutely necessary psychic grip on our natural living environment [31].

Regarded from within the domain of everyday life, the world where we live may be described as a hemisphere, whose fluid horizons enclose us. Even though we have always been able to represent it, in some form or another as a totality, we have not managed, until today at least, to visualize it in its wholeness for a simple reason: we have always been physically situated within it. Today, contemplated from orbit, the same world appears to us as a globe floating in the cosmic void. It is in this form that we appropriate it visually for the first time.

All the spaces of the human habitation that we come to contemplate at a given moment evoke the sense of place insofar as we can identify their center and edges. The supporting forces sustain the center, and the threatening ones constantly assault the borders, and, therefore, emphasize them, highlight them [32]. Thus, the psychological impact of the image of Earth from space: beyond the striking aesthetic quality of the image, we became intensely aware that this planet is our Place within a hostile universe.

3. Conclusions

A phenomenological approach to human habitation, based on notions such as corporeality and spatially-situated character of human existence, can be legitimately engaged in exploring the continuous interaction between human beings and their surroundings, providing valuable insights into the field of environmental psychology.

The subjective appropriation of the surrounding world starts with the space of the early phases of ontogenesis. In the temporal order of our life as situated subjects, the house of childhood becomes first our home, then the village or city, the region, the country, and, perhaps, the continent. Thanks to technology, we can contemplate the world we live in as a blue sphere floating in the deep darkness of space. This form of visual appropriation is possible for the first time in history. The entire globe becomes our Home.

The psychological impact of this image can be evaluated starting from an anthropological finding: any location, where humans live long enough, activates a sense of belonging, expressed through the wish to be there, rather than elsewhere, to be safe, not exposed to the unknown, to be inside, not outside. During the long process of identification with that place, due to daily habit, its natural particularities are often lost from sight. In that regard, a newfound awareness arises when the subject distances himself temporarily from it, leaving it, and then returns. Seen from far away, the planet appears to us as our place in the universe.

As human order is imprinted onto the natural world, every place is reconstructed, gaining a center and an outside border. The wilderness menace highlights that border. Hence, the profound psychological impact of the image of the Earth from space: the awareness that the planet is our place in an absolutely hostile universe. Its borders are easy to notice: a thin atmospheric lair separates it from the frozen surrounding vacuum. Evoking that soothing and protective closeness in which life begins, the image of the Earth-House can trigger reveries of intimacy as the only place that secures human existence inside the immeasurable vastness and the radical hostility of the universe.