Is My House My Home? An Analysis of “Nowhereness” Among “Noknowers” in Transitional Settings

Introduction

In a war displacement scenario, apart from the generally acknowledged grief over lost homes, the humiliation of being thrown out from the native setting is also significant; this act may even cause internally displaced people (IDP) to challenge their self-worth to a great extent (Fried, 1972; Marcus, 1995). Marcus (1995) further avers on a reciprocal relationship between lost home and one’s coping ability; those who have experienced such loss may perceive it not only as a loss of material possessions but also of part of one’s self. In discussing social systems, Pratt (1981) implies that houses are in fact a representation of one’s social self. At the community level, this notion of “self” has extended boundaries in terms of shared values, attitudes, and belief at a complex level of interaction (Festinger, 1972). Membership is crucial for one to maintain self-identity by attaining vital individual goals while satisfying the essential human needs that can only be fulfilled through relationships with other members of the group. Group identity, as formulated by Erik Erikson, refers to an individual’s sense of belonging, of being a part of larger human and social entities. Group or social identity may refer to obtaining the “membership” in social groups with whom an individual initially has little overt contact, whether it be a family, a social class, an ethnic collectivity, a profession, or a group of people sharing a common ideology (Fried, 1972). If IDPs are unable to reproduce their original environment’s social cohesion, established friendship networks, and sense of community into the setting in which they have been transplanted, they will face environmental deprivation (Fried, 1972).

In such scenarios, deprivation can reduce one’s status and mind-set from member to “noknower” where most of the tacit sociocultural references such as local knowledge of the environment, life histories, folklores, mythologies, cosmologies were unfamiliar. Although social and spatial identities operate under somewhat distinct domains, apparent overlaps between the two faculties facilitate the notions that a lack of spatial identity may contribute to “nowhereness” while the absence of social identity may create a “noknower.” This seemingly polemic relationship means something more than duality, conflict, or opposition; they are distinct yet inseparably related. Perhaps, this relationship is best supported by Hummon’s (1992) assertions that “a community identity may be defined as an interpretation of self that uses community as a locus of attachment or an image for self-characterization.” Social psychologist Wiesenfeld (1992) describes how one may feel like a “noknower” when he or she steps into a space where he or she does not have a home of his or her own.

Extrapolating from seminal literature in the context of civil war–induced displacement, the study conceptualizes home as an ongoing process of persevering memories of lively times, present experiences of separation and distress, and accumulated projections for an uncertain future. Although highly colloquial, the aftermath of a lack of membership to the spatial and aspatial cognizance of one’s environment constitutes them as “noknowers.” A “noknower” may deal with a sense of placelessness, rootlessness, alienation, and finally “nowhereness” (Arefi, 1999; Tuan, 1980). Somewhat similar to “otherness” or “non-places,” “nowhereness” is characterized by loss of meaning and loss of proper connection between locations (Arefi, 1999; Augé, 2009; Paxson, 2005). Even though the concept of home versus house for civil war–displaced peoples has been extensively researched, there are only a few analyses that exist for altered environmental perceptions as expressed through the concepts of “noknower” and “nowhereness.” These concepts represent a postdisaster spatial semantics in-the-making. From these assertions, arise the questions investigated in this study: “What meaning does home evoke in those displaced in a transitional setting?” While some find individual meaning, others emphasize common meanings based on shared or similar experience (Meinig, 1979; Relph, 1976). Extending such notions, an operational scenario was extrapolated to a displaced person’s acclimatization to a new setting in which new meanings of place are acquired via shared, similar experiences with new neighbors.

From 1983 to 2012, over a hundred thousand people were displaced as a result of the armed battle between the Liberation Tamil Tiger of Elam (LTTE) and the government of Sri Lanka (Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, 2010). Those caught in the crossfire fled as a group to safe areas and were initially accommodated in several different locations depending on the availability of temporary shelters. The makeup of these transitional settings was not representative of IDP’s original communities, rather they were composed of a mixture of people from different locales. With no sign of immediate peace, the local government, with the help of local charities and foreign aid groups, arranged a package that consisted of both financial and material assistance for IDPs to construct houses of their own. No layout design or master plan was made or executed for such settlements (Subasinghe, 1999). In comparison to the shelter and land that the IDPs enjoyed in their native homes, transitional settings were inferior substitutes in regards to the spatial, functional, and emotional qualities to the places they had previously identified as “home” (Subasinghe, 2012). The IDP-transitional setting can be described as “moderately permanent basic shelter[s] with open access resources, in a fairly small, barren, left over piece of land, which often [are] socially as well as physically abandoned nook[s] of an existing village” (Benedikt & Hartmut, 2006).

Method

This study is based on open-ended interviews with 31 individuals from three rural communities in the district of Horowpothana, located in the North Central province of Sri Lanka. Purposive sampling of the communities was based on the size of the transitional settlement, distance to nearest infrastructure base or existing village, ethnic profile, duration of the displacement, the location of the original settlements. All three communities hosted approximately 17 families within a 1.5-km radius of an established infrastructure base. The communities are predominantly made of a Sinhala-language speaking population from the bordering villages of Horowpothana district who fled and resettled in their respective transitional settings at around the same time after the initial displacement. Although fluent in Sinhala, the majority of interviewees were females who had been displaced over 10 years ago, had originally come from different ethnic groups, and varied in age from 26 to 72 years. All the interviews took place at the subject’s transitional place, and most were voluntarily supported by the most elderly or conversational family member available at the time of the interview; a few times more than a single member volunteered to support the interviewees. The first round of interviews was conducted in the months of May and July 1999 and the second verification round in September 2000 with the same interviewees. The length of time between the two sets of interviews was intended to furnish a broader perspective of the homemaking process from the notions of “noknowers” and “nowhereness.” A qualified, bilingual translator who was also an expert on the local dialect verified the original translation from local language to English by the principal investigator.

The first set of transcripts from the pilot research was sorted into somewhat distinctive categories, these categories were verified during the second set of interviews and also through peer debriefing (Figure 1). Emergence of final themes at the second rounds of interviews from the initial interview transcripts occurred via interpolation (building narratives by filling the gaps in transcripts via familiarity of the subjects’ oral and behavioral language), unitization (breaking transcripts to self-standing units/sentences), categorization (identifying emerging categories through multiple sorting of units), thematization (including recurring categories into themes).

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Figure 1.

Themes distillation process from interview transcripts, 2013.

On analysis of these interviews, the IDP’s definitions of home in transitional places were placed into the following categories: home as orientation, home as a lifelong making of material success, home as accumulation of values, home as continuance of tenure, home as a symbolic web of support, home as membership within community, home as a family in progress, and finally, home as a future in construction. It was further revealed that the sophistication of the lost home and the extent and fertility of the land are major factors in constructing the following place-related themes. The excerpts quoted in each theme are representative of their categories in which keywords are critiqued for their recurring meanings.

A. Home as Orientation

A woman, age 67 years, presently staying with her granddaughter, described her transitional place in relation to her lost home:

I had the best: my home my castle; nothing was impossible in that small world; even the best kitchen of the village, people came to taste my latest dish there. My Pila ¹ was pretty decent too, it was the perfect place to enjoy a dish fresh out of the stove; it felt so good when I talked to them of my parental home and how I experimented various country delicacies there: What I have here in this dingy place is only memories. Do I have here anything to be proud of?

It was noticed that the greater the lived-in experiences, the higher the number of references were made to their home or favorite place/s of home. The very notions of “castle” and “world” demonstrate centrality or core feelings about the home. However, it was not the mere physical presence of the space that made their home the main source of reference but a set of meanings that emerged from interacting with the physical setting as well as the lived-in knowledge generated through such interactions over time. Activities, processes, and routines associated with specific places were missed more than the places themselves. Being able to define and also to enjoy a level of control over one’s own set of values with minimum or no hindrance was deciphered. Another female participant, age 70 years, echoed similar thoughts on the centrality of home:

One feels totally lost when you do not have a home to return to, especially when one is faced with serious challenges. I cannot even plan my day here because it doesn’t feel right here. It does not offer much to make it easy for me. My old home was the center of everything and the world felt so small and friendly when I’m at home.

According to Dal Co (1990), peasant’s adobe is rootedness, model to direct link to the soil, an expression of primordial blood tie to the homeland. Notably, IDPs have a very narrow universe, a fact which establishes a very important sense of reference with the home and to the rest of “the world” (Wiesenfeld, 1992). The expression, “at home I used to have . . .” usually initiates a conversation of comparison between “my home” with “your home.” Perhaps, it may even extend beyond the boundaries of a personal home to a village, city, state, or, ultimately, homeland. Tuan (1977) explains that the home becomes a center of meaning based on all of the experiences one has had in that home and that it furnishes referential power to describe other experiences. Lalli (1992) elaborates by asserting that the home in fact is a central point of reference of human existence.

B. Lifelong Making of Material Success

A man of 57, who had fallen from his roof and was wounded during the construction of his house, said,

I even lost my padura. ² I lost my beloved house. I made it along with my life, just like “Kumbala ³ “ making his nest; every bit and piece of my place had something special to tell. Sometimes I resent certain pieces I hardly rescued and brought here, which remind me of other losses. This thing now I reside (points at the main door of his transitional house) is only four days’ work. I hardly put myself into doing this. But it’s bigger than my previous house and cleaner as well. Look at me now, I’m worthless. It was like that I beat by time.

Instead of the word “home,” the subject used the expression “house” to suggest the contentment of the material achievement of building a home. Apart from the general grief over material loss, the subject clearly exemplifies the feeling of self-degradation due to the lost value of self-labor and capital investment (Subasinghe, 2011). The comparison of the time-consuming and laborious process of making previous home to the current status of his transitional house demonstrates the interviewees’ difficulty in coming to terms with this shifting reality. Perhaps, a parallel process of making another home or a resumption of the homemaking process is evident in reference to the size and cleanliness of the transitional place. Another participant, a 32-year-old brick maker who described why his home is the ultimate material possession:

When you have a home of your own, they know that you made it to there. My old home was my job as much as the job was my home. Bricks I make go in and out of the wall in the making in my new store room. It’s my showcase where people can see stocks I have ready for sale. When I don’t have enough sales a small part of the wall get built.

Changing attitudes of belongingness and resentment to objects from the past remind IDPs of both material tragedy as well as the meaning associated with such loss (Marcus, 1995). As there is a joy of discovery, and advancement and originality are involved, home is a personal innovation. As much as its symbolic ties mediate, for most people, a home is the most valuable material thing ever attained throughout their entire life. A home not only alludes to material success but also marks an ultimate satisfaction in relation to consumption (Hill, 1991). Marcus (1995) further avers the contrary situations of where the home has become a source of income and a container of objects from the past. In this vein, the home consumed its creator’s energy and effort, and in return, it offers “employment” or “a road” to establish milestones of one’s life. Self-labor is the very energy of acquisition of a home (Subasinghe, 2012). Survival would be impossible for a being that had no home (Dal Co, 1990). Finch and Hayes (1994) assert that home is something actively constructed through a process that turns the raw materials of a house plus possessions into a home.

C. Home as Accumulation of Values

A woman, age 57 years, who is the village witchdoctor, deliberated how she has lost the place where she tied into her kith and kin via indigenous practices:

It seemed like it never was completed; I spent my whole life foretelling and advising the past, present and the future written in “my folks” horoscopes (cries). Now, do I have a place to show them where my forefathers styled and practiced their blessed traditions; it wasn’t just four walls and a roof above, but my very story: soul? My grandchildren will never learn how to keep a home the way I kept mine; with my very hands (wipe tears): each new year I replaced the water of the sacred bottle kept in the shrine with fresh water from the well ⁴ ; it was the first thing I did in the New Year’s Eve. For me, it was more about nurturing values than continuing a practice.

This kind of nostalgia for a ritual or routine practice is quite common among remarks by elderly women. The nostalgia is evidence of an appreciation of generational efforts to achieve both individual and family goals, as well as an ability to be current and relevant with timely accumulations of ideals and accomplishments on what “the world” has to offer. Time certainly adds value to the kind of family and community practices for which an individual’s home is the breeding ground. Continuation and progression of such values may be heavily dependent on the symbolism that the home bears. A female participant, 47 years old, raised concerns on the difficulty of bringing up kids with right values:

It’s near impossible to differentiate between good and bad here. Back at home kids never used to be this adamant, of course here the values different from ours. Not that I have anything against the way these people raise their kids, but I really am worried about my kids not knowing where my values come from.

As Tuan (1980) theorizes, the depth of the feeling for a home reflects time and permanence. Home is a place where one leaves marks of his belief, attitudes, culture, traditions, and values, all of which evolve over the time. Dal Co (1990) stresses the intensity of this expenditure, thus, “every dwelling denies its existence as a place when once inhabited, it becomes marked by the traces of habits that negate or mask its essential character.” The greater a person’s predisplacement commitment to his or her native setting, the more likely he or she is to react with marked grief for lost values (Fried, 1972). A home reproduces norms, values, and beliefs shared by its inhabitants (Wiesenfeld, 1992). As further deliberated by Dal Co (1990), not only is a dwelling essentially the “finding of a homeland” but the home, as the form of the dwelling, is a metaphor for the historical–political concept of homeland. Home as a conceptual miniature replica of one’s homeland implies an ideal locus for values best available and at the same time for values provided by as well as acquired within geographical restrictions. The loss of home usually creates fragmentation of routines, of relationships, and of expectations, and frequently implies an alteration in the worlds of physically available objects and spatially oriented action (Fried, 1972).

D. Home as Continuance of Tenure

A man, age 49 years, who was a rice cultivator and was well conversed in traditional agricultural systems, described his lost home as an extended livelihood system:

Do I need this land (points index finger toward the ground) No I don’t; what use of a house with clay tiles if there is no fertile garden; back at home I used to work back and forth between my house and garden; it was so convenient. I didn’t see any difference between taking a meal under a tree or on the “Pila” ⁵ of my house. What woman need is a solid man, but man: the good earth.

The subject’s environmental images of deprivation exclusively focus on home garden and paddy fields. He distinctly keeps both his home and the land associated with his livelihood intact as a claim of lost ownership. In the majority of cases, the land occupied or cultivated does not actually belong to the IDPs; thus, such ownership is symbolic rather than legal. Being an agricultural community full of telluric links, acknowledgment of symbolic ownership is core to personal and interpersonal relationships. Apparently, the interviewee’s notion of home ownership spreads beyond the boundaries of the four walls of a house and into extended boundaries of shared landscape. Even though the subject legally owns the land and house of the transitional setting, the lost home weighs much heavier because he enjoyed symbolic ownership through an informal-acquisition process based on generational occupation. Another farmer, a 77-year-old male, expressed his concerns over tenure in terms of losing hereditary aristocracy:

My land is my say in the community. Folks listened to me because most of them were employed in my estates. They were proud of working for I was for them because thanks to the land I was a ruler in my own right.

Among low-income people, ownership is an especially important determinant of residential satisfaction and has direct links to the sense of stability experienced by people in the neighborhood (Cooper, 1992; Wiesenfeld, 1992). Kith and kin relationships to the principal provider/owner furnish “not under my roof,” an authority over outsiders or even shared owners. On the contrary, an ancestral relationship is not a compulsory requirement to enjoy certain hegemony at “familiar home,” but membership to the principal owner’s peer group. Among rural communities with interdependent work-based relationships, authority is not generally exercised overtly, but rather is expected, communally agreed upon, and seldom affronted.

E. A Safe Voyage Between “Self” and the World

A woman, age 42 years, a widow, mother of three, and midwife by profession who lost her husband during military attacks expressed how she turns to “her corner” when she was exhausted of the “world”:

I don’t even have time to think about whether I lost my place or not; my life is busier than ever, just think of walking miles and miles to find those pregnant mothers who will be anywhere, but not in their homes! If they stay home and relax, their kids will starve. Even I wrote details of my next visit for pre-delivery advice on their doors in huge letters. They are such chickens. After exhausted day what I need is my corner of the world, all to myself, to take a short break from this endless stalking. I loved my previous place, but this would do for the time being. At home, I can easily relax to my fatherless kittens (kids). I’m more open to myself and kids when I’m back home and that’s it. I just plant myself in the home.

The phrase “I’m home” denotes a claim of returning temporarily to lost connectedness rather than to mere physical comfort. Thus, if home is simply “something to hold on to,” the task of bringing one’s mind-set into its original or muted condition from an interrupted status can be fulfilled only partially; rather, the degree of a place’s “home-like” quality—in which it allows healthy and interactive relationships among its members—presents its neighborliness via reliance. The home allows the subject to put all worldly troubles aside and nurse or rejuvenate his or her ego. It further offers freedom to conform to the formal and complex rules of the one’s public-character while also providing a locus for one’s individual autonomy. As captured in an expression like “. . . open to myself and kids—whether it is solitude or company one seeks from his/her home”—solace proffered is rather symbolic. Another single mother, age 49 years, expressed her concerns over being a “noknower” in a transitional environment:

Everything is against you when you cannot trust the place you live. It takes more than time to get to know a place. I have been living in this place more than 8 years, but never felt safe enough to leave my kids alone. Even if there’s no one around, when I’m on my mat surrounded by my kids it becomes a real home where I can do things for them and myself.

In the broadest sense, the home acknowledges the mental status of its creator by accommodating his or her moods (Marcus, 1995). Dal Co (1990) describes the home as “search of and desire within myself—a space or point in which only the ego exists, where the world does not reach, where my ego only alone resides.” The home is presented here as an exclusion of the world, as a definitive renunciation. Between the world and the home falls the irreversible distance of voyage; interior and exterior, to paraphrase Bhar, are irreparably separated by the act of departure that produces the nostalgia for refuge. He further argues the home as a realized plenitude, regular pulsation through a body that expresses itself in the harmony of its features and movements. Especially in a situation where one seeks secular solace to overcome severe emotional burden, the home becomes an enormously important anchor or “island” (Cooper, 1992). Rainwater (1972) theorizes the home as a haven because it secures one from where the homicide, burglary, and social pathology are commonplace. The home also provides a refuge from noxious elements in the outside world, a place where one can regroup his or her energies to deal with the outside world. For Heidegger (cited in Dal Co, 1990), the essence of dwelling lies in “remaining,” in “staying on”—not in just any place, but in a place that provides peace; a dwelling is being in-peace. Building a dwelling, therefore, preserves our being-in-peace.

F. Home as Membership to Community

A man, age 48 years, who was one of the very successful and reputed onion cultivators, emphasized how he missed his “big place”:

I feel rootless; I lost all the friends I knew. Nobody here knows who I am. Am I just a peasant? Back at home, pretty much anyone would volunteer to harvest my six acres. Of course, it was indeed a prestige for them. We were like one humongous family. My doors were opened to anybody; even to my enemies: not that I have many (broad smile). Evenings were simply exuberant. After a heavy day at work, we always had loads of things to talk about and laughed-at in my “Pila” ⁵ while chewing “betel” leaves and drinking tea. If my folks are back there I wouldn’t mind picking up this little house and put in my corner. People down here got a very low opinion of us: they call us “camp guys.” ⁶

The absence of familiar places and people with predictable behavioral patterns mutate feelings for one’s transitional home. Apparently, missing interactive livelihood-related relationships—expressed as “am I just a peasant?”—not only demonstrates severely affected social orientation but also self-worthlessness and a shaken ego. The lack of social traversing among familiar people may result in a feeling of social isolation similar to that of linguistic barriers between locals and nomadic tribes. Similarly, routine personal and interpersonal interactions such as verbal greetings and familiar sounds from people walking by also recall the existence of the social realm or membership of what one defines as “a home.” Perhaps, “out of my door” implies a notion of boundaries and a threshold of social filtering, no matter how extensive the social realm of peasant’s home may be. The preceding interview shows how deeply displaced the interviewee feels from his previous peer group life. Quite often, the lengthier the pre-relocation commitment, the greater the extent of extended home boundaries demarcated by social realm.

Once a quite successful matchmaker, age 64 years, wanted to know what exactly a place has to offer if it has nothing to do with good relationships:

Once you an outsider, you always are. I do believe in new relationships, but genuine relationships are only possible when you have a home to welcome them. Home is where people in their element, where they can negotiate relationships in and out. You name it I can put any two clans together if they are well networked.

By belonging to someplace that is quite familiar and easily delineated, one feels like it is “a home.” As Fried (1972) asserts, on the one hand, the residential area is the region in which a vast and interlocking set of social networks is localized. And on the other, the physical area has considerable meaning as an extension of home, in which various parts are delineated and structured on the basis of a sense of belonging. Dal Co (1990) conceptualizes social territories of the home “outside as an inevitable extension of the inside and of the inside as deeply affected by what goes on immediately outside.” Rainwater (1972) further explores the social diversity of the home: A suburb, just as a village or farm homestead, can be conceptualized as one large protecting and gratifying home. This is also an expression of a holistic meaning that stresses a collective process arising from the individual need for a home, and which, over time, generated a common satisfaction of needs. This transcends the physical space in which to live and allowing for the construction of a social space to which the respondent belongs and where he wants to stay (Wiesenfeld, 1997).

G. Home as a Family in Progress

A woman, age 56 years, mother of four kids, and housewife who regularly helped her husband at paddy fields and home garden, spoke of her home as the family:

It was like a piece being taken away from me. Nothing else, I lost my right hand. I don’t have a decent enough place to raise my kids. All my kids were born there. A lot of care had gone into those rooms; even though it wasn’t big enough like this (spreads her both hands) eight family members including my parents were totally content there. Did I ever complain about seven bellies that need to be filled every day? We helped each other: even this smallest one (she took the youngest kid into her lap) knows how busy I am. A matter of an applause I can summon a handful of our friends or relatives in case of an emergency. I had regular visits from neighbors and they were always willing to give us a hand. Nothing supportive about here, even my parents are cross these days.

This woman’s perspective is quite distinct in the concept of the home as a rebirth after getting married and as a meticulously chosen place to discover the novelties of a co-constructed space and to appreciate the new values of making a family. Parental ideals about how children should be raised and taught are at the very core of home as a progressive unit of nurturing knowledge, protection against outside human and metaphysical threats, reaching up to family values, and living up to the “family name.” Several negative sentiments about the transitional home were recurring throughout this interview: looser family ties, a lack of value-understanding among members, insensitivity to value transformation of the changing world, inability to provide what is best for the children, lack of informal visits from kith and kin, and ultimately having “nothing to hold onto.” While looking for lost ties is not uncommon among the displaced, “cross or irritated parents” certainly hints at emotional revisits to the lost home. A widow in early 20s was skeptical about possibility of having a family in the future as she was not in her home:

Everybody has a negative opinion when it comes to finding a man for me. They think it will be difficult for me as I do not have most of my close family alive. With my home, they all were gone for good. With or without a man, a home make it possible for a woman to look forward, expect something good to come along.

Dal Co (1990) further deliberates, “the fundamental cause of the nostalgia for the spirit of community lies in the disappearance of the family system of learned behavior that erects norms by starting with the direct, parental transferal of handicraft knowledge-the organic base.” Marcus (1995) describes the underlying unspoken interpersonal relationships among family members, saying that the “house is state of consciousness among the family members.” Especially among agrarian communities who are highly dependent on the labor of family members as a means of key income, a strong sense of family is often maintained. Among Low’s (1992) typology of home and place attachment, the social component is portrayed as “place attachment through family or kinship ties.” Hummon (1992) has considered the attachment to the place as an individual’s perspective of the home and of the community. Lalli (1992) further strengthens this, asserting “home as context where the family emerges and learns to live with others.” Very central to all of these theses is the concept that beyond the physical presence of the house, the family constructs home as “our socio-cultural half” of the world. In this way, the home is the last thing one can afford to lose.

H. Home as a Future in Construction

A woman, age 26 years, newly married, who built a new house close to her ancestral home for her new family, expressed how she is looking forward to starting from scratch as soon as time permits:

I loved it—it’s the only home I’ve ever known, but I can’t take chances; we just started our life and we had so many plans. I can’t ruin my future like this. I don’t mind settling in this area, but not in this spot; this is the worst part of the village. If my man and parents agree, with some money I want to start it even right now (she calls her husband). Maybe you can write to press about us, I mean about young ones; the ones just started their life. We haven’t done a grain of things any married couple would love to experience. No home; no future.

A sense of “a step forward,” permanence, progress through time, and potential separation for betterment is a sort of a typical mental plan one drafts for his or her home. For example, “a whitewashed thatched cottage with high gables on the coast/suburb” is a typical future projection depicted in post–World War II autobiography literature, often by returning soldiers; such descriptions, perhaps, suggest that “home is future.” On a personal level, this notion is represented by a desire to build, purchase, or lease a space at the same location or with reasonable access to ancestral attachments; On an interpersonal level, notions similar to “born again” infer postmarriage or postwar ensemble in a chosen place to start one’s a life afresh. A simple face-lift or minor interior alteration to home too is a rudimentary attempt to approach the future more optimistically. Even under the most bizarre or worst circumstances, the displaced still hope and struggle to secure the future in a preferred place. The strong anticipation among the displaced for an immediate ceasefire, which may eventually lead to peace, further highlights the yearning for an uninterrupted present for a better future. To settle somewhere immediately, “not this spot,” conveys the extreme levels of compromise a displaced person is able to make in a desperate situation; however, those who are displaced do not want to negotiate certain critical needs that can only be attained through their potential home’s proximity and conformity to family members. Not quite different from the notion of home as a family in progress, one of the male participants, age 34 years, voiced on a reciprocal relationship between progress and future:

Progress is future, but progress alone is just useless when it was not initiated, accepted and continued at home. One need to have a control over “time” to plan ahead.

Wiesenfeld (1997) reports that “there is a projection toward future; there is a desire for continuity through time, in which the new generations incorporate the community into projects of living at home. This has to be dynamic community that has a shared need.” Fragmentation of essential components of the sense of continuity, unpredictability of necessary support, false hope of an immediate peace, and continuous media attention prevent them from moving on with their future (Fried, 1972).

Analysis

An inconclusive nexus between location-based and relationship-based environmental deprivation was revealed as a critical determinant for conditions that led to “nowhereness” and caused people to become “noknowers.” However, a representative sample felt that they have been challenged with lack of interdependent network of support, which critically contributed to reducing their status to “noknowers.” Another group confirmed failed or halfhearted attempts to establish a membership to social settings in a new locale that eventually led to “nowhereness.” As they have been thrown into a social-dump (their words) of “nowhereness,” a majority believed that they indeed are “noknowers” in outcast-graveyards (their words) among their own people as well as natives of the transitional setting.

The sophistication of a lost home together with livelihood-base, extent, and tenure of land heavily moderated the concept of home. However, the displaced seemed to feel more deeply about loss of farmland than loss of houses, as their livelihood was primarily land-based; however, there was no clear distinction as the interviewees alternatively used the term home to describe their home (i.e., the physical structure) as well as the land upon which it was built. In categories of A, D, and F, the interviewees stressed that they very much feel like “noknowers” due to lack of spatial identity in their transitional place. The IDPs represented in B, D, E, G, and H were more specific about “nowhereness” that caused loss of social identity. The categories A, C, and F expressed themes hardwired to losing both self and social identity that ultimately enabled the conditions to expedite “noknowers” in “nowhereness”. Being the least, the fourth group espoused that the H category have not had expressed concerns about such “identity loss” and at the same time preferred to settle in an alternate location to give life a fresh start. The research suggests generally observed direct relationship between social identity to “noknowers” and spatial identity to “nowhereness.” A conceptualized cartography of IDPs’ environmental perception as manifested in the eight place-related themes on three parameters,

is represented in Figure 2. The simulation demonstrates making a home from a house as a co-construct between “noknower” and “nowhereness” in which themes A, C, and F make the core while H sits in the periphery.

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Figure 2.

The relative coordinates of themes in the construction of core (home) and periphery (house), 2016.

Conclusions

Undoubtedly, transitional places, a co-constructed effort to offer an immediate security and fewer responsibilities to deal with were cannons of prejudices for a group of people previously foreign to the place. It was somewhat awkward hearing IDP’s yearning for lost home, expressed so heartily as well as emotionally even after more than 10 years of displacement. Mourning for lost home was not quite different from the way displaced community wept for lost loved ones who got caught in the armed conflict. Prior locations, webs of relationships, and intrapsychic dispositions do affect the adjustments to transitional setting. As a result, the owner’s vulnerability had been projected onto the very fabric and makeup of transitional places.

The concept of home for the civil war–displaced transcends beyond spatial, and aspatial attributes; it rather is an indefinite process of reconciling with their transitional settings. In making a home, their passive admission or perpetual dissension to new environments distinguishes the civil war displaced in their negotiations and confrontations with people and places. At transitional places, among the majority of the displaced, initial loss of security led to failed attempts for place attachment and, subsequently, to a status of “noknower” and “nowhereness.”

A generally depressive tone idealizing the lost place was the result of environmental deprivation in combination with active work required in the adapting to the altered situation. The greater a person’s prelocation commitment to the lost place, the more he or she is likely to complain about inadequacies of the transitional place and also find it more difficult to make peace with the new setting. In most cases, the wider the displaced person’s prelocation domain of familiarity and the stronger the work base relationships, the lesser attempts were made to adjust to the new locale. Instead of familiar people with predictable patterns of behavior, a foreign setting with somewhat alien patterns of social affiliations contributed to a state of confusion with regard to holding the identity. Memories associated with the lost home were the only hook of continuity, perhaps, in which attempts to make the transitional place a home took the displaced further away from the very core of their spatial and social orientation. Indifferent initiations such as readymade solutions, undue advantages via publicity, and continuous bombarding for information by aid groups, local politicians, researchers, electronic and published media made it difficult for IDPs to assimilate to a new setting.