A Language of Togetherness: Issue #1

Querencia (n. Español) and Einhausung (n. Deutsch)

Welcome to the first issue of this series, A language of togetherness, where we’ll be exploring care, connection and community — and how they might help to nurture a regenerative sense of home and belonging in our turbulent times.

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Photo by Luke Richardson (via unsplash)

What are the ways you long to be with other people?

What forms of togetherness do you hope for?

In her recent piece, In the darkling earth,

Kerri ní Dochartaigh

writes, following the harrowing US election results, “Our togetherness needs to write a whole new language.”

Society has left us angry, afraid, alone, ignored, disconnected and uncared for.

For many years, since childhood, I feel as if I have been in search of this new language of belonging, crafted through being embodied and in community with those who share lived experience.

It is this invitation — to find a new language through togetherness — amidst yet another dark cycle in our global geopolitics that I am turning to the subtle power of language to rewrite my sense of home and belonging in the world.

Querencia: (n) Spanish; a place where one can be their most authentic self because they feel safe; to have a deep yearning for a place where one feels an innate sense of belonging, comfort and peace. A sanctuary where one’s spirit is at home and strength is being drawn (via humerakilife).

When you think of your favourite comfort meal, I imagine that your memories surrounding this dish might be imbued with a sense of warmth and feeling cared for.

This might have been the soup a caregiver always made for you when you were sick; a family recipe passed down through generations and lovingly made at moments of celebration; or a meal that someone (perhaps a stranger) once made for you that made you feel a little bit more at home in the world.

Political scientists Joan C. Tronto and Berenice Fisher define care as follows:

‘On the most general level, we suggest that caring be viewed as a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web.’¹

Tronto challenges the persistent conceptualisation of care in Western society as being dyadic or individualistic (most strikingly represented in society as the mother-child paradigm of care). Singular acts of individualistic care remain unwarrantedly privatised in the home or limited to marginalised and under-funded spaces of care. But, as Tronto argues, ‘The world will look different if we move care from its current peripheral location to a place near the center of human life.’²

Care ought to be transformed from its limited position in society toward an ongoing ‘process’, as Tronto suggests. In a world that embraces an ethic of care, care becomes a process of everyday living in which humans are actively engaged. Moving care from the private realm into the public means we would all have a stake in the state of care in society.

Similarly, a place is transformed into a home through ongoing acts of care, or a practice of care. A location may engender homeliness and safety through being lived in over time — transforming into a space where relations of care are continually nourished.

Tronto proposes ways we might practice this ethic of care. Tronto writes, ‘For a society to be judged as a morally admirable society, it must…adequately provide for care of its members and its territory.’³ For Tronto and Fisher, there are four ethical elements of care: attentiveness, responsibility, competence and responsiveness.

Our rapacious economy allows our daily needs to be met, or perceived as so being, with less reliance or dependence needed on ‘particular others’: our friends, neighbours, comrades and kin. Capitalism has crafted a smooth, efficient network of ‘impersonal interdependence.’ Through global markets, we do away with the need for deep, ongoing relationships built on relations of care.

Reflecting on Fisher and Tronto’s proposed ethic of care, we might see inattention to others (humans and non-human species alike) as a precursor to collective unbelonging. A lack of responsibility and responsiveness to others thereby leads to a lack of homeliness in the world.

To live well in this world, care needs to be given a more central place in our lives, landscapes and communities.

What if we could network our care like unseen roots between trees beneath the soil, like mycorrhiza?⁴ Where care is foundational and innate rather than an afterthought. In that sense, home might look more like mycorrhizal networks, an ant hill, or a bee hive.

Philosopher Byung-Chul Han knows the consequences of our societal atomisation well, claiming our age to be characterised by a “crisis of community”.

Byung-Chul Han, in his book, The Disappearance of Rituals, describes how — in contrast to the constant cycle of the new that is demanded in a neoliberal capitalist society, rituals have the power to create a deeper sense of home and belonging:

‘Chasing new stimuli, excitement and experience, we lose the capacity for repetition. The neoliberal dispositifs of authenticity, innovation and creativity involve a permanent compulsion to seek the new, but they ultimately only produce variations of the same. The old, once was and what allows for a fulfilling repetition, is expunged because it opposes the logical of intensification that pertains to production. Repetition, by contrast, stabilizes life. Its characteristic trait is the ‘making at home in the world’ [Einhausung].’⁵

Reflecting on both Tronto’s ethic of care and Han’s indictment of neoliberal capitalism in its destruction of human rituals, we might see that “home” could become a verb — an ongoing, caring practice of attention, responsibility and responsiveness in a changing world. By caring for each other, and across species, we mutually make ourselves at home in the world. Human/non-human species and landscape co-create home.

Referencing funghi and foragers, academic Anna Tsing writes, ‘Their expansive and overlapping geographies resist common models, which divide the world into ‘your space’ and ‘mine.’”⁶ In caring for each other, my sense of home might overlap with yours. We make a home for each other in collective space, rather than dividing lines between our private homes.

When I consider who and what has made me feel most at home in the world these past few years, it has been those wonderful people and other beings who have cared for me, in big and small ways, widening my life map to encompass more and more places of care.

Yet, the current system does not allow for fluid, transgressive notions of care and home-making:

‘States encouraged sedentary, stable farms. States encouraged family-based households and guaranteed the forms of family property and inheritance that drew lines within and between families.’⁷

To challenge these models of care and home, care must move beyond the limits of domestic intimacy and towards communal, ritualistic practices — collective rest, community gardens, storytelling, and seed sharing.

Collective care might be the only means through which we can imbue places, whether transitory or stable, hostile or welcoming, with an innate belonging.

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Resources on home and belonging:

1. The Japanese Art of Living Seasonally by Natalie Leon

2. The Disappearance of Rituals by Byung-Chul Han

3. My podcast interview with Evie Muir on their book, Radical Rest on Xeno.

1. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care, Joan C. Tront (Routledge 1993), 103.

2. Ibid, 101.

3. Ibid, 126.

4. ‘Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species’, Anna Tsing (Environmental Humanities 1, 2012).

5. The Disappearance of Rituals, Byung-Chul Han (Polity Press 2019).

6. Ibid n4.

7. Ibid.