Homecomer

The concept of the homecomer, although born in the literature of ancient Greece, received sociological recognition after World War II, when soldiers began returning home. Homecomers are people who leave their home for an extended period and expect to return to familiar environments. Homecomers expect their intimate knowledge of their primary groups and communities to be accurate on returning. Members of these groups also expect the homecomers to be the same people, despite their long-term nonparticipation in the many relations that form the texture of their home groups. The person returns expecting to find the same arrangements, but the arrangements and the persons in them have evolved and so has the homecomer. The homes they left are not the homes to which they return. They are not the homes they recall. Likewise, they are not the same people who left.

Sociologists use the concept homecomer to describe occupations that require the worker to be gone for extended periods, like soldiers and merchant seaman. In the case of returning soldiers, families typically expect that their returning loved ones will be the same as when they left, albeit with hero status. After World War II, both homecomers and their families were mentored as to these often faulty expectations. Presently, the concept is used to describe those who have left home for any reason. The longer the absence, controlling for technological connections, the more the homecomer role fits those who return. In this sense, those defined as homecomers can be compared with both strangers and the marginalized. An exaggerated homecomer role brings one closer to the concept of stranger. But the stranger is one who comes to a new place, so it can never be the case that a homecomer becomes a “true” stranger. The “marginal man” is between two cultures but not a fully integrated member of either.

The home is the place to which a person intends to return when he or she is away from it. To feel at home is to express the highest degree of familiarity and intimacy. Life at home means to have in common with others a section of time and space, and interests, based on underlying homogeneous systems of relevance. These are part of people's autobiographies. They are elements of personal history. What they are, what they grow to be, and what they will become are codetermined by their taking part in the relationships that prevail within their home groups. This is the context of the home structure for the people who live in it. It changes entirely for those who leave home. They have stepped into another social structure not covered by the schemes of reference for life at home. They no longer participate in its experiences; consequently, their development within these schemes of reference has come to a standstill. While there are still means of communication (e.g., the letter, phone calls, computer contact with images), these presuppose that each party is the same as the one each left behind. This assumes that life will continue to be what it has been so far. But other things will have become important for both—old experiences are reevaluated and new ones are inaccessible to the other life.

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