152 THE SOCIAL THEORY OF GEORG SIMMEL 
grate is an expression of its strength and of the security it 
feels about its own continuity as independent of the move- 
ments of its members. The local diffusion of the modern 
family in contrast with its centralization in the ancestral 
home is, on the other hand, an expression of the weakening 
of the family unity. 
The significance of this spatial expression of the rela- 
tions between the group and its individual members re- 
mains the same when the group as a whole is nomadic. 
Many nomadic peoples like the Arabs prohibited the per- 
sonal ownership of land or the building of permanent 
dwellings. The fixation of the individual to a definite lo- 
cality under such conditions of nomadic existence would 
also have meant a dissolution of the bonds with his group. 
The sociological unity of the group finds its spatial expres- 
sion in this case in a prohibition of fixation, just as under 
certain sedentary conditions it finds expression in a pre- 
scribed fixation. 
Another form of spatial fixation which is of importance 
for the social structure is the fixation which results from 
the creation of a focal point for the reciprocities within the 
group. The fact that the family, the club, the university, 
the trade union, and the religious community have a home 
and a definite meeting-place gives them a distinct char- 
acter. All associations which have a home of their own are 
thereby differentiated from all those other associations, 
like mutual-benefit societies, political parties, unions for 
temporary or illegal purposes, and socializations which con- 
sist merely in a consciousness of common aims and ideals, 
which lack all spatial fixation. The word “home” is used 
here, not in the sense of a mere piece of property, but in the 
sense of a locality in which the group meets and lives its 
social life. In that sense it is the spatial expression of the 
unity of its sociological energies. But this objectivation