Abstract
How is home made and negotiated by the anthropologist? Secondly, how does the researcher relate to, fight against or play with notions of home which informants bring forward? Unlike theoretically – or philosophically-oriented studies that seek to define notions of home, this collection focuses instead on how people both researcher and informant themselves act and therefore define, alter, and recreate home in everyday life.
Contributions are wide-ranging and draw on a variety of social situations and encounters: council housing and middle-class apartment buildings, homelessness and migration, problems with accessing the field as well as limiting it, physical as well as sentimental notions of home, objects as well as inter-human social relations. By linking both the view on the researcher as well as the field Johannes Lenhard and Farhan Samanani generate new insights into the anthropology of home. The essays draw attention to processes of sociality that normally remain analytically invisible, thus contributing to a growing and rich field of study that has seen much development in recent years
How are notions of ‘home’ made and negotiated by ethnographers? And how does the researcher relate to forms of home encountered during fieldwork? Rather than searching for an abstract, philosophical understanding of home, this collection asks how home gains its meaning and significance through ongoing efforts to create, sustain or remake a sense of home. The volume explores how researchers and informants alike are always involved in the process of making and unmaking home, and challenges readers to reimagine ethnographic practice in terms of active, morally complex process of home-making. Contributions reach across the globe and across social contexts, and the book includes chapters on council housing and middle-class apartment buildings, homelessness and migration, problems with accessing the field as well as limiting it, physical as well as sentimental notions of home, and objects as well as inter-human social relations. Home draws attention to processes of sociality that normally remain analytically invisible, and contributes to a growing and rich field of study on the anthropology of home.
