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.
Author(s): Johannes Lenhard, Farhan Samanani
Series: Encounters: Experience and Anthropological Knowledge
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2019
Language: English
Pages: 256
City: Abingdon
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Acknowledgements
Contributors
Preface
Introduction: Ethnography, dwelling and home-making
What is home?
Chapter 1: Studying gay sex in Beirut: The lascivious suture of home/field
Gay sex and the home in Beirut
My own sex life
Creating shared worlds of experience and affect
The stories of others
Sex and ethnographic positionality
On Being Welcomed Home
Notes
Chapter 2: Curtains, cars, and privacy: Experiences of dwelling and home-making in Azerbaijan
Experiencing privacy: Gender and the ‘Other’ home
No Home without Curtains: Of Home Boundaries and Thresholds
Caring for cars, or home-making the other way
Notes
Chapter 3: A lonely home: Balancing intimacy and estrangement in the field
Divya’s story
Becoming intimate
Becoming strange
Vaani’s story
A peculiar loneliness
Notes
Chapter 4: Ethnography of police ‘domestic abuse’ interventions: Ethico-methodological reflections
Accompanying the police: Ethical considerations
An account of the encounter
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 5: Digging holes, posting signs, loading guns: Constructing home near the Grand Canyon
Building a home
Making a home
Notes
Chapter 6: Becoming a planner: Participation and anticipation in producing home
Step one: Become a member
Step two: Survive the emails
Step three: Learn the lingo
Step four: Become active
Step five: Embrace shared values
Conclusion
Chapter 7: Making a home with homeless people
Making homes together and apart
Responsibility and home-making for the researcher
Notes
Chapter 8: A threshold space: Connecting a home in the city with the city
Architecture is moving
Creating thresholds
When a temporary home is a public space
Note
Chapter 9: Making a home on a volcano
Creeping to the edge
Why didn’t I do this at home?
Note
Chapter 10: After the eviction: Navigating ambiguity in the ethnographic field
Notes
Chapter 11: Acts of ‘homing’ in the Eastern Desert – How Syrian refugees make temporary homes in a village outside Zaatari Camp, Jordan
Guests
Kinsmen
Employees
Home-making in transitional spaces
Notes
Chapter 12: A house divided: Movement and race in urban ethnography
Displacement
Becoming known
Intestacy
Going home
Notes
Bibliography
Index
