At home. But the soul finds its own home if it has a home at all. —Marilynne Robinson, Home In Marilynne Robinson’s Home (2008), Jack, the principal character of the story, goes back to his dwelling place after twenty years of absence. By
Home as a Model for Sociality in Danish Children's Homes
A Question of Authenticity
Susanne Højlund
Based on fieldwork in Danish children's homes, this article examines how the idea of 'home' has emerged and become integrated in institutional practices. The ideal of hominess serves as a positive model for sociality in the institution, but at the same time it also produces dilemmas, paradoxes, and contradictions for both children and social workers. These dilemmas stem from the conflicting values of institution and home. Nevertheless, the two spheres should not be seen as spaces with incompatible logics; rather, they should be viewed as mutually dependent but competing ideas (and practices) that are inherent in the institutional value hierarchy. The article argues that the ideal of authenticity plays a central role in the way that hominess is perceived as a positive value in children's homes—and perhaps in institutions in general.
Suranjana Choudhury
Introduction The Partition of 1947 is one of the most defining moments of the history of the Indian subcontinent. Maps were redrawn along religious lines to displace millions on both sides of the border. People lost their homes, their loved ones
Introduction
Movement, violence, and the making of home
Stef Jansen and Staffan Löfving
By giving an extensive literature review and presenting the central objectives of this theme section, this introductory article develops a programmatic call for a critical anthropology of 'home' in relation to violence and place. Challenging assumptions that territoriality, rootedness, and memories of violence are necessarily the primary determinants of identification among people on the move, it proposes conceptual tools to investigate how and when such discourses may provide or prohibit the making of 'home'. In particular, it draws attention to issues of political and economic transformation and the changing forms of violence and movement produced by them.
A new morning?
Reoccupying home in the aftermath of violence in Sri Lanka
Sharika Thiranagama
Charting the life course of Malathi, a young Sri Lankan Tamil woman, this article attempts to discuss the ways in which people and places in Sri Lanka are remade through experiences of violence. The article suggests moving away from a notion of 'home' as fixed on one place; instead, it considers the movement of people between different places. Further, it suggests that senses of home are also embedded within uneasy, constantly negotiated relationships with those people with whom we feel at home. Moreover, the article argues that ideas about 'the future' as equally as 'the past' inform the possibility of being at home.
Anthropology from Home
Advice on Digital Ethnography for the Pandemic Times
Magdalena Góralska
discuss the obstacles some of the more offline-trained researchers can encounter. Proposing the term ‘anthropology from home’ in the last section of this article, I share my worries on the future challenges and adjustments that anthropologists will be
Representing the Sensory Home
Ethnographic Experience and Anthropological Hypermedia
Sarah Pink
In this article I draw from my research about gender, identity, and the home, to discuss the visual and the other senses in ethnographic experience and anthropological representation. First, I discuss how visual ethnographic research might appreciate the sensory nature of experience. Seeing the home as both the context and subject of field- work, I shall introduce the idea of the ‘sensory home’. This refers to the home as a domain composed of different sensory elements (smell, touch, taste, vision, sound) that is simultaneously understood and created through the sensory experience and manipulation of these elements. I then explore how such visual and sensory research might best be represented as text that is conversant with mainstream anthropology. I shall suggest that while film and writing have both tackled this theme, hypermedia offers new possibilities that might bridge the gap between written and visual anthropology.
The Literary Making of Home(land)
Transnational Fictions of Home in Lloyd Jones' Mister Pip
Stella Butter
This article discusses the role literature plays in shaping 'home' as an ideological site of the spatial imaginary by drawing on Lloyd Jones' novel Mister Pip (2006) as a case study. Special emphasis is placed on analysing how ideals of home are rooted in 'cultures of subjectivity' (Reckwitz 2012). I systematically tease out two paradigms of home in Mister Pip and comment on their social implications within a postcolonial context. As I show, literature features as the privileged model of home in Mister Pip. This ideal of home is connected to a specific form of subjectivity, namely the 'creative self' (Reckwitz 2012). By shifting my attention to issues of reader response, I argue that Mister Pip 'trains' its readers in practices of the creative self, thereby contributing to a specific form of homemaking. I conclude with a critical assessment of Jones' literary achievement in the light of postcolonial power relations.
In Anthropological Journal of European Cultures
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2014
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 119–137
Troubled locations
Return, the life course, and transformations of 'home' in Bosnia-Herzegovina
Stef Jansen
This article confronts the nationalist and foreign interventionist discourses on 'home' in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina with the everyday experiences of a category of persons who are perceived as the ultimate embodiment of the promised homecoming encapsulated in sedentarism: minority returnees. It ethnographically traces the initially mirroring movements of two households and their differential ways to overcome the effects of displacement as well as their insertion in broader transformations. Infusing the notion of 'home' with an eye for security in its widest sense, and, in particular, highlighting the importance of the life course, it investigates the significance of place through a contextualized household political economy of 'home'. In that way it explores the conditions in which certain remakings of 'home' come to be seen as more feasible than others.
Surfacing Moves
Spatial-Timings of Senior Home Care
Peter A. Lutz
Like many countries, Sweden faces the challenge of population aging and senior care. Compared with institutionalized health care, senior home care offers a viable option, promising familiar surroundings and lower costs. However, those performing senior home care sometimes resist time-management policies that pressure such care in practice. Some scholars analyze this situation as opposition between 'objective' and 'subjective' time. This article takes a different route. It explores how time surfaces in Swedish senior home care through relational movements of care. These enlist things such as schedules, machines, and aging bodies. To this end, the article also experiments with 'surfacing' as an ethnographic heuristic for figuring these different 'spatial-timings'. The article concludes that surfacing matters not only in senior home care but also in the field-desks of ethnographic analysis.