Description
Book SynopsisIn contemporary society, passport checks at nation-state borders are accepted. But what if these checks were happening in our own home? This book is the first intimate ethnography of these governing encounters in the home space between Romanian Roma migrants and local frontline workers. Focusing on how the nation-state is reproduced within the home, the book considers what it is like to have your legal status, your right to ‘belong’, judged from your everyday domestic life. In essence this book is about the divide between state and family, home-land and home and what it means for the new rules of citizenship.
Trade Review''This must-read exploration of ‘intimate state encounters’ exposes the complex relation between protection and exclusion, offering important insights into daily practices of care and the crafting of border regimes.'' Bridget Anderson, Bristol University
''Powerfully written with care and insight, this sensitive ethnography reminds us that even at ‘home’, in shared domestic spaces, Roma families are subjected to Kafkaesque methods of state monitoring and surveillance. This is a wonderful account of life on the margins, placed on the outside but very much looking in.'' Colin Clark, University of the West of Scotland
''Home-Land is an important and incisive ethnography of the state that reveals just how deeply the border has invaded the ostensibly ''private'' lives and ''domestic'' space of the poorest and most racially subjugated of migrants.'' Nicholas De Genova, University of Houston
Table of ContentsPreface; Introduction: Romanian Roma, motherhood and the home; Chapter 1: Home truths: fieldwork, writing and anthropology’s ‘home encounter’; Interlude: Facebook with Cristina; Chapter 2: Shifting faces of the state: austerity, post-welfare and frontline work; Interlude: Disappearing Dinni; Chapter 3: Romanian Roma mothers: labelling and negotiating stigma; Interlude: Remembering Brussels with Georgeta; Chapter 4: Intimate bureaucracy and home encounters; Interlude: Clara’s Belgian torte; Chapter 5: Gender and intimate state encounters; Interlude: Losing Sophia and Angela; Chapter 6: Borders and intimate state encounters; Conclusion: Homemade state: intimate state encounters at the margins;
