Description
Book Synopsis Based on anthropological studies across the globe, this book explores the social practice of home-making amongst people whose lives are characterized by movement and violence. Social scientific and policy understandings of home and migration tend to focus on territory, culture and nation, often carrying implicit 'sedentarist' assumptions of a naturalised link between people and particular places. This book challenges such views, drawing attention instead to unpredictable forms of dwelling in the often violent processes that connect yet differently affect the movement of people and capital. Taking seriously the political implications of this challenge, the authors do not resort to a free floating, placeless approach. Instead, through the detailed ethnography of lived experiences of displacement and emplacement, *Struggles for Home* investigates the power sedentarism may have to provide or prohibit hope. Research conducted in Sri Lanka, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Zambia, Cyprus, the Palestinian West Bank, Guatemala, and amongst Romanians and Moroccans in Spain articulates a novel theoretical framework for the development of a critical political anthropology of one of the most controversial and fascinating issues of our time - the remaking of home in migration.
Trade Review "[A] theoretical milestone that signposts provocative new directions for scholars and students of displacement. This volume offers an exceptional critical synthesis of emergent strands of thinking about displacement while also posing new questions about how processes of 'home making, un-making, and re-making' unfold for people who must navigate the socially transformative and uncertain conditions generated by conflict and structural violence." · Stephen C. Lubkemann, author of Culture in Chaos: An Anthropology of the Social Condition in War
Table of Contents Introduction: Towards an Anthropology of Violence, Hope and the Movement of People
Stef Jansen and Staffan Löfving
Chapter 1. Returning to Palestine: Confinement and Displacement under Israeli Occupation
Tobias Kelly
Chapter 2. Troubled Locations: Return, the Life Course and Transformations of Home in Bosnia-Herzegovina
Stef Jansen
Chapter 3. The Loss of Home: From Passion to Pragmatism in Cyprus
Peter Loizos
Chapter 4. The Social Significance of Crossing State Borders: Home, Mobility and Life Paths in the Angolan-Zambian Borderland
Michael Barrett
Chapter 5. Strategies of Visibility and Invisibility: Rumanians and Moroccans in El Ejido, Spain
Swanie Potot
Chapter 6. A New Morning? Reoccupying Home in the Aftermath of Violence in Sri Lanka
Sharika Thiranagama
Chapter 7. Liberal Emplacement: Violence, Home and the Transforming Space of Popular Protest in Central America Staffan Löfving
Postscript: Home, Fragility and Irregulation: Reflections on Ethnographies of Im/mobility
Finn Stepputat
Notes on Contributors
Index
