Struggles for Home

Violence, Hope and the Movement of People

Stef Jansen, Staffan Löfving, Stef Jansen, Staffan Löfving

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780857451507, 9781845455231
• eBook ISBN: 9781845458607
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Political Freedom
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Table of contents

• Title page-Struggles for Home
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1-Returning to palestine
• Chapter 2-Troubled locations
• Chapter 3-The loss of home
• Chapter 4-The social significance of crossing state borders
• Chapter 5-Strategies of visibility and invisibility
• Chapter 6-A new morning?
• Chapter 7-Liberal emplacement
• Postscript
• Notes on Contributors
• Index