Johannes Lenhard

Farhan Samanani

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.

Ethnographic Encounters

Home

An anthropologist looks at our modern world - and shows how we can build a better, more connected one Increasingly, we are coming to see difference, whether in the form of conflicting values or growing ethnic diversity, as an existential threat. Within much of the world, our main response has been to surround ourselves with like-minded people and double down on our own convictions, in an attempt to hold difference at bay. So, how did we get here, and what can we do about it? Here, anthropologist Farhan Samanani combines case studies from across the world with his own research to provide insights into the capacity of humankind to connect across divides. Using his anthropologist's toolkit, he explores the roots of our present tensions and casts fresh light on how we can cultivate common ground, build healthy communities and not just live but flourish together.

Farhan Samanani

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