Workshop 22
Embracing Home: Options
and Constraints in
Relationships of
Belonging
Convenors:
Katharina Schramm, Free
University of Berlin
Hansjörg Dilger,
Free University of Berlin
Globalisation and mass
movements of people – migrations, exile,
tourism etc. – have
led to changing conceptions of belonging. In
particular,
‘home‘ as the prior category of a stable identity has
been called into question.
Recent anthropological
theory has attempted to understand
how belonging and home are
being redefined. First, identity
and belonging appear as a
matter of choice, given that people
are constantly switching
codes and putting up new affiliations
and attachments. Second,
the re-essentialising strategies of
‘communities on the
move‘, where home is imagined as the fixed
locality of a pristine
existence, have come into focus.
Our workshop builds on
these former debates. However, while
those discussions focussed
on ‘imagination‘ and ‘construction‘,
we are more concerned with
the level of concrete interaction:
How are relationships of
belonging – the emotional and moral
commitment to a place, a
political unit, or to groups of people –
(re-)created in the
encounters between individuals and the larger
forces of society? How are
they manipulated and transformed
by structural constraints
(e.g., state bureaucracies; nationalist/
racist tendencies; economic
pressures or acts of violence)? How
have newly acquired
cultural or religious bonds come to affect
relationships of belonging
which are based on ethnic or kinship
affiliations? How do the
often gender-specific perspectives on
home become transformed
over the various life stages of a
person and how are these
issues re-negotiated after death / in
burials?
We intend to examine those
relationships not as a unidirectional
or bilateral flow, but
rather consider the complex entanglement
that constitutes home,
which involves many different localities,
communities and
interconnections.
Heimat: Belonging as Resistance in a Europe of
‘Free-Floating‘
Regions
Ullrich Kockel, University
of the West of England
Contested Homeland(s) in
Two Londoner Turkish Cypriot Life
(Hi)Stories
Ayse Aybil Goker,
University College London
Elsewhere and the
Bambino: Neoliberal Geographies and the
European Union
Verity Elston, University
of Chicago
Engaging Authenticity,
Creating Home: the Consumption of
Mass-Mediated
‚Tradition‘ in Mali
Dorothea E. Schulz, Free
University of Berlin
‘Returning
Home‘: Moral Conflicts in the (Re)Building of
Disrupted Kin Relations
in Post-Conflict Ayacucho, Peru
Wendy Coxshall, University
of Manchester
Towards an Anthropology
of Care: the Material Culture of the
Romanian Home
Adam Drazin, The Technical
University of Eindhoven
Living With a History:
Identity, Emplacement and a Family to
Belong
Auksuolė
Čepaitienė, Lithuanian Institute of History
Domestic Boundaries,
Visibility, Privacy, and the Window
Pauline Garvey, National
University of Ireland, Maynooth