Abstract

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.

Staffan Löfving is Lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University. The editor of books on Cultural Economics (2005) and Identity Politics (2002), his current research revolves around the neoliberal social contract in Colombian and Central American polities.

"[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

Stef Jansen is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. His research centres upon critical ethnographic investigations of home and hope with regard to nation, place and state transformation on the intersection of postwar and postsocialist change in the post-Yugoslav states.