Homeplaces
Dwelling and Habitability in Critical Times
Federico Neiburg editor João Biehl editor
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Duke University Press
Publishing:30th Nov '26
£26.99
This title is due to be published on 30th November, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
A home is dismantled to make another home habitable. This is where Homeplaces begins. Spanning continents, this landmark volume brings together leading anthropologists to chart “house-ing,” the unrelenting, reciprocal process of people making houses and houses making people amid ongoing calamity. Their oikographies—vivid, writerly ethnographies of home as sense and action—blow open the fantasy of the private domicile and reveal houses as live forms: porous, incomplete, bleeding into neighborhoods, economies, ecologies, and the dead. They detonate philosophical abstractions about dwelling and technocratic assumptions about homemaking, revealing why home plays such a vital role in worldmaking. Refusing end-times thinking, Homeplaces reveals incompleteness as generative drive. The dissolution of forms, bodies, and buildings becomes the material from which people craft shelter, dignity, and transcendence. As war, climate catastrophe, and toxic landscapes dehouse the planet, Homeplaces captures the stubborn human insistence on dwelling—provisional, fierce, and alive.
“bell hooks’ call for attention to homeplaces is answered with thirteen gems of ethnographic short stories in this beautiful collection, offering a model of comparative and juxtapositional work as well as a model of more intimate styles of writing—both engaged and renewing of how larger social issues are refracted through homeplace constructions in all their multiple meanings.”—Michael M.J. Fischer, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies, MIT
“By exploring dwellings as homes inhabited by humans and non-humans, transcending the private and the public, connecting the intimate and the political, combining the material and the imaginary, Homeplaces insightfully revisits major themes in anthropology, from kinship to agency, from displacement to survival, thus creatively opening new avenues of inquiry.”—Didier Fassin, author of,Life: A Critical User's Manual
"We live in a world where notions of 'home' are increasingly being disrupted by climate change, war, political instability, and late-stage capitalism. With keen ethnographic eyes and sharp analytical insights, the authors of Homeplaces make a powerful case that much can be learned by interrogating the concept of home and its dynamic, complicated, and contradictory histories. Homeplaces is the centering narrative that we need during this global moment of great upheaval."—Jason De León, author of Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling
ISBN: 9781478039129
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 445g
362 pages