Thinking Home on the Move by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, Sociology
ISBN: 9781839097225
Google: JvX0DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing
Published: 2020-08-10T02:47:02+00:00

Stef Jansen: The Ethnography of Homemaking4

If we start from the notion that home is an ideal, then we cannot study it empirically because it is not there. We could only study people's representations of it. What we can study, instead, are the things that people do, their practices while trying to approximate that ideal.

What does home mean to you in light of your work and disciplinary approach?

As an anthropologist, I conceptualize home as it emerged from my ethnographic research amongst displaced persons in the post-Yugoslav states. Nevertheless, that inductive conceptualization is very much in line with Hage's (1997) definition. He basically says that home is an ideal, it is something most of us continually try to approximate. However, home involves material places where people feel or attempt to achieve a sense of belonging. He then disentangles these attempts in four dimensions: familiarity, security, sense of community and sense of possibility. All four dimensions, in Bourdieusian fashion, involve maximization: people can be seen to try and fulfill them to as high a degree as possible. These four dimensions are really useful to summarize my own anthropological approach to homemaking. If we start from the notion that home is an ideal, then we cannot study it empirically because it is not there. We could only study people's representations of it. What we can study, instead, are the things that people do, their practices while trying to approximate that ideal. For ethnographic research on home, it seems to me, it is best to avoid working on a nominal level, on the words people actually use. At the start of my study, I tried to find out what people associated with the notion of home, but I felt this produced limited results. This kind of approach quickly leads to a semantic discussion about the meanings of terms, related to particular languages. This raises issues of translation, and, remains on the level of representation and particularly verbal articulation. My focus on practices of homemaking emerged as an attempt to overcome this limitation.

We are researching homemaking in relation to contemporary migrant trajectories. What do you think this investigation could add to the field of migration and social integration?

I will answer in light of my own experience with the concept of home. My interest in home and in homemaking came from a very specific angle, since it was a way to solve another problem. And this problem was the overemphasis on identity, or what I call ‘identitarianism’. In my particular field sites, first in Serbia and Croatia, then in Bosnia and Herzegovina, identity was and is ever-present and it colonizes almost all fields of experience and life. As a result, using its register (its categories, its concepts, its preferences in terms of objects of analysis), I would not be able to gain insights in the best possible way. The politics of recognition, or identity politics, cannot really be critically analysed within the identitarian terms of that politics of recognition. I could say that my 20 years of

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