Struggles for Home

Based on anthropological studies across the globe, this book explores the experiences and contested meanings of home for people whose lives are characterized by migration related to varying forms of violence. Taking seriously the political implications and exploitation of discourses of home in the transnational processes that connect yet differently affect the movement of people and capital, it challenges the sedentarist assumption that territoriality and nation are necessarily the primary determinants of identification. However, it does not replace this sedentarism with a free floating, placeless approach. Instead, through the detailed ethnography of actual experiences of displacement and emplacement, it investigates the power sedentarist discourses may have to provide or prohibit hope. In Struggles for Home the focus is turned onto hope, aspiration and a sense of worth as necessary building blocks in the reconstruction of the social, amidst the violence of political and economic transformation. 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. 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 transformation, with particular reference to the post-Yugoslav states. Staffan Lofving is at the Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University. The author of books on cultural economics (2005) and identity politics (2002), his current research deals with violence in post-war processes of political and economic liberalisation.