To be at Home

Houses and homes are dynamic spaces within which people work to organize and secure their lives, livelihoods and relationships. Written by a team of renowned historians and anthropologists, and and accompanied by original photography by Maurice Weiss, To Be at Home: House,Work, and Self in the Modern World compares the ways people in different societies and historical periods strive to make and keep houses and homes under conditions of change, upheaval, displacement, impoverishment and violence. These conditions speak to the challenges of life in our modern world. The contributors of this volume position the home as a new nodal point between work, the self and the world to explore people's creativity, agency and labour. Houses and homes prove complex and powerful concepts if also often elusive invoking places, persons, objects, emotions, values, attachments and fantasies. This book demonstrates how the relations between houses, work and the self have transformed dramatically and unpredictably under conditions of capitalism and modernity and continue to change today.

Auteur

Felicitas Hentschke, Humboldt University James Williams, Zayed University

Contenu

To Be at Home: House, Work and Self in the Modern World

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Mamphela Ramphele

Preface

Andreas Eckert

Introduction: To Be at HomeHouse, Work and Self in the Modern World

Felicitas Hentschke and James Williams

1. Homes and Mobility: Borders, Boundaries, Thresholds

   Shoes Painfully Small: Material and Maternal Discomfort in Cape Verdean Remittance Houses

Heike Drotbohm

Hostel, Home and 'Life-Rhythm' for African Workers behind the Berlin Wall

Eric Allina

From Forecastle to Folk Club: The Homeless Seafarer

Jonathan Hyslop

Kinship and Displacement in Post-War Liberia: Children's Lives in an IDP Camp

James Williams

2. HOUSES, WORK and Everyday Life: Rhythms, Ruptures, Cycles

   Constructing Nineteenth-Century Middle Class Milieus: The Labour of Geselligkeit

David Warren Sabean

Home-Making among the Kel Ewey Tuareg in the Sahara

Gerd Spittler

Living in Homes, but What Kinds and Whose? Single Young People in Nineteenth-Century Central Europe

Josef Ehmer

The Place of Work and Workplace in Girls' Identities in Chinese and European History

Mary Jo Maynes and Ann Waltner

• Thabang Sefalafala

3. Construction, Demolition, Relocation

   Evicted in Dar es Salaam: From Tanganyika Packers to Uptown Kawe

Thaddeus Sunseri

"Build us a Church and We'll Stay!": Italian Migrant Workers in Lorraine

Felicitas Hentschke

Remaking Homes and Reproducing Inequalities in an Eastern Indian Steel Town

Christian Strümpell

• Alla Bolotova

4. THE POWER of PLACE: SPACE, EXCLUSIONS, Vulnerability

   Homes and Colonial Violence: The Coolie Pondok

Vincent Houben

Public-Private Continuities and Alternate Domesticities

Renu Addlakha

Subaltern Urbanism, Or Dwelling and the Unhoused

Anupama Rao

• Anne-Katrin Bicher

5. Houses and Selves: Nostalgia, Imagination, Memory

   Where I Rest my Sea Legs? Bulgarian Seafarers between the Home and the Ship

Milena Kremakova

The Home and the Hearth: Poetic Imagination and Bhojpuriya Women

Nitin Sinha

A Woman and a Nation: A Story of Job and Home in China

Ju Li

• Sidney Chalhoub

6. HOMES AND STYLE: AESTHETICS, POETICS, ETHICS

   • Jan Grill

• Steven Rockell

• Nitin Varma

7. Networks, Neighbourhoods, Communities

   The Enlarged Parlour? Structures and Varieties of German Working-Class Housing around 1900

Jürgen Schmidt

The Chawl and the Slum: The Transformation of Housing in Ahmedabad's Industrial East

Rukmini Barua

"Land of Boarding Houses": Migrant Workers and Collective Dwellings in São Paulo, Brazil, 1945-1970

Paulo Fontes

The Political Work of Home-Making by Refugees and Civil Society in Berlin

Fazila Bhimji

8. BEING AT HOME IN THE WORLD: Thinking with Houses and Homes

   The Importance of Owning a Home in Bamako, or Life after Death

Isaie Dougnon

From Ancestral Tablets to Patriotic Snapshots: Remembering Kinship in Rural Chinese Homes

Charlotte Bruckermann

Unhomely Afterlives: Reading Life-Phases through Phases of Afterlife

Claudio Pinheiro

• Maria José de Abreu

REFLECTIONS

On Homes, Work and Personhood

Prabhu Mohapatra

On Photography and History

Alf Lüdtke

On Why Homes Still Matter: Thoughts on Mamphela Ramphela's A Bed Called Home: Life in the Migrant Labour Hostels of Cape Town

Frederick Cooper

Contributor Biographies

Photography Credits

Index