ABOUT THIS BOOK

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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

João Biehl is Susan Dod Brown Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University.

Federico Neiburg is Professor of Anthropology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

REVIEWS

“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

TABLE OF CONTENTS