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.
Table of Content
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 Home—House, 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
About the author
Felicitas Hentschke, Humboldt UniversityJames Williams, Zayed University
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