Ethnographies of Home and Mobility: Shifting Roofs 9781350084254, 9781003085300

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Ethnographies of Home and Mobility Tis book lays out a framework for understanding connections between home and mobility, and situates this within a multidisciplinary feld of social research. Te authors show how the idea of home ofers a privileged entry point into forced migration, diversity and inequality. Using original feldwork, they adopt an encompassing lens on labour, family and refugee fows, with cases of migrants from Latin America, Africa and the Indian subcontinent. With the book structured around these key topics, the authors look at how practices of home and mobility emerge along with emotions and manifold social processes. In doing so, their scope shifs from the household to streets, neighbourhoods, cities and even nations. Yet, the meaning of ‘home’ as a lived experience goes beyond place; the authors analyse literature on migration and mobility to reveal how the past and future are equally projected into imaginings of home. Alejandro Miranda Nieto is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Trento in Italy. Aurora Massa is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Trento in Italy. Sara Bonfanti is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Trento in Italy.

HOME

Series editors: Rosie Cox and Victor Buchli Tis interdisciplinary series responds to the growing interest in the home as an area of research and teaching. Te titles feature contributions from across the social sciences, including anthropology, material culture studies, architecture and design, sociology, gender studies, migration studies, and environmental studies. Relevant to students as well as researchers, the series consolidates the home as a feld of study. Making Homes: Ethnography and Design by Sarah Pink, Kerstin Leder Mackley, Roxana Morosanu, Val Mitchell and Tracy Bhamra Queering the Interior edited by Andrew Gorman-Murray and Matt Cook Living with Strangers: Bedsits and Boarding Houses in Modern English Life, Literature and Film edited by Chiara Briganti and Kathy Mezei Tinking Home: Interdisciplinary Dialogues edited by Sanja Bahun and Bojana Petrić Homely Atmospheres and Lighting Technologies in Denmark: Living with Light Mikkel Bille A Cultural History of Twin Beds by Hilary Hinds Art and Masculinity in Post-War Britain: Reconstructing Home by Gregory Salter Food Identities at Home and on the Move: Explorations at the Intersection of Food, Belonging and Dwelling edited by Raúl Matta, Charles-Édouard de Suremain and Chantal Crenn Ethnographies of Home and Mobility: Shifing Roofs by Alejandro Miranda Nieto, Aurora Massa and Sara Bonfanti For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Home/book-series/BLANTHOME

Ethnographies of Home and Mobility Shifing Roofs Alejandro Miranda Nieto, Aurora Massa and Sara Bonfanti

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Alejandro Miranda Nieto, Aurora Massa and Sara Bonfanti Te right of Alejandro Miranda Nieto, Aurora Massa and Sara Bonfanti to be identifed as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. vii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Series design by Clare Turner. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafer invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-350-08425-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-08530-0 (ebk) Typeset in Minion by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents List of fgures Acknowledgements Foreword: Mainstreaming the study of home and migration Introduction: Unlocking doors 1 Scales 2 (Im)materiality 3 Mobility and immobility 4 Temporalities 5 Diversities 6 Inequalities Conclusion: Dwelling between mobility and stasis Aferword Index

vi vii viii 1 15 39 67 91 115 141 167 175 180

List of fgures 1.1 2.1 2.2 3.1 3.2 4.1 4.2 5.1 5.2

A street in Mariana’s neighbourhood Sofa set in a Punjabi remittance house Hindu home shrine in a Dutch closet Aman on his sofa A woman in a reception centre in Rome Lentils soaking in Carlos’ kitchen Carlos’ living room Southall Black Sisters’ HQs: A shelter from domestic abuse Mama’s stitches and pillow talks in a South Asian diaspora bedroom 6.1 A private apartment in a squat in Rome 6.2 A corridor in a squat in Rome

29 48 55 81 83 102 104 122 127 158 158

Acknowledgements Tis book is the outcome of a rich collaboration between its authors that started in 2017 when we began our work as postdoctoral fellows at the University of Trento. HOMInG (formally known as ERC StG 678456 – HOMInG [2016–21]) is the EU-funded project in which we have participated, led by Paolo Boccagni to whom we want to express our sincere thanks for his support and advice. We would also like to thank our colleagues from the HOMInG and HOASI projects who have been a source of refection and insight, as well as all our colleagues at the University of Trento. We are grateful to Chiara Cacciotti, Lorenzo d’Orsi, Daniela Giudici, Laura Hassmut, Friedemann Neumann and Laureline Coulomb for reading and commenting on previous versions of some chapters. Te team at Bloomsbury has been very supportive throughout the development of this publication project and we thank them for their clear guidance. We also wish to express our gratitude to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive critique of our work. Finally, we would like to express our thanks to our families for their patience and support throughout our intellectual pursuits. It is to them and to all the generous people who shared their experiences of home, migration and mobility, putting up with our nosiness in their ‘islands of privacy’, that this book is dedicated.

Foreword: Mainstreaming the study of home and migration Paolo Boccagni

University of Trento and ERC-StG HOMInG

Is there such a thing as ‘home studies’? In a strictly, somewhat narrowly academic sense, probably not (yet). However, an increasing minority of colleagues, all over social sciences, would give a positive response. In doing so they would emphasize the signifcance of the views, emotions and practices associated with home on a variety of scales, even while they would be unlikely to share one and the same defnition of home. Under the pressure of categorization, most of these researchers would defne themselves as primarily geographers, anthropologists, architects, housing and urban scholars, sometimes sociologists. Regardless of the background, they will probably acknowledge the start of the systematic social study of home as a recent development, driven by ethnographies such as Miller (2001), overviews such as Blunt and Dowling (2006) or socio-political essays such as Duyvendak (2011); not to mention markers of institutionalization such as the birth of dedicated journals, for example, Home Cultures, at the intersection of the preexisting traditions in housing, cultural and design studies; the foundation of research centres such as Queen Mary’s Centre for Studies of Home; the ‘musealization’ of home itself, the Gefrye Museum in London being an obvious case in point. Such a list of key markers is far from exhaustive, if only because it does not consider a number of key papers in the previous decades, or major interdisciplinary collections such as Altman and Werner (1985) and Benjamin and Stea (1995). Yet, the list is long and authoritative enough to make a critical point: the social study of home, with all of the ambiguities and mixed fascinations this word embodies, matters and is here to stay. Tis is a point which the authors of this book also share, and which they address in an original way through the study of migration and mobility.

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Te experience of migration has much to say for the study of home from without, from a distance or from the margins. As a result of the absence of what should be naturally ‘here’, that is, a fxed and supposedly protective domestic space, migrant life trajectories open unique ways for the study, no less than the lived experience of home (Ahmed et al. 2003; Ralph and Staeheli 2011; Boccagni 2017). However, the authors of Shifing Roofs start from the broader analytical category of mobility. Tis enables them to go beyond the predominant frames of migration (including securitarian, emergency-driven and humanitarian ones), by connecting home and migration to the study of everyday life. Tis ‘mainstreaming’ of the topic opens up to two research perspectives. Te frst has already been extensively discussed under the rubric of a ‘mobility turn’ (Urry 2007). In short, a mobility lens highlights the development, patterns and consequences of a variety of forms of movement – literal and metaphorical, large and short scale, exceptional and everyday. It also illuminates the infrastructures that facilitate or hinder any form of movement, and the continuum between its micro-experience and its social consequences on larger scales, even beyond the nation-state-based idea of ‘society’. In this perspective there is much more to appreciate, in the study of homemaking on the move, than the migrant condition alone. As a matter of fact, being attentive to mobility at large is also a way to ‘de-migranticize’ migration studies (Dahinden 2016). Te argument, here, is that the migrant condition, while being a major social marker, does not speak for itself, nor is it a ‘social reality’ in itself. It is rather a relational device. Te categorization of a number of individuals as migrants, under particular time and space coordinates, is necessary for several purposes. Nonetheless, it remains somewhat arbitrary and simplistic. More critically, it obscures the variety of individual or group characteristics, attributes or markers that may matter more than the migrant label as such. If this is the case, some more conceptual movement is in order, along an ideal-typical continuum between two opposite stances: on the one hand the still predominant view of the migrant home experience as essentially diferent from the mainstream, or, external to it, in a sort of epistemological otherization that parallels much common sense and nativist public discourse and, on the other, the emerging recognition of the ways in which migration is co-constitutive of broader forms of social change

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associated with life course variables, labour market conditions, housing and political structures of opportunities, and so forth. Moving towards the latter (constructivist) frame, instead of getting stuck in the former (essentialist) one, is a promising research avenue at many levels, including the development of a stronger refexivity. Studying those portrayed as others, or outsiders, is also a way of studying the national or local ‘us’ and so-called receiving societies, through a variety of mirror efects. Tis also holds for the social study of home. Unless in the most blatantly orientalist accounts, there is no migrant home – or for that matter, migrant house – to be set against an equally essentialized native, autochthonous or long-resident home or house. Tere is, instead, a signifcant promise in seeing how a migration background shapes people’s possibility and interest to get access to new dwelling places and to (re)produce or not a sense of home towards them – or towards any other setting – in the light of their homerelated views, emotions and cultures, and of the resources accessible to make them real. Whatever the ‘keyword’ selected for analysis, each of the chapters in this book provides some conceptual and empirically based advancement along these lines. Shifing Roofs is an empirically based conceptualization of several key dimensions of home and homemaking on the move. In this sense, it is a critical mirror of what ERC HOMInG has been like, over the frst half of its life course as a research project: a forum where a variety of ideas and research interests about home were frst discussed, in dialogue with a burgeoning literature (and with several leading theorists), then put to the test of feldwork. It is not infrequent to fnd out, in academic events, that attending formal presentations is less rewarding than getting into the back side: the informal opportunity to catch up with colleagues, share their respective ‘tricks of the trade’ (Becker 1998), revisit one’s preliminary fndings through an engaged intellectual conversation. Tis is exactly the spirit through which this book has come to life, as a part and parcel of HOMInG’s organizational and cultural life. While more publications will come out of this large-scale project, both on specifc target populations and on the broader conceptual framework of homing, Shifing Roofs already makes for an original and innovative contribution. Besides drawing fresh inspiration from their ongoing ethnographies, Miranda Nieto, Massa and Bonfanti have the merit of bringing together under the lens

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of mobility a variety of research areas that are clearly fundamental to home, but are generally analysed separate from each other: materiality, temporality, diversity, scalarity and so forth. Each of these concepts, of course, has a long intellectual history behind. Little of that, however, has addressed its specifc relevance to the study of home, intersected with all the others. In this sense, Shifing Roofs does ‘unlock’ new doors to enter into the debate on home, migration and mobility. At the end of the day, and despite my own previous case for ‘home studies’, home is fascinatingly more than a research topic in itself. Tis is, frst of all, because home lies at the bases of our everyday lives, whether as a place, as an experience or as the search or struggle for it. In this sense home holds a necessarily phenomenological side (Jacobson 2009) and is a major source of refexivity on ourselves and our private lives – the ‘our’ including researchers themselves, as the chapters of this book reveal. Research wise, moreover, home is an entry point into a variety of diferent areas and topics, as long as the latter is embedded in the everyday life experience of social actors and groups. In both respects, the six essays in Shifing Roofs cannot claim to be completely exhaustive, as they address very broad and complex questions, while also refecting the theoretical preferences and research interests of their authors. Nevertheless, all of them ofer fresh food for thought and for research, to further advance – particularly along comparative lines – the study of home among people on the move and their ‘sedentary’ counterparts.

References Ahmed, S., C. Castañeda, A. M. Fortier and M. Sheller, eds. (2003), Uprootings/ Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration, London: Berg. Altman, I., and C. Werner, eds. (1985), Home Environments, New York: Plenum Press. Becker, H. (1998), Tricks of the Trade, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Benjamin, D. N., and D. Stea, eds. (1995), Te Home: Words, Interpretations, Meanings and Environments, Aldershot: Ashgate. Blunt, A., and R., Dowling (2006), Home, London: Routledge. Boccagni, P. (2017), Migration and the Search for Home: Mapping Domestic Space in Migrants’ Everyday Lives, New York: Palgrave.

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Dahinden, J. (2016), ‘A plea for the “demigranticization” of research on migration and integration’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 39 (13): 2207–25. Duyvendak, J. W. (2011), Te Politics of Home, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Jacobson, K. (2009), ‘A developed nature: A phenomenological account of the experience of home’, Contemporary Philosophical Review, 42: 355–73. Miller, D., ed. (2001), Home Possessions: Material Culture behind Closed Doors, London: Bloomsbury. Ralph, D., and L. Staeheli (2011), ‘Home and migration: Mobilities, belongings and identities’, Geography Compass, 5 (7): 517–30. Urry, J. (2007), Mobilities, Cambridge: Polity.

Introduction: Unlocking doors Sara Bonfanti and Aurora Massa

Migration matters In his last book just hot from the press, Tomas Faist (2019) strongly argues that ‘the social question is back’. Yet, compared to nineteenth- and twentieth-century history, today’s critical issue cannot be reduced to a postMarxist tension between labour and capital. During the production of this manuscript, the outcome of a research project based in Italy and funded by the EU, thousands of corpses lost at sea while crossing the Mediterranean painfully remind us that the contemporary social question is located at the interstices between privileged and disadvantaged, more than on a frontier dividing the Global South from the Global North. Tis book does not pretend to enter into the slippery terrain of politics, but, since we are dealing with transnational lives and the search for home across borders, we cannot feign to be blind to social emergencies. Not that migration as a phenomenon is an emergency in our view; it is a recurrent feature of human history. What is at stake today are the governance of people’s movement and moorings, the management of migration and diversity under a certain international order (Betts 2011; Scholten and Penninx 2016). Tis volume focuses on mobility and home, migratory patterns and home-making strategies and, while it engages with critical issues, it does not advance any radical contestation. Migrations, or better yet mobility in all its forms, raise plenty of social questions and heighten public debates. Home, as a metaphor for ordering social life in bounded spaces, plays a huge part in the perception of moving and settling. Te efcacy of this image of home is consistent with political mechanisms that produce selective inclusion in (or rejection from)

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any sovereign territory for diferent mobile people and that William Walters (2004) named ‘domopolitics’. As co-authors and research colleagues, we do not disregard the transnational social question that our work encounters, but assume a more modest stance by just disseminating what we became experts of: everyday domestic life with migrant people of various backgrounds and aspirations. Quite literally, we tried to enter people’s homes, pleading our informants to unlock their doors for us, at times considering that some of them were unable to do so. Figuratively, we would instead like to give to our interlocutors, and all those who are experiencing similar lives on the move, the afordance to have a home to (un)lock as they please. Since 1948, when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was signed, the right to a life with dignity, including a proper livelihood and dwelling, is an entitlement that anyone anywhere deserves by birthright and should be able to claim. To Faist’s transnationalized social question, we reply upholding one critical matter: with our scholarly book, imbued with theory but grounded in ethnographic evidence, we wish to claim for a universal right to home.

Beyond the title Shifing Roofs is a multivocal book that thematizes and analyses a series of home-related processes in their complex tension with mobility. Although nowadays people as well objects and ideas seem to be more mobile than ever, the sense of home tends to be strongly associated with specifc places, circumstances and signifcant others. In addressing this tension, we focus on a particular kind of mobile people, namely transnational migrants, whose pathways help us to challenge a static understanding of home and enhance its processual, shifing dimensions. Troughout this book we manipulate the categories of home and mobility, vis-à-vis our ethnographic experiences and with the aid of pertinent literature. To make sense of the nexus between home and migration and infuse movement into the apparent stasis of dwelling, we conceptualize it as a process in the making, as ‘homing’ (Boccagni 2017). By transforming a noun into a verb, the term homing turns a research object into a process made of enactments

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and interactions, therefore ofering a tentative bridge between migration studies and social theory. Although homing is an attempt to produce a more dynamic category of analysis, ‘home’ instead pertains solidly in the lexicon and conceptual repertoire of social sciences. While notable authors have juggled with the many aspects of home in the long term (a house and a household, a place and a meaning) (Appadurai 1986; Miller 2001), just to cite one pivotal defnition, anthropologist Mary Douglas (1991) pooled in a brief essay ‘the kind of space’ that home is. In her words, home is described as virtual and memorial, self-organizing and tyrannical. Home is thus a repository of the past, as much as an imaginative platform for the future; it operates through a share of roles and functions, but its coordination is always hierarchical and uneven. Among the many valuable defnitions of home, in this book we adopt as starting point Boccagni’s (2017) description of the home experience as ideally characterized by security (a sense of personal protection), familiarity (in both an emotional and cognitive sense) and control (autonomy in using a certain place, predicting the development of events in it and expressing oneself). According to this defnition, there would be a widespread need and aspiration to make one’s dwelling circumstances a secure, familiar and manageable space. While looking at the eforts of migrants in achieving these conditions, during our feldworks we empirically tested this notion, questioning its degree of generalization with the myriad of situations, solutions, feelings, conficts and contradictions we met. Whatever cases we expose in the following chapters, we all convene to investigate home as a category of both practice and analysis. As dedicated ethnographers, we analyse home as a generative device for thought: at once a material setting, a set of relations and a discursive argument, all of which being relatively bounded (and thus engendering an in/out or us/them dichotomy). Tree approaches, historically subsequent, infuence our theoretical developments: phenomenology, diaspora studies and, most notably, the socalled mobility turn. Referring to a notable philosophical tradition (Heidegger 1993 [1971]), the frst credibly argues that home is always in the making, that inhabiting is a form of habituation, postulating a lifelong inclination of humanity towards being at home (Jackson 1995; Jacobson 2009). Te second attributes to home a perennial sense of loss and yearning for return, inscribed into the forced dispersal of persecuted minorities (Brah 1996; Fortier 2001).

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Te last sees the increased complexity of a hyper-connected world, where people’s movements across borders cannot be easily bounded in time nor space. Over the last decade, the mobility paradigm has ofered a fresh theoretical and analytical approach to the study of transnational migration (Sheller and Urry 2006). Framing migration as an area within a wider feld of mobility studies has led to a critique of the assumption (largely spread in both scientifc and lay representations) that sedentarism would be the ‘normal’ condition of social reality, while mobility would be an exceptional, ofen problematic, circumstance (Bakewell 2008; Salazar 2016). Trough this lens, mobility has been understood as a fundamental aspect of social life which cannot be reduced to a spatial phenomenon, tied instead to manifold social, existential and imaginative dimensions. Scholars have started to focus on how transnational migrants’ geographical mobility is interconnected with diferent forms of movements (such as the ones of objects, images and discourses), with other mobile people (i.e. tourists, students, internal and seasonal migrants) and with elements of fxities (from infrastructures to geopolitical borders). Tis awareness of mobilities has led to challenge any essentialist notion of ‘migrant’ and ‘migration’ in light of their nation-state-centred epistemology, and to enhance the multiple social dimensions which have to be taken into account when studying everyday life. Te study of whoever moves has indeed revealed the role played by states, political institutions and the market in establishing the conditions as well as the legitimacy for mobility itself and in shaping hierarchies of (im)mobility (Cresswell 2010; Fassin 2011), whereby moving is a chance precluded to large sections of the global population (Faist 2013; Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013). Within current global migration regimes, human mobility is systematically fltered and decelerated (Tsianos et al. 2009; Andersson 2014), yielding a new form of governmentality (De Genova 2002) which infuences migrants’ trajectories and their subjectivities. In this light, migratory mobilities have been seen as fragmented phenomena, which include departures, stops and returns as well as onward, internal and everyday movements. While our perspective as ethnographers is based on an appreciation of migrations within a mobility paradigm, we ofen refer to our research participants as migrants, recognizing the importance of the everyday language in which their lives are embedded. Most of the mobile people whose home-making stories feature in this volume do consider themselves as migrants (having journeyed from a home place in

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search of a new one, so to speak). ‘Immigrants’ or ‘refugees’ are not just critical tags, but real mobile people who acknowledge all the (dis)advantages that such nominal status might imply in their new social environs. By looking at mobility through the perspective of home and, vice-versa, by refecting on home with a mobile approach we have produced a distinct theoretically informed stance. On one hand, this double gaze emphasizes the multiple emplacements which occur despite, or rather through, mobility itself. On another hand, this ‘strabismus’ helps us to challenge static conceptualizations of home and grasp its processual dimension. In connecting mobility to home, we had to consider the experience of those who were away from (some previous) home, or those who were provisionally without one. Our ethnographies show that home is a prism containing a variety of possible ways of dwelling. Domestic settings may vary in scales (from one’s private place to a community space), locations (from a birth land to transits or countless resettlements) and times (a real or aspired existential attachment shifing across the life course). Far from reporting ad hoc drama cases, we disclose that migratory experiences exposed the riddles of home: its double-tie with identity and belonging, with feelings and strategies of social inclusion or exclusion (Rapport and Dawson 1998). Attending to people’s homes being made and unmade in everyday life upon conditions of mobility has made it possible for us to de-exoticize the materiality of others’ homes, and to de-romanticize the normative good associated with domestic space. Our research does not claim ground-breaking discoveries, but it does assert that testing the notion of a relatively universal search for home (thus dwelling in secure, familiar and controllable conditions) with various migrant groups and experiences of mobility results in countless ways of home-making, whose singularities though are mutually intelligible. Tis volume is a frst attempt to liken and contrast the results of a project still in progress, and to draf a social map of home and mobility in Europe.

Te collaborative research project Tis book has its roots in the project ‘HOMInG – Te home-migration nexus’.1 Based on a multi-sited and comparative framework, the project aims at investigating how home is constructed, experienced, made and remade by

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international migrants across several European countries, and circulated with their countries of origin. Particularly, the book stems from the involvement of the three authors in the frst phase of HOMInG, whereby we conducted qualitative investigation in urban settings in fve European countries, namely, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK (the research design was developed prior to the 2016 UK Brexit referendum) and among migrants from three regions of the world: the Horn of Africa (Eritrea and Somalia), South Asia (Pakistan and India) and South America (Ecuador and Peru). Because of signifcant diferences in terms of immigration and emigration histories, public policies and welfare regimes, the fve countries ofer an original comparative angle for the study of urban areas and homing processes. Likewise, the six groups of migrants provide a variety of migratory experiences, including those of forced migrants, labour and highly skilled migrants as well as those of second, third or even fourth immigrant generations. Our research participants do difer not only in their country of origin and legal status, but also in their length of stay in the country of settlement, gender and age. Although we are fully aware that the partition among various migrant categories (i.e. forced and economic migrants) is fuid, changeable and the result of socio-political processes (see, among many others, Jansen and Löfving 2009), nonetheless we give value to the ways these categories actually afect people’s opportunities, afordances and limitations, as well as their experiences and agency. In the same vein, we avoid reifying other social diferences, paying attention to the ways in which such diferences intersect with each other. Combined together, the fve countries and the six groups of migrants provide us with remarkably rich empirical materials to advance comparative considerations on ‘ways of homing’, here intended as a multi-layered and multi-sensorial process that evolves both over space – following migratory itineraries and family or community networks – and over time, as it is afected by past memories and future aspirations. From a methodological point of view, our investigation is based on qualitative techniques of data collection, such as in-depth interviews, life histories and ethnographic investigation conducted according to shared guidelines and a common analytical framework. Interviews and life histories are essential tools for comprehending emotions, values and socio-cultural representations associated with home and for understanding how the sense of

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home changes during, and in relationship to, migrants’ life course. However, words and narratives represent only a part of the picture: home is a social practice with a performative character, founded in routines, embodied praxis, senses, conscious interactions and unconscious actions. Tis theoretical stance led us to focus on home-making practices, understood as part of the set of resources and habits that migrants take with them or shape in their new contexts of emplacement. Finally, these practices are not enacted in a vacuum. Home has indeed an intrinsic spatial dimension, imbued with feelings and emotions (Blunt and Dowling 2006) as well as close-knit social relations. As a consequence, we conducted ‘home visits’ within informants’ domestic spaces, looking at furniture, decorations, practices of hospitality and thresholds of intimacy. Moreover, we took into consideration not only the private dwellings of our interlocutors, but also public and semi-public home spaces (including worship places, so-called ethnic restaurants, public parks and squares), which spur feelings of attachment and familiarity in which they feel at home or perform being at home. Although each of us conducted his or her feldwork individually, a core aspect of our ethnographic implementation was our periodic meetings, where we discussed collectively our empirical fndings, exchanged feedback and ideas, and engaged in theoretical and analytical refections and readings (Bonfanti et al. 2019). Te comparative dimension of our research, as well as of this book, is not developed ex-post, but is a constitutive aspect of our project: ongoing from the frst idea to the last draf of these pages.

Te co-authoring process Tis book has been a scholarly exercise for all three authors, walking on the wire between independent authorship and co-writing. As just recalled, the overall theme of home and mobility, and the focus topics which title each chapter, has been the shared matter of debate over the past two years, as team members within a collaborative large-scale project. Yet, while we worked in our respective felds autonomously, across diferent cities and with diverse research participants (only occasionally we were co-present in the same city, but our research routes rarely crossed), we wish to reiterate that this work is not an edited volume.

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Each chapter takes a diferent angle, analyses cases drawn from the ethnographic experience of each author and engages with a literature review that was selected according to personal research interests and expertise. Miranda Nieto, a cultural sociologist attentive to theories of practice, deals with scales and temporalities of home especially in regard to Latin American mobilities. Massa, a social anthropologist expert in border studies, accounts for the inequities that (im)mobilize Eritrean and Somali refugees and that their (in)formal housing regimes produce. Bonfanti, an anthropologist of kinship and religion, considers material culture and diversities at home, recovering half a decade of participatory work with Indian diasporas. Te blending of such disparate ethnographic insights and inter-disciplinary approaches (not only anthropology and sociology, but also geography and cultural studies) is an asset in this volume: fresh and eccentric, and yet powerfully cohesive. Tere are numerous red threads that cut across the contributions here collated, and the readers will see themselves how our case studies and analyses call upon each other, as if an echo reverberated throughout the volume. A few concepts that resonate here and there might well be thresholds, process and social change. Te notion of threshold refers back to the long history of limen and liminality (from Van Gennep 1909 to Turner 1969), which describes situations of ‘betwixt and between’ two social statuses. Treshold indicates interstices, zones of passage that establish rules for the social use of space and the renewal of a sense of mutuality or of alienation (Boccagni and Brighenti 2017). Tresholds also foreground rites of passage, extra-ordinary practices that transit individuals or groups from one stage or social status to another. As for the term process, more than researching homes as settings per se, we crossed the home threshold of our hosts and took part in their reproduction of domesticity, which we recognize as an ongoing enactment of petty activities such as cleaning and cooking, always repetitive, never identical, a sui generis art of the ordinary (Miller and Woodward 2012). Rather than a set location, we came to appreciate each and every home we visited as a process in the making, a catalyst of people’s thick and thin deeds. Te latter did not lapse behind closed doors but reverberated far and wide, opening to the study of social change that we explored mainly in relation with vulnerability. We highlight that if we subscribe to the search for home as a human disposition, we cannot disregard that in everyday life the loss or lack of home, or again its inadequacy,

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is real experience that many of our interlocutors have faced (but also ofen due to their mobile conditions). Tere are histories of vulnerability that we saw inscribed in people’s homes, as well as political forces, ofen impinging on discriminatory housing systems, that make migrants (and non) at risk of exclusion or segregation (Low and Iveson 2016). Nonetheless, there are also stories of agency, resistance and social transformation that we witnessed throughout our feldwork, cases that we account as forms of seeking for spatial justice (Soja 2010). As urban ethnographers of home, doing feldwork in super diverse cities (Vertovec 2007), at times we felt humble and vulnerable ourselves in crossing those thresholds of intimacy that are key architectural features of domestic settings. Furthermore, it is in the practices that make or unmake, respect or trespass home boundaries that we saw homes in the making as a constellation of enactments. Tose three red threads, thus limen, process and social change, also indicate that there is a further tension in researching home and mobility with qualitative methods, besides recognizing the political dimensions of migration and the eventual implication of our fndings for housing and migratory policies. At all stages of our ethnographic work we were confronted with the research ethics needed to comply with for respecting and protecting our informants, remaining open to creative adaptations on site, besides reaping informed consent and safely storing our data (Belloni et al. 2019). Although it ofen goes without saying in ethnographic writing, we would like to make clear that all names and identities of our informants have been altered, systematically using pseudonyms in order to protect the anonymity of the individuals concerned (or concealing details about places and events that may breach confdentiality). Moreover, all photos here published are our own, which we carefully selected among our original collection of visuals from the feld. Instead of reducing ethics to a narrow methodological issue, we may consider this book as a collective commitment of the authors to make public the research we have done, to take responsibility for the trust our interlocutors have granted us, for the experience and struggles we have witnessed. Finally, we intend this volume as a much-needed dissemination of the original knowledge we produced, which builds on freshly collected empirical data, is aware of underlying social criticalities, and tries to connect with the best scholarly literature available on home and migration.

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Keywords and chapters Tis volume comprises six chapters, each headed with one keyword that condenses its arguments. Like Raymond Williams frst noted in his Keyword: Culture and Society (1976), keywords have the power to both expand and reduce the reality they signify, of evoking more than there is, and obscuring alternatives. Following afer Noel Salazar (who edited a volume on the Keywords of Mobility 2017), keywords are ‘essentially contested concepts’ that never acquire a closed or fnal meaning (not even within one domain or discipline). We selected six keywords to title our chapters, as we used to proceed when, during our intense collective meetings, we reported our fndings and contributed to the common debate. Te same intent lies within this volume: each chapter wishes to render the particularities of contexts and approaches, while ofering material for comparison and refections. Te opening chapter, ‘Scales’, addresses the multiple geographical representations of home in light of contemporary theorizations in human geography and the ethnographic analysis of the case of a Peruvian migrant in Madrid. In focusing on home-making within and beyond dwelling places, this chapter explores the meanings of being and feeling at home in – and identifying one’s home with – non-domestic spaces such as neighbourhoods, cities, regions or nations. It argues that home constitutes a scalable set of relationships and illustrates how migrants’ sense of home can become rescaled through the experience of dwelling. Te second chapter, ‘(Im)materiality’, considers homes with a material culture approach, thus arguing that while people make and unmake homes (across places and over their life course), in turn these special bounded places contribute to shape (exhibit or crash) their subjectivities. Paying homage to the mobile life experiences of research participants, three domestic objects are taken into account: sofas, transnational parcels and webcams; as a matter of fact, things are infused with afects, and material culture at home may stand for fxity as much as movement, proximity as well as distance. Te third chapter, ‘Mobility and Immobility’, investigates home-making practices and emotions in conditions of hyper-mobility and of stuckness. It brings the experiences of highly skilled workers together with those of disadvantaged movers, such as asylum seekers, and moves across diferent settings, from

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hotel rooms to refugee camps to reception centres. By analysing how people engage with the architectural and material structures of these settings, enact daily routines, create connections with the past and the aspirations for future, produce a sense of community and domesticity, the discussion challenges essentialist notions of home and away-from-home. Te fourth chapter explores ‘temporalities’ of home-making and migration. While the experience of home within and beyond the household appears to be demarcated by the spaces in which it takes place, there are various temporalities that give shape to our domestic lives. Ways of portraying previous homes in current dwelling places, hopes of returning to an idealized homeland and ways of orienting one’s social experience of home towards potential futures are crucial temporal dimensions that shape migrants’ sense of home. Te ffh chapter, ‘Diversities’, considers home as a threshold between private and public social life, where the variety of human subjectivities may be expressed or tampered. Upon ethnographic home visits, the relations and positionalities presented question three paradigms, related to gender, sexuality and class or race. Is the kitchen a feminine space indeed? How can homes validate or challenge sexual (hetero)normativity? What does transnational domestic work entail (and for whom)? Conditions of mobility and migrant categorizations do intersect with all other aforementioned diferences, amplifying social questions and making domopolitics (Walters 2004) a critical everyday issue: a politics at home, as well as a politics of homes. Te last chapter, ‘Inequality’, sheds light on how inequalities which characterize migrants’ conditions in countries of settlement infuence their processes of homing. Te focus is on conditions of inequalities that are produced at the intersection of migration background, race-ethnic diversity, poverty and class, which are explored through the analysis of spatial segregations and informal settlements. Trough the case study of squats, the analysis tackles the strong yet ambivalent relationships with local political movements and the ways in which the notions of home and its emotional languages are negotiated and (re)defned. All of our keywords are contested concepts, none of our chapters pretend to be encompassing; we acknowledge and rejoice that. We hope that the readers will enjoy musing through our experiences and interpretations of home and mobility across Europe, as much as we did while doing ethnography, in the feld and in this writing endeavour.

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Note 1

‘HOMInG – Te home-migration nexus: Home as a window on migrant belonging, integration and circulation’ is an ERC-granted research project (ERC StG 678456 – HOMInG [2016–21]) led by Paolo Boccagni, whereby we have been involved since 2017 as postdoctoral researchers. Te project aims at implementing a large comparative investigation on home and migration, based on mixed qualitative and quantitative methodologies.

References Andersson, R. (2014), Illegality Inc. Clandestine Migration and the Business of Bordering Europe, Berkeley: University of California Press. Appadurai, A., ed. (1986), Te Social Life of Tings. Commodities in Cultural Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bakewell, O. (2008), ‘Research beyond the categories: Te importance of policy irrelevant research into forced migration’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 21 (4): 432–53. Belloni, M. et al. (2019), ‘On the complexities of collaborative ethnography: Ethical and methodological insights from the HOMInG project’, in Cross Migration Briefs, IMISCOE, Available online: https://crossmigration.eu/storage/app/uploads/ public/5d9/b61/c6e/5d9b61c6e39b5077257428.pdf (accessed 23 March 2020). Betts, A., ed. (2011), Te Global Migration Governance, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Blunt A., and R. Dowling (2006), Home, London: Routledge. Boccagni, P. (2017), Migration and the Search for Home: Mapping Domestic Space in Migrants’ Everyday Lives, New York: Palgrave. Boccagni, P., and A. M. Brighenti (2017), ‘Immigrants and home in the making: Tresholds of domesticity, commonality and publicness’, Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, 32 (1): 1–11. Bonfanti, S., A. Massa and A. Miranda (2019), ‘Whifs of home: Ethnographic comparison in a collaborative research across European cities’, Etnografa e Ricerca Qualitativa, 3: 153–74. Brah, A. (1996), Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities, London: Routledge. Cresswell, T. (2010), ‘Towards a politics of mobility’, Environment and Planning D, 28: 17–31.

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De Genova, N. (2002), ‘Migrant “illegality” and deportability in everyday life’, Annual Review of Anthropology, XXXI: 419–47. Douglas, M. (1991), ‘Te idea of a home: A kind of space’, Social Research, 58 (1): 287–307. Faist, T. (2013), ‘Te mobility turn: A new paradigm for the social sciences?’ Ethnic and Racial Studies, 36 (11): 1637–46. Faist, T. (2019), Te Transnationalized Social Question: Migration and the Politics of Social Inequalities in the Twenty-First Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fassin, D. (2011), ‘Policing borders, producing boundaries. Te governmentality of immigration in dark times’, Annual Review of Anthropology, XL: 213–26. Fortier, A. M. (2001), Migrant Belongings. Memory, Space, Identity, London: Bloomsbury. Glick Schiller, N., and N. Salazar (2013), ‘Regimes of mobility across the globe’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 39 (2): 183–200. Hahn, H., and G. Klute (2007), Cultures of Migration: African Perspectives, Berlin: LIT Verlag. Heidegger, M. (1993 [1971]), ‘Building, dwelling, thinking’, in M. Heidegger (ed.), Basic Writings, 143–61, London: Routledge. Jackson, M. (1995), At Home in the World, Durham: Duke University Press. Jacobson, K. (2009), ‘A developed nature: A phenomenological account of the experience of home’, Contemporary Philosophical Review, 42: 355–73. Jansen, S., and S. Löfving, eds. (2009), Struggles for Home: Violence, Hope and the Movement of People, Oxford: Berghahn Books. Low, S., and Iveson K. (2016), ‘Propositions for more just urban public spaces’, City, 20: 1–10. Miller, D., ed. (2001), Home Possessions: Material Culture Behind Closed Doors, London: Bloomsbury. Miller, D., and Woodward S. (2012), Blue Jeans: Te Art of the Ordinary, Berkeley: University of California Press. Rapport, N., and A. Dawson (1998), Migrants of Identity: Perceptions of Home in a World of Movement, Oxford: Berg. Salazar, N. (2011), ‘Te power of imagination in transnational mobilities’, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 18: 576–98. Salazar, N. (2016), ‘Introduction. keywords of mobility. What’s in a name?’ in N. B. Salazar and K. Jayaram (eds.), Keywords of Mobility. Critical Engagements, 1–12, New York & Oxford: Berghahn. Scholten, P., and Penninx R. (2016), ‘Te multilevel governance of migration and integration’, in Penninx, Mascarenas (eds.), Integration Processes and Policies in Europe: Contexts, Levels and Actors, 91–108, Amsterdam: IMISCOE Springer Open.

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Sheller M., and J. Urry (2006), ‘Te new mobilities paradigm’, Environment and Planning A, 38 (2): 207–26. Soja, E. (2010), Seeking Spatial Justice, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Tsianos, V., S. Hess and S. Karakayali (2009), ‘Transnational migration. Teory and method of an ethnographic analysis of border regimes’, Working Paper 55. Sussex Centre for Migration Research, University of Sussex. Turner, V. (1969), Te Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Van Gennep, A. (1909), Les Rites de Passage, Paris: E. Nourry. Vertovec, S. (2007), ‘Super-diversity and its implications’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30 (6): 1024–54. Walters, W. (2004), ‘Secure borders, safe haven, domopolitics’, Citizenship Studies, 8: 237–60. Williams, R. (2005 [1976]), Keyword: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Oxford: Blackwell.

1

Scales Alejandro Miranda Nieto

Introduction In an evocative book about the tensions between space and place, geographer Yi-Fu Tuan (2001: 149) refects on how our experience of place is shaped by scale. ‘Place exists at diferent scales,’ he says. ‘At one extreme a favourite armchair is a place, at the other extreme the whole earth.’ In a similar fashion, home occurs at diferent scales, unfolding from the corner of an armchair through the dwelling place and beyond. ‘When space feels thoroughly familiar to us, it has become place,’ Tuan (2001: 73) reminds us. Home may emerge through a form of familiarity that occurs in more than one place. It is increasingly common to fnd in scholarly debates the idea of home extending to a range of spatial scales: home as a household or a café, a street or neighbourhood, a city or a nation. It is even more common to think about scales as smaller or larger, as in the body or the domestic space as smaller scales and regions or nations as larger ones. Yet, notions of what home is, the emotions associated with feeling or not at home and the processes of home-making at diferent scales remain elusive. In what ways does home take place inside a house or extend across diferent spaces? What does it mean to be at home, feel at home or identify one’s home with non-domestic spaces such as a neighbourhood, a city, a region or a nation? Tis chapter explores the intersection between home and migration in light of contemporary theorizations on geographical scale, as well as my own ethnographic research with South American migrants in Madrid. Households have been widely studied as a site of diverse social processes, namely consumption, gender relations, reproduction and learning (Briganti

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and Mezei 2012). In more recent decades there has also been a growing body of scholarly literature on home as social process that occurs in diferent contexts beyond the dwelling place. Tese discussions have been infuenced to various extents by theoretical advances on scale, mobilities and socio-spatial practices. Blunt and Dowling (2006), for instance, develop a critical geography of home that focuses on various scales, such as domestic, urban, regional, national and transnational spaces. Another example comes from Duyvendak’s (2011) study on the politics of feeling at home as a multi-scalar phenomenon. Still, the investigation of home as a set of relationships that unfold across diferent registers of the social is infrequently made explicit. Tis chapter analyses some of the ways in which scalar thinking (both in everyday practice and scholarly analysis) is used in relation to home and migration. It is guided by the intuition that examining home within and beyond the household can greatly beneft from engaging with the rich conceptual repertoire of contemporary theorizations of scale. Scholarly debates on scale have considerably advanced during the last four decades, mostly in the feld of human geography. Tese discussions have been stimulated by the relevance that ‘global’ phenomena have acquired and also by the necessity to understand what globalism and localism are, how they relate to other scales such as the regional, national or transnational and, more generally, how scale relates to other key concepts in geography, such as space, place or territory. Te various turns of these debates have infuenced the ways in which some scholars address issues of geographical scale in relation to domesticity and diaspora (see, for instance, Blunt 2005). But there is much to be learnt from investigating what is ‘scalar’ about home, how scales of home come into existence and how they relate to each other in the context of migration. Contemporary analyses from the feld of human geography ofer valuable resources to address these issues. Tere has been a signifcant development of theories of scale investigating the processes through which space becomes represented as a series of discrete units, namely the local, regional, national or global. Notions of ‘production of scale’ (Smith 1992a), ‘construction of scale’ (Delaney and Leitner 1997; Marston 2000), ‘politics of scale’ (Smith 1992b; Swyngedouw 1997) and even discussions about the futility of scale as analytical category (Marston et al. 2005) are examples of the relevance of this debate and its capacity to permeate other areas of social enquiry. Te notion of

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scale constitutes a resource for developing sharper approaches to home, as well as gaining insight into the relationships among the multiple forms that home takes within and beyond the domestic space. Here and throughout this chapter, I refer to scale in its areal connotation; that is, as geographical demarcations around specifc spaces (Herod 2010: xi). Tis is the most common way in which the literature on home and migration has assumed issues of social scale. I therefore focus on geographical scale as areal and socially produced, leaving aside other forms (such as cartographic or temporal scales) that go beyond the scope of this volume. Tis chapter is organized into two main sections. Te following one discusses a series of examples from the scholarly literature on home within and beyond the dwelling place. Tere is a growing amount of scholarly contributions in the feld of home, migration and mobility that highlight the need to develop current understandings of home as multi-located and multi-scalar. Te second section draws on my ethnographic work conducted with South American migrants in Madrid. I analyse the case of Mariana, a young woman whose sense of home has been rescaled throughout her migratory experiences. My overall aim is to argue that migrating can disrupt people’s sense of home, and that such transformations are negotiated amid socio-spatial relations that take shape at diferent scales.

Scaling the domestic Scales of home constitute representations about the extent to which homerelated practices, relationships and experiences occur in a given place. Troughout this chapter I use the notion of ‘scales of home’ to refer to scalar thinking applied to home, either as categories of practice or categories of analysis. In this way, scales are not concrete spaces, places or locations, but ways of framing social activity. Tey produce and constrain particular forms of engagement with material worlds by underpinning a sense of home. Te body, households, streets, neighbourhoods, cities, regions and nations are some of the most common registers of the social (but not the only) to which meanings of home are assigned. As representations of social phenomena, these scales are not directly manifest in the materiality of the settings in question,

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but constitute ordering devices (Herod 2010: 31) for engaging with, and making sense of, our experience of home in relation to the world. A city or a neighbourhood, for example, is not directly afected by the fact that some of their inhabitants assign or not a sense of home to them. Yet, living in a city or a neighbourhood that one experiences as home is an outcome of complex social interactions that shapes one’s engagement with that particular place. More generally, the notion of scale has transitioned from a term used to diferentiate levels of analysis, namely global and local (Delaney and Leitner 1997: 93), to a sophisticated conceptual framework and theorization in human geography and other disciplines interested in space and place (for an overview of scale in human geography see Herod 2010). Drawing on Lefebvre’s (1991) observation that space is socially produced, recent geographical theorizations have sought to question the apparent objectivity and neutrality of space and its presumed hierarchical divisions into scales. Much of this literature agrees that scales are representations of space that come into existence through social processes. Hence, the production of scale as a political phenomenon dominated most of the debates for several decades. Neil Smith (1992a), David Delaney and Helga Leitner (1997), and Sallie A. Marston (2000), for instance, have shown how scales are produced through economic and political processes. Te ‘production of scale’ as an object of analysis was introduced by Smith (1992a) to describe how capital negotiates the tension between investing in a particular location and moving to locations with the objective of increasing proft. In contrast to this and many other subsequent studies centred in how economic and political activity produces scale, Delaney and Leitner (1997) advanced the notion of ‘construction of scale’ to refer to a ‘bottom-up’ process of diferentiation and boundary construction. Globalization, of course, is a prominent theme at the core of analyses of the relationship between state and capital (Smith 1995; Brenner 1997; Leitner 1997; Miller 1997) or political activism (Brown 1996; Miller 2000), among other themes. Te common denominator among these and other studies of scale is a focus on processes of scale production through the examination of large structural capitalist transformations. Te concept of scale has also been used to examine the dwelling place. Te household became a relevant focus in the theorization of scale through the work of Marston (2000, 2004). In questioning approaches that focused

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on the production of scale mostly through the prism of economic and political processes, Marston argued that the mechanisms of reproduction and consumption under capitalism had been largely overlooked. Te household, she reminds us, is a key site of the production of scale. Her analysis of feminist movements in the United States during the nineteenth century illustrates how household activities shaped the organization of social welfare and consumption from households to the levels of local states and Federal institutions. ‘Nineteenth-century middle-class women’, Marston (2000: 238) argues, ‘altered the prevailing “Gestalt of scale” by altering the structures and practices of social reproduction and consumption’, having impacts ‘beyond the home to the city, the country and the globe.’ Marston’s contributions are some of the most explicit examples addressing home from a scalar perspective. In thinking about scales of home, it is ofen assumed that ‘smaller’ scales are nested in ‘larger’ ones. Tere is a common tendency to imagine scales as organized in a hierarchical manner, which probably owes to the origins of the term. Scale derives from the late Latin scala, ladder, which alludes to images of vertical movement, ascending and descending. And just as with other concepts, metaphors constitute powerful devices that shape how we approach and portray the relationships and limits of the notion in question. Another common way of imagining scale is to think about concentric circles or areas in which the ‘larger’ units contain the ‘smaller’ ones. In this case the relationship among scales is that of larger and smaller, rather than higher and lower (Herod 2010: 45–56). Other representations are ‘Chinese boxes’ as a series of boxes or containers that ft inside each other, much like a matryoshka or Russian doll. Tese representations hold much in common with the concentric one, although there is a strict sequential progression from one scale to the other that poses several limits on the relationships among the diferent scales. Alternative metaphors of geographical scale have emerged from theorizations of networks applied to scales, focusing on nonlinear relationships and approaches such as ‘scale-free networks’ (Barabási 2002). In approaching scale as an ordering device, one does not necessarily need to look at it in terms of static size or level. Scale can also be understood in relational terms. Richard Howitt (1998) advances such an understanding of scale from a musical point of view by taking into consideration the example of musical scales. In a tonal system, the relationships between a series of musical

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notes defne the character of the scale in question. Tese relationships are hierarchical and have a central tone, but the functions of the notes can change when the tone changes. Tis perspective highlights how certain elements ‘remain consistent in a geographical analysis that spans across diferent geographical scales’, while others change. Elements such as ‘features on a landscape, the sites involved in a production process, the ecological processes afecting a social formation, the cultural practices performed by people’ may be stable, while the changes become manifest in ‘the relationships that we perceive between them and the ways in which we might emphasize specifc elements for analytical attention’ (1998: 55). Howitt’s argument on the relational character of geographical scale is relevant for the study of home and mobility because it shows that scales of home are not merely about their relative or absolute size – as in home at a large or small scale, see Montello (2013) – or about places nested into each other – as in home contained in a neighbourhood, a city, a region or a country. Rather, a given scale of home has to do with changing relationships among the diferent elements that compose home. In the next section of this chapter, I draw from Howitt’s relational approach to scale to analyse how the experience of migration involves changes in socio-spatial relationships that I refer to as the rescaling of home. I specifcally focus on the experiences of a Peruvian migrant in Madrid to examine how the complex of relationships that compose her sense of home become rescaled through the experience of dwelling. What is relevant to highlight at this point of the argument is that a relational approach to scale addresses the continuities and shifs of the scope of a sense of home as dynamic phenomena. In following contemporary debates in human geography to understand home and migration, the caveat is to avoid taking scale as a pre-given category. Tere is nothing ‘natural’ about home-making in relation to a register of the social, namely the body, household, neighbourhood or city. Tis is why there is much to be learnt from the examination of how home shapes and becomes shaped by the social across diferent scales (Marston 2004: 173). From this perspective, assigning a sense of home to a house could be investigated as socially intricate and political, just as the politics of identity pervading discourses of the nation-as-home (Walters 2004) could be analysed in relation to intimacy, privacy and control. Te key issue here is not to treat scales of

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home as if they came into being through similar processes, but to investigate how they shape each other and how they become historically constituted. A way of doing so is to examine the enactment of home-related practices in relation to specifc spaces. Te ‘scope’ of home is ofen based on dichotomies such as private and public, domestic and foreign, or interior and exterior. Tese elements tend to be treated as essentially diferent in everyday practice, although there is a growing body of scholarly literature seeking to unveil how these apparently discrete facets become intertwined and mutually constitutive. It is to some examples of this literature that we now turn.

Within the domestic space Urban and suburban households currently constitute the most common representation of home. What might be less evident, however, is that contemporary understandings of house-as-home stem from the historical development of meanings of the domestic space as essentially intimate, private and distinct from the public sphere. Te separation between private domestic space and the public realm is nothing new. Maria Kaika (2004: 265), for example, briefy describes how these issues go back to antiquity. Yet, contemporary diferentiations between private and public are sustained through distinct cultural, political and economic processes, as much of the literature tells us (see, for instance, Massey 1984; Sennett 1990; Attfeld 2000). Embedded within these processes, the social construction of house-as-home can be traced back to the Enlightenment, as Kaika (2004) argues. In analysing how the modern bourgeois home became separated from political and public realms, Kaika explains how home turned into an inherently private and intimate space. It is in the privacy of the modern home that scholars from various research traditions have examined the intricate social textures of the ofen taken for granted experience of the domestic space. In anthropology there is an established tradition of researching ‘the tribal house’. Cunningham (1964), for example, interprets the house as a refection of the group’s cosmology and symbolism. But fne-grained analyses of dwelling places in urban and suburban areas are much more recent. Relevant examples come from the essays in At Home: An Anthropology of Domestic Space (Cieraad 1999), which focus on the transitions between domestic and public space, and

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how their borders are settled, unsettled and negotiated. Among many other points, this volume shows how windows, facades, doors and the action of getting in and out of houses are at the core of the ‘spatial identities’ of the domestic (1999: 12). Tis and other scholarly analyses of the domestic space demonstrate how privacy is not an essential property of a dwelling space, but an ongoing set of practices of diferentiation (Cieraad 2012: 68). Memories also constitute a signifcant element in the process of turning a house into a home. In studying the meanings of house-as-home, Irene Cieraad (2010) describes how the domestic space is structured through memories that take shape of individual recollections of past homes. ‘Reinvented time afer time’ (2010: 85), narratives of past homes are not only nostalgic recollections, but current elements that play an important role in the projection of future homes. Tus, transitioning from one house to another is a matter of remembering and recollecting just as much as it is related to life transitions or shifing economic conditions. Much of the scholarly interest in the minute details of domestic life has emerged from studies of material culture, as the chapter on (im)materialities in this volume illustrates. Daniel Miller’s (1998, 2001) examination of the materiality of, and the forms of consumption associated to, home has opened important avenues for the study of the social life of domestic spaces. Te essays of Home Possessions illustrate the ways in which home and those inhabiting it ‘transform each other’ (2001: 2). It also shows the importance and difculties of conducting participant observation in private spaces, and how such an immersion leads to relevant insights on the material cultures of home. Miller’s studies of material culture in the domestic space highlight how stuf is central for the making of the social. In these and other studies (see also Ochs and Kremer-Sadlik 2013), the household is revealed as a site of consumption, reproduction, gender relations, learning, agreeing and disagreeing. Here I have introduced just a few examples from the vast literature on dwelling places to illustrate how these approaches highlight a series of practices, relationships, emotions and sensorial experiences in relation to a particular scale. House-as-home, this literature shows, is socially produced through a matrix of relationships within and beyond its material and symbolic boundaries. Although the entry point of these approaches is clearly the dwelling place, many analyses of home as domestic environment

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have demonstrated that there is much more to home than the confnes of the household. Of course, this is not to say that studies of home should simply turn their attention to social phenomena outside the domestic sphere. It is rather an attempt to emphasize the importance of unsettling dichotomies that lie at the core of notions of home, namely public and private, interior and exterior, or domestic and foreign. We now move to examples that further illustrate the tension between such dichotomies.

Beyond the house Sensing, making, thinking of and talking about home outside the dwelling place can have several consequences in everyday life. Consider, for instance, a neighbourhood-as-home and one can imagine how this sense infuences the way in which one approaches that place, how one relates to people living there and assigns meanings to its past, present and future events. Suzanne M. Hall  (2009) takes a café in a culturally diverse neighbourhood in London as an entry point to analyse the ways in which ‘newcomers’ and ‘established’ neighbours make themselves at home. In examining various modes of belonging and their contestation inside the café, Hall highlights the ‘combination of shared space, practice and sociability as ways of reconstituting home’ (2009: 86–87). In this and other texts (see also Hall 2012) Hall illustrates how an extra-domestic scale of home, such a street and its shops, is a matter of practice, relationships and experience. In these cases, home assumes a distinct form beyond the dwelling place. Home is therefore a type of place constituted by relationships that extend across diferent spheres. An example comes from Andrew Gorman-Murray’s (2006: 54) study on the case of gay men in Australia. Tis paper describes how the apparent privacy of home extends to public sites of belonging, ‘stretching’ home and imbricating ‘unhomely domestic spaces with homelike non-domestic environments’. Gorman-Murray illustrates the overlap between public and private through contrasting experiences of home in diferent realms, showing how home-making occurs in multiple spaces and putting into question the notion of home as a ‘safe haven’. Making oneself at home in non-domestic spaces can also be a struggle, as Adriano Cancellieri (2017) illustrates through his exploration of home-making practices in a condominium in Italy. Tis

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article describes how wider social processes are constitutive of the tensions that many migrants encounter in trying to create ‘homely relations’ in public and collective spaces. In reference to housing studies, Hazel Easthope (2004: 128) advances a ‘more integrated approach’ that takes into account scales beyond the household and investigates home as a signifcant form of place at ‘regional, national and international scale’. Easthope’s emphasis on multi-scalar approaches to dwelling resonates with the focus that Blunt and Sheringham (2018) take on the intersection between dwelling and mobility. Teir home-city geographies put the ‘domestic’ and the ‘urban’ in the same sphere of analysis. In taking both the city and the home as points of departure, Blunt and Sheringham set up a research agenda to investigate how the scales of home and city become intertwined through migration and mobility. Migrating can sometimes involve a sense of ambivalence, especially when one is seeking to make oneself at home. Greg Noble (2013) analyses the experiences of a Lebanese man in Australia to show how the process of learning to feel at home involves ‘not just learning the diferences of a new place, it is learning that you are “diferent”’ (2013: 349). A distinct ‘migrant habitus’ is therefore produced amid the ambivalence of feeling and not at home at the same time. Tis ambivalence is indicative of the difculties associated with relocating a sense of home across diferent scales – a point that is illustrated in the following section. Tis ambiguous feeling can be experienced as an ongoing ‘provisional’ living arrangement, a ‘permanent impermanence’ (Brun  2012:  427) and a vacillation between staying, leaving or moving somewhere else. A feeling that shows that home is composed by contested relationships and attachments with the near and far, within and beyond the household. Home is also a set of shifing relationships between what appears to be inside and outside. As Doreen Massey (1994: 5) puts it, ‘What defnes the uniqueness of any place is by no means all included within that place itself.’ As a ‘special kind of place’ (Easthope 2004: 135), home becomes unique, distinct and recognizable because of the set of relationships that extend within and beyond the confnes of the dwelling place. A way of capturing the transformations of these relationships is to turn to scalar thinking. Home within and beyond the dwelling place is not a thing but, to borrow from Massey’s (1994: 5) theorization of place, a series of ‘particular moments’ in socio-spatial relations. And besides

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being a place, home is also an event in time, a happening that fades in and out of one’s life trajectory. Tis is why home is a set of spatiotemporal relationships in constant process of rescaling and not an established fact to be experienced (or investigated). My aim in bringing selected examples of the literature on home within and beyond the domestic is twofold. On the one hand, I seek to argue that home-related phenomena occur at various scales, especially through people’s relocation of their sense of home in assorted spaces that range from the private to the public. On the other, I claim that the scales in question are social phenomena that need to be studied in their own right. If scales of home are ordered systems of relatively bounded ‘space envelopes’ (Lefebvre 1991: 351), how do they become reproduced or reshaped by migration?

Rescaling through migration Issues of multi-located homes and the nexus between home, space and scale become much more salient when considered through the prism of migration. Dwelling in the context of migration constitutes a relevant entry point to the examination of the production of scales of home. At its most basic level, this is so because changing one’s country of residence involves relocation, impacting the scope of home-making processes. And more generally, there are various ways in which leaving, changing or feeing one’s place of residence disrupts one’s sense of home (Blunt and Dowling 2006: 2). In conceptualizing home and home-making for displaced people, Brun and Fábos (2015) propose a ‘triadic constellation of home’. Tey distinguish between, and elaborate the notions of, ‘home’ as home-making practices, ‘Home’ as ‘values, traditions, memories and feelings of home’ (2015: 5), and ‘HOME’ as home embedded in a global order and diferent institutions. While their objective is not to develop a scalar approach to home, Brun and Fábos explain the ways in which home in long-term displacement takes shape at various interrelated scales. Te experience of dwelling as a migrant can disrupt settled notions of where and what home is, sometimes leading to a fragmented and dispersed sense of home. As argued in the previous section, home may occur within and beyond the dwelling place, and in more than one location. But the relationships that

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constitute home become signifcantly rescaled through migratory experiences. A set of questions that emerge from this point regard how these processes of rescaling take place, how the eforts to recreate and negotiate home in the context of migration become manifest at multiple scales, and how the scales at which this recreation and negotiation relate to each other. In the case of many recently arrived and so-called frst-generation migrants, home is ofen back in the place of origin. As Riccio (2002) describes in the case of Senegalese migrants in Italy, the tight and well-organized transnational networks that extend across Senegal and Western Europe have not led to the development of ‘multiple attachments: their meaning of home does not shif dramatically’, partly owing to strategies to cope with ‘an occasionally racist and constraining receiving context’ (2002: 68). For many others, however, home is a much more fuid notion that changes throughout the life course. Western (1992) explains how his personal experience of home resonates with that of several of his informants in the sense of being dynamic and stretching at various scales: ‘Home’ for me is, or was, a certain house on a certain Margate street; then, the Isle of Tanet; then, my county Kent; then, my country England – depending on the context. And later (only once I started living in the New World), I realized I was coming to identify myself at a yet more general scale – as one for whom Europe was home. Similarly, for many interviewees, ‘It depends on the context’ was the response given to the question about home, and for a small minority of them the unproblematic segmentary system seemed to apply just as it did once for me: that is, ‘home’ was this house on this Ilford street; then, London; then, Britain. (Western 1992: 256)

For Western and many others amid migratory processes, home is not simply located in an identifable place, but depends on a series of contextual changes. In this account, Western frames it as if these places were in a nested series, just as in the example of ‘Chinese boxes’ or the matryoshka described earlier. But regardless the ways in which we conceptualize, portray or imagine them, scales of home occur processually, as our migratory experiences unfold. Mazzullo and Ingold argue that places ‘do not so much exist as occur – they are stations along the byways of life […] places occur along the life-paths of

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persons’. Borrowing from this perspective, home and migration become an issue of shifing scales just as much as a matter of multi-locality. Te meanings of home tend to become messier by the disruption of their scope. Terefore, the question might not be where exactly home is located, but how and why some places (rather than others) become home through the continuity and transformation of experiences and relationships. To explore this point we now turn to the case of Mariana, a woman whose sense of home has been rescaled throughout her migratory experience.

Mariana’s sense of home Mariana was born in Lima and arrived in Madrid slightly before turning fve years old. She and her mother were the frst ones to move to Spain, followed by the rest of her nuclear family and, later on, uncles and cousins. All of them remained in the same neighbourhood in the southwest of Madrid since their arrival. Still, Mariana and her nuclear family moved from fat to fat every one or two years because sharing accommodation with other South American families in overcrowded condominiums proved to be a fragile arrangement. Sharing one fat among several nuclear families is a common living arrangement in several working-class suburbs in Madrid (Miranda Nieto 2018). Mariana told me that in these shared fats, notions of privacy and intimacy were not straightforwardly demarcated, especially within the members of the same nuclear family. And she also explained that, for this reason, she developed a stronger identifcation with her neighbourhood instead of their dwelling place. A counterbalance of the experience of making herself at home in her neighbourhood (rather than in one of the fats she happened to inhabit) was ‘la casa de Perú’, the family project consisting in sending remittances back to Lima and building fats for her extended family. Over the years her parents and extended family members remitted part of their income to undertake the construction of a house in the land inherited from her grandfather. Tat was the place in which they were living before migrating to Spain, a place that served as an anchor for their migratory experience in Madrid: We used to live in a piece of land that my grandfather had bought a long time ago. As everybody came here [to Madrid], as all the brothers [of her mother]

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have moved here, what happened? Tat they built on that land, there is a building of all the brothers. We have the house there; my mother has the house there. Each brother has a fat, each of them built one, so there is a building. So the times I’ve visited I haven’t gone to any other place, no, I’ve always gone to the same neighbourhood where I come from.

In recalling the places in which she has lived, the permanency of la casa de Perú contrasted with the experience of constantly moving from fat to fat in a neighbourhood in southern Madrid. When Mariana succinctly said that she comes from that neighbourhood in Lima, she put certain emphasis to highlight the relevance of that place. Her identifcation with this overlapping between house-, neighbourhood- and country-as-home stems from the eforts of her family to undertake the project of constructing a small building for two decades of work and frugality. Despite having visited that house a handful of times and keeping no personal objects in there, she describes it as something like home. Contrastingly, the fats that she and her family rented in her youth were portrayed as shelters and repositories of personal objects, as spaces in which one reunites and rests. Te tone that she uses immediately changes when turning the conversation to la casa de Perú: We always talk about la casa, so my mom also says ‘la casa de Perú, la casa de Perú’, we always talk about la casa de Perú. And although I have my tíos (uncles) here, I’ve got tíos there too, we call them that way, friends from the neighbourhood, I was taught to call them that way when I was little. So I’ve got the tío Edu, tío Juán, I’ve got tíos and the times I’ve been in Peru, I’ve made neighbourhood (he hecho barrio). I mean, I can say ‘let’s go to buy chocolates there, with tía Roberta’, or ‘let’s go to the corner to have a sandwich with tío Miguelón’. I mean, the times I’ve gone I’ve made neighbourhood. And also, as they don’t let me go around by myself, alone, I was hanging out only there [in that neighbourhood]. Going to the market, of course, going to the corner of the market to buy bread, that is something I’ve got there, although I haven’t stayed for a long time, only the occasions I’ve visited.

Mariana has been ‘making neighbourhood’ in the part of Madrid she has inhabited most of her life, as well as in the place in Lima where she was born and has visited a few times. Tis translocal way of making neighbourhoodas-home has been possible because of her negotiation of a sense of home does not always occur in the place that she refers as home. Tat is, Mariana

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Figure 1.1 A street in Mariana’s neighbourhood. Author’s photo.

and her family are making themselves at home while talking, remembering or daydreaming about la casa de Perú, even if this happens in Madrid. Tey are making home at a distance because their home-making practices are ofen enacted in several (and interrelated) locations, apart from their current dwelling place. Tis point is indicative not only of the multiple locations in which home-making occurs, but also of the processes of rescaling home that are constitutive of migratory experiences. Home-making away from home is an issue already noted in the literature on migration and displacement. Kabachnik et al. (2010) notice it in their study of Georgian internally displaced people from Abkhazia. Tis paper describes how ‘home-making practices need not be physical acts (e.g. hanging a photograph, arranging furniture, decorating), but that conversations,

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memories, and ideas can play the more signifcant role in the construction of home’ (2010: 331). It is certain that the experience of dwelling is central to the construction of a sense of home. But as the cases of migrants, homeless and other very mobile people reveal, a sense of home can also be attached through memories and experiences that have no current, material base (see also Freund 2015). Whether we are migrants or not, we all dwell in one specifc location at the time. In the meantime, our sense of home fnds its references across multiple scales. For there is much more to home-making than the act of inhabiting space: home-making is a way of producing scale.

A mantra of vacillation Te experience of dwelling as a migrant is a telling example of producing scale through the relocation of one’s sense of home. As many other migrants, Mariana is immersed in a process of reshaping the scope of home-related practices, experiences and relationships. Her sense of house-as-home was probably absent during her childhood, but this situation changed gradually when her parents decided to buy a fat when she was a teenager. ‘La casa de mi mamá’ (the house of her mother) became a point of reference built on the strong identifcation she already had with her neighbourhood. She lived in that fat for several years with her nuclear family, and it has been a couple of years that she formed a new family and moved with her partner and daughter to the outskirts of Madrid. Te convergence of attaching a sense of home to her mother’s house as well as the neighbourhood in which she lived most of her life became evident when contrasting them to the place where she lives now: Alejandro: And now in your current place, do you feel at home? Mariana: at home? … A: yes, when one feels at home, like it’s your space? Or have you always felt at home here or anywhere? M: no, uh … I mean, I haven’t felt like that always. I feel good [in her house in the outskirts], perhaps because it’s calm, but at home, at home, I feel here, in my neighbourhood, here in my house, that is, in my mother’s house. A: that is your house … M: of course, it’s diferent because I live here, but one block away lives my

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aunt with my cousins, and in that other block lives my uncle. In the end, we are all together. From here, a few blocks away lives my father, so here is like … I mean, I like the other house for ‘disconnecting’ [relaxing], I commute every day and go wherever I need to go, and there I’m calm, I’m telling you. But I don’t see myself living just there, for me this is … like it or not … perhaps because I was raised here, because I know this, this is my neighbourhood, uh … because here I have my relatives, my family, so everything together becomes appealing to me. If it’s about feeling good, good, I feel good in here.

It is clear that people may feel attached to diferent places at the same time, at diferent scales (Gorman-Murray 2011: 212); and also that it depends on the context (Western 1992: 256). Yet, developing a sense of home requires certain dose of familiarity, security and control (Boccagni 2017: 7). Mariana draws this particular blend from experiences and relationships that extend across her neighbourhood in southern Madrid, la casa de Perú and some other signifcant places. Scales of home, let me repeat, are representations about the extent to which home-related activity occurs – they are ways of framing the continuities and changes in people’s ways of dwelling. Te relationships among diferent scales of home have become more noticeable to Mariana when changing context. In her travels to other countries (apart from Peru and Spain), she has found herself mistaking the name Peru or Lima for Spain or Madrid when talking to people about how things are ‘back home’. Tis might appear as an insignifcant slip, but it is probably reminiscent of how home is not merely located ‘here’ or ‘there’, but rather emerges from relationships across interrelated places. M: […] I went abroad a few times … two times. Tere was a time in which the Spanish government funded scholarships for going overseas to learn languages, you needed to go for about four weeks, they were scholarships to learn languages abroad. So with one of these scholarships I went to the United States, to New York, and then it happened to me that when I was talking to people and tried to say something about here, in Spain, I said it was Peru. I mean, I said ‘oh, yes, it is like this in Peru’, but I actually wanted to refer to Spain. A: right, so you said Peru instead of … M: yes, yes, I mistook one for the other. I thought ‘how strange’, but it has always happened to me when I have spent some time abroad, in a long trip, for several weeks. It’s not that much, but I get confused, I don’t

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know why … Of course, when I talk about Peru here [in Madrid], I mean there. But while abroad, when I talked about Peru, I meant here [Madrid]. […] I think it has to do with the theme of the distances, or the theme of … the scale. ‘Spain … did I say Peru? No, no, no … I mean Madrid, Madrid.’ It automatically came out of my head, I don’t know why.

As she suggests, orienting oneself in relation to homes, here and there, is indeed an issue of distances and scales. For her, ‘back home’ occurs in Madrid and Peru, her neighbourhoods, houses, streets, cities and nations. It also occurs with (and partly because of) relatives living near and far. Te meaning of these registers informs why and how certain places become more home-like instead of others. Some of these meanings may be stable while others change. And as Howitt (1998: 55) puts it, their scale becomes reshaped through changes in ‘the relationships that we perceive between them and the ways in which we might emphasize specifc elements’. Rescaling home consists in re-ordering the representations that we use for engaging with, and making sense of, our experience of home. Tis rescaling of home is also evident in the case for Mariana’s partner, who also migrated from Peru to Madrid several years ago. It has been two years that they moved to the outskirts of Madrid because it is closer to her partner’s job. But they are still keen on ‘making neighbourhood’ in southern Madrid (the place where they used to live) by doing all their grocery shopping there, visiting relatives and occasionally spending a night of a weekend in the fat of Mariana’s mother. Life in the outskirts has proven to be more calm, away from noise, pollution and difculties to fnd parking. Tey have a garden that they enjoy mostly in summer. Yet, Mariana describes their dwelling place almost like a dormitory in which to perform routines like cleaning or sleeping. She is at home in places that are not her current house. And while her sense of home takes shape through sets of relationships that extend across her neighbourhoods, the house of her mother and la casa de Perú, her partner breeds the idea of going back to Peru one day and settle in his hometown, at the foot of the Andes. When Mariana mentioned to me that he is very clear about going back, she refected about it for a moment and then expressed her views on the ambiguity of staying and leaving: He has it clear but, can one have it clear? My parents were also ‘very clear’ about going back until we spent 10, 12 years in here [in Madrid] and then

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they said ‘let’s buy a house because it seems that we are not going back’ […] Tey always thought about going back, but there is a moment in which one thinks about buying a house because the right moment to return never arrives.

For those who are legally entitled and have the economic resources, buying a house in the country of arrival may constitute a signifcant anchor in their migratory trajectory. It can also be indicative of a shif of perspective. Mariana knows that for many around her, returning or staying is unclear, partly because the meanings of home are unsettled. Reminiscent of Noble’s (2013) analysis of the inadequacy that comes from feeling and not at home, this is a form of ambiguity that has always been around Mariana, a mantra of vacillation that might be inherent to the experience of migration. Troughout I have examined a series of shifs in Mariana’s sense of home to argue that the relationships that compose this sense become rescaled through the experience of migration. Whether we are migrants or not, homemaking occurs in multiple places, knitting together sets of relationships that gradually turn places into homes – or turn homes into ordinary places. What is particular about the experience of migration is that one’s sense of home is shaped by the daunting task of fnding the right moment to move or stay. Tis sense of home is ofen built around a ‘perceived absence’ (Boccagni 2017: 17). Terefore, the process of making oneself at home may feel like an unfnished, even endless task because, as Moore (2000: 211) puts it, ‘through the absence of home, home itself gains meaning’. Leaving or staying, returning or moving somewhere else is in constant tension, sufused by incompleteness.

Conclusion In this chapter I have argued that home constitutes a scalable set of relationships. From the familiarity of an armchair to rather abstract registers of the social such as a homeland, people experience and represent home in multiple ways. Tese scales of home, I contend, are not merely determined by their areal size, but become formed by a series of relationships that tend to remain consistent while others change (Howitt 1998). Whether changing or enduring, scales of home are therefore like canvasses that appear static while depicting the transformations of their geographical scope. Furthermore,

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migratory processes, among other forms of human mobility (Hui 2016), have the potential to disrupt people’s sense of home. To analyse this disruption, I have drawn on the case of a migrant’s sense of home and, particularly, on the ways in which her home-making is sustained by relationships within and beyond the dwelling place. Home-making inescapably refers to specifc places at certain scales; the neighbourhood, house, city and country were some of the scales considered throughout this chapter. In the context of migration, I suggest, home-making is not so much about locating or anchoring home in a specifc location, but rather about developing a sense of home out of a series of relationships that ofen involve diferent places. Home is eventful and processual – a point that becomes most evident from a scalar perspective. Just as home can mean several things at the same time, one’s sense of home can develop in relation to multiple locations, simultaneously. Tis is why scalar thinking holds potential to examine the experience of home in migratory contexts. Tis chapter is not simply a call for making use of the fresh metaphors ofered by human geography’s conceptual developments. In bringing scale at the forefront to discuss home and migration, I have rather sought to highlight that the analysis of various scales of home opens the possibility to understand a way in which ‘spatial diference’ (Smith 1992b: 62) emerges through social activity. Te study of home as process calls for a multi-scalar approach, for an angle that takes seriously the combination, overlapping and permutation between public and private, inside and outside, near and far. Another related angle is to look at the materiality of home, to which we now turn.

References Attfeld, J. (2000), Wild Tings: Te Material Culture of Everyday Life, Oxford: Berg. Barabási, A. L. (2002), Linked: Te New Science of Networks, Cambridge, MA: Perseus. Blunt, A. (2005), Domicile and Diaspora: Anglo-Indian Women and the Spatial Politics of Home, Oxford: Blackwell. Blunt, A., and R. Dowling (2006), Home, London: Routledge. Blunt, A., and O. Sheringham (2018), ‘Home-city geographies: Urban dwelling and mobility’, Progress in Human Geography, XX (X): 1–20.

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Boccagni, P. (2017), Migration and the Search for Home: Mapping Domestic Space in Migrants’ Everyday Lives, New York: Palgrave. Brenner, N. (1997), ‘State territorial restructuring and the production of spatial scale: Urban and regional planning in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1960–1990’, Political Geography, 16: 273–306. Briganti, C., and K. Mezei, eds. (2012), Te Domestic Space Reader, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Brown, M. (1996), ‘Sex, scale and the “new urban politics”: HIV prevention strategies from Yaletown, Vancouver’, in D. Bell and G. Valentine (eds.), Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities, 245–63, London: Routledge. Brun, C. (2012), ‘Home in temporary dwellings’, in S. Smith (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Housing and Home, 424–33, London: Elsevier. Brun, C., and A. Fábos (2015), ‘Making homes in limbo? A conceptual framework’, Refuge, 31 (1): 5–17. Cancellieri, A. (2017), ‘Towards a progressive home-making: Te ambivalence of migrants’ experience in a multicultural condominium’, Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, 32 (1): 49–61. Cieraad, I. (1999), At Home: An Anthropology of Domestic Space, New York: Syracuse University Press. Cieraad, I. (2010), ‘Homes from home: Memories and projections’, Home Cultures, 7 (1): 85–102. Cieraad, I. (2012), ‘Anthropological perspectives on home’, in S. Smith (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Housing and Home, 65–9, London: Elsevier. Cunningham, C. E. (1964), ‘Order in the Atoni house’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Landen Volkenkunde, 120: 34–68. Delaney, D., and H. Leitner (1997), ‘Te political construction of scale’, Political Geography, 16 (2): 93–7. Duyvendak, J. W. (2011), Te Politics of Home, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Easthope, H. (2004), ‘A place called home’, Housing, Teory and Society, 21 (3): 128–38. Freund, A. (2015), ‘Transnationalizing home in Winnipeg: Refugees’ stories of the places between the “here-and-there”’, CES, 47 (1): 61–86. Gorman-Murray, A. (2006), ‘Homeboys: Uses of home by gay Australian men’, Social and Cultural Geographies, 7: 53–69. Gorman-Murray, A. (2011), ‘Economic crises and emotional fallout: Work, home and men’s senses of belonging in post-GFC Sydney’, Emotion, Space and Society, 4 (4): 211–20. Hall, S. (2009), ‘Being at home: Space for belonging in a London Caf ’, Open House International, 34 (3): 81–7.

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Hall, S. (2012), City, Street and Citizen: Te Measure of the Ordinary, New York: Routledge. Herod, A. (2010), Scale, London: Routledge. Howitt, R. (1998), ‘Scale as relation: Musical metaphors of geographical scale’, Area, 30 (1): 49–58. Hui, A. (2016), ‘Te boundaries of interdisciplinary felds: Temporalities shaping the past and future of dialogue between migration and mobilities research’, Mobilities, 11 (1): 66–82. Kabachnik, P., J. Regulska and B. Mitchneck (2010), ‘When and where is home? Te double displacement of Georgian IDPs from Abkhazia’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 23 (3): 316–36. Kaika, M. (2004), ‘Interrogating the geographies of the familiar: Domesticating nature and constructing the autonomy of the modern home’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 28 (2): 265–86. Lefebvre, H. (1991), Te Production of Space, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Leitner, H. (1997), ‘Reconfguring the spatiality of power: Te construction of a supranational migration framework for the European Union’, Political Geography, 16: 123–44. Marston, S. A. (2000), ‘Te social construction of scale’, Progress in Human Geography, 24 (2): 219–42. Marston, S. A. (2004), ‘A long way from home: Domesticating the social production of scale’, in E. Sheppard and R. McMaster (eds.), Scale and Geographic Inquiry: Nature, Society and Method, 170–91, Oxford: Blackwell. Marston, S. A., J. P. Jones III and K. Woodward (2005), ‘Human geography without scale’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 30: 416–32. Massey, D. (1984), Spatial Divisions of Labour: Social Structures and the Geography of Production, London: Macmillan. Massey, D. (1994), Space, Place, and Gender, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Miller, B. (1997), ‘Political action and the geography of defense investment: Geographical scale and the representation of the Massachusetts miracle’, Political Geography, 16: 171–85. Miller, B. (2000), Geography and Social Movements, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Miller, D., ed. (1998), Material Cultures: Why Some Tings Matter, London: University College London Press. Miller, D., ed. (2001), Home Possessions: Material Culture behind Closed Doors, London: Bloomsbury. Miranda Nieto, A. (2018), ‘Flat sharing in Madrid: Tresholds of privacy and intimacy’. 5 March. Available online: https://homing.soc.unitn.it/2018/03/05/

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alejandro-miranda-fat-sharing-in-madrid-thresholds-of-privacy-and-intimacy/ (accessed 26 November 2018). Montello, D.R. (2001) `Scale in geography’, in N.J. Smelser and P.B. Baltes (eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, Oxford: Pergamon Press, 13501–04. Moore, J. (2000), ‘Placing home in context’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 20: 207–17. Noble, G. (2013), ‘“It is home but it is not home”: Habitus, feld and the migrant’, Journal of Sociology, 49 (2–3): 341–56. Ochs, E., and T. Kremer-Sadlik, eds. (2013), Fast Forward Family: Home, Work and Relationships in Middle-Class America, Los Angeles: California University Press. Riccio, B. (2002), ‘Senegal is our home: Te anchored nature of Senegalese transnational networks’, in N. Al-Alì and K. Koser (eds.), New Approaches to Migration? Transnational Communities and the Transformation of Home, 68–83, London: Routledge. Sennett, R. (1990), Te Conscience of the Eye: Te Design and Social Life of Cities, New York: Knopf. Smith, N. (1992a), ‘Geography, diference and the politics of scale’, in J. Doherty, E. Graham and M. Mallek (eds.), Postmodernism and the Social Sciences, 57–79, London: Macmillan. Smith, N. (1992b), ‘Contours of a spatialized politics: Homeless vehicles and the production of geographical scale’, Social Text, 33: 55–81. Smith, N. (1995), ‘Remaking scale: Competition and cooperation in prenational and postnational Europe’, in H. Eskelinen and F. Snickars (eds.), Competitive European Peripheries, 59–74, Berlin: Springer. Swyngedouw, E. (1997), ‘Excluding the other: Te production of scale and scaled politics’, in R. Lee and J. Wills (eds.), Geographies of Economies, 167–76, London: Arnold. Tuan, Y. (2001), Space and Place: Te Perspective of Experience, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Walters, W. (2004), ‘Secure borders, safe haven, domopolitics’, Citizenship Studies, 8: 237–60. Western, J. (1992), A Passage to England: Barbadian Londoners Speak of Home, London: University College London Press.

2

(Im)materiality Sara Bonfanti

Introduction A focus on materiality is itself critical to an analysis of the social relations of the home. Once one acknowledges the degree to which the home itself is both a site of agency and a site of mobility, rather than simply a kind of symbolic system that acts as the backdrop or blueprint for practice and agency, then the rewards of this focus upon material culture in trying to understand the social relations that pertain to the home become apparent. (Miller 2001: 18–19)

Doing an anthropology of home and mobility implies a counter-intuition: rather than a fnal port, more than ofen home is where one’s story begins. As Miller suggests, the meaning and existence of home hinge on tales of movement, its built stones turning into narratives. Tis chapter muses across home interior decors and exterior facades, under the magnifying glass of anthropological literature. While in the social sciences and humanities the refection upon material culture in domestic spaces is ample and dates back to pioneer scholars (Appadurai 1986; Douglas 1991), design anthropology has developed only recently (Buchli et al. 2004; Tilley et al. 2006; Buchli 2013; Pink et al. 2016), touching on the late modern industry (from new technologies in construction to future housing policies, Wasson 2016). Although grasping materiality is less prompt than it seems (what’s the relation between architectures and lifestyles, are all artefacts replenished with cultural meanings?) consolidated interpretations convincingly argue that things are constitutive of social identity (Woodward 2007; Noble 2012).

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Material culture matters because objects create subjects more than the other way round; the closer our ties with objects, the closer our relationships with people (Miller 2005, 2009). Stuf acquires signifcance according to its holders or users, as much as to the space it occupies. Home possessions make a boundless repertoire for cultural analysis (Miller 2001; Chevalier 2012) and reveal that inert materiality does not deny but is the very scafold of mobile lives (Ralph and Staeheli 2011). As this volume contends, if we appreciate a plurality of homes in places and scales (transnational or translocal, more or less private or public, lived or imagined; see the previous chapter ‘Scales’), we are taken aback by the variety of objects which people hone in their houses, whether for explicit needs or comforting motifs (Miller 2008), in a time of global consumerism (Casey and Martens 2016). Among the plenty opportunities that observations in home spaces provide, the journey here proposed is dicey and partial, but close to on-feld experience. On the basis of my long-term ethnographic research in multiple domestic settings with migrants and non, I argue that what turns any dwelling into someone’s home place is the way concrete items are selected and arranged, made meaningful and deployed in everyday activities by household members (Cieraad 1999; Miller 2001; Pink 2004a). Tinking through artefacts (Henare et al. 2007) allows harnessing the relational and emotional dimensions of material culture in use; no homemaking would be possible without people crafing some home stuf and engaging with these afective blocks of daily life (Hage 1997; Povrzanović Frykman 2009). For those on the move, be they economic migrants, refugees or temporary drifers, the petty arrangement of home items is a cosmology in its own respect, which may prove the search for steadiness, while pointing to erratic vagaries (Fortier 2000; Boccagni 2017). Domestic objects serve as mediators of memories and desires (Cieraad 2010), silent agents spinning emotional relations that might have lapsed through time and space (Svašek 2012). Materiality in the home ofers a base to debate about homemaking and mobility: as such, materiality is entangled with its opposite, with the elusiveness of multiple symbolic attachments, with temporalities and scales other than the ‘here and now’. Besides, an ethnography of the everyday reveals how the familiar may become strange when considering trivial stuf at home (Ehn et al. 2016).

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Te following discussion is articulated under three headings, each referring to petty domestic items, revisited as momentous ethnographic insights within migrants’ homes: the sofa, the parcel, the webcam. Not only did these objects appear in multiple sites and scales of homes (from private to semi-public ones, in countries of origin, transit or destination), but they were bond to irreducibly peculiar meanings, practices and sets of relations. Materiality is never neutral, and domestic items illuminate how the emotions that migrants project on them, and the agency they exert, is contingent and contextual, depending on how stuf is deployed and where people themselves live (which place and stage of their migration path they are literally inhabiting). While the original empirical data hereafer discussed mainly draws from a certain form of mobility, that is, South Asian diasporas resettled in three European countries (Italy, the Netherlands and the UK), analysing the material culture in migrant domestic spaces does not douse under ethnic studies. On the contrary, the specifcs of materiality for people living upon conditions of mobility ofer ground for comparison among movers and settlers, migrants and natives1: studying material culture is an excellent metonymy for doing anthropology, for extracting similarities and diferences in the face of ethnographic uniqueness. Applying another fgure of speech, migrants’ objects within or across their home spaces connote deeper experiences and larger issues: any item might stand for a ‘synecdoche’ of home and mobility, a part which is made to represent the whole. Yet, the afects that stuf and places mobilize are not equally salient nor distributed (Frykman and Povrzanović Frykman 2016; see my chapter ‘Diversities’ within this volume). Ethnography takes upon the mission to understand and posit the fuid relevance that social actors imbue their material world with. Afer a brief theoretical passage, which exposes the meaning of material culture itself, its weight for an ethnography of home and signifcance for mobility studies, three core sections develop a cultural analysis of exemplary items in migrants’ homes. Te frst deals with a piece of furniture which stands for cosiness at home, evoking co-presence and possible intimacy; the second one focuses on those objects that travel in boxes between migrants’ homes, connecting translocal social felds; the third creates a connection between ofine and online materiality, seeing how media may contribute to un/make home relations at a distance. A fnal comment indulges on a methodological

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argument, considering those techniques particularly apt to investigate materiality at home, from drawing to photography and audio-visual recording. All the sections adopt an inductive approach: ethnographic accounts from the author’s research on home and mobility ignite the debate of each subtheme, recovering the insights from pertinent literature. Instead of restating how people under conditions of mobility make their surroundings home-like with ad hoc items, I conclude that it’s in the materiality of home itself that subjects are constituted amid changing places, symbols and relations. Within a naïve constructionist perspective ‘people make homes’, whereas with a postmodern approach to material culture ‘homes make people’ (Miller 2005; Henare et al. 2007). Te minute ethnographic data hereafer analysed dismiss neither alternative: the construction of homes and mobile subjects appears irreducible to one another.

A historical prelude Understandings of material culture have been central to anthropology since its inception (Tilly et al. 2006). Since the nineteenth century, like Buchli (2013) suggests, architecture and anthropology have shared a mutual interest in how buildings were established, maintained and demolished. At the turn of the twentieth century, anthropologists collected material culture that was displayed in museums across the Atlantic. With the start of ethnographic feldwork, the study of material culture became belittled until it regained a peripheral interest by the 1980s. While original studies on materiality drew amply from archaeology, for which things are a source to infer history (Lubar and Kingery 2013), postmodernism raised the question of agency and the ways in which objects can afect behaviours or practices (Bourdieu 1970). Today, the new study of material culture has turned interactional (Miller 2005), focusing upon how objects become signifcant as people interact with them: doing something with or feeling something about an item. If stuf and people, practices and emotions are matted, material culture fares central to understanding culture and social relations. Recent advancements dispute that objects merely symbolize or represent abstract values: empirical research explores specifc genres of material culture, such as food or clothing, while theoretical work

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considers categories of objects, such as gifs and commodities, situated within wider systems of value and exchange. Te anthology edited by Henare et al. (2007) forged a new direction in thinking through artefacts in ethnographic research, seeing them in constant fux and permeated with senses: by the twenty-frst century, as foci of present anthropological analysis, ethnographic artefacts are removed from museum collections, subtracted of their colonialist ‘purposeful naiveté’ and returned to where they belong, to real fragments of social life, to everyday lived spaces. As Basu and Coleman (2008) advocate, the homes of migrants, vernacular like any other and yet universally tinged with mobility dynamics, become key sites where to grasp the tangle of worlds in movement and its material culture, a matter of display and enactment. Although migration studies have endorsed the preference for undertaking multi-sited ethnographies (Falzon 2009), as Gielis (2011) reminds us, it is highly valuable to conduct single-sited feldwork in a migrant house (Boccagni 2014): in particular, domestic material culture provides the chance to speculatively travel across space and time along a household’s migratory rhythms. Tat at least was the journey I travelled myself betwixt and within the homes of my informants.

Material culture at home: Sitting on a round of sofas In this section, I argue that domestic stuf is a mighty social signifer for people on the move in order to (re)construct a sense of self in their mobility trajectories: despite spatial shifs and time lags, domestic objects rest anchored in physical spaces, as well as in memories or projections (Cieraad 2010). If any domestic item is a catalyst for observing people’s engagement with their home environment, a banal piece of furniture that conveys the idea of steadiness and comfort may in fact contain many ambivalent experiences that people face in their homemaking across locations. Following Chapman (2001), home is a place intimately known, and this knowledge arises from iterative and embodied interactions with the very stuf that dwells in such space. In modern Western interior design, few items are as ubiquitous as sofas. IKEA’s yearly catalogue never fails to portray an inviting sofa – cheap yet comfortable – on its cover page, a metonym of good home living

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(Garvey  2017). While not a universal piece of furniture (Japanese houses do not traditionally avail of couches – if not lower ones, tatami mats), the sofa (of Turkish etymology) might well be a recurrent ftting of an ethnography of home. Just like a table or a bed, the couch seems to be a globalized commodity ever-present in people’s home places, and its usual collocation in a living – sitting room – makes it the spot for resting, hosting, conversing, sharing leisure time at home, ofen with signifcant others, our bodies almost skin to skin (Jacobs and Smith 2008). Besides, the sofa might surge as the fanciest element of one’s furniture, the piece people would spend more money on and proudly show to their guests as a sign of social distinction (Bourdieu 1979) or mark of pretension for a vivre bourgeois (Casey and Martens 2016). Tus, a sofa epitomizes the many overlapping features of material culture at home: functional, relational and ostensive all at once (Kopytof 1986). Doing feldwork with South Asians, homeland and in the diaspora, the diwan, which translates as assembly or couch, literally backed my participant observation and catalysed many banters with informants.2 Usually these futons are lower in height with bolsters and cushions placed at the back without a sofa frame as backrest. Shapes, textiles and embroidery of such hassocks vary, though handmade is most appreciated. Under traditional sewing and stitching, not only garments but also shells and tops for home décor are a national pride of India and Pakistan: blankets, carpets, tablecloth and curtains, bedroom sets, towels, and sofa covers indeed make a solid base for export. Diwans were ofen a marker of homing in various spaces I attended with research participants: dwellings, workstations and worship houses. As I went through my interviews, sofas were ofen described as compelling icons of home and relational items, and at times presented to me in photographs or self-sketches when I asked people to show me their home stuf. For the sake of variety in the phenomenology of home, and the consistency of its theoretical underpinnings, I will present a few vignettes where sofas were central to my ethnographic understanding of homemaking in the everyday for my research participants. Sofas turned out to be elected material items which Indo-Pakistani migrants of various backgrounds used to arrange home in multiple sites, but which also embedded their interpersonal development of the self as they lef their homeland and resettled in Europe.

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Tat a sofa might seat the micro-politics of home was clear to Lameea,3 a Brit-Pakistani divorced lady I befriended in Birmingham. Returned to live with her widow mother and young siblings, my interviewee identifed their home diwan as the hub of family routine: for her to apply makeup and chat with her sister at dawn, for the kids to chill out afer school, for the household to get together at dinner, each with their assigned seat. Not only did she sketch that comforting sofa as the symbol which endorsed her return to her mother’s house, despite the community acrimonies she faced afer fling for divorce. When mentioning her failed marriage, she reported how her spouse used to invite over male peers who would occupy their diwan, for a booze or to stay overnight, estranging her from the lounge: ‘as if he was still in Ahmedabad […], or in a crap fat shared with other men’. I ofen found myself walking into South Asian homes where male dwellers would nod at me lying on the couch, and the women would shove me to the back bedrooms. Across times and locales, architecture has elaborated means to accommodate gender diferences in space (Kuhlmann 2013). If men have ofen been entitled to the front of the house, while women have been granted (or relegated to) the backstage, generally enforcing a rif between visibility and hiddenness, public and secretive, sofas are items which may reafrm this division of labour, or eventually enquire it. A sofa in the home acts thus as a liminal object: the threshold between common and private, reinstating male and female spatial segregation or possible subordination. Sofas might enable and mark the production of separateness, and eventual reunion, also in so to speak public homes. Like many authors have timely described, a South Asian house of worship is an arena of authority, honour and redistribution, with its own set of material, practical and symbolic rules (Appadurai and Breckenridge 1976). Although the ritual attendance of any South Asian temple (whether Hindu, Muslim or Sikh) entails accommodating in the prayer hall sitting cross-legged on the ground (where carpeted foors might be covered with whitewashed bed linen, weekly changed to sanitize the ambience), diwans may feature in temples. Sofas would be placed along the perimeter of the hall, for the elderly or lessabled to partake in celebrations at ease, or in separate rooms for engaging in conversations with notable guests (or giving shelter to newcomers provisionally adrif). Depending on the size and architectural assets of a South Asian temple, I came across a wide range of diwans.

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For instance, in a wee Hindu mandir undergoing completion in Brescia, northern Italy, I sat for hours on an elegant two-seater diwan, administering an interview to a young Indian woman, who took me by the hand, under the priest’s consent, to the only ‘safe spot’ to park ourselves in the premise. As tens of devotees sat on the foor few metres away, side-looking at us while doing their collective pray, and background buzzes covered our voices, the way we occupied that brown timber sofa, covered with spark hand-stitched cushions in a tacky white and crimson hall, made the scene for separating mundane and sacred, locals and natives, researcher and researched. Te licence of couches for joining and separating, both in private and in semi-public homes, is an interesting dynamic, which reveals the agencies that subjects themselves exert on the space they occupy through the mediation of furnishings. Could a sofa convey a diferent story from the homeland of a diaspora family? Travelling back to the Indian region of Punjab a few years ago, I was invited every night to take a seat on a large, brand-new diwan, a buttoned leather chesterfeld set still wrapped in cling folds, which my Sikh host had positioned right in the middle of his son’s remittance house, in a remote countryside village.4 Te property underwent restoring a year earlier, and that sofa looked like a most sought-afer piece of furniture, whose coloured patterns carefully matched the tapestry in the sitting room. A decoration that the old man had secured afer his daughter-in-law had provided him her aesthetic preferences: crimson fowers and golden feathers on a dark green-washed backdrop. He had travelled to Hyderabad, Telangana, thousand miles away, to make sure he could please his beloved abroad with an artisanal craf. When I suggested we might strip of that sticky top (stained with varnish and smears caused by passing neighbours dripping their teas), my host looked at me dismayed: only his son, or grandson, would be entitled to do that, but neither of them had been able to return yet, since the house had been completed. Tere was a hierarchy in the rights to use and claim ownership in an expat’s home space, where I was allowed to lodge for a few weeks in their best en-suite room. Te diwan in the sitting room was the fulcrum of sociality: dozen neighbours dropped in during my visit and crowded it with chai-chats. But this item of conviviality was also the rampart of the property owner’s control over a space he had fnanced from a distance, without enjoying it in the everyday. Tat plastic cover, grimy as it was, protected the purity of the sofa, substantiating the sacredness of the home

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(Douglas 1991), and the expat owners only could remove it onsite, in order to ritually consecrate their remittance house, at once heritage and status symbol. A fne lodge that they would occupy for short visits, and could just boast about on their smartphones, as I sat with the teenage grandson on a low-cost sofa in their tenant fat within a working-class district in northern Italy (Bonfanti 2019). Among my hosts’ neighbours in Punjab, I happened to mingle with another family on a return visit, which had since relocated to Southall, London’s Little India. When I met again that Brit-Sikh family man in the UK, he had become the head of a ftted furniture company: in their showroom, crowded by generations of British Punjabi buyers, sofas abounded, as much as they featured on his commercial webpage. When I quizzed him which furnishing was more essential in a home, he cut it short: ‘Well, on a bed you crush and get a good sleep. On a couch you can have someone else to crush, not just for sleeping.’ In his view, as a producer and seller of sofas in West London, these articles seemed to make home a more amenable place, less focused on the self, more open to those others who could be – selectively – admitted to enter and be entertained at one’s home space. In each vignette just sketched, sofas are the backdrop of radically diferent personal and community experiences, but what we may further investigate, with an overarching comparative attitude, is the home location where such couches are located and the engagement that people develop with them. As evident in these snippets, in a private home the sofa might be a source of familial warmth or conversely a site of despotism; in a semi-public space a sofa might serve to accommodate guests for the night or to negotiate higher dealing with strangers. In both contexts, ostentation and purpose blend in with diferent degrees, according to the dwellers’ intentions and afordances. I would not reduce ethnographic minutiae to ethnic home studies on the grounds of material culture, running the risk to make ‘Other’, diferent and exotic, what is just peculiar to each and every home, household and culture. On one hand, home studies were established as a niche scholarly interest in the West (Cieraad 1999); on another, within anthropology cataloguing cultural specimens began with the collection of ethnic objects ofen ravaged from the house of informants (Woodward 2007). Yet, in the above ref ection over the diwan in contemporary diaspora contexts, putative South Asian oddities combine with the needs of mobile lifestyles and the globalization

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Figure 2.1 Sofa set in a Punjabi remittance house. Author’s photo.

of home design which takes place at the many ends of migrant people’s journeys (Tolia-Kelly 2004a, b). Tis discourse can apply also to other ‘diaspora tastes’, like Savas (2014) elaborated in her superb ethnography of Turkish objects in Vienna, addressing the relational constitution of a collective taste and a diasporic belonging that is enunciated in the aesthetics of the everyday. Although sofas may represent the steadiness of home, they do not only intercept people’s mobile attitudes, but ofen relate to tangible shifs: pieces of furniture as much as décors and myriad other household objects move across space and intertwine with the itineraries of subjects. Like Vilar Rosales (2010) contends, the ‘work of domestic consumption’ constitutes a productive feld to look at the relationships between macro-contexts and micro-practices, social formations and cultural institutions that afect and shape the life experiences of those who migrate. In the following section, we will thus refect on material transfers across migrants’ home spaces (Svašek 2012), that is, the trafc of items from home to home, either from one’s homeland to their place of resettlement or from a kindred’s abode to another.

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Domestic materiality on the go: Sending parcels, unwrapping gifs Te frst time Kanval invited me to her house, which she shared by then with her reunited family, she took out a worn photograph album. Among the yellowed pictures of her girlhood, pretty braided in an Indian school uniform, she paused over her frst photo taken in Italy since she had migrated as a married yet lone woman: smiling on a lakeshore, wearing the national football team T-shirt of the country just reached. Tat garment had been sent back to India ages ago, to her two kids she had temporarily lef behind, in a transnational parcel whose tracking had long been lost, as much as the iconic blue item itself. Disappeared from any corner, out of sight, still well alive in her memory and visual biography. (From my feld notes, Bergamo, 11 September 2013)

Reading this fragment years afer that episode occurred, I found it intriguing in reason of the items, social processes and emotions that it evokes. Within experiences of mobility, material culture (or else the loss of it) ofen triggered a sweet and sour recalling in the narrative of informants: in this case, a frst-generation migrant woman who led the way for her whole household to resettle in Italy. Pictures and clothing were the objects charged with her afective memories of places and modes of inhabitance. Parcels were the infrastructure that consented (or failed) to mobilize that emotional material culture in response to a relational proximity going loose. Tat garment gone missing resonated in Kanval’s moaning as an inalienable good (Weiner 1992), neither a valuable commodity nor a gif , but a dear souvenir which time had erased, but whose trace endured in a fading photo (Berger 1984). As my interlocutor voiced her nostalgia for that phantom shipment, we concurred that the circulation of materiality swayed around shifs in time and space over a migrant life course. Te material of such circulation is time and again ‘the gif’, or better to say, the practice of gif giving, inherently constitutive for social relations and bonds (Mauss 1954). In the Maussian sense, gifs establish a chain of reciprocity, of giving, receiving and reciprocating; the rupture of this loop might be detrimental to the sustainment of solid relations, especially when intimate ones are already harmed by a lack of co-presence.

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Notwithstanding a generalized de-materialization of living, as ICTs and social media have impinged on how people structure their everyday with virtual means (as I will argue in the next section), transcontinental shipping does not appear to dwindle: neither for the big sharks of corporation and business interests, nor for the small fshes of migrant households. In migration studies, two forms of sustained domestic connection between sending and destination countries have long been recognized, namely remittances and transnational parcels (Povrzanović Frykman 2009; Hurdley 2013). Within the scope of this chapter, I wish to focus on the content and means of such material transfers. While ‘millennial’ migrants (second or subsequent generations, particularly youths born afer 2000) would ofen confrm that their rate of exchanging packages with the homeland does not compete anymore with their elders’ experience, the material transfer of objects from one’s previous home (or the ancestors’ one) to another is still a common custom not to neglect. In my ethnographic practice, as much as in the existing literature, household items were key contents of these shipping boxes. Discussing the Archipelago of Care among Filipino labourers moved to the West, Deirdre McKay (2017) reconstructs in detail their transnational habits, in particular the complex function and impact of balikbayan, the cartons of used goods that emigrants send back to the Philippines. Setting the demands of one home against the other, such boxes express a painful domestic ambivalence: while materializing the resistance to permanent settlement abroad, they simultaneously reassert migrants’ growing distance from everyday domesticity in their homeland. Within the entangled mobilities of humans and artefacts, the volume edited by Mata-Codesal and Abranches (2018) focuses on food parcels to examine how people try to reconcile localized intimate experiences of nurture and care with globalizing forces of displacement and inequalities. Te cases covered fare widely, counting very diferent mobile people (from asylum seekers to international professionals), sending or receiving the most diverse food transfers (from raw produce to seeds and food containers), across erratic places (between Macedonia and Italy, or from Hong Kong to the Netherlands). Te book adds to an embodied and sensorial approach to social change by placing ‘travelling food’ at the centre of migrants’ experiences in re-producing homes and making global relatedness. Like Maja Povrzanović Frykman argued, in her contribution to the book:

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Deliberations around the meanings of ‘the taste of home’ are plentiful in the intersected felds of food, migration and material culture studies, and tend to focus on identity and memory. Indeed, food can be interpreted as a material expression of belonging, status or family history, or of social and cultural diference. Food can be central to migrants’ creation of places of remembrance or pride, mourning or celebration, privacy or symbolic communion, or economic connection with the relatives who stayed behind. As the negotiation of belonging ofen entails communication through objects, food parcels are involved in multifaceted quests and attempts to belong. (Povrzanović Frykman 2018: 26)

Te salience of food in migrants’ homemaking has been documented among diferent communities, possibly suggesting new tools for analysis. Starting with the case of Latinos in the United States, Lidia Marte (2007) proposed food mappings as a methodology to trace gendered boundaries of home within a minority and to research food relations among coexistent working classes. A rich ethnography of food and mobility is ofered by Ajay Bailey (2017) in Te Migrant Suitcase: a metaphor to discover how social remittances are sent, received and transformed, in the light of material culture and food sharing. Among the author’s respondents, mostly Indian expats recently relocated in the Netherlands, their sense of belonging was intensely related to the food they brought from the homeland and the memories it generated. Te practices of cooking and sensorial experiences surrounding food seemed to activate ambivalent home making processes (as amply covered in the next chapter ‘Temporalities’). While commensality with co-ethnics led to a stronger sense of community, sharing with non-Indians was perceived as being problematic due to snif and taste misalignments. Te same jars of mango pickles there evoked in the article were stufed in the boxes that Punjabi residents dispatched to their dears living in Italy. In my research with Indian diasporas looking at domestic possessions and home habits, I could not elude family worship and food practices. Most objects Punjabis kept sending over to their expat kin upon request fell into supplies for rituals or food provisions. A third set of items included garments or beauty products that women would cater for (from traditional Indian dresses, to henna’s little tubes to realize mehndi body painting and fne bangles; nuggets of that ‘gender of the gif’, as Strathern theorized in 1988). Kids would especially revel the delivery of transnational packages: delight in their eyes as they unwrapped tiny bags which their grandparents, or uncles and aunts, had enveloped with equal expectation.

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Tese homely goods do travel not only across space, in parcels or suitcases, but also among social networks, and are meant to be shared: tightening bonds with co-ethnics, or fostering ‘Indianness’ with local outsiders. Some commodities from the homeland are also traded for commercial purposes, with migrants’ capitalizing on their material culture heritage (like Punjabi seamstresses who would ofen deal in informal ethnic fashion). Observing the matching fows of material culture and its consumption on both sides of migration, from one’s home to another and back, enables us to see how stuf is interspersed with migrants’ self-perception, interpersonal relations and social imagination (Miller 2010). Applying Svašek’s (2012) insights of ‘transit, transition and transformation’, we may best understand the linkages between material culture, home and mobility. Transit describes the movements of people, objects and images through time and space. Transition denotes the changes that occur in the perceived value or meaning of objects in relation to their location. Transformation refers to the transit-related changes that migrants may experience in terms of identity and subjectivity. In this way, shifing home objects starts to take a life of their own as people move through time, space and life-stages. As in the quote that opened this paragraph, parcels and suitcases, shipments and transfers keep circulating items across scattered households. In addition, the current digitalization trend has been impinging on remote interactions and the circulation of care and memory. Returning to feldwork, Kanval’s grown-up daughter, just married, proudly exhibited her wedding album at a next home visit of mine. She had printed only one picture on photo paper and framed it, hanging it on the wall in the family’s lounge, right above the sofa; hundreds more were safely stored on her electronic devices for future retrieval.

Visualizing home stuf: Rooms with a webcam While transnational parcels provided sparkles of reconnection, allowing migrants to catch hold of afective objects and memories in spite of uprootedness, connected migrants can maintain a sense of co-presence, being ‘here and there at the same time’ (Diminescu 2008: 565). Since the emergence of new technologies, rather than in twofold absence, migrants’ mobility, media use and space-making can be grasped on a relational continuum.

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On the level of transnational communication, as Leurs and Ponzanesi sum up (2018), researchers have studied the impact of digital technologies on maintaining diaspora communities, as well as family relations and amities across distance. On the one hand, the use of digital technologies is indicative of the portability of networks of belonging, on the other migrant connectivity swings between the two poles of ‘encapsulation’ and ‘cosmopolitanization’ (closing down on identitarianism or opening up to other sociabilities). On the level of an ethnography of the everyday, digital anthropology co-opted the methods of material culture studies, including ethnography and object analysis, to understand how new technologies have come to be used, and transformed, across the globe (Miller and Horst 2012). No current anthropology could elude the materiality of the digital, evermore present in people’s lives. With the notion of polymedia (Herbig et al. 2015), theorists do signify not only the many forms that media take, but also the diferent interactions people can have with them while radically stretching connections outside their daily base. Among social media, the webcam has become almost a totemic object, a tool that goes beyond the relatively static qualities of mere audios or videos. Webcams fascinate users as they consent a mediated co-presence that not only traces the factual location of people and places, but also enables an almost immediate interaction, mimicking face-to-face conversations. Skype in particular has become a mode of regular communication, including groups like the elderly who otherwise have been resistant to technologies, but have welcomed the potential of the webcam to sustain close relationships remotely. Among the studies that focused on rewiring kinship ties and family care at a distance, Madianou and Miller (2012) analysed how the new communication media were being used to rewire emotionally Filipina mothers in the UK with their lef-behind children in the Philippines. Although webcams are nowadays installed on any small portable device such as smartphones, models of evermore ‘miniaturized mobilities’ (Elliott and Urry 2010), most migrants would make ample use of a webcam inside their home: a safe and functional base from where to connect, and a setting that enhances the authenticity of one’s self performance. Miller and Sinanan (2014) developed a poignant ‘theory of attainment’ to describe how new technologies may facilitate our ability to attain something, especially in terms of presenting oneself and making contacts. What do migrants attain

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with a webcam, and what might ethnographers infer from webcams in their homes? Even within the ephemeral of digital connections, materiality and agency combine. Almost ten years ago, in the rented house of my frst Indian migrant informant, the family webcam occupied a most peculiar place: a corner of their sitting room, just opposite the domestic altar Asha adorned every day for doing her worship. Ten, I used to visit her ofen to let our kids play together in the afernoon, and she would invariably suggest calling up her sister in the Emirates, her brother in Canada or her parents in India (time-lag permitting). We entertained paltry chats and her relatives (‘close to heart, far away in space’) wooed over the progress of their emigrant dears as they made home in Italy. In time, Asha’s household (by now naturalized Italian) managed to buy a house and fully refurbish their domestic environs. From rudimental devices, once-little bulks on a desktop PC, webcams have become smarter appliances, incorporated in all portables. Asha still cultivates the habit of Skype calling worldwide once a week: not only her pace of life has somehow settled, but what she deemed ‘the magic of chatting through a screen’ has vanished. WhatsApp is a more individualistic way of engaging remotely with her kin, such as sending out personalized digital card in order to wish them well every morning. Nowadays, the proper place for a family video call is the en-suite bedroom of her teenage son, replenished with hi-tech communication devices. Longdistance relations avail of new technologies, but many contingencies, material and symbolic, defne people’s engagement with such afordances. Aesthetics feeds back on ethics as much as the other way round (Craciun 2017). All ethnographic work in people’s home might raise ethical doubts, and at least momentous feelings of awkwardness; privacy and the protection of one’s intimacy might entail uneasy bargains (Cieraad 1999; Miller 2001; Blunt and Dowling 2006). How many times was I asked not to gaze upon, not to mention taking pictures of one’s clothes on the line, or dirty vessels in the sink (see my blogpost from Amsterdam, Bonfanti 2018)? In fact, material culture strongly informs the possibilities for in-depth observation, and the choice of recording techniques. Likewise, a video ethnography of people’s home (Pink 2004b; Pink et al. 2016) might be hard to pursue by the ethnographer herself, while it may be an exceptional method to procure valuable participatory data, if the research participants are willing to collaborate. If ‘what you perceive is what you conceive’,

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Figure 2.2 Hindu home shrine in a Dutch closet. Author’s photo.

unravelling with informants what stands behind the technical reproduction of the material jumble in their homes is a prodigious gateway to co-evaluating subjects and objects through emotions (Svašek 2012; Pechurina 2015). Ranika is a second-generation Indian in the Netherlands, a young woman entrepreneur committed to bridging the gap between Dutch national culture and the local Indian minority (made of both IT expats and long-term labour migrants) through an association she established, funded by the tiers of her community. Afer meeting for a cofee in Amsterdam, she agreed into a follow-up via Skype, set from her ofce space in her parents’ home (a wealthy household that manages two hotels in the city). She enjoyed taking a virtual tour with her video camera around the house, showing bits of her domestic material culture: indulging on her mother’s lush camellias (bulbs supplied in

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Holland, but a gardening habit cultivated in India), swifly passing over her father’s liquor cabinet (of which she jested her brother would have a secret spare key when inviting friends), repeatedly zooming in and out of her wellorganized desktop (strictly digital only, no paperwork to be seen) and a plain grey chaise longue covered with bright Jaipur blankets, just like the one she was wearing real-time in the guise of a saree. My informant’s selection of what could be displayed to my brief media co-presence, and her sensitive description of the stuf that mattered in the place she called home (at once her family abode and private workspace), bore witness to multiple issues. On one hand, that petty materiality clearly connected peoples, places and relations she daily engaged with, in presence or absence. Material culture can be a tool for selfactualization, and practices such as re-decoration illustrate the importance of personal engagement with the domestic environment or the concretization of domestic relationships. On another, that virtual tour proved that, if only remotely, inviting a guest to cross the threshold of one’s home meant to ration (access to) one’s ‘island of privacy’ (Nippert-Eng 2010). Each frame and every item was the repository of routines, stories and afects, whose relevance she felt compelled to share with me. Presenting herself in the everyday of her ‘home ofce’ (Gofman 1959), my informant picked and rendered on screen those items that not only made up her home, but also made herself up, as a certain subject with certain tastes, memories and desires: a middle-class young woman, with a migrant ancestry, probing professional recognition. Ranika’s use of the webcam in our remote conversation revealed the attainment she gained through the media device, posing to me as she wanted to be seen (Miller and Sinanan 2014) and validating her aesthetical social aspiration through the micro materiality of her home (Clarke 2001): at once depicted and accounted, an image and a narrative.

A methodological aferword Te episode just cited invites a refection upon the methodological choices adopted to collect and analyse data on material culture. Afer forty years of travelling in Colombia, Michael Taussig (2011) juxtaposed his raw feld notes with thoughts through illustrations: newspaper cuttings and his sketches with

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occasional word cues on small material details evoked the power of the visual in understanding the world, at once an ontological reality and a trance of symbols and emotions. ‘Drawing is thus a depicting, a hauling, an unravelling, and being impelled toward something or somebody’ (Taussig 2011: 14). Tinking through artefacts within migrants’ home places meant starting of with the sight of objects, glimpsing through participant observation, and slowly appreciating the many senses and meanings these activated. I ofen adopted myself the immediate post-feldwork habit of jotting down thoughts in words, and objects in sketches, afer visiting the home spaces (private or public) of my interlocutors. In practice, all colleagues authoring this book considered three facets of visuals while doing an ethnography of home and mobility: (1) visual inputs provided in the feld, be they portraits on the wall or photo shared with informants (prompts from our part, or feedback from theirs), (2) audio-visual material we ourselves produced recording places or events with technological devices; (3) hand-drawings that interviewees agreed to make on the spot for illustrating what home meant to them. Needless to say, all these visuals represented home realities whose materiality in action was central. Focusing on stuf gave us a chance to refect on practices (in which mundane activities are home items deployed?), on narratives (what stories do domestic objects recall?) and on afects (which feelings does materiality enact?). Despite a dominance of the visual (ocular-centrism plaguing scientifc knowledge as well as architecture), studying material culture consented us to explore the multisensoriality of home, the agencies that people exert on it, the relations there weaved, emotions embedded, stories treasured. Considering the paradoxical physicality of the immaterial, we follow from Victor Buchli: Somewhat unexpectedly, immateriality can be understood in many signifcant registers as a highly sophisticated visual practice, in the sense that it is precisely the sensual and embodied dimensions of the visual (as opposed to touch, hearing, smell, etc.) that sustain the immaterial. (Buchli 2015: 20)

Drawing towards a provisional close, if a house doesn’t make a home, nonetheless home can be neither thought of, nor attained, without some architectures and artefacts. Not only do people make homes, but also homes

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make people. And yet, how do we draw the subtle line that hyphenizes material and immaterial? What is specifc then to the home stuf of people on the move, what actions and intents do objects mediate? Even afer years of researching this puzzle, on feld and at desk, my answers remain lingering and open-ended, like those of my interlocutors. However, it is not in the properties of material culture that humans fnd defnitive meanings; it is in people’s creative ability to signify, use and transform materiality that homes can be made and reversed, scattered and retrieved alongside forms of mobility.

Conclusion Troughout this chapter, we have seen to what extent the materiality of home is fastened to immaterial concerns. People’s home possessions, evermore when shifing over a migratory experience, are inextricably tied to feelings of belonging. When researching ways of constructing, reproducing and circulating ideas, practices and emotions of home (Boccagni 2017), material culture in translocal and multi-scale domestic settings stands at the core of any possible socio-cultural analysis of home making. Sofas are wrapped in rough or silky covers; people can occupy them with the most diverse intentions: male mates to have a forbidden drink, couples to make love, families to share a meal. Transnational parcels leave and reach their ports with bits of home life carefully sealed to be slit open elsewhere: to smell, wear and taste, to use, display or circulate. Video calls punctuate almost anyone’s time spells today, though the added value for maintaining a proximate close relation is paramount for those who move and fnd ‘kinning’5 or belonging a hard job at a distance: migrant mothers who leave their children behind or spouses who live across country borders, diaspora members who rest on the fringes of their networks. What keeps in dialogue all these facets of material culture in the home, and the mobility of individuals and groups? Quoting Miller again (2001: 23): ‘Tere are many conficts between the agency expressed by the household and not least the house itself, that make the private more a turbulent sea of constant negotiation rather than simply some haven for the self.’ Ethnographic evidence shows that tidemarks of social change are engraved in and acted out through the materials of migrants’ homes.

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A material culture perspective on everyday practices and sensations delivers a fundamental critique of purely symbolic and representational approaches to an anthropology of home; following Ingold (2000), ‘dwelling’ is also a constantly learnt skill, a practice of apprenticeship for dwellers as much as for ethnographers. Our tentative journey of thinking through home artefacts began with a recollection of items only apparently ordinary: sofa, parcels and webcams do feature in most contemporary houses, including those of non-migrant natives, although their exact properties and arrangement, people’s deployment and emotive resonance, allowed for unforeseen comparative refections. Domestic artefacts speak about their material provenance as much as their societal reference. Does anyone wonder if a jar of mango pickles might come all the way from India in a migrant suitcase? Yet, such pot gives texture and taste to a regional gastronomy that reinstates a chain of care across continents, and may be diferently received at its journey’s end. Not only may a home place be up- or down-scaled, but any crumb of material culture turns meaningful within multiple frames, in space and in time. A scalar perspective on materiality at home also avoids the bias of an ethnic approach stricto sensu, as well as a view tapered on one typology of migration, blind to other cases. Drawing from the author’s ethnographic expertise, this chapter focused on items that recurred in South Asian diaspora homes, but were nonetheless consistent across other migrant home spaces, as the cited literature indicates. However, I admit a lack of better insights on the relation that more precarious mobilities entail with materiality. What is in a refugee bag or in a homeless shelter (Dovey 1985)? What kind of homely objects do people engage with (and what agencies do they activate or impede) when their life journeys face a shortage of dwelling infrastructures, or the coercion of institutional care? Tese spurs are addressed in the chapter of this volume ‘Mobility and Immobility’, which also considers some domestic stuf I here analysed. Sofas and webcams again will come into the limelight, proving that it’s not materiality per se at determining social interactions, but that material culture mediates relational resources and elicits certain behaviours or afects in relation to specifc time-space scales. Last, if material culture exposes processes of social reproduction and change, in the homes of migrants objects give thickness to the profound

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ambivalence between movement and settlement, departures and returns (Gielis 2011; Boccagni 2014; Povrzanović Frykman and Humbracht 2013). Being common sense that people move searching for betterment, patterns of home-making within experiences of mobility trespass this vulgarization, ingrained in neoliberal consumer culture and in the myth of progress in late modernity (Casey and Martens 2016). Te instances presented prove that there is no recipe for all, neither for migrants nor for non-migrants, but that home designs and items intimately interact with people’s emotions and relations, contributing to ever-changing landscapes of belonging and afect, ethics and aesthetics. While all the chapters of this volume are built around themes of mobility that materiality at home substantiates, the one which follows on, ‘Diversities’, will make a case in point.

Notes 1

Operating a distinction between migrants and non-migrants, natives or locals and outsiders, is quite an ideological choice. For further consideration, I refer to the introduction of this volume, and cite as a source of information the last revised edition of the handbook Te Age of Migration (Castles et al. 2009).

2

While the term in Hindi and Urdu originally designated an anthology of poems or a court trial (evoking refned emotions or gripping arguments), an Indianstyle sofa is called a diwan (like an amused Sikh teen noticed, its translation into Italian sounds homophonous ‘divano’, a word absent in other Romance languages).

3

As made explicit in the Introduction to the volume, all names of research participants hereafer introduced are fctional, and any reference to places or people has been opportunely anonymized, complying with research ethics standards.

4

As Taylor (2014) commented, Punjabi transnationalism is engraved in complex ‘home-to-home’ dynamics from the homeland to the diaspora and back.

5

Sahlins (2013) defnes kinship as ‘mutuality of being’, meaning that kinfolk are members of one another, intrinsic to each other’s identity and existence. Although physical separateness ofen hinders the creation and maintenance of intimate relatedness, (im)material resources in people’s mobilities might reverse the hurdles (such as the case of sofas, parcels or webcams so far described).

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Chapman, T. (2001), ‘Tere’s no place like home’, Teory Culture and Society, 18 (6): 135–46. Chevalier, S. (2012), ‘Material cultures of home’, in S. Smith (ed.), International Encyclopaedia of Housing and Home, 222–30, London: Elsevier. Cieraad, I., ed. (1999), At Home: An Anthropology of Domestic Space, New York: Syracuse University Press. Cieraad, I. (2010), ‘Homes from home: Memories and projections’, Home Cultures, 7 (1): 85–102. Clarke, A. (2001), ‘Te aesthetics of social aspirations’, in D. Miller (ed.), Home Possessions: Material Culture behind Closed Doors, 23–46, Oxford: Berg. Craciun, M, ed. (2017), ‘Anthropological approaches to the relationship between ethics and aesthetics’, World Art, 1: 189–206. Diminescu, D. (2008), Te connected migrant: An epistemological manifesto, Social Science Information, 47 (4): 565–79. Douglas, M. (1991), ‘Te idea of a home: A kind of space’, Social Research, 58 (1): 287–307. Dovey, K. (1985), ‘Home and homelessness’, in I. Altman and C. Werner (eds.), Home Environments, 113–32, New York: Plenum Press. Ehn, B., O. Löfgren, and R. Wilk (2016) Exploring Everyday Life: Strategies for Ethnography and Cultural Analysis Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefeld. Elliott, A., and J. Urry (2010), Mobile Lives, London: Routledge. Falzon, M. A., ed. (2009) Multi-Sited Ethnography: Teory, Praxis and Locality in Contemporary Research, Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate. Fortier, A.-M. (2000), Migrant Belongings: Memory, Space, Identity, Oxford: Berg. Foucault, M. (2001), Te Order of Tings, London: Routledge. Frykman, J., and M. Povrzanović Frykman, eds. (2016), Sensitive Objects: Afect and Material Culture, Lund: Nordic Academic Press. Gardner, K. (2002), Age, Narrative and Migration: Te Life Course and Life Histories of Bengali Elders in London, Oxford: Berg. Garvey, P. (2017), Unpacking Ikea: Swedish Design for the Purchasing Masses, London: Routledge. Gielis, R. (2011), ‘Te value of single-site ethnography in the global era: Studying transnational experiences in the migrant house’, Area, 43 (3): 25–63. Giorgi, S., and A. Fasulo (2013), ‘Transformative homes: Squatting and furnishing as sociocultural projects’, Home Cultures, 10 (2): 111–34. Gofman, E. (1959), Te Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, New York: Anchor Books. Hage, G. (1997), ‘At home in the entrails of the west: Multiculturalism, ethnic food and migrant home-building’, in H. Grace et al. (eds.), Home/World, Sydney:

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Pluto Press.Henare, A., M. Holbraad and S. Wastell, eds. (2007), Tinking through Tings: Teorising Artefacts Ethnographically, 99–153, London: Routledge. Herbig, A., A. F. Herrmann and A. W. Tyma, eds. (2015), Beyond New Media: Discourse and Critique in a Polymediated Age, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Hurdley, R. (2013), Home, Materiality, Memory and Belonging, London: Palgrave. Ingold, T. (2000), Te Perception of the Environment. Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill, London: Routledge. Jacobs, J., and S. Smith (2008), ‘Living room: Re-materialising home’, Environment and Planning A, 40: 515–19. Kopytof, I. (1986), ‘Te cultural biography of things: Commoditization as process’, in A. Appadurai (ed.), Te Social Life of Tings, 64–91, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kuhlmann, D. (2013), Gender Studies in Architecture: Space, Power and Diference, London: Routledge. Leivestad, H. H. (2017), ‘Inventorying immobility. Methodology on wheels’, in N. Salazar, A. Elliot, R, Norum (eds.), Methodologies of Mobility: Ethnography and Experiment, 47–67, Oxford: Berghahn. Leurs, K., and S. Ponzanesi (2018), ‘Connected migrants: Encapsulation and cosmopolitanization’, Popular Communication, 16 (1): 4–20. Levin, I. (2016), Migration, Settlement, and the Concepts of House and Home, London: Routledge. Löfgren, O. (2016), ‘Containing the past, the present and the future: Packing a suitcase’, NU, 53 (1): 59–74. Lubar, S. and D. W. Kingery, eds. (2013), History from Tings: Essays on Material Culture, Washington DC, USA: Smithsonian Institute. Madianou, M. (2016), ‘Ambient co-presence: Transnational family practices in polymedia environments’, Global Networks, 16 (2): 183–201. Madianou, M., and D. Miller (2012), Migration and New Media: Transnational Families and Polymedia, London: Routledge. Marte, L. (2007), ‘Foodmaps: Tracing boundaries of “home” through food relations’, Food & Foodways, 15: 261–89. Massey, D. (1992), ‘A place called home?’, New Formations, 17: 3–15. Mata-Codesal, D., and M. Abranches, eds. (2018), Food Parcels in International Migration. Intimate Connections, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Mauss, M. (1954), Te Gif, London: Cohen and West. McKay, D. (2017), An Archipelago of Care. Filipino Migrants and Global Networks, Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. Miller, D., ed. (2001), Home Possessions: Material Culture behind Closed Doors, Oxford: Berg.

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Miller, D. (2003), ‘Te virtual moment’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14: 57–75. Miller, D. ed. (2005) Materiality, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Miller, D. (2008), Te Comfort of Tings, Cambridge: Polity Press. Miller, D., ed. (2009), Anthropology and the Individual: a Material Culture Perspective, Oxford and New York: Berg. Miller, D. (2010), Stuf, Cambridge: Polity Press. Miller, D., and A. Horst (2012), Digital Anthropology, Oxford: Berg. Miller, D. and J. Sinanan (2014), Webcam. Cambridge: Polity Press. Moore, J. (2000), ‘Placing home in context’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 20: 207–17. Nippert-Eng, C. (2010), Islands of Privacy, Chicago and London: Chicago University Press. Noble, G. (2012), ‘Home objects’, in S. Smith, ed. International Encyclopaedia of Housing and Home, 434–8, London: Elsevier. Ochs, E., and T. Kremer-Sadlik, eds. (2013), Fast-Forward Family. Home, Work, and Relationships in Middle-Class America, Berkeley: University of California Press. Pamuk, O. (2006), My Father’s Suitcase. Nobel Prize Lecture. Available online: www. nobelprize.org Pechurina, A. (2015), Material Cultures, Migrations, and Identities: What the Eye Cannot See, London: Palgrave. Pink et al., eds. (2016), Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practice, London: Sage. Pink, S. (2004a), Home Truths. Gender, Domestic Objects and Everyday Life, London: Bloomsbury. Pink, S. (2004b), ‘In and out of the academy: Video ethnography of the home’, Visual Anthropology Review, 20 (1): 82–8. Povrzanović Frykman, M. (2009), ‘Material aspects of transnational social felds: An introduction’, Two Homelands, 29: 105–13. Povrzanović Frykman, M., and M. Humbracht (2013), ‘Making palpable connections. Objects in migrants’ transnational lives’, Ethnologia Scandinavica 43: 46–67. Povrzanović Frykman, M. (2018) ‘Food as a Matter of Being: Experiential Continuity in Transnational Lives.’ in D. Mata-Codesal and M. Abranches (eds.) Food Parcels in International Migration. Anthropology, Change, and Development, 25–46, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Rabinow, P., and G. E. Marcus (2008), Design for an Anthropology of the Contemporary, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ralph, D., and L. A. Staeheli (2011), ‘Home and migration: Mobilities, belongings and identities’, Geography Compass, 5 (7): 517–30.

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3

Mobility and immobility Aurora Massa

Introduction Troughout this book there is a tension between the movement across spaces and the feelings, discourses and practices of homing. In this chapter, this tension is addressed in situations where mobility and immobility are intertwined into people’s experiences, whether they be those migrants blocked at a point in their journey due to the current obstacles to migration, or those who live in situations of protracted displacement. New patterns of migration and the securitization of migration – namely, the political and rhetoric transformation of migration into a security issue – have increased the instances of prolonged displacement and turned it into a globalized phenomenon (Donà 2015). Using the juridical labels regulating people’s movement under specifc ‘mobility regimes’ (Glick-Schiller and Salazar 2013), the protagonists of this chapter are: camp refugees who cannot go back to their homeland, asylum seekers in reception centres waiting to know the result of their refugee applications and migrants in transit who face obstacles to continuing their routes. Both migrants who are on their journeys and refugees in protracted displacement have been described by several scholars as people in liminal conditions (cf., among others, Agier 2008; Korac 2009; Streif-Fénart and Segatti 2011; Brun and Fábos 2015), in a simultaneous process of marginalization and transformation. To use Victor Turner’s well-known expression (1969), this is a situation of ‘betwixt and between’, a former home lef behind and a new home yet to come, a homeland and a country of displacement, being in transit and the fnal destination. Tese

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liminal conditions are centred around people’s experiences, involving spatial, temporal and bureaucratic levels, meaning that they involve emotional and relational qualities. Te extension in time of these liminal conditions means that mobility merges with immobility, trapping people in protracted precariousness. In situations of immobility, where going back or moving forward is impossible, where ties with the past are interrupted and where the future is difcult to imagine, how are homing practices and feelings reshaped? To what extent do people transform spaces and start to develop a sense of home? How do they try to recreate conditions of familiarity, security and control in unhomely circumstances? In order to answer these questions, this chapter focuses on some specifc forms of temporary accommodation, such as refugee camps, reception centres and informal transit settlements. Tey are used as exemplary case studies with which to address the issue of the interlacing of home with mobility and immobility, since dwelling is intertwined with temporariness, and mobility is an ever-present horizon over which people have little, if no, control. Tese types of temporary accommodation are not meant to be homes and are not set up for family lives, but people can end up living in them for years, with limited power to emplace themselves (Feld and Basso 1996), or to decide whether or not to move, due to the multiple political forces (i.e. state, transnational and supranational institutions), which act upon them. From this vantage point, this chapter intends to challenge essentialist notions of both ‘home’ and ‘being away from home’. Although the notion of home may feel irrelevant in places of displacement and transit, people continuously make eforts to improve their living conditions, to build connections with their past and to imagine a better future. Tese eforts may in turn produce a sense of familiarity, security and control, and so an enactment of processes of homing (Boccagni 2017). In other words, people may make a home, even if they do not feel at home, try to resist making a home or are not supposed to make a home in certain places (see Brun and Fábos 2015; Massa 2017; Grønseth 2018). A friction can emerge between the ideal home, which may be in the country of origin or somewhere else, and the everyday home, which is made in the here and now. In the following pages I ofer a review of some recent investigations conducted among refugees and asylum seekers dwelling in refugee camps and reception centres. Te studies I consider approach the topic from diferent

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angles (from social media to materiality) and diferent theoretical perspectives, and refer particularly to the case of African migrants to Europe, without being limited to them. Tis chapter is based on the ethnographic feldwork that I have conducted among Somali and Eritrean communities living in Rome, London and Stockholm within the HOMInG project. It also draws on the ethnographic research I have carried out since 2013 in Ethiopia and Europe among Eritrean refugees who fed the authoritarian Eritrean government, as well as on my experiences both as a researcher and as a social worker in several reception centres in Italy.1 My aim is not to provide a comprehensive account of a range of empirical situations, nor to ofer an analysis of a single case study, but to use a number of ethnographic vignettes to illuminate some general dynamics of homing and its relationships with the pendulum that swings between mobility and immobility. In order to avoid seeing migrants as ‘extraordinary mobile subjects, discrete from other (concurrent) subject positions, and central units within methodologies’ (Hui 2016: 11), I also take into account more privileged people who are mobile, such as mobile professionals and highly skilled migrants. As laid out in the Introduction to this book, our study takes into consideration a variety of migrant groups, difering in their country of origin, length of stay in the country of settlement, legal status (asylum seekers, labour migrants etc.), gender, age, and so on. Adopting a comparative approach, we scrutinize similarities and divergences in the ways home is emplaced and reproduced, without reifying social diferences or neglecting the ways such diferences intersect with each other. Although advantaged and disadvantaged travellers have conceptual and empirical diferences between them, by analysing both groups in this chapter I am able to observe practices of home-making in transient situations in which a person does not feel settled and in which dwelling is related to the prospect of another move in the imminent future. Te chapter’s opening section introduces mobility studies and sheds light on the homing practices and experiences of privileged mobile people. Te second section introduces the analytical flter of inequality with respect to mobility regimes and outlines the current scenarios where, for a relevant part of the global population, mobility is both forced and forbidden. Te subjects and spaces at the core of the chapter are kept together by the analytical interlocking

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of mobility studies, border studies and refugee studies. Te sections that follow focus on so-called forced migrants, the homes they leave behind and the struggle for home that they engage in as they inhabit refugee camps and reception centres. Despite their diferences, both refugee camps and reception centres are forms of governmentality that discipline space and regulate people’s movement, placing them in defnitively temporary zones (Rahola 2010). My analysis does not take into account the political dimension of either of these places, but considers them as temporary and long-lasting dwellings. I explore the social and home-making practices of the inhabitants as well as the materiality of these settings, looking both at the objects that people fll their living spaces with and at the shelters themselves. Although a structure built for human habitation is not automatically a home, its material qualities play a role in enabling it to become a home.

Dwelling in travel In recent decades, the so-called mobility turn has changed our understanding of mobility, showing how in many contexts being mobile is not the exception (Sheller and Urry 2006; Urry 2007). Tis approach has led scholars to shed light on the analytical and empirical links between mobility and immobility, and on the links between diferent types of movement – from global fows of ideas and capital, to day-to-day activities – and diferent kinds of mobile people – from tourists to asylum seekers, from low-skilled migrants to international students (see, for instance, Schapendonk et al. 2015). In relation to the concept of home, herein understood from a multi-scalar perspective, the de-exceptionalization of spatial movements has created a strong impulse among researchers towards overcoming a ‘sedentaristic bias’ (Gupta and Ferguson 1997) and the representation of migrants as uprooted people, which has resulted in mobility scholars taking up some of the founding ideas of transnational perspectives (Glick-Schiller et al. 1994). In relation to domestic spaces, the focus on mobility has led to investigations into how one can also ‘dwell in travel’, recalling James Cliford’s expression (1997) referenced in the title of this section, as well as to the analysis of the ways in which the dyad of being-at-home vs being-not-at-home is experienced by

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mobile subjects. Indeed, despite their continuous mobility between countries and diferent types of temporary accommodation, such as hotels or college dorms, highly mobile people enact social, material and imaginative strategies to make themselves at home, even if only for a while. Tese forms of home-making are ofen based on the repetition of habitual routines (Rapport and Dawson 1998) and on the use of social media to keep in contact with family members and friends, and usually do not involve any permanent change in the physical space (Ley-Cervantes and Duyvendak 2017). Tis is something that many of us have frequently experienced. Speaking for myself, for example, every time in which I have had to stay in a rented room for a few weeks or months while conducting feldwork, in Europe as well as in Ethiopia, I ‘made myself at home’ by bringing some specifc objects with me, such as a lamp for reading at night and my hairdryer, by scattering my belongings across the space so as to combat the alien tidiness of a rented room, and by keeping pictures of my loved ones close by (on academic mobility, cf. Tandogan and Incirlioglu 2004). Following the work of Michel de Certeau (1990), Ida Winther (2008) understands frequent travellers’ ways of making home as ‘tactics’, namely, ways of using the space without turning it into a place, such as carrying out everyday practices that also involve embodied and sensorial dimensions. Based on her fndings from a ‘feld-walk’ in which she followed people commuting between places, Winther defnes ‘homing’2 as all the activities people do in order to make themselves comfortable while staying for brief periods in diferent locations. Her case studies include a variety of mobile people, from businessmen on work trips to teenagers moving between divorced parents’ homes. By focusing on materiality and on home as a tactile and contextualized experience, Winther follows the phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard (1958), who defnes home as primarily a process of territorialization and of bringing a place under control (cf. Douglas 1991). In this light, the homing tactics Winther investigates deal with banal and daily practices, such as not unpacking luggage, not adapting to the local time but keeping the time zone of the country in which they normally live or having everyday things (i.e. toothbrushes) in more than one ‘home’. Not only Winther’s empirical fndings are useful, but the notion of homing tactics is a fruitful analytical lens to grasp the ways through which travellers and migrants in transit pragmatically create their own provisional nest away from home.

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Te analysis of the role played by space in highly mobile people’s sense of home has been frequently addressed by scholars, most notably by geographers. For example, Butcher (2010) shows how Australian professionals working in Asia ‘attempt to fx their understanding of home by attaching to it the characteristics, imagined and concrete, of a particular place’ (2010: 23, my emphasis) wherever this place is (Australia, an ‘Australian’ cultural space in Singapore, or Singapore). Instead, Nowicka (2007) interprets home as a part of transnational networks which move with people and which are independent from a specifc locality, making home primarily a socially defned entity. Her investigation of employees of an international organization shows how they construct their homes through networks which connect them with distant family members and through a variety of practices that convey a sense of similarity to their previous life experience. Both Nowicka and Butcher demonstrate how the emphasis on mobility does not necessarily lead to the ‘placeless paradigm’, suggesting that it is rather the ways in which home practices are territorialized or not that need to be investigated. People’s engagement with the space they fnd themselves in can occur in diferent ways, through practices such as running in a park or going to the gym or, for those who stay longer, by fnding a school for their children and getting in contact with the social circles created by diasporic groups. Paradoxically, it can also come about by attending ‘generic private place’ such as malls, hotel rooms or cofee shops (Ley-Cervantes and Duyvendak 2017), which are the quintessence of globalization. Although Marc Augé (1992) contentiously defned these places as ‘non-places’, they are far from it. Despite their standardization, they do not necessarily inspire a sense of solitude and anonymity, but can instead feel immediately familiar, as they provide certain ‘cognitive assurances’ that have the potential of fostering feelings of home (Ley-Cervantes and Duyvendak 2017). An important role is also played by new communication technologies. Despite its virtual character, the online world is not separate from the ofine one, but is an ordinary space of daily life (Miller et al. 2016). Much research has highlighted the importance of digital technologies in creating a sense of home for migrants, through their use of social media and devices such as smartphones and webcams, as the chapter on (im)materiality in this book points out. Te internet can allow very mobile people to maintain a sense of continuity and

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also to create a ‘virtual house’, as my interview with Naima shows. Naima is a woman in her twenties who was born in the Somali town of Mogadishu to a well-of family. Even though she lef Somalia as a refugee in her teens, she is now a highly skilled person. When we met in London, she had a degree from a prestigious institution, worked for an important broadcasting organization and had a prominent role within circles of Somali artists. She envisioned a highly mobile future for herself, in order to combine her passion for travel with her career aspirations, two ambitions that she shares with her fancé living in the United States. Tey were planning to get married soon but were struggling to decide where to make their home. She told me that in the last few months they had thought about living together in the United States, in the Middle East and also in Somalia, according to the multiple desires they have as young adults. While preventing them from planning where to set up their marital home, this expected hyper-mobility pushed them to fnd creative solutions. She told me: In those days we were again discussing about were to move and all of a sudden Mohammed told me: ‘Honey, at Christmas they [name of furniture shops] have half price! Let’s do shopping on the internet!’ […]. Te things we chose are still online somewhere. I always wanted to move out [my family’s place], but I never put together a house in my mind. But suddenly this place looked so good […]. We didn’t buy anything, but we put together what we wanted. I enjoyed doing that! So now the idea of having my own place is really big in me.

To ease the discomfort of not actually living together and of not being able to decide where to settle, Naima and her partner gave a virtual materiality to their future home. Tis practice of choosing the furniture together from an online shop can be interpreted as an example of Winther’s notion of ‘homing tactics’ (2008), which has made their imagined home compatible with their desired mobile future, at least for the time being. For forced migrants, transit migrants and people in administrative limbo, ‘dwelling in travel’ frequently occurs in similar ways, that is, by enacting certain routines, going to specifc places or using social media. While the emphasis on mobility sheds light on similarities, that should not obscure the inequalities in people’s chances of moving across borders. Indeed, these inequalities have signifcant consequences for ways of making a home in situations of mobility as well as of immobility.

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Forced and forbidden mobilities Te current geopolitical conjuncture is characterized by the contradiction between the acceleration of the physical mobility experienced by some people (whether they enjoy or endure it) and the strong hostility towards certain forms of movement, particularly those from poorer to richer contexts. Tis attitude is refected in ever-stricter border restrictions, through the proliferation of physical walls, and of political and bureaucratic mechanisms, such as visa policies, border patrols and so on. Tese restrictions infuence the possibility of moving, producing specifc forms of human mobility and immobility (cf. Cunningham and Heyman 2004; Salazar and Smart 2011). In the European scenario, danger and threat have imbued the representations made by governments and policy-makers about certain kinds of migrants and travellers, which afect and are in turn afected by public opinion. Te eforts to limit the mobility of such people have contributed to weakening the right to asylum and have favoured agreements with neighbouring countries, in which the latter obtains political and economic benefts in exchange for acting as a bufer zone. Tis externalization of borders has gone hand in hand with their internalization, namely the (re)creation of mechanisms of control in specifc border areas within the EU, such as Brennero (ItalyAustria), Ventimiglia (Italy-France) or Calais (France-UK), which has called into question the very existence of the freedom of movement in the Schengen area, at least for non-EU citizens. Borders have thus acquired a tentacular form (Pinelli 2017), spreading out both within and outside of Europe, as well as a mobile character to counter the mobility of those they try to govern (Mountz 2011). As a consequence, migrant trajectories have become turbulent (Schapendonk 2011). Dealing with unstable and dangerous borders, people frequently adapt their journeys to the obstacles and opportunities they encounter along the way, and ofen remain stuck in transit areas for variable amounts of time and in variable conditions. While in Libya many of them face violence and detention, elsewhere they can enact their routines, work and maintain their social ties. In this respect, the embryonic forms of homing they develop do not totally difer from those of highly skilled migrants, despite their condition of oppression, scarcity of resources and lack of control over their own situation.

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Moreover, the continuous passage of people ofen infuences the toponymy, the economy and the sociality of transit spaces – hubs such as the towns of Agadez in Niger and Nouadhibou in Mauritania, but also border areas. Te changes that these passages create are however ofen ephemeral, since they rise and fall on the basis of a shifing political scenario (Bava 2005; Brachet, 2005; Massa 2014). A good example is the so-called Jungle in Calais, one of the most important transit areas within Europe, at the French border with Great Britain. Since the early 2000s, Calais has hosted a huge informal settlement with a population that reached 7,000 afer the so-called refugee crisis in 2015 (Agier 2018). Te settlement has been destroyed more than once by the French police, the last time being in 2017. But despite the harsh living conditions, it had a strong ‘sense of place’ (Boyle 2017). Waiting for the opportunity to cross the Channel, diferent groups of migrants created community-specifc architectural environments in which many of them developed a sense of agency, familiarity and transient domesticity. Te contrast between highly mobile and immobilized subjects should not tempt us to simplistically consider movement as an expression of freedom (Cresswell 2006; Adey 2006), since there can be lack of freedom and compulsion in mobility as much as in immobility. Rather, it should induce us to look at the intertwining of mobility and home in contexts where ‘movement occurs within constraints and constraints within movements’ (Gill et al. 2011: 302). Indeed, the experiences of forcibly displaced persons are dotted with more or less long periods of immobility, which sometimes occur in specifc areas, such as refugee camps and reception facilities, other times in more ordinary places, such as cities. Tese experiences of immobility are caused by the impossibility of returning home, of settling down for good or of moving forward along one’s imagined migratory trajectory. In this sense, following Brun and Fábos (2015), I include in so-called protracted refugee situations not only those forced migrants who spend years, possibly decades, in encampments and detention centres, but also those ‘who go into “hiding” in urban areas, who are “in transit” from one place to the next, and who are subject to other “temporary” conditions such as unresolved residency permission’ (2015: 6). Likewise, in line with a deep-rooted trend in social sciences, I take a position in relation to the bureaucratic ways of categorizing people on the move. Labels, rhetoric and practices composing humanitarian and political

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systems that govern mobility are historical and political products, which convey power relationships and specifc worldviews (cf. Malkki 1995a; Fassin 2010). Teir taken-for-granted uses in scientifc investigation have proved to be problematic (Black 2001; Scalettaris 2007; Bakewell 2008), as they may disregard people’s experiences and situations that operate in the interstices between these juridical labels, as the exemplary case of ‘forced migration’ shows. As Jansen and Löfving argue, ‘Tere is an inherent contradiction in the notion of “forced” migration, which implies a lack of agency, whereas migration most certainly carries with it associations of choices and resolve’ (Jansen and Löfving 2009: 8; cf. also Turton 2003). Displacement is not only an escape from conditions of violence or oppression, nor simply the loss of place, but also a ‘search for cool ground’ (Allen 1996; Turton 1996), that is, for places to (re)make home (Korac 2009). Tis turns the alleged dichotomy between forced and voluntary migration into a continuum. At the same time, juridical categories are not neutral, because of the humanitarian and governmental power to actually impose constraints and spaces of action, to shape subjectivity and habitus (Malkki 1996; Ong 2003). In fact, the commonality of ‘refugeness’ ofen lies only in people’s engagement with similar legal frameworks. Despite their diferences, camps and reception centres are one expression of these legal frameworks. Tey are brought together through their being sites where humanitarian agencies implement policy-driven temporary solutions and where migrants experience immobility (Donà 2015). However, this takes shape in a frame of mobility that hampers the possibility of settling down, since it is intertwined with a sense of temporariness and instability.

Searching for home in displacement Posing the key questions as either/or oppositions – Do I return or stay forever? Is home here or is it there? – may not be the right move, at least not for many of the refugees. […] Tere is good reason to expect that the either/or question will never get an either/or answer and that some of those people who have here been called town refugees will continue to straddle both places, calling both ‘home’ or, more likely, fnding ‘home’ somewhere in between. (Malkki 1995b: 196)

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Tis excerpt from Liisa Malkki’s Purity and Exile (1995b) ofers signifcant insights into the relationship between home and displacement. Te book deals with Hutu refugees in Tanzania who fed Burundi in the 1970s, and, among other topics, addresses the diferent meanings which refugees living in camps and refugees settled in townships ascribed to national identity, exile and the past. Whereas camp refugees constructed themselves as a nation by telling and re-telling their mythico-history, and defned their exile as a ‘moral trajectory’ that would lead them to reclaiming their homeland in Burundi, town refugees did not linger on narratives of the past, but tended to pragmatically adopt multiple identities, creating a cosmopolitan style of living which weakened the myth of return. Te diferent attitude towards these mythico-historical narratives infuenced the morality and the self-identifcation of urban and camp refugees, afecting many domains of their everyday life (such as work choices and marriage strategies), their desires for the future, as well as the relationship with their homeland. In other words, it infuenced how they built their being at home (or not) in Tanzania and Burundi. While the refugees in camps lived in a protracted but temporary period of exile and longed to return home, refugees in the town merged with local populations and tried to fnd home, as Malkki (1995b) writes, ‘somewhere in between’ here and there. Studies on refugees’ and asylum seekers’ sense of home ofen focus on situations that lie between the two diferent situations found by Malkki. Tese studies have focused not only on the complex relationships of forcibly displaced people with the idea of return, but also on their attempts to make home in exile and – under the infuence of transnational and diaspora studies  – on their multi-sited ways of belonging and homing. Indeed, the experiences of return and place of origin felt by people in protracted displacement are not completely diferent from those of other diasporic communities (see Cohen 2008). Nonetheless, displacement is ofen triggered by situations of political, social or environmental crisis which make relationships with ‘back home’ more complicated. In many cases, displacement entails a loss of home ‘which leaves no domain of social experience untouched, with profound and existential consequences’ (Eastmond 1997: 11). And this loss can start even before departure. Home can be efectively unmade by fear and anxiety, and turned into an unfamiliar, insecure and out-of-control space due to violent and unexpected changes

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(Löfving 2009). Moreover, as the case of camp refugees in Tanzania shows, the desire to return home, even though is played out at a mythico-historical level, is exactly what defnes the condition of protracted displacement as such. Indeed, protracted displacement is the result not only of forced mobility, but also of the impossibility of returning home. In a similar way to that experienced by most diasporic groups, especially among so-called frst-generation migrants, waiting to return home is crucial for many displaced communities, whose lives are framed by nostalgia and social marginalization. Te prospect, or even only the myth, of return ofers a reassuring horizon that helps when dealing with a difcult present and an uncertain future. However, in many cases the relationship of forced migrants with their place of origin is problematic. Forced displacement can provoke resentment and rejection of what was previously considered home. Return itself is ofen impossible and, when it occurs, can result in new forms of marginalization or in a ‘reverse cultural shock’ (Graham and Khosravi 1997: 126; Kibreab 2002), with implications for people’s ability ‘to reclaim a sense of home upon homecoming’ (Stefansson 2004: 57). However, the condition of immobility does not result only from the dream of returning home, but also from the desire to move forward. For example, for the young Eritreans in Ethiopia with whom I conducted my ethnographic research in 2013–14, the feeling of being in transit was nurtured by the desire to reach other destinations (primarily Western countries), a desire hampered by local and global regimes of mobility (Massa  2018). Paradoxically, their feeling of being unsettled was actually increased by the environmental, social and linguistic similarities between their place of displacement and their homeland. Tus, paraphrasing Maja Korac (2009), forced migration should not be considered only as a loss of place, but also as a way of projecting oneself into the future and of getting settled in new and hopefully improved life circumstances. Rethinking refugeehood as a process that may entail both disempowerment and empowerment (Korac 2009) has a wide implication for the subjects of this chapter: even in hostile and temporary settings such as refugee camps and reception centres, migrants tend to engage with the struggle of making a home by trying to recreate familiarity, improve their material conditions and imagine a home located elsewhere.

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Fragmentary forms of home and forced migration Building shelters and a sense of home in refugee camps According to UNHCR (2018), almost half of the 25.4 million refugees worldwide live in camps, which are ofen in inhospitable areas characterized by unhealthy and unsafe conditions, lack of natural resources and poor assistance. Despite being managed by a wide range of actors in very heterogeneous local contexts, refugee camps are part of a global system of managing mass displacement, which is enacted through relatively standardized procedures. To cope with emergency situations and fulfl basic needs anywhere in the world, humanitarian action is designed to be transferable and universal, thus neglecting socio-cultural, historical, political as well as environmental peculiarities. For instance, tents have been the most widespread solution for providing shelter within these contexts, as they are lightweight, inexpensive and simple. However, they are ofen a long way from the kinds of shelters that people are used to or would like to inhabit (Scott-Smith 2018; see also Davis 1978). Camps force refugees to engage with the material dimension of dwelling in many ways, through attempts to survive in a new and sometime hostile natural environment, through the struggle to adapt themselves to shelters which cannot be changed or, in other cases, through eforts to build their own housing. Even in conditions of displacement, accommodation does not just provide shelter. Modifying the camp is a way of domesticating an unknown space and enabling a sense of continuity between the past and the present, which is also open to the future. As the chapter on temporality in this book demonstrates, these changes usually occur over time, through previous practical and architectural skills and aesthetic tastes, as well as through creativity and adaptability. For example, by looking at the dwellings built by Eritrean refugees in Ethiopia, it is possible to identify which ethnic groups inhabit the diferent sections of a particular refugee camp. While Kunama families coming from the countryside have tended to rebuild tukhul, traditional and circular huts with straw roofs, young urbanites – predominantly male and Tigrinya speaking – have usually constructed rectangular mud houses, canopied with UNHCR plastic sheets (Treiber and Tesfaye 2008). Moreover, in areas with a predominance of Tigrinya speakers, refugees have also set up cinemas, hairdressers and cafés, which provide an urban atmosphere.

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Te reconstruction of a familiar environment does not operate only on a symbolic level, but also on a sensory and embodied one. Dundley (2011) makes use of some classic phenomenological ideas in her analysis of Karenni refugee camps on the Tai-Burma border, writing that the body and its senses are not only culturally constituted, but are also components of the material world. Bodies interact with ‘things’ and these interactions infuence people’s actions, practices and lives (see Heidegger 1971 [1954]; Csordas 1993; Merleau-Ponty 2005 [1945]). For the Karenni, these things include the bamboo they use to build their huts in their homeland as well as in the refugee camps. In Dundley’s view, manipulating the bamboo during the building processes and physically interacting with it through the huts allows refugees to experience a sensory and embodied continuity between past and present: ‘Te movement, rhythm and texture of the bamboo foors in Karenni houses, for example, was a well accustomed feeling before displacement and is still felt in the camp – not only by the bare feet on which one enters the house but by the legs and buttocks as one sits down, and the entire body when one sleeps’ (Dundley 2011). However, life in refugee camps is not only about reproducing what is lef behind. Looking again at Eritrean refugee camps in Ethiopia, private dwelling spaces are ofen personalized and decorated with handmade furniture made of mud, such as beds, sofas and shelves, demonstrating remarkable creativity. As my conversation with Aman shows, home stuf in Eritrean refugee shelters can be also a source of pride for their makers. At the time of my feldwork, Aman had lived in Ethiopia for nine years and had never considered that country to be his fnal destination. His dream was rather to reach the United States. He spent most of these nine years in a refugee camp, where he got used to domestic chores (washing clothes and cooking), which as a young man who had grown up in a wealthy urban family he had never done before. He also learnt to build furniture from mud. Among his various works, he was particularly happy with a huge corner sofa that he had constructed with his closest friends. Painted black and covered with a white cloth, it was big enough to allow all of them to sit down, eat and hang out together. As in other parts of the world (cf. chapter ‘(Im)materiality’), the sofa is an essential item in Eritrean dwellings and has functional, relational and ostensive features. It is a place for resting, hosting and eating with other

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Figure 3.1 Aman on his sofa. Photo by Aman.

members of the household. Its presence in one’s home displays a certain degree of afuence, being replaced by the bed or a low bench covered with cushions in the dwellings of those who cannot aford a sofa or a living room. Located as it was in a temporary shelter within a refugee camp, Aman’s mud sofa can be considered to be part of his homing tactics (Winther 2008), which enabled him to recreate a more familiar and ‘normal’ domestic environment in a locality that did not have anything in common with his previous home. His sofa evoked the warmth of his family and the modernized lifestyle he had had in his hometown, although the foam had been replaced by hardened mud. Moreover, it gave a concrete shape to the sense of communality and solidarity which bound together his group of friends, all young people living away from their families, whom they had lef behind in Eritrea. It was also a successful attempt to bring the space under control: giving meaning and shape to the mud can be seen as a symbolic and concrete demonstration of the possibility of domesticating the formless space of the camp. Modifying the shelter allowed Aman to partially regain his agency and his sense of self, which had been undermined by the Eritrean regime, his experience of displacement and

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the impossibility of reaching his desired destination. It also enabled Aman to prefgure his desired futures and destinations, that is to say, locations in which he would be able to have a sofa, a living room and, consequently, a home. While materiality can allow refugees to transcend their condition of immobility in the camp, and symbolically move back and forth in time and space, this is even more the case with communication technologies. Teir importance becomes clear when looking, for instance, at the materiality of internet cafés in refugee camps and transit areas, or at the frequent possession of smartphones by asylum seekers and refugees in reception centres. On the one hand, the internet, social media and smartphones are fundamental tools in migrant trajectories in order to contact smugglers and friends and to get information about the best way to continue their journey (De Bruijn et al. 2009). On the other hand, in prolonged displacement they can come to symbolize home (Donà 2015) and operate as a home-making tool (Bonini 2011). Smartphones and computers enable people to transcend immobility by interacting with family members and friends in transnational spaces (Horst 2006), and to overcome the isolation of refugee camps and reception centres by connecting them with the outside world (Leung 2011). Moreover, social media provides a virtual space that people can decorate and personalize according to socio-cultural and personal tastes, enacting home-making tactics in the absence of a material space to modify. As an open space for imagining the self, which is shaped by local and global scales of moral values, standards of success and horizons of expectations (Graw and Schielke 2013), the online world allows people to live the dreamed future, subverting immobility and waiting. A similar tension between forced immobility and forbidden mobility, between unalterable space and the need to make oneself at home also characterizes reception centres in Europe.

Reception centres Te increase in the number of asylum seekers in Europe has led to the creation of a wide range of reception centres. Tese centres are ofen established in already existing buildings, such as disused hotels or factories, and ofer a variety of models of housing to their residents (families and single individuals), from shared rooms to independent apartments. According to the reception

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policies of each European country, reception facilities are characterized by diferent forms of assistance, but they are all marked by the same paradox: they are not set up to be a home, even though the length that residents stay there and their difcult backgrounds of displacement lead them to search for home (Grønseth 2018). Te centres are designed to be ‘not-home’, through their low housing standards (i.e. their poor heating and air conditioning systems, dampness and poorly maintained buildings) and the ways in which the space is used (van der Horst 2004). Living in an asylum centre ofen means having limited, if any, private spaces and little opportunity to engage in home-making practices, such as decorating, cooking and sharing meals. Te rules of the centres and migrants’ condition of temporary permanence, together with people’s low incomes, restrain the personalization of the space to small-scale furnishings and decorations, such as sticking pictures of family members on the wall near one’s pillow, putting up small items or hanging sheets around beds to create a feeting sense of privacy in collective rooms (Parsloe 2017). Migrants dwelling in these centres are trapped in a condition of immobility, waiting and transit. Tis applies frstly to their biographical trajectories, due to the uncertainty regarding the result of their asylum applications and thus

Figure 3.2 A woman in a reception centre in Rome. Photo by Cinzia Canneri.

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the delay in starting a new life (a delay that adds to the long time that they have already spent getting there). And secondly, it applies to their limited possibility of making a new home. In fact, these two dimensions reinforce one another. As Grønseth and Torshaug (2014) argue, asylum seekers and refugees in Norwegian transit centres ofen fnd themselves unable to make a home that evokes their past or anticipates their future through objects and meaningful daily routines. Tis makes their present more vague and uncertain, with major consequences for their sense of self. In the phenomenological approach adopted by the authors, home is built in intersubjective relations that constitute individual self and personhood together with wellbeing and mental health. Rather than representing images of what home should be, asylum centres are dwellings in which people in protracted displacement struggle to make a home, to see their future and to fnd a space for themselves. Te relevance of what buildings do (Grønseth et al. 2016) to their residents is also stressed in Brun’s analysis (2015) of a group of internally displaced people in Georgia who moved from collective centres to block houses, that is to say, from shelters such as dormitories and hotels which are not meant for permanent living, to buildings with a house-like shape. Soon afer the assignation, almost all of them started to furnish and embellish the block houses, to adapt them to their needs and tastes, changing the physical structure and materiality of these buildings over the years. Tese engagements with the physical building may seem to contrast with the fact that these displaced people still hoped to return to their region of origin in the future. However, as Brun writes, ‘Te block houses enabled stronger connections with the past, in terms of practices of home-making as well as imagining and re-creating feelings of home from the past’ (2015: 49), thus allowing them to express complex selves, which were interlocked not only with the past but also with imagination and idealization.

Conclusion Te sense of being at home is ofen trivialized as a sense of familiarity and a process of becoming accustomed to a place or a situation. In this common

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understanding, home seems to be in opposition to conditions of mobility, precariousness and transit. As this chapter demonstrates, however, mobile people enact various diferent tactics to make themselves temporarily at home. Tese tactics work on material and virtual, social and imaginative levels, and concern privileged travellers, such as highly skilled migrants, and also less advantaged ones, such as refugees and migrants coming from the so-called Global South. A wide range of home-making practices are portable – including food habits, everyday routines and activities, the use of social media, and so on – and, especially in a globalized world, can also be performed on the move, or while staying somewhere for a short period of time. Tese practices, as well as the length of stay and attempts to improve one’s situation, can also elicit a process of homing, even in places that cannot be turned into a home. Tis last aspect is made evident in globalized contexts of displacement such as those of refugee camps and reception centres. Established as temporary accommodation for people who are supposed to come from and move to somewhere else, they ofen become sites of protracted displacement, where residents are both about to move and prevented from moving at the same time. Tis chapter shows how, in these settings, forced migrants engage in home-making practices and, in so doing, ofen turn shelters into fragmentary forms of home. Tese architectural forms can be read as efects of state policies and as ‘networks of violence and care’ (Dunn 2017: 17) to deal with the phenomena of refuge and forced migration. However, they are also sociomaterial arrangements in which refugees attempt to ‘remake themselves as coherent subjects by re-forging relationships to places, things, and other people’ and so to ‘rebuild a normal situation’ (2017: 24). In ‘rebuilding a normal situation’ the process of making oneself at home plays an important role, since the ability to have a sense of power, a sense of doing something despite going nowhere, as well as having a social and mental space for oneself is a crucial factor in the wellbeing of people living in protracted displacement. Making oneself at home also owes much to the temporalities of the social context in which one dwells. For homing is a mode of temporality, as we will see in the next chapter.

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Notes 1

Tese previous research experiences were supported by the University of Bergamo (Doctoral School in Anthropology and Epistemology of Complexity), the Felsberg Institute for Education and Academic Research and the Italian Ethnological Mission in Tigray-Ethiopia.

2

In Winther’s conception, homing refers to Deleuze and Guattari’s (1988) verbalizing of nouns whereas things are in constant becoming (see also Petersen et al. 2010).

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Brun C., and A. Fábos (2015), ‘Making homes in limbo? A conceptual framework’, Refuge, 31 (1): 5–17. Butcher, M. (2010), ‘From “fsh out of water” to “ftting in.” Te challenge of re-placing home in a mobile world’, Population, Space and Place, 16: 23–36. Cliford, J. (1997), Routes. Travel and Translation in the Late 20th Century, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London: Harvard University Press. Cohen, R. (2008), Global Diaspora. An Introduction, London: Routledge. Cresswell, T. (2006), On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World, London: Routledge. Csordas, T. J. (1993), ‘Somatic modes of attention’, Cultural Anthropology, 8 (2): 135–56. Cunningham, H., and J. Heyman (2004), ‘Introduction: Mobilities and enclosures at borders’, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 11 (3): 289–302. Davis, I. (1978), Shelter afer Disaster, Oxford: Oxford Polytechnic Press. De Bruijn, M. E., F. Nyamnjoh and I. Brinkman, eds. (2009), Mobile Phones: Te New Talking Drums of Everyday Africa, Bamenda: Langaa Publishers. De Certeau, M. (1990), L’Invention du quotidien, 1.: Arts de faire et 2: Habiter, cuisine, Paris: Gallimard. Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari (1988), Mille Plateaux, Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Donà, G. (2015), ‘Making homes in Limbo: Embodied virtual “Homes” in prolonged conditions of displacement’, Refuge, 31 (1): 67–73. Douglas, M. (1991), ‘Te idea of home – a kind of space’, Social Research, 58 (1): 51–62. Dundley, S. (2011), ‘Feeling at home: Producing and consuming things in Karenni refugee camps on the Tai-Burma border’, Population, Space and Place, 17 (6): 742–55. Dunn, E. C. (2017), No Path Home. Humanitarian Camps and the Grief of Displacement, Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press. Eastmond, M. (1997), Te Dilemmas of Exile. Chilean Refugees in the USA, Gothenburg: Acta Univesitatis Gothenburgensis. Fassin, D. (2010), La Raison humanitaire. Une histoire morale du temps présent, Paris: Gallimard-Seuil. Feld S., and K. H. Basso, eds. (1996), Senses of Place, Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. Gill, N., J. Caletrio and V. Mason (2011), ‘Introduction: Mobilities and forced migration’, Mobilities, 6 (3): 301–16. Glick Schiller, N., L. Basch and C. Blanc-Szanton, eds. (1994), Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized NationStates, Lanhorne: Gordon and Breach. Glick Shiller, N., and N. Salazar (2013), ‘Regimes of mobility across the globe’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 39 (2): 183–200. Graham, M., and S. Khosravi (1997), ‘Home is where you make it: Repatriation and diaspora culture among Iranians in Sweden’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 10 (2): 115–33.

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Graw, K., and S. Schielke, eds. (2012), Te Global Horizon: Expectations of Migration in Africa and the Middle East, Leuven: Leuven University Press. Grønseth, A. S. (2018), Homing Interview #18. Available online: https://homing.soc. unitn.it/homing-interviews/ (accessed 13 November 2018). Grønseth, A. S., E. Støa, R. Ø. Torshaug and Å. L. Hauge (2016), ‘Housing qualities and efects on identity and well-being: Teoretical perspectives for interdisciplinary research on asylum seeker receptions centres’, Research Report No. 169/2016, Lillehammer: Lillehammer University College. Grønseth, A. S. and R. Ø. Torshaug (2014), ‘Struggling for home where home is not meant to be: A study of asylum seekers in reception centres in Norway’, paper presented at the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth Decennial Conference Anthropology and Enlightenment, University of Edinburgh, 19–22, June. Gupta, A., and J., Ferguson, eds. (1997), Culture Power Place, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Heidegger, M. (1971 [1954]), ‘Building dwelling thinking’, in M. Heidegger (ed.), Poetry, Language, Tought, 143–61, New York: Harper & Row. Horst, C. (2006), ‘Virtual dialogues? Te value of electronic media for research among refugee diasporas’, Refuge, 23 (1): 51–7. Hui, A. (2016), ‘Te boundaries of interdisciplinary felds: Temporalities shaping the past and future of dialogue between migration and mobilities research’, Mobilities, 11: 66–82. Jansen, S., and S. Löfving eds. (2009), Struggles for Home: Violence, Hope and the Movement of People, Oxford: Berghahn Books. Kibreab, G. (2002), ‘When refugees come home: Te relationship between stayers and returnees in post-confict Eritrea’, Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 20 (1): 53–80. Korac, M. (2009), Remaking Home: Reconstructing Life, Place and Identity in Rome and Amsterdam, Oxford: Berghahn Books. Leung, L. (2011), ‘Taking refuge in technology: Communications practices in refugee camps and immigration detention’, New Issues in Refugee Research, Research Paper 202, Geneva: UNHCR. Ley-Cervantes M., and J. M. Duyvendak (2017), ‘At home in generic places: Personalizing strategies of the mobile rich’, Journal of Housing and the Built Environment 32: 63–76. Löfving, S. (2009), ‘Liberal emplacement: Violence, home and the transforming space of popular protest in Central America’, in S. Jansen and S. Löfving (eds.), Struggles for Home: Violence, Hope and the Movement of People, 149–72, Oxford: Berghahn Books.

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Malkki, L. (1995a), ‘Refugees and exile: From “refugee studies” to the national order of things’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 24: 495–523. Malkki, L. (1995b), Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Malkki, L. (1996), ‘Speechless emissaries: Refugees, humanitarism, and dehistoricization’, Cultural Anthropology, 11 (3): 377–404. Massa, A. (2014), ‘Migrazioni di transito’, in B. Riccio (ed.), Antropologia e migrazioni, 35–44, Roma: CISU. Massa, A. (2017), ‘Putting homing in perspective. Te home/non-home continuum among Eritrean refugees in transit in Ethiopia’, Paper presented at the international workshop Researching Home and Migration. Questions, Methods, Prospects, University of Trento, 5–6 June. Massa, A. (2018), ‘Borders and boundaries as resources for mobility. Multiple regimes of mobility and incoherent trajectories on the Ethiopian-Eritrean border’, Geoforum. Available online: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2018.01.007 (accessed 15 September 2018). Merleau-Ponty, M. (2005 [1945]), Phenomenology of Perceptions, London and New York: Routledge. Miller, D. et al. (2016), How the World Changed Social Media, London: UCL Press. Mountz, A. (2011), ‘Te enforcement archipelago: Detention, haunting, and asylum on islands’, Political Geography, 30 (3): 118–28. Nowicka, M. (2007), ‘Mobile locations. Construction of home in the group of transnational professionals’, Global Networks, 7 (1): 69–86. Ong, A. (2003), Buddha Is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America, Berkley: University of California Press. Parsloe, T. (2017), ‘Appropriating buildings to house refugees: Berlin Tempelhof ’, Forced Migration Review, 55: 35–6. Petersen, M. G. et al. (2010), ‘Tactics for homing in mobile life – A feldwalk study of extremely mobile people’, Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services, 265–74, New York: Association for Computing Machinery. Pinelli, B. (2017), ‘Border, politics and subjects. Introductory notes on refugee research in Europe’, Etnografa e ricerca qualitativa, X (1): 5–24. Rahola, F. (2010), ‘Te space of camps. Towards a genealogy of places of internment in the present’, in A. Dal Lago and S. Palidda (eds.), Confict, Security and the Reshaping of Society, 185–99, London and New York: Routledge. Rapport, N., and A. Dawson, eds. (1998), Migrants of Identity: Perceptions of Home in a World of Movement, London: Berg, 1998.

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4

Temporalities Alejandro Miranda Nieto

Introduction Finding appropriate moments for acting is crucial to the making of home. ‘Timing is everything’, the saying goes, and adjusting our actions to a minuteby-minute precision constitutes a key aspect of our ordinary routines. Besides the issue of when to do what, there are specifc forms of temporality that emerge from the social synchronization of these actions. ‘In one day in the modern world’, Lefebvre (2004: 75) maintains, ‘everybody does more or less the same thing at more or less the same times, but each person is really alone in doing it’. Shared or not, one’s ordinary activities tend to be synchronized to the rhythms of the place in which one lives. Consider, for instance, eating or sleeping: the appropriate moments for doing these activities greatly vary from place to place and country to country. Still, the vast majority of people tend to eat or sleep roughly at the same time like others around them. Timing is key to social life. Tis is why the social synchronization of our ordinary activities becomes most noticeable when migrating to a new country (Cwerner 2001). Carlos, an Ecuadorian man who moved to Madrid nineteen years ago, told me that right afer migrating he experienced a gradual process of adaptation to the timing for eating and resting. ‘Hurried’ breakfasts in Madrid contrasted with the hearty and leisurely ones he was used to have in his hometown, and lunch, dinner and bedtime tended to be much later. Like many other migrants, I have also passed through periods of digestive and gastronomic conversion in moving from one country to another, having main meals and going bed at diferent times. And like most people, Carlos and I have ended up adapting

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to generalized temporalities, seeking to give subjective coherence to the succession of our quotidian activities while attuning ourselves to temporal regimes. As Zerubavel’s (1976, 1981) studies on the rhythms of the social show, our private and public lives are synchronized to social organization. A point that is less evident, however, is that it takes time to synchronize oneself to new routines and to become attuned to the right moments for partaking of ordinary activities. In other words, it takes time to make oneself at home. My aim in this chapter is to explore temporal dimensions of home-making and migration. I specifcally seek to investigate migrants’ home-making from a perspective that puts temporality at the centre. Te experience of home within and beyond the dwelling place seems to be punctuated by various temporalities. While we tend to portray our lives as a continuous progression through time, it is widely recognized in the scholarly literature that there is no single, but multiple (and ofen-conficting) temporalities of the social (see, for instance, Crang 2011: 339). Troughout this chapter I argue that the timing of domestic life tends to be framed by temporal regimes. Here I use the notion of temporal regime to refer to systems through which the duration of events becomes structured. For instance, the activities that one carries out within the confnes of the domestic space tend to be attuned to a more or less successive organization of events. Of course, our domestic lives tend to be far from a smooth fow from one activity to the next. Struggling to wake up in the morning, to then getting ready with minute-by-minute precision and having breakfast with an eye on the clock calculating the exact moment to leave home is a very common scenario – and an example of temporalization of the mundane. Tis way of addressing regimes of temporality partly draws from Hartog’s (2015) notion of ‘regimes of historicity’, defned as ‘a way of linking together past, present, and future, or of mixing the three categories’ (2015: XV). From Hartog’s perspective, historicity here refers to ‘how individuals or groups situate themselves and develop in time, that is, the forms taken by their historical condition’ (2015: XV). While this perspective informs this chapter, I use the narrower notion of temporal regimes to convey dimensions of home and migration, and to capture diferent forms of temporality produced by home-making. By framing home as a type of place (Easthope 2004: 135), much of the social sciences literature on home has privileged space over time. Tis emphasis on spatiality also resonates with much of the literature on migration, since it

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ofen portrays the process of migrating as a type of movement that involves re-location. It would be unthinkable to approach home-making or migratory processes without referring to their spatial dimensions (Boccagni 2017: 49– 64), and also to deny that space and time are intimately associated (Schatzki 2010: 38). Still, the temporalities of home and migration have been investigated to a much lesser extent. Tere is an emerging body of literature explicitly dealing with issues of home and temporality (Pink 2012; Boccagni 2017; Pink et al. 2017), as well as migration and temporality (Cwerner 2001; Robertson 2015; Mavroudi et al. 2017). I draw on these theoretical and empirical contributions, as well as my ethnographic feldwork conducted with Ecuadorian migrants in Madrid, to examine the plural and contextual character of temporalities of home in light of migratory experiences. Te reminder of this chapter consists of two moves. First, it locates the problematic of temporalities of home by bringing into focus a series of conceptual and theoretical contributions from the aforementioned literature. It then analyses the everyday temporalities in a household to investigate how degrees of privacy and intimacy are produced through temporal regimes. I argue that ways of representing the past in one’s current place of dwelling, hopes of returning to an idealized home(land) (whatever scale may be involved) and ways of actualizing the future while searching for home constitute signifcant temporal dimensions (among many others) that inform and shape migrants’ sense of home.

Home and migration through the prism of temporality Despite being concepts that escape sharp defnitions, much of the literature concurs that time and temporality allude to the processual and irreversible. ‘Temporality’, Sartre (1978: 130) suggests, ‘is ofen considered as indefnable. Everybody admits however that it is before all else a succession.’ What is ‘successive’ about home and how could a temporal perspective assist us in the examination of home-making processes? Drawing from Heidegger’s Being and Time (2010 [1953]), Iparraguirre (2015) distinguishes between time and temporality. Time can be understood as ‘the phenomenon of becoming in itself ’ (2015: 4) which is common to the experience of every human. Although temporality is also inherent to the human experience,

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it specifcally refers to the ‘apprehension of becoming’ (2015: 4). In other words, temporality connotes the social appropriation of time. Tus, from this perspective temporality is understood as socially produced, plural and contextual. Temporality is not homogeneous, but multiple and in constant process of unfolding. Troughout this chapter I draw from this distinction to focus primarily on temporalities of the social to investigate the successive character of home. In broad terms, there has been a much more pronounced interest in spatial dimensions of home than in its temporalities. Tis is not to say, of course, that time and its related notions – such as pace, rhythm and tempo – have been overlooked in the literature (see, for instance, Heller 1995; Cwerner and Metcalfe 2003; Bailey 2017). It is rather that perspectives that explicitly address time and temporal dimensions of home as object of study have been less widely acknowledged and much more recent. Tese new approaches are related to the growing interest in assorted felds on themes that point towards a processual and dynamic understanding of society as complex relationships that unfold over time. Adam (1990, 1994, 1995, 1998) has made convincing cases for analyses of social phenomena that disentangle time-related concepts largely confated in everyday parlance. Adam specifcally indicates that there is much to be explored in the confgurations of ‘tempo, timing, duration, sequence and rhythm as the mutually implicating structures of time’ (1998: 202). ‘Norms, habits and conventions’, she (1995: 66) reminds us, constitute ways of regulating social space through the order, pace, duration, recurrence and timing of social life. In relation to the temporalities of home, Pink (2012) and Pink et al. (2017) analyse household routines, such as house cleaning, to explore how domestic time is constituted in practice. Pink (2012: 188) suggests that domestic time is variously formed through the intersection between routines, skills and sensorial ways of knowing, as well as ‘biographical, memorial and imaginative ways of situating the “now” in relation to past and future’. Drawing from contemporary theories of practice, as well as the work of Massey (2005) and Ingold (2008), Pink’s emphasis on the temporal dimensions of home-making practices opens up avenues for thinking of home as ‘always in progress, always being made, it is, a “constellation of processes”, one of which is its architectural form’ (2012: 191).

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Since many activities cannot be enacted simultaneously, our everyday routines ofen overlap and we seem to ‘run out’ of time. Tis is partly why domestic time is ofen portrayed as a limited resource than can be saved, spent, wasted or exhausted. From this perspective, time is portrayed as homogeneous, universal and abstract. But this thinking habit reifes the notion of time (here understood as the irreversible process of becoming). Teories of practice contend this approach by arguing that social practices not only ‘consume’ time, but also ‘produce’ it. Shove (2003), among others (see also Schatzki 2009, 2010; Shove et al. 2012), argues that practices indeed take objective time (in terms of measured time such as minutes and hours), but also that time and space are produced and reconstituted through social practice. In considering that human activity takes time, it is important to be aware that the measurement of time is neither time in itself, nor temporality (Serres and Latour 1995: 61–2). In other words, minutes, hours or years are merely ways of measuring time, and do not constitute the inexorable and irreversible process of becoming as such. Tis point resonates with de Certeau’s (2002: 117) argument that ‘space is practised place’, although Shove and others extend it to the realm of time-space. Pink (2012) takes the insight that time is ‘produced’ through practice and brings it into the analysis of the household. In examining ordinary activities conducted in domestic places, Pink invites us to rethink ‘how the routine and (apparently) normative practices of everyday life – such as cooking, showering and so on – which unfold day afer day, are the makers and markers of time’ (2012: 189). Te process of making oneself at home not only takes time, but also ‘makes’ time in the sense of producing distinct temporalities. What changes and what stays the same in this incessant fow? A sense of home tends to endure throughout people’s life trajectories. Past home-related experiences inform and shape current home-making practices. Habitual dispositions, meanings, use of artefacts and development of skills become inscribed in our bodies, just as much as into the materiality of our domestic spaces. Current practices carry traces that become oriented towards ideal futures. Terefore, it is possible to consider that home-making ‘makes’ time as it unfolds and reconstitutes temporal regimes. As Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992: 139) put it: Far from being the automatic product of a mechanical process, the reproduction of social order accomplishes itself only through the strategies and practices via which agents temporalize themselves and make the time

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of the world (which does not prevent them from ofen experiencing it as a transcendent reality upon which they have no control, as with waiting, impatience, uncertainty, etc.).

In drawing from Bourdieu and Wacquant’s insight that the social order is structured through practices that produce time, I argue that home-making produces and reshapes temporal dimensions of domestic life. Tat is, home becomes temporalized through practice. Tis is a point to be further elaborated in the following sections in light of the case of a household’s temporal regimes. However, it is signifcant to highlight here that the temporal modalities of home (Adam and Groves 2007) are ofen revisited throughout people’s domestic lives. Tese modalities ofen take shape as a meaningful past, attached to present dwelling conditions and oriented towards aspirations for the upcoming. In other words, the meanings of past, present and future homes in people’s lives do constitute not only an ongoing movement from early to old age, but also a series of overlapping trails (Ingold 2007). Tis convergence in the modalities of time is a stance that Boccagni (2017: 70) calls ‘cross-temporal imagination’, an ongoing exercise through which people orient their sense of home in relation to past, present and future. At the core of issues of the temporalities of home lie the tension between continuity and change, the friction between what moves and what stays the same. This is what Serres and Latour (1995: 58–9) refer to as the ‘percolation of time’: the constant flow through which certain elements pass through, while others stay. This metaphor is useful for thinking of the ways through which specific ways of making home endure over time and space. There are ways of doing that persist despite changing context: cleaning habits, ways of cooking, organizing the space, or establishing moments of intimacy and privacy. Among the myriad elements that compose our sense of home, there are certain elements that endure while others fade away. This dialectic is central in the temporal modalities of home, to the process of recalling the past and reorienting it to the present and anticipating the future. Therefore, enquiring about time and home is to enquire about the permanence and transformation of its material bases, meanings, relationships and practices.

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Migration and temporality Te experience of migration is characterized to an extent by the interplay between transformation and continuity. What changes and what stays the same throughout migrants’ dwelling experiences are refected on a series of practices that endure despite being enacted in new contexts, while others are adapted, enacted infrequently or merely forgotten. Just as assimilation and enduring transnational ties are ‘neither incompatible nor binary opposites’ (Levitt and Glick-Schiller 2004: 1003), but can be complementary and coconstitutive, home-making practices can persist and adapt at the same time. Tere is much to be learnt from the processes through which migrants’ homemaking practices endure, become reshaped or substituted, particularly in relation to the material bases of households, as well as the meanings and skills that emerge as part of this process. In focusing on the temporalities of home among migrants, it would be facile to frame this phenomenon without questioning what is characteristic from the migratory experience. In her critique of approaches to time in the social sciences, Adam (1994) questions the distinctions made in classical anthropology between the perceptions of time among so-called modern societies and non-Western societies that draw from categorizations such as linear and cyclical temporalities. Much of the contemporary literature makes clear that there are multiple ways of experiencing temporality in the process of socially appropriating time (Adam 1990). Tis diversity is certainly not an attribute of a particular social group. In following Adam (1994), we can then acknowledge that migrants, peasants, inhabitants of global cities and pretty much everyone must deal with assorted temporalities, both linear and cyclical. Still, becoming and being a migrant involves distinct experiences of temporality. Migrating, for instance, facilitates a ‘cross-temporal imagination’ through which the current meanings of home are evaluated through the prism of past experiences and restructured towards the uncertainties of the future. Tis imagination is, in part, marked by a sense of incompleteness that turns home into an ongoing project of construction. As Cwerner (2001: 27) puts it in his study of Brazilian migrants in London, ‘Te future is uncertain; the present seems to be leading nowhere; and the past cannot be relied upon as a guide for action.’ While experiences may widely vary, there is ofen a sense

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of temporariness in the lives of highly mobile people, a feeling of dwelling on a provisional arrangement, a hesitance between staying and foreseeing the possibility of moving again – a point that is illustrated later in this chapter.

Home and work Apart from its common connotations of site of rest, refuge and security (Rapoport 1995: 29), the domestic place is also used by many people as a space for working. Te overlapping between work and domestic life constitutes a privileged entry point into the temporalities of home given that the realms of labour and domesticity have been largely constructed as separate and essentially distinct (Perin 1998). In other words, the dwelling place is ofen seen as a place of non-work – although for many it involves both labour and leisure. In their study of professionals working signifcant periods of time at home, Tietze and Musson (2002, 2003) describe how the lived temporalities are shaped by the ways in which these individuals engage with the spheres of work and home. Tey illustrate how professionals working from home establish strict temporal boundaries that regulate their activities, protecting their work time from the seemingly uncontrollable times of the household. Tese boundaries are ‘continually queried, challenged and eroded by the family/household’ (2002: 451). Te regulation and control of labour at home have been a prominent theme in several case studies. In discussing the relevance of constraints within or external to the household, Felstead and Jewson (2000: 115–42) highlight the relevance of discipline, self-management techniques and ‘technologies of the self ’. Drawing from these analyses, I elaborate later in this chapter how temporal and spatial regimes are constructed and regulated to sustain both labour and domestic life. Working at home is not merely a relocation of labour, but a confuence between two spheres of meaning that is ofen structured as essentially diferent. Tis distinction partly owes to the ways in which generating conditions for privacy or publicness underpins dwelling experiences. And this is also why examining temporal dimensions of home-making becomes useful to understand how the thresholds between private and public, leisure and work become enacted in practice. While conducting feldwork in Madrid, I observed how my informants set the timing of home by establishing thresholds of privacy and intimacy. In fnding ways to allocate specifc moments to certain activities,

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it appears as if they simply lef other activities aside. In this way, diferentiating between work and domestic life constituted an attempt to distinguish between the inside and outside of a specifc time-space. Contrasting with these attempts to control the unfolding of working at home, Adam (1995: 95) reminds us that the times for many of our household activities such as ‘caring, loving and educating […] are not so much time measured, spent, allocated and controlled, as time lived, time made and time generated’. Tese eforts to shape the unfolding of events point towards the importance of examining how people establish temporal regimes of home. Te crucial point about the temporalities of working while sustaining and domestic life at home – and what diferentiates them from other nondomestic times, paces, tempi and rhythms – is that they tend to overlap while social actors struggle to arrange them in a successive manner. In these cases, home and work get easily entangled. To further explore this point, we now turn to the domestic life of Carlos, the man whom I have briefy introduced at the beginning of this chapter. As an example of contemporary migratory experiences, the succession of events in his fat illustrates the entanglement between the sort of work he does and the orchestration of his domestic life.

Domesticating temporal regimes Carlos is a man from Ecuador in his late forties who migrated to Madrid nineteen years ago. He currently lives with his wife and son in a three-bedroom fat in a suburb in the south of Madrid. Two of the bedrooms in this fat are rented on Airbnb, an online platform that allows people to rent their entire properties, or part of them, to be used as a ‘bed and breakfast’. I stayed at Carlos’ for several weeks in two diferent periods while conducting feldwork in that city. Tis fortunate circumstance gave me access to, and allowed me to participate in, the rhythm, pace and tempo of the domestic life in this fat. Carlos and I got along well with each other from the outset because, as he pointed out afer I told him I come from Mexico, he has become interested in Mexican culture since he hosted for a long period a young student from my country who became almost ‘part of the family’. His efortless hospitality made it easy for me to spend several mornings in his living room conversing

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about previous tenants, his siblings living in Madrid, London and Loja, Ecuador, his casual jobs, my family, my job, and more generally about life in Spain and Ecuador. Tese conversations were complemented with an in-depth interview and a series of casual interactions with his wife, son and the hosts who happened to be renting the room next door to mine. Before moving to Madrid nineteen years ago, Carlos was a teacher in a primary school in a rural town in southern Ecuador. His initial description of a calm and almost-idyllic environment became much more nuanced as he detailed the difculties he faced during those years. One of the most noticeable issues regarded the delays on the payment of his salary, as the public school in which he was teaching was ofen two to three months late in processing teachers’ payments. Tese were also times marked by political confict, social unrest and economic depression in Ecuador (Fontaine 2002). Teacher trade unions, among some others, led strikes across the country. Tese circumstances coincided with the fact that his brother had moved to Madrid some years before and was then insisting that he should quit his teaching job and move with him. In Madrid, his brother asserted, work was hard and bad, but the pay was better than in their town. Carlos found somebody to replace him for three months in his job as a teacher and lef to Madrid to try his luck. He worked as a waiter in a restaurant for one year, missing the possibility of going back to his former job. Tis irreversible choice was infuenced by the hope of regularizing his migratory status, which to his surprise went relatively smooth: three years afer his arrival he became a regular migrant and some years later acquired the Spanish nationality. It was during these early years in Madrid that he found a job in the construction industry, a booming sector that in those years was recruiting many newcomers – and that would end up sufering a dramatic fall in the economic crisis of 2008 (Neuhauser 2018; Nolte 2018). During those years he shared a fat with his brother’s family – a period in which he also met his wife, a woman from Quito who had also migrated to Madrid. Tey ended up moving to a fat they acquired with one of the accessible credits available at that time. Te economic crisis of 2008 had a devastating efect on the real estate market and construction industry in Spain (Mahía and de Arce 2010; Albertos Puebla and Sánchez Hernández 2014). Carlos and his wife could not keep up with the interest rates and ‘had to return’ their fat. Teir investment suddenly vanished, but now that he refects on this episode with the passage of time,

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he said with a half-smile that at least there was no debt remaining. Tree years later, he had to leave his employment afer working for eleven years in a construction company that went broke. Having lost his job and property, he used the money of his severance package to start building a house in a suburb in Quito, close from where his parents-in-law live. He and his family then moved to his current fat in southern Madrid, an apartment that was initially unafordable to them but they have managed to sustain by subletting two of its bedrooms through an online platform. Troughout these years his wife has continued working full time as a secretary while he turned to more fexible, casual work. It has been several years already that he has been driving a taxi, running the Airbnb and doing some other casual jobs when time afords. Carlos and his family have created a distinct living arrangement as a response to the difculties brought by the economic crisis, distinct from their previous dwelling experiences in Ecuador, as well as the ones in Madrid before the crisis. A signifcant dimension of this new arrangement is its temporal regimes, which operate as an ordered way of doing things in time, as ‘rule’ of timing. Tey needed to reshape their activities to carry on with their family goals, leading to a new balance between work and domestic life: full time work for her and a much more fexible schedule for him. In this way, distinguishing between work and home has become more difcult for Carlos, but has allowed him to take care of his son while performing some remunerated activities, producing a particular ordering of activities (Felski 2000: 77–98). Te wider socio-economic change that carried the economic crisis transformed the domestic life of Carlos and his family. To further analyse how these spatiotemporal orders are practised in their dwelling place it is necessary to look more carefully at their domestic routines and the ways in which their space is used at diferent moments of the day, and days of the week.

Temporalizing private space Carlos’ apartment is small, sober and its cleanness is that of a place that has been prepared for strangers, for Airbnb guests. On weekdays the scent of pine cleaning product mixes with that of lentils or chickpeas, on the weekends with tostado (toasted maize) or pork stew. Te narrow and elongated shape of the fat is given by a corridor without windows that gives access to the other areas

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of the apartment. As one enters through the corridor, there is a continuous wall on the right-hand side, and on the lef there are the two guest bedrooms, a narrow kitchen, the living room, the bedroom that Carlos and his wife share, and fnally the bathroom at the end of the corridor. Because the only source of natural light comes from the rooms on the lef, it is necessary to switch the light on in the corridor as one crosses the entrance – except when this is your home and you know where things are without having to look at them. In one occasion I went to the toilet in the middle of the night, trying to be as quiet as possible. Te corridor was obviously dark and I walked touching the wall, fumbling about to the bathroom. It was then that I realized that guests and hosts use this house in diferent ways, as being at home involves an embodied knowledge of the disposition of things, even in the dark. As a temporary guest, I noisily stumbled upon several objects before fnding the bathroom’s light switch. Te intimate knowledge of a place not only takes time but it also produces spatiotemporal confgurations through the very process of dwelling.

Figure 4.1 Lentils soaking in Carlos’ kitchen. Author’s photo.

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Establishing degrees of privacy is one of the most relevant ways through which guests and hosts produce temporal regimes in negotiating the diferent areas of this fat. Tis demarcation of privacy is bound to specifc moments of the day, a timed set of actions that turns certain areas of the fat into temporalized spaces (Lefebvre 2004: 89). Bedrooms are strongholds of privacy all day long, and the use of the kitchen and bathroom is negotiated as needed, usually without much overlapping afer getting to know each other’s morning or evening routines. But the area that captured my attention because of its temporal rhythms was the living room. Tis area constitutes a semi-private space that contrasts with the rest of the apartment, an area that acquires diferent functions depending on the moment of the day, and the day of the week. Te morning on weekdays starts with the bustle of people leaving the fat and Carlos dropping his son at school. Ten, the living room becomes Carlos’ zone, his place for intermittently watching the TV while also sweeping and mopping the foors of the fat, cleaning the bathroom, doing laundry, preparing lunch, sending WhatsApp messages and making some phone calls. Te sofa becomes the epicentre of these actions. Sometimes he has to leave in a hurry because of a taxi lif has been suddenly solicited: most of his customers ask for private lifs scheduled in advance, but sometimes there are unexpected requests. In any case, he needs to make time to pick his son up from school. On their return they transform the living room into an eating area by placing some chairs and the table in the middle of the room. Te TV is sometimes on, but that depends on how leisurely the lunch is. Some days Carlos takes his son to sports activities; otherwise they clear up the table, turn the TV of and the boy starts doing his homework. I quite noticed that he spent several years working as a teacher in Ecuador because during those moments he adopts a much more teacherly tone while assisting his son with his homework. Tese afernoons are also moments in which Carlos checks his mobile phone while fnishing some housekeeping or cooking. Several late afernoons we chatted in the kitchen over a cup of cofee right before his wife arrived from work. Te living room then shifs into a family space for playing, having dinner and conversing. Sitting on the sofa – one of the key relational items of home – chatting and sporadically paying attention to the TV is an event that livens up their evening and tightens their family bonds. Te evenings are also the moments in which the guests arrive and have some interaction from the threshold between the corridor and the living room.

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Figure 4.2 Carlos’ living room. Author’s photo.

In saying that degrees of privacy are established throughout the day, I imply that the access to diferent rooms of this small fat is carefully timed. Te only occasion in which I entered the living room was in the mornings, when this area had its more public facet. But in the evenings Carlos and his family established a pocket of privacy by using it as a place to be as a family. Tis is the way in which their home, family and place overlapped to become temporalized. Since the other areas in their apartment are regularly shared with strangers, they have managed to turn this area into a space of intimacy and familiarity by establishing an ordinary system that structures the unfolding of these events. How did I perceive that I could not get into this room at certain moments of the day? Te space was small and there was not much room for several people moving around. But it was not simply a matter of having enough room for interacting. Rather, there was a tacit agreement set by the disposition of the

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objects and bodies, and especially by the way in which they communicated with the guests from inside of the living room. In our evening interactions I greeted them and had brief exchanges standing in the corridor, right at the threshold of the living room. Always kind and welcoming, they casually greeted me with a ‘good evening, how was your day?’, while projecting their voice slightly louder and lifing their face as if speaking to somebody at the distance. We were roughly one-and-a-half metre from each other, but their gesticulation indicated a greater intersubjective distance (Canetti 1978). Troughout my stay I saw other guests engaging in conversation in the same fashion, standing in the corridor right as I did. We respected those spatiotemporal arrangements and sticked to the privacy of our bedrooms, meeting others only while using the common areas in the evenings. But the mornings were diferent, as Carlos turned the living room into a semi-public area with words of familiarity, quietly saying pásale, siéntate (come in, have a seat). Tese gestures and ways of negotiating space – the making of what Gofman (1971) calls ‘territories of the self ’ – constitute temporal orderings that give structure to the ongoing process we call home. However ordinary these gestures of privacy may appear, my aim here is to point that the production of privacy and intimacy relies on a careful orchestration of routines and tacit agreements. All the care that is put into ensuring a relatively smooth sequence of activities within the limited confnes of this fat responds to a large extent to the fact that this is a guest house. As an Airbnb, the online reputation built by the guests’ comments is crucial. And while Carlos keeps this place clean, tidy and tourist-friendly, his wife, son and himself still have to sustain a family life. Te timing for enacting privacy in that living room was fnely calibrated because Carlos’ family set up the conditions for attuning guests and hosts to such temporal regimes. On weekends the living room was again reshaped for socialization, becoming an area for receiving two or three friends or relatives and having shared meals. Te Airbnb guests were typically not invited, although they made some concessions with me a few times. I was surprised by how gender roles in this household changed during the weekend. As I have mentioned, on weekdays Carlos takes care of most cooking and cleaning while taking care of his son afer school. Weekends were the opposite, as his wife does most of the cooking and cleaning and assumes a much more traditional role of housewife.

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Tis was particularly noticeable while having lunch in the living room: Carlos’ wife had a more conventional role caring for routine household tasks while he conversed and entertained their guests. Food was diferent too: more elaborate, of course, because of the leisurely pace for its preparation and the possibility of lingering around the table in sobremesa (afer-lunch conversation). Te pace of these activities also constituted a way of marking the end of the week, as well as a way of being in their living room as a family and recovering energies for the upcoming week. Tis is just an example of a larger system of timing and duration of activities that reconstitutes domestic spatiotemporalities. A system for connecting, as well as establishing, distances through thresholds of privacy (Brighenti 2014: 33). Tese spatiotemporal regimes enacted in and around the living room are crucial for both sustaining the work of running this Airbnb and continuing having a family life. In this way, Carlos, his family and guests create the conditions to diferentiate between work and domestic life. In allocating periods of time to each activity, the space fulfls diferent functions, serving both as a guest house and as a family house. Tis is where home, as a temporalized space, reveals itself as practised through home-making. Home is temporally bound, which is to say that its past, present and future representations do not constitute an ongoing movement from previous to upcoming occurrences. Te temporalities of home are not characterized by mere repetition, but by relationships that become formed through reprisal, variation and motion. Tey are forms of recurrence that build up and lead forward, an interplay between accumulation and change, an ‘ordered variation of changes’ (Dewey 2005: 160).

A provisional arrangement As we have seen, Carlos and his family resort to a series of strategies for making themselves at home and producing forms of privacy in their shared apartment. Tis situation is passable to Carlos because, he explained, they are investing in a project for the future: the remittance house in Quito. Overall, the mechanisms through which they share their place with strangers are partly possible because of the emergence of a so-called sharing economy and the pervasiveness of digital technologies (Russo and Domínguez 2016). Hosting

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others in their fat can also carry meanings of exchange and encounter with tourists from all over the world. But more generally, this living arrangement originates in a context of economic crisis, social disadvantage and inequality that makes it difcult for this family to make a living. Doing taxi lifs at irregular hours while meeting commitments at home during the day and fnding time to take care of his son on weekdays are some of the ways through which Carlos responds to this context. Tis household arrangement was initially envisioned to be a provisional measure, but now it seems to last longer than expected. Sharing their fat was planned by Carlos and his wife as a way to confront the impact of the economic crisis on their domestic life. Yet, afer all these years the crisis does not seem to be quite over for them and many others (Neuhauser 2018). At certain point they confded to me that this household arrangement now feels rather endless. Tis situation somehow resembles the years afer Carlos arrived in Madrid. At that time, he ambiguously imagined to return to his life in southern Ecuador some years later, afer having saved enough money. Finding the right moment to shif one’s life circumstances is ofen a daunting task. Imagining and living one’s stay in the country of arrival as a provisional measure infuse a distinct temporality to the experience of migration, turning it into a form of ‘permanent impermanence’ (Brun 2012: 427). As the Chapter 3 in this volume elaborates, people tend to become involved in home-making even when striving to make themselves at home, not feeling at home, being prevented from its making or opposing to it. One morning Carlos and I were having cofee in his living room. I was sitting on a chair close to the small table cornered in a side while he sat on his habitual corner on the sofa. We watched on the large TV screening the latest news about a boy from Andalusia who had been missing for several days. Te story suddenly took over the media and we were listening to speculations on the whereabouts of a boy about the same age as Carlos’ son. I asked him if he and his family felt safe in Madrid. He nodded and went on comparing between Ecuador and Spain, saying that sometimes he would like to move back to Ecuador because he could fnd an easier living arrangement. ‘But then, one’s fearful because of the insecurity in the country. I think about going back, but there is that fear: you go around Quito and you can’t go just like that with your mobile, you can be robbed in the bus, sometimes for a

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simple thing you can even lose your life. If you catch a taxi, the driver fears the passenger and the passenger the driver.’ Carlos hesitation between staying and leaving involves many diferent considerations, among which feeling safe in an urban context plays a signifcant role. Tis concern also resonates the experience of many South American migrants in Europe (Boccagni and Lagomarsino 2011; López de Lera and Pérez-Caramés 2015). It appears that Carlos’ current dwelling arrangement is a provisional compromise between security, afordability and familiarity. Yet, leaving, staying or moving somewhere else is on the hunt. He is anticipating future scenarios by considering their return to Ecuador, while also fantasizing about swaying between the two countries afer his eventual retirement. He would like his son to continue his studies in Madrid, but also imagines he and his wife retiring in a provincial town in Ecuador and returning to Spain for extended periods of time to visit family and friends. In one of our conversations Carlos confessed being a bit nostalgic about having his extended family reunited together. While he spends holidays in Ecuador once every two years, there is also a lack of synchronization with his siblings and other relatives, as they rarely coincide because they live in Madrid, London and diferent regions of Ecuador. Digital technologies, such as the webcam, have made possible to sustain family relationships despite the geographical distance and diferences in time zone. But the inability of being co-present during important celebrations is the main ingredient in Carlos’ nostalgia. He and his family are not able to go to Ecuador during semana santa (holy week), a Catholic celebration that used to gather his extended family. ‘I haven’t had a proper fanesca in years!’ he said as a way of expressing the inability to reproduce what was once his family life. Fanesca, a dish made of numerous grains, tubers, salted cod and plantain is traditionally cooked the week before Easter. ‘A dish that reunites the family,’ he highlighted. I asked him if they cook fanesca in Madrid, but he replied that it is a dish to be cooked in large quantities given the number of ingredients that require. ‘We go to a [an Ecuadorian] restaurant nearby, one has it there and that’s it, better that way so we don’t forget [about this tradition].’ Having this dish is one of the annual routines through which a sense of home sediments in his life experience, a practice that has remained despite being enacted diferently. Memorable events from our past – such as companionship or the

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aroma and taste of a dish – ofen become idealized to avoid the unwanted circumstances of the present. Nostalgia is not merely a feeling but a trigger for continuity and change. In relation to the tension between continuity and change, Serres and Latour (1995: 58) maintain that time ‘passes, and also it doesn’t pass […]. Time doesn’t fow; it percolates. Tis means precisely that it passes and doesn’t pass […] In a flter one fux passes through, while another does not’ (see also Witmore 2006). A sense of home sediments through the aggregation of past events that form current social structures (Archer 1995). Just as migration corridors between Ecuador and Madrid structured the migratory trajectories of Carlos, the accumulation of past trajectories, routines and habits orients his current sense of home and its orientation towards the future (Lacroix 2016: 187). Tinking about the constant passage of time as a form of percolation is a way of portraying the things that remain while others pass. Migratory experiences are besieged by timing, that is, by the need for judging and controlling when certain activities have to be done. In the case of Carlos, this need is expressed in the tension between staying in Madrid and returning to Ecuador. As in the case of Mariana, analysed in Chapter 1, many migrants carry with them a sense of being temporarily in a place, something that in their study of the experience among refugees Brun and Fábos (2015: 12) call ‘permanent temporariness’. Waiting seems to punctuate the experience of making oneself at home in its provisional guise. While many migrants wait for bureaucratic procedures (Cwerner 2001: 28), some others reorient their future, imagining moving between their homeland and their current place of residence. As Minnegal puts it, ‘By strategic waiting, as much as by strategically making others wait, I argue, we give rhythm to social life’ (2009: 90). ‘Timing is everything’, the saying goes, which is perhaps why seeking appropriate moments for moving or staying becomes the predicament of many migrants trying to make themselves at home in Europe.

Conclusion The composition of people’s domestic lives is partly marked by the recurrence of ordinary activities. The meanings, materiality, skills and people that participate in these domestic lives interact in ways that structure

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the timing and duration of domestic activities. But there is more to home than what occurs within the dwelling place. The approach on temporal regimes that this chapter advances can be useful for connecting the actor-oriented practices within the domestic environment to overarching relationships that extend across different registers of the social. In the case that has been analysed we can see how the links between different registers of the social – namely, transnational locations, family relationships and visitors, households and digital platforms of the so-called sharing economy, routines, embodied ways of knowing, and the overlapping of past, present and future – orient people’s sense of home as a form of cross-temporal imagination. While this chapter has focused on temporality, I have also sought to illustrate the intimate relationship between time and space, and to highlight the need to further develop analyses that put the spatiotemporal unfolding of the social at the forefront. If temporalities are ofen taken for granted by both homemakers and scholars, it is partly because they are deeply ingrained in our quotidian lives, becoming hardly noticeable. For Urry (2000: 114), lived time in modern societies tends to be invisible or reduced to its measurement. As I have argued, time is not the measurement of time, but an irreversible process that is made invisible by our habits – which is why it is important to attend to the spatiotemporal constitution of home. Tis chapter has done so by examining processes of synchronicity and asynchronicity within a household. Tis chapter has shown that home-making practices ‘consume’ time as much as ‘produce’ it in the very process of establishing orderings of activities. Moreover, it has sought to illustrate that the making of home is given by temporal modalities that connect past home experiences, future hopes to make oneself at home and present circumstances. In this way, the experience of home is punctuated not only by the spaces in which it takes place, but also by various overlapping temporalities. Rather than perpetuating the view that home is a (fxed) location, this chapter has argued that it is through spatiotemporal arrangements that we give shape to our domestic lives. Home is a process that afords multiple confgurations and social positionalities – which is the issue to be examined next.

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5

Diversities Sara Bonfanti

Introduction Te same people who endorse diversity tend to reject diference. Te question […] is where the boundary between diversity and diference is located. However, it is also necessary to explore whether it could be the case that this kind of boundary, usually seen as one between ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ cultural diferences, is a token one, concealing conficts of another order, to do with politics and class. (Eriksen 2006: 14)

In a world where DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) has become the acronym for a business solution, it is vital to retrace the legacy of social sciences in articulating the meaning of ‘diversity’. Anthropologist Peter Wood (2004) tried to account for the twentieth-century invention of this concept since the rise of Culture and Personality School, through Civil Rights movements, to today’s post-capitalist global condition. Anchored in the US intellectual history, his journey remains partial and positioned, but pays homage to the discipline’s commitment to understand the full range of human identities and experiences. Within a humanistic approach (born in Western modernity, revisited with the development of ‘relatively universal’ human rights, Donnelly  2007), we have come to recognize that diversities crosscut culture, race, ethnicity, nationality, class, gender, sexuality, religion, language, age and ability. Tese multiple identities do not simply coexist in individuals and express across groups; they intersect, engendering multiple modes of being-in-the-world. Yet, such identities are not value-free; any

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past or present society is hierarchical and systematically awards power and privilege to some, while others are marginalized, or repressed. Cultural and moral evaluations have historical and social meanings as well as political, economic and psychological consequences; academy at large, anthropology included, has ofen reproduced these hierarchies. Migration studies have acknowledged that diversity cannot be sieved from diference; contemporary mobilities have enhanced the entanglements of diversities and their swelling interpretations (Brah 1996; Yuval-Davis 2011). As ethnographers, the knowledge we produce tries to represent the world as shared with informants, on the one hand accounting for human variable experiences, on the other laying bare our stance to it. While this chapter mainly focuses upon private home places, and the interpersonal intimacy that domestic ethnography allows, a politically conscious posture in the social sciences cannot overlook that home stands as a metaphor for spatial rights and selective inclusion at many levels. No other image of a bounded place (albeit multiscale and time shifing), which is held to be the cradle of social reproduction, is so relatively universal. While in this volume the notion of ‘domopolitics’ recurs ofen, referring to today’s international order as a planet of state-based homes (Walters 2004), this chapter engages with domopolitics at a minute level: Which orders do diversities at home and across homes articulate? Teoretically, studying home within a mobile perspective (Boccagni 2017) merges the anthropology paradigms of roots and routes (Cliford 1997), moorings and transfers, whose supposed divergence has been defed in recent years since the ‘mobility turn’ (Sheller and Urry 2006; Jayaram and Salazar 2016). Tis chapter subsumes some of the arguments raised by Groes and Fernandez (2018: 21) in their Intimate Mobilities, adding to ‘studies of intimate economies of mobility and migration that challenge widespread dichotomies and assumptions that separate money and sex, intimacy and power, love and labour, bodies and material resources’. Empirically, of the many diversities that I explored within and across homes under conditions of mobility, I chose to focus upon three clusters. Based on my ethnographic data and literature insights from social anthropology and cultural geography, three sections will follow which deal with gender (and age), sexuality and race (and class). Since no axis of human diversity occurs without intersecting others, my headings serve just for

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informative purpose, acknowledging that lived experiences are much more entangled than social scientists may discern. As a feminist ethnographer, familiar with South Asian diasporas, my discussion not only moves from a personal and political standpoint (Stoetzler and Yuval-Davis 2002), but also tries to reconcile self-biases with the gains of two years’ collaboration in a comparative large-scale project on the home-migration nexus. In the chapter ‘(Im)materiality’, I conclude with a postmodern approach to material culture that homes make people as much as the other way round (Miller 2005). In this chapter, I move forward to state that any scale of homes (be they dwellings, neighbourhoods, cities or states) mirrors and forges people’s diversity: their multiple identities, belongings and subjectivities. Within experiences of migration, voluntary or forced, diasporic or self-paced, people’s diversity is read in light of how their cognition, practice and feeling of home(s) are constituted amid changing places, symbols and relations. Before showcasing, I need to clarify what diversity approach I rely upon.

Unplugging diversity Following a paper that the three authors of this book co-wrote and published on the HOMInG project website (Bonfanti et al. 2018), I argue that ‘diversity’ is not an umbrella term for a reductionist taxonomy of being human. Diversity is an elusive concept. It only exists the minute we see it embodied and embedded in real-life experiences, enacted in how people inhabit specifc contexts with their own bodies and subjectivities. At a theoretical level, I stress the crevice between cultural diversity and social diference, whose quote I put in the incipit: comparative and commendable the frst, hierarchical and lamentable the latter (see Bhabha 1994 and Eriksen 2006). Yet, this distinction seems to operate only in abstract terms: mainstreaming diversity raises issues of freedom from discrimination and right to equality. Analytically speaking, diversity is not a concoction of exact social attributes, but it is about the meanings that people may assume when such elements interplay in a social arena. Diversity thus is signifcant only when it stands in context.

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‘Positionality’ is an idea that grew out of the refexive turn in the social sciences in the late 1980s, its main contribution coming from cultural feminism (Alcof 1991). Refusing essentialism, positionality asserts that the many parcels composing one’s identity mark relational positions among unevenly situated subjects (England 1994). In doing ethnography, positionality refers to participants as much as to researchers, shedding light on the politics of identity developed in the feld. Moving forth the integration of the personal into politics, Black Feminism (Crenshaw 1989) coined a new term complementary to positionality: ‘intersectionality’ twigs the interconnection of social categorizations (such as gender, age, sexuality, race, nationality, religion, class, education) as they apply to any given individual or group, creating overlapping and interdependent systems of (dis)advantage (Yuval-Davis 2011). Positionality and intersectionality can help researchers understand the views, struggles and privileges of their diverse interlocutors as well as the bias of their own perspective, thus inviting to exercise refexivity (Salzman 2002). If all diversities are positioned, working on the homemigration nexus in (semi)public and private domestic settings requires careful consideration. Being home itself a threshold between an inside and outside, a place of belonging and another of alienation, some ethical challenges contingent to practising such ethnography emerged. Where do researchers stand in mobile people’s domestic spaces as relatively cultural others (with a certain age and gender, ethnos and capitals and so forth)? On what premises could I gain access to my informants’ homes and gauge their ‘diversities’? Te ensuing sections account for some of the puzzles that lived diversities (with regard to gender, sexuality, race and class, in several combinations) pose when considering home and mobility. Ethnographic examples are drawn from my research experience and a tentative analysis is pursued through a literature review which blends gender studies (from feminist to queer insights) with critical theory, including postcolonial thought. If feminism and anthropology entertain an ‘awkward relationship’ (Strathern 1987), even more awkward is, for an ethnographer herself, to discover that, in the process of writing, anthropology and autobiography merge (Okely and Callaway 1992). Compared to all other chapters in this book, the present one maintains a distinctive style, which is at times self-ethnographic. I defend my argumentative choice claiming that, precisely when talking about others’ diversities, the author holds the right and the duty to make explicit her own critical stand.

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Engendering homes I always worked on home and mobility: though unalike in phenomenological terms, my research sites were home spaces continuously shifing, reproduced and contested, which I approached with critical and feminist concerns. Whether I lived with Irish travellers being displaced from their caravans and forced to settle in city fats or I took prenatal courses together with migrant women (sharing the embodied reproduction of home) or I returned to the home villages of my Indian collaborators resettled in Italy (and then trailed South Asian diasporas across Europe), how these peculiar homes were ‘engendered’ elated me. In spite of their manifest diversity, did I consider the same ‘kind of space’ (Douglas 1991) disguised in many forms and inhabited in various ways by diferent people on the move? ‘En-gendering’1 is a wondrous term. It forces us to see that everything social which comes to life undergoes some development, and that such process is inevitably gendered (put it simply, reliant on the cultural construction of being feminine, masculine – or out of this binary – and on people’s performance of such roles shaped in context, Butler 1990). All ways of homing described in this volume are gendered, any home is en-gendered just like any form of mobility is (Cresswell and Uteng 2012). Hereafer, I wish to discuss, through literature review and ethnographic fndings, how gender, as a prime mark of diversity, relates to home and migration. Since the rise of social sciences in the late nineteenth century, home has been a key issue for feminist geographers, who tended to consider it one of the most emotive geographical concepts clinging to positive connotations of family relations (Longhurst 2012). Te idea of home as a private place, a woman’s realm inherently connected to nature and nurture (thus a marginal space set aside from public discourse), was frst challenged by second wave feminism in the 1970s. In Sheila Ardener’s Women and Space (1981), the relation between place and gender began to be disentangled as a bond of mutual constitution. Borrowing from psychology, geography encouraged then the use of ‘social maps’, to explore how gendered subjects perceive and make use of space. In Ardener’s edited volume, ethnographic evidence collected from actresses, politicians, farmers and housewives in countries across the globe illustrated how space ought to be considered in its physical dimension alongside with

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social and symbolic aspects, as experienced by the subjects who inhabit it in the everyday. Residential layouts in particular are seen as grounded in social rules which articulate gender relations and the division of labour, a theme that human geography has put forth time and again (Massey 1994; McDowell 1999). To feminist eyes, home came to be seen with fascinating rejection: a paradoxical place where to project a womanly identity and/or fght patriarchal oppression. In her essay on the ambivalent values of house and home, Marion Young (2005) agrees with Irigaray and de Beauvoir that the comforts and supports of the domestic place historically come at women’s expense as home keepers. Yet, the author maintains that women’s subjectivities and desires need not be seen on the barricades against such homely role, which is disparately conceived and enacted, especially outside the box usually held by white feminists. As bell hooks (1991) argued retracing the history of Afro-American women, homes could also be a source of female self-esteem, as well as of resistance against gendered racism (referring to coloured domestic work, as I discuss in the third section of this chapter). Applying sensory anthropology to gender studies and material culture, Sarah Pink (2004) wrote an ethnography of home that demystifes the indisputable link between femininity and domesticity. Connoted with smells and sounds, textures and objects, ‘home truths’ reveal how people enact their everyday lives performing gender roles within personal, private worlds. Although quite restrained in a white bourgeois pose, Pink discusses how the home has been afected by the fact that evermore women go out to work, and apparently more men engage in domestic tasks. Her study of domestic en-gendering shows how social change occurs behind closed doors (Miller 2001), looking at how ‘traditional’ households (i.e. heterosexual spouses and children) compare with those belonging to diverse family forms and people living alone. Over the past two decades, as Europe increasingly ‘diversifed’, also owing to new human mobility fows which topped postcolonial movements, migration and diversity studies unleashed new avenues of enquiry, especially into the complex intersections of gender and race. Home, as a metaphor for the Family in Question (Grillo 2008), qualifed as a highly politicized arena: the key place where to understand seemingly ‘other’ gender, generation and kinship relations being enacted and where to unveil the interplay between integration dynamics for minorities in private versus public settings. Being home an eminently

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gendered space, studying it leads to refect on the methodological choices and constraints that may afect the ethnographic quest: whether in terms of accessing homes or of being able to observe and participate in the events that there take place. As outlined in the chapter on scales within this volume, there are inner thresholds in any domestic space that mark not only access to or proscription from specifc rooms, but also coercion or freedom with regard to the interactions casually occurring or being scheduled in such quarters. Te kitchen is perhaps the most womanly gendered of home spaces, and although its interpretation varies vastly, it is within this hearth that the tension between women’s autonomy and oppression has ofen been located (Cieraad 1999). Moreover, as the scope of critical geography research progressed, attention was drawn on negative experiences of home, calling to address forms of domestic injustice that were ofen enacted beside the frelog (Brickell 2012). No other interlocutor of mine was better able to address this critical issue than the West London-based association SBS (Southall Black Sisters). SBS was set up in 1979 to meet the needs of Asian and Afro-Caribbean women. Since then, the organization has helped thousands of women facing violence and abuse at home. Besides providing welfare services and support, it has run campaigns to bring about changes in the social, political, economic and cultural constrictions that have led these women to their door. As I apprehended discussing with a Brit-Sikh volunteer who led me in their premise in 2017, every woman escaping violence presents complex issues, all of which revolve around the collapse of an ideal of home as a haven and the need to restore a new material, symbolic and relational place to make herself (feeling) at home. As Rahila Gupta (2003), leader of SBS, wrote in her introductory remarks to the edited collection From Homebreakers to Jailbreakers: [Every woman] needs help to fnd a refuge space and decent housing, aid with the legal battles for custody of the children and skills to navigate the complicated welfare benefts system, help to safeguard their immigration status once that she may not be dependent upon her spouse anymore, even to support children who may have been abused (or been the spectators of violence perpetrated at home). SBS has been there for the past 40 years to open doors for women locked away by their lack of English, of family and community support, of self-confdence. (Gupta 2003: 1)

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Figure 5.1 Southall Black Sisters’ HQs: A shelter from domestic abuse. Author’s photo.

Regarding domestic violence, not all inner spaces within a house are equally safe or dangerous. Domestic injuries such as severe cuts and burns can be accounted for the very activities and utensils that cooking involves, unless such injuries are raged on women’s bodies by someone else (most of the time by male partners in the household, Duvvury 2010). While SBS volunteers easily confrmed that the kitchen was the most hazardous space for all (disadvantaged or not) British women, not dissimilarly from what I knew about violence against women in Italy, there was a topic crucial to their understanding of domestic abuse among South Asian communities. Women are being burned every day in India in an atrocious inversion of sati (the funeral practice outlawed under British rule in 1829, with wives going up in smoke at their spouses’ funeral pyres). In dowry deaths, the wife is set ablaze by her husband’s kin upon charges of dishonour, for rumoured

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infdelity or for community dissatisfaction with her wedding gif (Suman and Hari 2011). Advocacy groups worldwide have condemned such murders, as tragic examples of violence against women, grounded on a slanted perception of gender and capital: as if women were disposable commodities, valued on a combination of sexual (and reproductive) bodily capital and the material wealth delivered at marriage. Since the setting of these femicides is the home kitchen itself and the weapon the kerosene used to maintain the fre lit on the stove, across the globe they have been known (and disguised by the slayers) as ‘kitchen burnings’. Not only these ominous events crack open the presumed control, security and familiarity that women would f nd and cultivate in their kitchen, but they are a dreadful transnational form of home circulation between the West and the Rest, the subcontinent and its diasporas. Far from being a humble place for cooking and eating, food preparation and family commensality, the kitchen can be a magnifying glass of the diverse activities performed in the home, which, though not certainly extreme as the ones just reported, even so dismantle naïve views of gender and domesticity (Price 2002). Last, this interlude on kitchens as the site of gendered carnage also induces a provocative refection which intersects gender and ethnicity at home. If domestic places are arguably feminine, to what extent cultural diversities are there expressed also in the form of a more violent patriarchal oppression? In the UK, for instance, there grows a literature on ‘honour-based’ crimes against female youths as the ultimate expression of gendered domestic violence, especially reported among Muslim families (Gill et al. 2014). Don’t ethnographers risk to reproduce exotic and degrading views of other people’s domesticity in raising these questions, tracing distinct ‘cultural geographies of home’ (Blunt 2005)? An anthropology of mobility and home cannot refrain from social predicaments, but shall be able to present evidence and discuss interpretations, seeing global issues being deployed in local places with a critical attitude. Te intersection of diversities at home, and how these are positioned in wider social arenas, amplifes (and does not solve) the perennial dilemma of making ‘Otherness’ (Miller 2008). More importantly, it reveals that this process is not just an imperialist tool of social analysis, but an efective procedure operating in the everyday: homes are a bundle of ‘othering’ processes for those who inhabit them.

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Queering homes At the intersection of geography and feminism, Rachel Scicluna (2017) wrote a notable ethnography of home and sexuality focusing on ‘the other side of the kitchen’. Te author explored the experiences of home among a group of older lesbians who, over fve decades, sought to create alternative intimate living spaces. Her ethnographic subjects are a circle of feminist activists residing in London, whose meanings of home emerge from life stories informed by the wider social and political context, and move from memories of childhood kitchens to their contemporary domestic lives. Leaping from radical feminist collectives and squats of the 1980s to the ordinariness of daily home life, their kitchens emerge as a tangle of cultural norms and duties, aspirations and values that reveal the thoughts and behaviours of a cluster of unconventional homemakers. Tese hearths held the most diverse en-gendering of home, proving to be inner thresholds where to investigate the possible queering of apparently normative spaces. Ensuing with feldwork, I pondered whether in the homes of migrants and natives visited I met almost exclusively hetero-normative sexual relations. Was home the sanctuary of heterosexuality or was there something hidden to my view? Did I not see much alternatives because I was not able to recognize ‘other’ sexualities (other than the ‘norm’, or other than mine, Mai and King 2009)? In this section, I wish to refect upon a gap in my research on home and mobilities, reviving experiences that queered my ethnography despite not having discussed them yet. In the following episodes, private dwellings set my informants’ deliberate display (or reluctant concealing) of their sexual orientations and lifestyles; self-narratives and material culture were both crucial to ignite a pre-comprehension of home dynamics usually at bay from visibility and debate. Dina was the frst Italian native to invite me home in Brescia (mid-size industrial city with a high share of immigrant population in northern Italy). In fact, hers was a women-only home: Dina shared the apartment with a younger female partner and her little daughter from a previous marriage; the latter, away on a kids’ camp, had lef a pile of clothes and toys behind (including a giant wooden house for dolls) that their maid was quick at tidying up. From her terrace, Dina pointed to her favourite public home in the neighbourhood: a park whose greens were a retreat for kids and women to gather (‘foreign ones’,

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who had little chance to get out of their homes, according to her know-how as a trade unionist). Dina’s recollection of her previous houses was ingrained in her ‘coming of age’: her engagement in feminist politics and passage from normative heterosexuality to liberating homosexuality. Although her transition to lesbianism had been hard for her old parents to accept, and also meant putting up with name calling at political rallies, apparently it had been harder for her partner, who had moved from south to north Italy and lost touch with her kin altogether. When the two women moved in together, they fled for family status, so that Dina could be legally appointed as parent to her mate’s biological daughter. Tat day we had lunch together, which Dina prepared with locally sourced products, in a messy kitchen forbidden to their maid. Grocery shopping and cooking were chores she carried out herself in a conscious efort to ‘turn their house into a home’. Her remarks resonated with what Ellen Lewin (2017) wrote about gay men couples in the United States, who took up children in foster care in order to socially reproduce their homes according to paradigmatic traditional households. Before parting, I  queried Dina whether her house was any diferent from a heterosexual one. Apparently, the same question had been posed by a legal inspector who came to resolve her parenting status: ‘You would not fnd contraceptive means here!’, had been her amused reply. Ironically, if this lesbian home was all about being a ‘rainbow family’ (a LGBT parented family, Casonato and Schuster 2014), thus sharing same-sex mothering in daily practice, it was the impossible biological reproduction that she emphasized as the mark of ‘another’ sexuality and way of home-making, alternative to heteronormative households. Dina’s her-story makes homosexuality lived at home nothing else than a normal diversity, inscribed in a domestic routine of social reproduction. Her lesbian home did sound as a space for being true to oneself, queering a family life that contravened institutional expectations. Te next life his-story I am going to recount, which is partly set in the same city within a transnational migration, made me ponder not so much how diversities can be expressed at home, but which and whether they can be expressed at all. Sunil was the trickiest persona to categorize among the Italian Indians I hanged out with. Born in Amritsar, Punjab, taken to Brescia as a baby (and naturalized Italian), he identifed with his Ravidas community (outcaste Sikh minority) as much as with the locality where he grew up (playing cricket

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and escorting his brothers to soccer). Although anti-casteist and anti-racist political wiles were his passion, advocating for equality ‘on all grounds’, what bothered him most were sexual speculations on his behalf. His peers ofen jerked on his quirkiness, not aligned with the normative hyper-masculinity of Punjabi males worldwide (Gill 2011). As I trailed my informant’s journeys for years, visiting his family home in Italy, birth village back in India and college residence when he moved to England, I beheld the makeover of his complex subjectivity across the life course and in the diaspora. Like Anthias (2018) maintains, forms of identity and belonging alter when seen through a ‘translocational lens’. While the dwellings that Sunil shared with kin or friends did say much about his struggles, it was in the intimacy of his bedrooms that he himself started to que(e)ry his idea of home. Dispossessed in Punjab,2 Sunil’s family, the Choors, rose dramatically their class status in Italy, where the father shifed from irregular to citizen, from constructor to company owner. Talking about his housing career, the man remarked how he moved from a cramped shared fat run by Bengalis (a space of male homo-sociality which ‘made him rebuke’), to a master villa where he was landlord and family head. Tere, the eldest of three brothers, Sunil had a bedroom of his own, where he once took me in to display a frame of Ambedkar, Indian leader of anticasteism. On the threshold, I had to bend under the Har, sun-shaped insignia of Ravidas people, with his watchful mother standing at the door. Two years later, moved to the Midlands for college, Sunil invited me to visit his student dorm, shared with cosmopolitan co-tenants. Among a Brit-Asian community which was a ‘jungle of contrasts’ (intra-ethnic diversities crosscut minorities anyhow), he felt free enough to voice the only diversity he had not fought for yet: his unsolved sexual orientation, neither gay nor straight. Now that he had won a slam competition in vernacular rap, he sported a tattoo of Bollywood’s hottest actor, Dev Patel, actually a gay icon. Still, that embodied visual mark was not an assertion of homosexuality inked on his ‘social skin’ (Turner 1980). Sunil’s Nepali girlfriend sat on his rufed bed, now and then jumping up to hug him in an ostensibly heterosexual embrace (Morrison 2012). Te couple was planning to get married for mutual convenience: she needed a visa to stay (by means of marrying a man who was South-Asian by background but Italian by nationality, the bride would eventually be extended that citizenship herself), he longed for a spouse ‘to make him a man’ and prevent kindred from intruding into his lifestyle, queer whatever it would mean.

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Figure 5.2 Mama’s stitches and pillow talks in a South Asian diaspora bedroom. Author’s photo.

Among the many and diverse Indian diaspora households that partook in my research for years, I found heterosexuality normalized or even naturalized: their members embodying heteronormativity, performing it in their homes (Schissel 2006) and ofen building their family migrations on it (Bonfanti 2016). Also during interviews, brisk references, ofen ironic, to other forms of sexual orientation and particularly male homosexuality (with the prejudices it cast) seemed to reinforce the validity of the norm. Especially within the home, Punjabi male and female roles and identities endured polarized (Palriwala and Uberoi 2008), nor its diaspora ‘third space’ (Bhabha 1994) had been much queered yet (Gopinath 2005). May I suggest an overarching analysis of Dina’s and Sunil’s que(e)ring their homes? Can I compare life stories so disparate and domestic experiences so dissonant? While Dina actively pursued her lesbian mothering in the home she shared with her partner, Sunil began to queer his sexuality away from the home where he was raised on the pillars of heteronormativity. Not only age and gender, but also ethnicity and status preclude easy juxtapositions. GormanMurray (2008) talks about the ‘quiet politics’ that takes place in homo-sexual homes, whose domesticity does spatialized identity work. Such identity work can be fully expressed, or has to be neglected; in both cases, homes are not only disputed within, but also porously linked to the outside society. Interestingly, Gorman-Murray refers back to Young (2005), to recover the feminist idea

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that the value of home as a space for free self-expression should simply be democratized, rather than rejected. Provisionally concluding, this section has attempted to defy the traditional confation of women and domesticity, heterosexuality and the nuclear family; in doing so, it suggests an exciting new territory to explore, seeing how home spaces shape (and are shaped by) our genders, sexualities and subjectivities. Following Alison Clarke (2001: 43), home environments cannot be characterized simply as normative or coercive, emulative or expressive, but they involve ‘a more complex process of projection and exteriorization that continues to evolve’. So far we have explored homes as spaces of privacy and intimacy, whether more or less attained for diverse reasons. In the next section, I wish to consider those homes which may not coincide with one’s dwelling, but be in fact one’s workplace, where home-making comes (also) at some fnancial costs.

(Un)waging homes Women from poor, developing countries are migrating to developed nations to work as maids and nannies to raise other people’s children but are not able to raise their own children back in their home countries. Poverty pushes these women to leave their home countries. Tese women can either live in their home country and raise their children in very difcult conditions or live in a wealthy country and make money to provide for their own children but not get to raise them – a disheartening choice for poor women of developing countries. (Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2002: 21)

Te quote just reported is an illuminating introduction to the issue of the global domestic economy. If economy harks back to the original Greek meaning of ‘management of the home’, who are the homemakers or who does the housekeeping in domestic environments that are inscribed into larger economies, especially marked by class and race? Tere is a thread in critical race theory (henceforth CRT): the social question par excellence, that of capital and class, is always linked to colour imperialism and gender inequity. Following Crenshaw, the leading voice of Black Feminism: ‘Critical Race Teory represents an attempt to inhabit and expand the space between two

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very diferent intellectual and ideological formations, Civil Rights reform and Critical Legal Studies’ (Crenshaw et al. 1995: 19). Although borne to denounce white racism in the American legal system, and having endured an array of harsh critiques, I argue that the foundations of CRT are apt to analyse the social question that, from the other side of the Atlantic, Faist (2019) recently describes as ‘trans-nationalized’ afer the blast of global migrations. I refer here not just to economic migrants, but to all those who venture on (ir)regular mobilities whereby a dictating political economy requires (and discharges) cheap labour bodies. Bodies which are nevertheless gendered and critically en-gendered as they are inscribed into neoliberal labour regimes. Like Ehrenreich and Hochschild preceded (and many others followed, see Benhabib and Resnik 2009; Kofman and Raghuram 2015), nannies, maids and sex workers in the new economy are not stereotypes of global women. Tese fgures occupy critical positions which are diferently experienced among female labour migrants (though male analogous also occur and deserve a consideration not here advanced, challenging the ‘international division of reproductive labour’, Gallo and Scrinzi 2016). Since domestic worker profles were not common among my research participants, this made me interrogate how diversities are positioned in localized labour markets within a global economy. Domestic work lies at the intersection of many activities and actors, not necessarily doom and gloom, always entangled with families and strangers alike. Had I not been an au pair myself twenty years ago, when my parents deemed it safe and cheap to send me to Ireland to learn English living-in with a local family? For months, the household for whom an au pair (ofen a young woman in her late teen – early twenties) cooks and sweeps, irons and minds the kids gives her back a home away from home, with full board and pocket money. Te fgure of the au pair, like Rosie Cox (2015) puts it, embodies the ambivalence of fctive sister or factual servant in the family: not a full member of the household, and yet an associate for a brief spell. Although conditions and afections of such co-residency may vary, global au pairing resembles, on a lighter note, the condition of domesticas: women immigrant workers who clean and care for other households ‘in the shadow of afuence’ (HondagneuSotelo 2007). Tat domestic work is a global form of labour and a solid channel for migration (afording further stay in a new country, upon the working

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visa supplied, Benhabib and Resnik 2009) forces us to see how gender and class/race diferences consistently intersect within and across homes. Private dwellings thus are not only the setting of micro power relations, but also the backdrop of much larger and critical political economies. Domestic work is a powerful lens to study the intersection of ‘domopolitics’ (Walters 2004). A deep concern in my recent ethnographic work was seeing whether, where and when domestic workers were a hushed but active presence in people’s homes. Who were these subsidized ‘labourers of love’, what kind of relations did they establish with their employers, especially with regard to gender and racial or ethnic diversities? Given the magnitude of issues at stake, considering how domestic workers occupy with their bodies other people’s private places, I here deliberately overlook the potential sexual exploitation which has been reported for centuries (Weiss 2017), determining to focus on class and race as the intersections which I deem most relevant. We should not neglect CRT as an argument which pertains to the US context only, or at most to European countries with a longstanding and yet contested tradition of race relations like the UK. CRT and postcolonial theory can be seen as contiguous intellectual challenges to contexts of racial oppression, respectively embedded in histories of anti-racist and anti-colonial political struggles, but both asserting that categories of diference are produced by social relations, cultural meanings and institutional practices. While insisting on international economic (dis)orders (Tomas 2000), CRT and postcolonial theory convene that the prime setting where diversities are expressed and possibly hierarchically positioned is the home itself. Like Mary Douglas (1991) explained, home is ‘a kind of space’ that rests on re-producing diferences, whatever its scale and whomever its dwellers. Te ethnographic evidence I am about to present substantiates this thesis: no householding is immune to turning diversities into diference. As for the middle-class Italian ‘rainbow’ mothers I mentioned in the previous section, once invited for lunch at their place, I run into their maid: a fretting Moldovan woman in her forties. Once they moved in together, the couple had agreed to hire a domestic worker to clean up and maintain their family house, dodging the most compelling of chores, since their white-collar jobs enabled them to free themselves from the ‘repetitive work with no value’ (quote attributed to de Beauvoir, that Dina cited penchant). Neither of them saw any

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contradiction in manifesting for women’s rights, while benefting from another woman’s labour in their home: how could that be exploitation, if they paid her for her service? Afer introducing me to Tasia, Dina went on to give her dusting instructions, kindly but frmly. Turning to me, it was the diminutive ‘la nostra donnina’, literally ‘our little servant’, that bothered me then, ringing the alert of veiled racism and sexism, stuck in that paradoxical situation in a feminists’ home, with the maid enduring her chores, while her domina3 patronized about her as if she was not in the room – an attitude which has ofen troubled me in accounting for the ethnography I did with ‘my female research participants’. Manisha was my unconventional informant vis-à-vis Punjabi families in Italy (mostly male-led Sikh households, from low rural background). Raised in Delhi and temporarily in Milan as a scientist in a biomedical centre (thanks to a Dutch grant), that young woman who considered herself to be a progressive cosmopolitan Indian was a tenant in a banister house: a classy fat inside, whose windows opened on communal verandas in a popular neighbourhood. Complaining for the noise made by a super diverse throng of kids running up and down the stairs all day, Manisha would ofen fee her rented home, spending her day in the ofce and her spare time at a Lebanese café nearby. Te eldest of three sisters, Manisha had been supported by her widow mother in her desire to pursue graduate studies in Europe. Although photos of her kinswomen sprang up on her walls and her electronic devices, the person she would talk about most was her family housekeeper. Seena was the only maid ever employed by her mother, a low-caste cook who, changed her sati apron as soon as she walked in her mistress’ house, fried the tastiest Indian omelette ever (whose recipe Manisha knew by heart but would not replicate herself abroad, missing the hearth that Seena’s cooking en-gendered in her family home). When I provocatively asked my informant why she did not hire someone to clean or cook in her current solo home, her reply was pristine: it was not about money, ‘keeping a maid is a matter of trust’. What is special and dear then into the routine practices of keeping one’s home? Te myriad chores collectively known as ‘housework’ (cooking, washing dishes, doing laundry, making beds, sweeping, shopping etc.) apparently consume thousand hours of an average housewife’s year. As startling as this statistic may be, it does not even account for the constant attention mothers give to their children. Just as a woman’s maternal duties are always taken for

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granted, her ongoing toil as a housewife seldom receives gratitude (a self-piting comment that many homemaker women informants shared with me). Despite its concreteness, housework is virtually invisible: no one notices it until it is not done, until its routine gets disrupted. ‘Invisible, repetitive, exhausting, unproductive, uncreative’, Angela Davis writes, ‘these are the adjectives which most perfectly capture the nature of housework’ (Davis 1981:12). In what ways can this nature of housework become visible and representable? How does housework pose a problem of mediation, especially in doing feminist ethnography (Davis and Craven 2016)?

Feminist ethics at home Among feminist ethnographic methods, there are attempts at involving research participants in the refective and writing process (Aune 2009). About two years ago, I prompted a publication project engaging a couple of non-academic friends, migrant mothers about my age (and neighbours of mine in a superdiverse small town of northern Italy, Bonizzoni and Marzorati 2015), wishing to co-write a blog article on transnational houseworking. We all began flling in a questionnaire I had devised on domestic economy, intended as a learning apprenticeship and a daily labour (Sandu 2013), enquiring timing of chores, appliances used and self-refections. Once the early excitement vanished, my two co-authors little by little backed out. Although we met a few times in my lounge, sipping tea and discussing personal and political matters, the topic turned out to be divisive: if not in its content, in the language apt to discuss it. One friend, an Indian immigrant woman, felt awkward to explain in Italian, a language she did not master, how she felt demeaned for not having a maid like her mother used to in India and her sister still held in Dubai. Just like higher status Manisha recounted, housework in contemporary India revolves around purity and abjection: a respectable family woman (with regard to class and caste) subscribes to hire lower status maids to ensure sanitation and moral cleanliness in her home (Wisvanath 2016). Te other friend, moved from Albania in her youth and naturalized Italian, mimetic to locals in language skills and habits, was hideously divorcing from her abusive husband. As a single mother without specifc trainings, she took up hours as a domestic helper, popping from one

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neighbours’ house to the next, in order to provide for her family; to her, waged housework was both a toil and a resource, the means she could remain selfsufcient though feeling degraded in scrubbing others’ foors. Not only did we not have much time lef to meet up then, but the theme showed its cloaked criticality. Te way we conceived of housework (and especially how we did it, where and for whom) was something neither of us wished to confront in-depth, sensing our reciprocal diferences, feeling discomfort for turning lenient friendship into an evaluation of one’s work worth. Instead of writing a militant piece against an ideological system of inequality, which did afect us all as women supposedly in charge of home keeping against all odds (global Cinderellas like the journal’s editor went ironic), reasoning comparatively across our three stances to (un)waged domestic work paralysed us. Such a debate would mean to confront face to face our relative (dis)advantages, as native or immigrant (with certain cultural assumptions about housework), as professionals, domestic workers or homemakers, proletarian or aspiring middle class. Placid female friendship took over radical feminist critique. Doing ethnographic research on home interrogates positionalities at all times: those of the ethnographer and of their informants. As in the last case related, the closer the amity, the trickier the tentative to step out of our everyday talk and debate domopolitics (Walters 2004) from below: a politics of housework (Malos 2008) as much as a politics of home (Duyvendak 2011). In the afermath of spatial transfers and time lags, migrant conditions turn positionalities even clearer, as these shif across locations and along people’s journeys, rendering diversities salient (thus diferent) upon contingencies. Mobilities reveal and produce further inequalities, and ‘home’ (in all its facets: material, symbolic and relational) ofers an entry point to unravel them. It is this threshold that ethnographers of home and migration like the three authors of this volume have learnt to navigate.

Conclusion Drawing towards a close, I subscribe to lesbian Afro-American feminist Alice Walker’s statement: ‘I am an activist. It pays the rent for living on this planet’ (Walker 2013: 298). It is a scholarly duty to pay back the knowledge we have

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been able to co-produce to the people who enabled us to do so. Anyone may wage for some rights, whenever and wherever we recognize inequalities; yet, grounds for discrimination emerge only once we are able to discern which diversities are at stake. Tat is why the present chapter resonates profoundly with the one on ‘inequalities’ in this book. Two authors, with their personal selection of diverse case studies, raised specifc but coherent arguments on home and mobility which bear the trace of personal dissonances as much as of research convergences. None of the authors of this volume engaged in activist ethnography while in the feld, but broad political implications into the qualitative study of home and migration start from the empirical minutiae we reported and tried to analyse with a consistent intersectional approach. Te three sections of this chapter illustrated ‘diversities’ of home and mobility looking at the entanglement of gender, sexuality and class or race. Tese social categorizations are deeply embodied and embedded in life stories which are nonetheless positioned within wider political and economic orders. Te frst section maintained that home, whatever its scale and location, is a gendered space; more precisely, home is a place which is constantly engendered. Feminist readings inspired the arguments sustained, particularly referring to the distress that domesticity may yield to home-makers, ripping a romanticized notion of the hearth. Te kitchen is taken as a model of this ambivalence, a sensory quarter of intimacy and family nurturing, as well as the elected site of (gendered) domestic violence. From the kitchen to the bedroom, the second section contended that home is a space which may also be ‘queered’ with regard to sexuality. Normativity is imprinted not just in a certain femininity of the home, but also in its much less defated heteronormativity. Te traditional household was here confronted with other sexualities (and kinship) being expressed or repressed at home, seeing the afrmative home-making of a lesbian family and the negative home feeing of a bisexual young man. If, considering gender and sexualities, migration experiences amplify the relation that the wider social context interplays with peoples’ homes (thus rendering domesticity porous to ideological formations and macro politics), the third section takes this premise further interrogating domestic work in the global economy. Class and race also disrupt the meaning of home, especially when looking at ‘hired help’, most of the time migrant women who take the edge of the patriarchal burden for their more privileged counterpart employers.

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Overall, the gaze I adopted was not ‘seeing like a State’ (Scott 1998), but accounting for the lived experiences of informants who (un)make their homes on the move with shifing (dis)advantages. Likewise, mine was not a voyeuristic nor ‘tourist gaze’ (Urry 2002), which construed picturesque vignettes of what home-making under conditions of mobility might entail. Because of my personal and political background, my view was in line with a feminist standpoint theory (Stoetzler and Yuval-Davis 2002). While the three sections articulated distinct themes, what remains consistent throughout the case studies is the tension between perceiving and enacting forms of otherness in domestic places that can be ascribed to cultural diversities, but are invariably put down to social diferences. Showcasing diversity at home and across homes meant to learn that the production of homeliness is a matter of ‘domestication’ (Hage 2017), of dominance and resistance, of inclusion and exclusion. Whatever its realization, in private or public space, home is always a place of powers being at stake. Te (im)possible unifed conclusion of this chapter, the only ‘unity in diversity’4 I foresee, may transit seamlessly the readers to the next chapter, being diversity and inequality the two sides of the same coin.

Notes 1

I frst came across the expression en-gendering from a work that argued, revising centuries of fctions and literary texts, that the idea of India as a nation (the widest home or imagined community possible, in fact ‘Bharat’ or mother country) was tied to the popularization of the Indian woman typecast, then done and undone in colonial and postcolonial times (Ray 2000).

2

While the Choors’ hospitality in Brescia was generous, in their home village Ranjewal I was dropped at the guesthouse of a bountiful ‘patron’. Sunil and his uncle slept in a local dera, unorthodox religious charity that provided housing and welfare for the downtrodden, to which they sent aiding remittances, instead of investing into a plan to return. Within such grand narrative of resistance to caste oppression and class redemption, there was little way for Sunny [as a second-generation Indian young man in Italy] to express the rest of his prismatic subjectivity.

3

It is worth to remember that domus, dominus and dominium (the house as a property, its rightful owner and the exercise of house-holding) are the Latin bases of Natural Law seventeenth-century vocabulary for understanding patriarchy

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4

Te slogan ‘Unity in diversity’ claimed by India’s frst Prime Minister (Nehru, in 1945), vindicating indigenous tradition and postcolonial modernity, has since enticed the subcontinent and its diasporas. Yet, the quaking governance of the country’s countless diversities still makes this nation question itself ‘whose community’ it represents (Chatterjee 1996).

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Brickell, K. (2012), ‘“Mapping” and “doing” critical geographies of home’, Progress in Human Geography, 36 (2): 225–44. Butler, J. (1990), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge. Casonato, C., and A. Schuster (2014), Rights on the Move: Rainbow Families in Europe. Conference Proceedings, 16–17 October 2014, Trento: Trento University Press. Chatterjee, P. (1996), ‘Whose imagined community?’ in G. Balkrishnan (ed.), Mapping the Nation, London and New York: Verso, New Lef Review. Cieraad, I., ed. (1999), At Home: An Anthropology of Domestic Space, New York: Syracuse University Press. Cieraad, I. (2010), ‘Homes from home: Memories and projections’, Home Cultures, 7 (1): 85–102. Clarke, A. (2001), ‘Te aesthetics of social aspirations’, in D. Miller (ed.), Home Possessions: Material Culture behind Closed Doors, 23–46, Oxford: Berg. Cliford, J. (1997), Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cox, R., ed. (2015), Au Pairs’ Lives in Global Context: Sisters or Servants? London: Palgrave Macmillan. Crenshaw, K. (1989), ‘De-marginalizing the intersection of race and sex. A Black Feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics’, Te University of Chicago Legal Forum, 140: 139–67. Crenshaw, K. et al., eds. (1995), Critical Race Teory: Te Key Writings Tat Formed the Movement, New York: Te New York Press. Cresswell, C., and P. Uteng, eds. (2012), Gendered Mobilities, London: Ashgate. Davis, A. (1981), ‘Te approaching obsolescence of housework: A working-class perspective’, in Women, Race and Class, 222–44, London: Women’s Press. Davis, A., and C. Craven (2016), Feminist Ethnography: Tinking through Methodologies, Challenges and Possibilities, New York and London: Rowman and Littlefeld. Donnelly, J. (2007), ‘Te relative universality of Human Rights’, Human Rights Quarterly, 29 (2): 281–306. Douglas, M. (1991), ‘Te idea of a home: A kind of space’, Social Research, 58 (1): 287–307. Duvvury, N. (2010), ‘Women’s vulnerability, risk and social protection: An exploration of links between property ownership and domestic violence in South Asia’, in N. Kabeer and S. Cook (eds.), Defcits and Trajectories in Social Protection: Asian Perspectives, 219–44, Delhi: Routledge. Duyvendak, J. W. (2011), Te Politics of Home, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Dwyer, C. (2002), ‘“Where are you from?” Young British Muslim women and the making of “home”’, in A. Blunt and C. McEwan (eds.), Postcolonial Geographies, 184–99, London: Continuum.

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Ehrenreich, B., and A. R. Hochschild, eds. (2002), Global Women: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy, New York: Henry Holt. England, K. (1994), ‘Getting personal: Refexivity, positionality, and feminist research’, Te Professional Geographer, 46 (1): 80–9. Eriksen, T. H. (2006), ‘Diversity versus diference: Neo-liberalism in the minority debate’, in R. Rottenburg et al. (eds.), Te Making and Unmaking of Diference, 13–36, Bielefeld: Transcript. Faist, T. (2019), Te Transnationalized Social Question Migration and the Politics of Social Inequalities in the Twenty-First Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gallo, E., and F. Scrinzi (2016), Migration, Masculinities and Reproductive Labour: Men of the Home, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan. Gill, A., C. Strange and K. Roberts, eds. (2014), ‘Honour’ Killing and Violence: Teory, Policy and Practice, London: Palgrave. Gill, H. (2011), Roots of Love: On Sikh Hair and Turban, 26min, color, Produced by PSBT, Washington: Tilotama Productions. Gopinath, G. (2005), Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures, Durham: Duke University Press. Gorman-Murray, A. (2008), ‘Queering the family home: Narratives from gay, lesbian and bisexual youth coming out in supportive family homes in Australia’, Gender, Place and Culture, 15: 31–44. Grillo, R., ed. (2008), Te Family in Question: Immigrant and Ethnic Minorities in Multicultural Europe, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Groes, C., and N. T. Fernandez, eds. (2018), Intimate Mobilities: Sexual Economies, Marriage and Migration in a Disparate World, London: Berghahn Books. Gupta, R., ed. (2003), From Homemakers to Jailbreakers. Southall Black Sisters, London and New York: Zed Books. Hage, G. (2017), Is Racism an Environmental Treat? Cambridge: Polity Press. Hondagneu-Sotelo, P. (2007), Doméstica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Afuence, Berkeley: University of California Press. Honig, B. (1994), ‘Diference, dilemmas, and the politics of the home’, Social Research, 61: 563–97. hooks, b. (1991), ‘Homeplace: A site of resistance’, in Yearning; Race, Gender and Cultural Politics, 41–9, London: Turnaround. Kofman, E., and P. Raghuram (2015), Gendered Migration and Global Social Reproduction, London: Palgrave. Lewin, E. (2017), ‘Making a house a home: Children and the meanings of home among gay men in the United States’, in B. Pilkey, R. Scicluna et al. (eds.), Sexuality and Gender at Home: Experience, Politics, Transgression, 65–79, London: Bloomsbury.

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Longhurst, R. (2012), ‘Feminist perspectives on home’, in S. Smith (ed.), International Encyclopaedia of Housing and Home, 158–62, London: Elsevier. Mai, N. and R. King (2009), ‘Love, sexuality and migration: Mapping the issue(s)’, Mobilities, 4 (3): 295–307. Malos, E. (2008), Te Politics of Housework, London: Allison & Busby. Massey, D. (1994), ‘A place called home’, in D. Massey (ed.), Space, Place and Gender, 157–74, Cambridge: Polity Press. McDowell, L. (1999), Gender, Identity and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies, Oxford: Blackwell. Miller, D., ed. (2001), Home Possessions: Material Culture behind Closed Doors, Oxford: Berg. Miller, D., ed. (2005), Materiality, Durham: Duke University Press. Miller, J. (2008), ‘Otherness’, in L. M. Given (ed.), Encyclopedia of Qualitative Reasearch Methods, 588–91, Tousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. Morrison, C. (2012), ‘Heterosexuality and home: Intimacies of space and spaces of touch’, Emotion, Space and Society, 5: 10–18. Oakley, A. (1985), Te Sociology of Housework, Oxford: Blackwell. Okely, J., and A. Callaway, eds. (1992), Anthropology and Autobiography, London: Routledge. Palriwala, R., and P. Uberoi (2008), Marriage, Migration and Gender, London: Sage. Pilkey B., R. Scicluna et al., eds. (2017), Sexuality and Gender at Home: Experience, Politics, Transgression, London: Bloomsbury. Pink, S. (2004), Home Truths: Gender, Domestic Objects and Everyday Life, Oxford: Berg. Price, J. (2002), ‘Te apotheosis of home and the maintenance of spaces of violence’, Hypathia, 17 (4): 39–70. Ray, S. (2000), En-Gendering India: Woman and Nation in Colonial and Postcolonial Narratives, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Salazar, N., and K. Jayaram, eds. (2016), Keywords of Mobility: Critical Engagements, Oxford: Berghahn. Salzman, P. (2002), ‘On refexivity’, American Anthropologist, 104 (3): 805–13. Sandu, A. (2013), ‘Transnational homemaking practices: Identity, belonging and informal learning’, Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 21 (4): 496–512. Schissel, W., ed. (2006), Home Bodies: Geographies of Self, Place and Space, Calgary: University of Calgary Press. Scicluna, R. (2017), Home and Sexuality: Te ‘Other’ Side of the Kitchen, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Scott, J. (1998), Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press.

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6

Inequalities Aurora Massa

Introduction Haile is a homeless Eritrean refugee in his forties, who lef his country to escape Eritrean national service. He reached Italy in 2013 afer surviving a shipwreck in the Mediterranean Sea and was accommodated in a reception centre in Rome which was closed a few months afer his arrival during the so-called Mafa Capitale investigation.1 For a while, he worked as a carer for an old man, but ended up on the street when the latter died. We met in 2017 during my feldwork in Rome when he was trapped in a vicious circle of homelessness, in which not having a shelter (i.e. a place to rest, have a shower and change his clothes) hindered the possibility of his fnding a job and vice versa. Each time we met, he enjoyed telling me how he had found a place to sleep the previous night, whether it was a reception centre that someone had smuggled him into, a friend’s apartment, a public park or somewhere else. All of his belongings were stored in a friend’s fat – where he goes on Saturdays to have a shower and eat Eritrean food – but he always carries a smartphone with him to communicate with relatives who have migrated elsewhere. In the winter of 2017, he worked for almost nothing as a guard in a warehouse because the boss allowed him to spend the night there. However, when the temperature dropped close to zero, the lack of heating made his stay difcult, forcing him to look for other solutions. Haile’s story introduces the topic of this chapter, which is the interlacing of home and mobility, looked at through the perspective of inequalities. Difculties in accessing social services, job segregation and everyday discrimination

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towards those who are perceived to be non-native – whether due to the colour of their skin or their nationality – systematically and increasingly characterize European countries. Tese dynamics palpably afect migrant populations’ forms of dwelling, taking tangible forms in specifc kinds of accommodation. During our feldwork studies across Europe, my colleagues and I have dealt with a wide range of vulnerabilities related to dwellings, such as homelessness, evictions, informal shelters, overcrowded apartments and ghettoization, which frequently characterize the experiences of low-skilled migrants and refugees like Haile. Tese poor living arrangements are ofen invisible to the local population and overlooked by institutions, becoming highly visible only when migration is turned into a public order problem. Most importantly, they have a huge efect on migrants’ everyday experiences, with repercussions for their possibility of homing. Tus in a book about home and mobility it is vital to devote a chapter to inequalities. Migrants’ housing disadvantages ensue from multiple axes of diferent inequalities, concerning ethnicity, religion, class and race, as well as gender, age, disabilities and so on. Tis leads me to speak about inequalities in the plural, and to adopt an intersectional approach, in tune with the previous chapter ‘Diversities’. Intersectionality can be understood as the complex and variable efects that result when multiple axes of diferentiation – whether they be economic, political, cultural, subjective etc. – intersect in historically specifc contexts (Brah and Phoenix 2004). Tese axes are not neutral, but are related with political-economic, cultural-ideological and institutional forces (Bourgois and Schonberg 2009). In other words, they are interlaced with cumulative forms of the social distribution of sufering (Kleiman et al. 1997) and with structural (Farmer 2003), everyday (Scheper-Hughes 1996) and symbolic violence (Bourdieu 1972). My focus here is on those inequalities that are produced when a migrant background, race-ethnic diversity, poverty and class intersect. I am interested in exploring the sense and the practices of home-making which emerge under conditions of housing inequality, and the ways migrants perceive, interpret and face such inequality. Tus, my aim is to give attention to the complex textures of adaptation, improvisation and confict that sustain attempts to deal with home-making in contexts of profound inequality. Tese attempts entail everyday difculties, as Haile’s history shows, such as discouragement, anxiety

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and sufering. However, they also include creative practices and imagination – that is to say a social practice and a form of negotiation between the individual and their globally defned felds of possibility (Appadurai 1996) – which emerge in home-making practices and feelings of belonging. In this analysis the boundary between house and home or housing and homing risks becoming slippery. Moreover, since the scientifc literature connected with home and inequalities is highly politicized, there is also a risk of making only a critical case for housing needs and processes, while neglecting the signifcance and practices of homing. On the contrary, I wish to show the centrality of ‘home’ in situations of deprivation: even though the house has a central role in the sense of home, the latter can also emerge in situations where there is no house. Te remainder of this chapter is organized as follow. In the second section, I present some theoretical refections on the concept of inequalities. Te third section analyses the relationships between inequalities and spatial distribution in urban settings, exploring the ambivalent value of ethnic enclaves and presenting some vignettes from the ethnographic feldwork I conducted in Stockholm among Somali migrants. Te fourth section tackles inequalities in domestic spaces where dwelling occurred in conditions of precarity, focusing on social status and on daily and afective relations. Te ffh and sixth sections analyse squats for housing needs in Europe, and particularly in Rome. Squats ofer a vantage point for analysing the home-inequality nexus, since they shed light on housing struggles, on the relationship between political movements and migrants, and on their conficting ideas of home. Te methodological choice of focusing on a single urban setting aims to show the importance of taking into account the local scenario and its particular histories, rather than reducing the housing emergency to universalistic frames, such as the impact of the 2008 economic crisis. Not strictly readable as a city of the Global North (Sassen 2012) and marked by a tolerance of informality comparable with cities of the Global South (Brignone and Cacciotti 2018; Pizzo and Altavilla 2018), the example of Rome serves as a crucial case for understanding the main topics of this chapter. Both the ffh and sixth sections analyse the ways in which thresholds of domesticity are negotiated within squats. Finally, seventh section is dedicated to Eritrean refugees dwellings.

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From theorizations to ethnography In recent years, studies on inequalities have blossomed in the social sciences. In anthropology, which is the disciplinary point of view of this chapter, the attention on social and power inequalities explicitly or implicitly informs many felds, from urban to migration studies, as well as investigations on memory, religion, economy, globalization and so on. Tis development can be linked to what Sherry Ortner calls ‘the rise of “dark anthropology”: that is, anthropology that emphasizes the harsh and brutal dimensions of human experience, and the structural and historical conditions that produce them’ (Ortner 2016: 49). According to Ortner, this turn is rooted in longer theoretical traditions passing through Marx, Foucault and the postcolonial framework, but its current difusion is not accidental. As with any theoretical frame used by social scientists, it stems from the political, economic and cultural circumstances in which we conduct our research, including phenomena such as neoliberalism, coercive state practices, austerity, public-sector cuts, labour exploitation, health epidemics, environmental crisis, border closure and so on. Despite the fact that many of these critical elements are not new, the current proliferation of economic, political, social and environmental precarities has made the anthropological study of global inequalities ever more pressing (Koch 2018). In studying how inequalities are legitimized, implemented and cemented, social anthropologists have highlighted the importance of looking at local contexts for understanding how apparently homogenizing macro processes concretize, taking seriously the experiences of the people they live and work with (Astuti 2017). Tis means focusing, on the one hand, on the historical, institutional and cultural factors which mediate global processes, and, on the other, on the phenomenological experiences that may manifest themselves in sufering, feelings of hopelessness and abandonment, as well as in forms of contestation and resistance (Koch 2018). Inequalities are related to a wider group of terms that include, among many others, vulnerability, marginality and precarity. In debates on these topics, the anthropological contribution has been to caution us against general theories and ‘super concepts’. A good example is an article recently published in the Annual Review of Anthropology in which Clara Han (2018)

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critically engages with the conceptualization of precarity and vulnerability by the philosopher Judith Butler. According to Butler (2004, 2010), there is a common human primary vulnerability that characterizes every embodied and fnite existence and that emerges from the relational interdependence of our existence, namely from the body’s dependence on others to survive. Te diferential distribution of this vulnerability is what Butler calls precarity, which is a condition that is induced by specifc social and political arrangements and that thus reveals their failures and inherent inequalities. In such an approach, Han argues, there is a risk that ‘the bits and pieces of social life get put into a grid under precarity as a master concept rather than present routes to a set of smaller, experience-laden concepts’ (2018: 339). Following Han’s suggestions, I will explore inequalities and home by paying attention both to the historical and political dynamics and to the singularity of lives in which inequalities are endured; in other words, I will link the global processes of accumulation and dispossession to people’s daily struggles, frustrations and aspirations towards home.

Inequalities in accessing shelters Te intersection of migratory conditions, race-ethnic diversity, poverty and class in accessing housing and home can be observed in migrants’ spatial distribution in urban contexts. Tere is general agreement in the academic literature that migrants’ residential patterns diverge from those of the native population, as the fourishing of multi-ethnic neighbourhoods in which citizens of national origin are a minority demonstrates (i.e. Andersson 1998; Johnston et al. 2002; Musterd 2005; Fong and Chan 2010). Tere is less agreement about the reasons for these divergences or their implications (Andersson 1998). On the one hand, inhabiting specifc areas is a strategy through which migrants, both newcomers and long-term residents, navigate their own way through their countries of arrival. Living close to other people who originate from the same country enables them to rely on solidarity networks, reproduce signifcant cultural practices and experience domesticity in unfamiliar contexts (van Kempen and Özuekren 1998; Murdi 2002). Migrant spatial concentration is accompanied by changes in street furniture and urban services to meet the

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economic, social and symbolic needs and desires of the new inhabitants. What I was told by Anur, a Somali refugee living in Rinkeby, a multi-ethnic suburb of Stockholm, is illuminating: Look at this square [the main square of Rinkeby]: anything a Somali migrant needs is here: there is the mosque, the shop for buying our food and clothes, the money transfer service for sending money back home, two cafés and two restaurants for meeting friends and eating our food. What else would we want? Tis is why Rinkeby is called ‘Little Mogadishu’.

Rinkeby is a district inhabited by a diverse array of immigrants, of which Somalis make up one of the larger communities. Despite master narratives generally depicting it as a dangerous and problematic neighbourhood, many Somali inhabitants demonstrate a strong feeling of attachment to the area. Without changing the architectonic aspects, people from Somalia have modifed the neighbourhood day by day (Olson 2008), laying the premises for recreating a sense of home. Tis domestication also entails a cultural and symbolic dimension, which makes the space signifcant, through the construction of correspondences and diferences, repertoires of metaphors and ways in which a place is told, organized and used, starting from the names places are given. On the other hand, ethnic concentration is the result of patterns of residential segregation due to socioeconomic and, most notably for migrants, ethnic or racialized dimensions (Bolt et al. 2010; Peach 2012). Segregation arises from inequalities in accessing the housing market, due to institutionalized discrimination in housing policies, landlords’ prejudices towards migrants and other forms of unequal treatment. It also emerges from the so-called white fight and avoidance, in which previous residents move from neighbourhoods with many ethnic minorities (Andersson 1998; Aalbers 2002). Although this behaviour refects xenophobic attitudes, it is not sufcient to label it simply as such, since these prejudicial practices are also intertwined with these previous residents’ sense of home – in fact, with the loss of it. Te arrival of new and diverse populations, with their smells and sounds, their clothes and shops, their celebrations and ways of inhabiting public spaces ofen entail great changes in the sensory, social and economic landscape of a neighbourhood. Tese changes can be alienating and even painful for previous residents. Tey

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can disrupt points of reference and interrupt routines, making people feel like strangers in their own neighbourhood. Recalling my feldwork in Stockholm, this was pointed out by Anne, a Swedish woman who referred to the feeling of estrangement she experienced while visiting the main square of Rinkeby afer many years. ‘I am sorry to say it, but while I was there I wondered if I was really in Stockholm,’ she told me, also expressing her discomfort in realizing that her views were somewhat in line with the common derogative representations of the area, which also includes the idea that migration is one of the sources of poverty and criminality and a cause of the social and moral degradation of the neighbourhood. At the same time, the idea that there is an automatic link between migrants’ spatial concentration and social exclusion and, vice versa, between migrants’ dispersed settlement and integration cannot be taken for granted (Arbaci 2008). Spatial proximity between natives’ dwellings and migrants’ dwellings is not necessarily a sign of (or the premise for) higher social inclusion, since the connection between the two elements is contextual and multifaceted (Simon 2002; Maloutas 2004). Much like with social marginality – understood as a simultaneous condition of inclusion and exclusion (Herzfeld 1997) – people who are spatially segregated are not outsiders, but part of the social body. Marginality’s apparent antonyms, such as inclusion, do not guarantee emancipation from subjugation, but can actually reinforce oppression. As the literature points out, ethnic and racial segregation and unequal access to housing are deeply related to other forms of social exclusion. When discussing social housing and race in the UK, Somerville and Steele (2002: 10) write that there is a ‘tendency for socially excluded individuals to be excluded from a number of diferent life chances (housing, health, education, employment, leisure and so on)’. Housing inequalities can in turn generate ‘cumulative disadvantages’. Obstacles to urban mobility in peripheral settlements with little access to public transport or unequal access to education for young people in areas with low-quality schools are cases in point. Tese disadvantages can be also intertwined with the poor social reputation of certain areas – for instance, in areas with a lot of social housing (Arbaci 2008) or in poor and multi-ethnic neighbourhoods (Bolt et al.  2010) – a perception which ofen afects inhabitants, fostering moral stigma (CECODHAS 2007).

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To a certain extent, social housing policies themselves contribute to the creation of forms of exclusion and marginalization, as they are unable to correct the inequalities produced as market side efects. As, for example, Tosi explains (2009, 2017), European social housing policies have always been ‘not so social’, since they have favoured the medium and medium-low sectors of housing demand while dealing with extreme poverty mainly through emergency solutions, such as temporary shelters and reception centres. Tese social policies have frequently acted as mechanisms that make these inequalities chronic, through defning sections of the population that only deserve lower-quality housing, which usually coincides with more vulnerable and marginal populations, such as homeless people and Roma people. Tis mechanism of diferentiation thus works as a disciplinary form of power that uses moral frameworks to distinguish between righteous citizens who follow ordinary or dominant models of production and reproduction and those that do not. Migrants are ofen considered to belong to the latter group. To sum up, migrants’ predominant patterns of residential distribution reveal inequalities both in their ghettoization in urban peripheries and in the hidden but patent obstacles they face in accessing housing markets and social housing. Tis distribution is intertwined with their ideas and practices of home in multiple ways. Migrants’ spatial concentration can foster their homemaking, thanks to the presence of conational individuals and certain kinds of sociality, shops or places of worship. For pre-existing populations, the arrival of migrants can afect their previous sense of familiarity and control. But how do social inequalities take shape at a micro and everyday level, within private forms of accommodation?

Home practices and inequalities One of the frst studies that comes to mind when connecting home interiors and inequalities is La Distinction by Pierre Bourdieu (1996 [1979]). Te book is informed by extensive research into the tastes and consumption preferences of various social classes in 1960s’ France, including ways of decorating domestic spaces. Drawing on the multiple relationships between dominant or dominated classes and high or low culture, the book explores

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the economic and social determinants of taste and their role in shaping social hierarchies. Bourdieu (1996: 57) writes, ‘Objectively and subjectively aesthetic stances adopted in matters like cosmetics, clothing or home decoration are opportunities to experience or assert one’s position in social space, as a rank to be upheld or a distance to be kept.’ In other words, through consumption and tastes, dominant classes afrm their higher social status while remarking their aversion for popular culture, because taste always implies distaste. However, tastes and choices are not instrumentally and consciously aimed at producing social status. Rather, they refer to a system of values that is embodied by subjects through family socialization and formal education, making up the concept of habitus. Tus, class-bound tastes are an expression of social inequality as well as one of the ways through which social distances are (re)produced. An extensive academic literature has enriched the analytical frameworks regarding ‘home stuf ’ (Miller 2010), especially when considering the multiple ideas and practices of home which move together with migrants. However, the role of social status is also important when we look at attempts to make home in precarious conditions. For example, through a longitudinal ethnography in informal settlements in Colombia, Kellet and Moore (2003) show how dwellers’ eforts to keep their homes tidy and to improve and decorate domestic spaces could also be understood to convey messages about status, aimed at demonstrating the decency, morality and respectability of the occupants. Nevertheless, if we are to investigate the sense of home, even under conditions of poverty, we cannot focus only on the material dimension or on social status. Home as an experience is also made up of practices, intimacy, a sense of familiarity, memories of the past and conficting feelings (such as protection and freedom, independence and afective bonds). Te latter aspects emerge, for instance, in Lancione’s (2016, 2018) studies of an underground canal inhabited by drug users in Bucharest. By adopting an assemblage-driven approach, which highlights the role of the non-human in the production of human subjectivity (Guattari 1996) and the processual dimensions of assemblages (Deleuze 2001), Lancione reaches a counterintuitive result: by living in the canal, people afrm a renovated cultural politics of home at the margins. Indeed, despite its infrastructural ‘weirdness’, the canal is made into a home through everyday assemblages, which concern the afective, practical and discursive registers. Te frst register refers to the

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afective care that people have for one another, for example, helping each other to cut their hair or inject drugs. Te practical register refers to the dwellers’ eforts to make the canal suitable for their needs, such as not only eating and sleeping, but also having an electricity source and using drugs. Te discursive register refers to the ways in which dwellers present themselves and their accommodation. Te interaction of these assemblages allows people not only to survive in this space, but also to fnd a better solution than living on the streets or in institutional shelters for homeless people. Tus inhabiting the canal is a politics of life, a way of being-in-the-world, to use the famous Heideggerian expression, that is marked by a deep togetherness and that challenges normative politics with its ‘weirdness’. While not focusing on migration, Lancione’s work draws on an analytical framework that can be fruitfully used in the study of home, inequalities and migration, as my study of Eritrean squats in Rome will show. Moreover, the political dimension of home introduced by Lancione is even more signifcant when looking at migration. As Boccagni (2017) writes, the migrants’ home is a political issue per se, since migrants challenge the idea of home in all its scalar dimensions if we understand it ‘as the deep-rooted and institutional marker of the boundaries of legitimate membership and belonging’ (2017: 87). At a very local level, making home entails an appropriation of space and deals with the visibility and legitimacy of marginalized groups. At a national level, the emotional and symbolic languages of home call into question the (un)making of social boundaries between insiders and outsiders and are ofen mobilized in the development of exclusionary ways of governing migration, as the concept of ‘domopolitic’ reveals (Walters 2004). However, migrants can also appropriate the home-centred discursive repertoire for forms of collective mobilization, which, as the next section on squats shows, can be aimed at demanding a home.

Fighting for a home Housing struggles and the occupation of buildings have been investigated through the lens of the new social movements (Pleyers 2011), the ‘right to the city’ as theorized by Lefebvre (1968) and Harvey (2012) and the notion of

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citizenship understood not as a legal status but as a form of political activism (Mezzadra 2011; Papadopoulus and Tsianos 2013). Te debate on squatting is heavily political both due to the underlying analytical approaches used and in researchers’ own political engagement as activists.2 Tis should not be surprising: squatting raises the contradiction between property relations and the basic human need for shelter. It opens up debates over the legitimacy of appropriating space and advancing political claims, calling into question inequalities (Anders and Sedlmaier 2017). Te centrality of housing rights movements clearly demonstrates how squats are not only a way through which those who are in need can get a roof over their head, but are also used for making political statements and for articulating a certain vision of the city. Tis is all the more true when squatting intersects with migration. As we saw in the previous section, the search for home by migrants is in itself a political issue (Boccagni 2017). By occupying buildings and apartments squatters physically proclaims their very existence, fnding visibility and a place in social systems that ofen exclude them (Bouillon 2017). But what is a squat and who is a squatter? With the word ‘squatter’ I refer to those dwellers who lack permission from both the owner of the property and the authorities. Several studies have distinguished between squats in diferent ways, based on various criteria such as location, the aims and the degree of choice of the people involved and so on. Diferences have been identifed between the Global South, where squatting is mainly associated with illegal land acquisitions (i.e. slums), and the Global North, where squatting ofen means the occupation of empty buildings linked with political demands (Anders and Sedlmaier 2017). Likewise, there are diferences between European countries where squats set up in order to make art are common and those, especially in southern Europe, where they are negligible compared to squats used only for housing purposes (Mudu and Chattopadhyay 2017). Te criterion of how much choice people have allows us to distinguish between squats which are occupied by poverty-stricken populations and squats which are chosen as a way of life by artists or militants (i.e. Novy and Colomb 2012). While these typologies are useful for highlighting peculiarities that may go unnoticed under the general label of squatting, ethnographic research shows that they are ofen insufcient for grasping the range of concrete possibilities, the changes that take place and the existence of mixed characteristics within squats.

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In Europe, squatting acquired an explicit political connotation during the 1960s, as an expression of the struggle against capitalism by antagonist lefist groups and youth subcultures. As Anders and Sedlmaier (2017) write, this politicization went hand in hand with a collective amnesia about the previous role of urban squats as informal housing solutions for subaltern classes dating back to the birth of the contemporary town. Because of this amnesia, public discourses today do not put squatter migrants in continuity with those historical experiences, but have ‘othered’ them, seeing their experiences as outside of the body of the nation, and at the same time criminalizing their presence (Vereni 2015a, 2017). Tus, the negative image of squatting contributes towards general negative public representations of migration and in particular of the fgure of the ‘migrant-squatter’ depicted as a foreigner and a deviant, as an intruder and a threat (Groham 2017). Te confict between migrants and activists is a recurring topic in the scientifc debate, as epitomized by the dissonances between their reasons for squatting. While the activists aim at politically fghting social injustice and engage with migrants as part of an ‘international proletariat’, migrants are ofen mainly interested in the material reality of accommodation and seek ‘to be included in a “mainstream” housing market they were unable to access with conventional means rather than challenging it in principle’ (Anders and Sedlmaier 2017: 2). By looking at this dissonance from the perspective of home and migration, it appears to be based not so much in a political and ideological distance, but rather a refection of diferent ideas about dwelling, which shape (and are shaped by) dissimilar ways of making home. A good example is the conficts which occur between the principles of commonality and solidarity promoted by activists, and the desire for squatter-migrants to fnd more personal space within squatted buildings. Tese frictions call into question the conundrum about where home begins and where it ends, suggesting the importance of scrutinizing the processes through which the thresholds of domesticity, communality and publicness are ‘crafed, enacted, negotiated, and if necessary, struggled upon’ (Boccagni and Brighenti 2017: 4) by diferent squatter groups. Te ways thresholds of domesticity are built and contested in the relationships between activists and newcomers, and their consequences on migrants’ sense of home, are explored in the next section on housing squats in Rome.

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Squatting in Rome, from the past to the present It is difcult to give a fgure on the number of squats in Rome today: new buildings are continuously occupied and old ones evicted, meaning new surveys quickly become obsolete.3 In 2016, there were sixty-four squatted buildings for housing purposes and around 6000 squatted households (Davoli 2017). Tis huge phenomenon has a long history, since informal and irregular constructions have always played an important role in the contemporary development of Roman urban space (Cellamare 2010). During the twentieth century, shantytowns, squatting and illegal constructions were part of the ordinary confguration of the city, existing alongside the ofcial urban plan. Baraccati (hut-dwellers) were a stigmatized and diverse population, composed of people who had been evicted to make way for the fascist government’s renewals of sections of the ancient town, then of people displaced by the war, who were unemployed or immigrants from southern Italy. From the 1980s onwards, previous hut-dwellers and squatters were joined by non-Italians (economic migrants, asylum seekers and migrants in transit), which now represent the majority of people living in informal accommodation. Te historical relevance of informal dwelling in Rome mirrors widespread speculation in construction projects by so-called palazzinari,4 the marginal role of housing in the agenda of local and national institutions and the exclusion of large sections of the population from social housing. Te 1980s saw the development of the main housing movements which are still in operation today  – namely Coordinamento cittadino di lotta per la casa (Citizen’s Committee for the Housing Struggle), Action and BPM (Blocchi Precari Metropolitani, Precarious Metropolitan Blocks) – and since then, squatting has become an increasingly structural phenomenon (Mudu 2014). Te deregulation of the housing rental market (1998), the increase in house prices (1990s–2000s) and the 2008 crisis have exacerbated the housing problem. Tus, the practice of squatting is neither the prerogative of migrants nor just a sign of their marginality. It is rather the result of their inclusion into the housing practices of the less well-of sections of local populations, namely their incorporation into certain social networks and their learning the historical ways in which people have lived in the city of Rome. Yet as migrants represent a particularly fragile population it is not surprising that, unlike

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members of political movements, the participation of migrants in squats ofen stems from economic and social precariousness, although a rigid separation between activists and migrants does not exist (Mugnani 2017). Migrants have established self-organized occupations or have been included in squats set up by the main housing rights movements (Citizen’s Committee, Action and BPM). Vereni (2013) distinguishes between three types of squat that are not self-organized by migrants, according to the role and position of the ‘front door’. Te ‘front door’ is nothing but a threshold that distinguishes the private domestic space from the outside world; thus, Vereni’s partition can be read in light of the analytical suggestion by Boccagni and Brighenti (2017) that we look at the processes of construction of thresholds of domesticity. In the frst type, where political aims tend to prevail over housing needs, there is no door demarcating a private space. Following the model of lefist collectivism, the building is organized as an undivided collective place. In the second type, settled by right-wing movements such as CasaPound, several front doors divide the whole building into as many private dwellings, reproducing bourgeois ways of dwelling. In the third type, established by the Citizen’s Committee, Action and BPM, the front doors demarcating single apartments coexist and are harmonized with the production of a further space, a common space where a wider sense of intimacy and domesticity is shared. Tis last type produces a special form of urban space that overcomes the modern fracture (marked by the front door) between private and public space, in an attempt to create a ‘neighbourhood’. By ‘neighbourhood’ Vereni refers to a ‘space of connection’, where people see each other as neither relatives nor strangers, but neighbours and acquaintances, and in which social relationships are marked by immediacy and spontaneity. In this sense, the neighbourhood echoes the concept of ‘communal space’ (Boccagni and Brighenti 2017), that is, a kind of spontaneous social territorialization in which people engage in collective action and mutual support. According to the leaders of the housing rights movements, participation in the neighbourhood is not optional, but is an integral part of life in the squat. Indeed, the threshold of domesticity between common and private spaces is not only theoretical or ideological, but must be put into practice by all squatters in their concrete daily activities. Squatters have to follow certain rules, for example concerning the use of common areas and having guests, and also have

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to participate in political activities inside and outside the squats (i.e. meetings, picket lines, demonstrations and support for other squats). Tey also have to share certain moral values, such as tolerance, solidarity and the dissolution of one’s own diverse background within a cosmopolitan class identity (see also Aureli and Mudu 2017). Te emphasis put by activists on the neighbourhood ofen contrasts with the plurality of needs of other inhabitants, most importantly their desire for homing. Although activists stress their political aims, for many dwellers squatting is the only way they have for achieving a certain model of home, understood as a domestic space where they can exert some control, raise a family, display objects and their aesthetic tastes and enact home-making practices, such as cooking and watching TV. According to Vereni, ‘the tiles in the kitchen, the sof light in the corner of the sofa, the shelf with porcelain trinkets’ (2015b: 167) that are present in many apartments within occupied buildings are good representations of migrant aspirations, ideas of home and desire for a lifestyle which are ofen far from the activists’ ways of life. However, minimizing the inclusive power of these political practices from below would be a mistake. Regardless of the intentions of the social actors, concrete participation in these political practices has a real efect on crafing neighbourhoods and reshaping migrants’ subjectivities, turning some of them into activists themselves. Tese dynamics are addressed by Giorgi and Fasulo (2013) in an article that ethnographically explores the transformative efects of squatting. Te paper focuses on the audio-tour and video-tour made by Fatima, a Moroccan migrant woman and an activist, inside her own fat in a squat in Rome. Fatima’s videotour depicts diferent levels of domesticity, which goes beyond her fat and her nuclear family to include the squatted building and its inhabitants. Her videotour starts from the iron door that marks the main entrance of the squatted building and lingers on spaces and objects evoking the communitarian life, such as the chairs in the courtyard. Moreover, it is characterized by continuous shifs from the pronoun ‘I’ to ‘we’, which she uses to describe the common housing problems of the squat’s residents, thus communicating a strong emotional attachment to the other squatters. As Giorgi and Fasulo (2013: 125) write, for Fatima ‘home is located within a network of relationships and is seen as the result of a collective endeavour’. It stems from a powerful togetherness.

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At the same time, the video-tour shows the importance of materiality in Fatima’s fat, which is for her a key to reproducing the past, envisioning the future and connecting ‘here’ with ‘back home’. Her furniture both re-afrms the family’s Moroccan background, in order to remember the past and familiarize her children with traditional uses of space, and asserts migratory experience, producing a syncretic and refective locus. Tus, for Fatima the communal and private dimensions of home are not separate but deeply intertwined. Te same tension between communality and privacy also characterizes Eritrean squats, which I will discuss in the last section.

Eritrean ways of squatting (and homing) Like Haile, whose history opened this chapter, most Eritreans living in Rome have arrived as forced migrants and have faced problems in fnding accommodation due to the lack of housing support for refugees. As Kissoon writes: ‘Te refugee and the homeless person have always had something in common – no place to call home or, rather, no place an outsider would deem suitable to be called “home”’ (2015: 5). Unlike Haile, however, the majority of Eritrean migrants do not sleep in the street, but stably inhabit squatted buildings. Squats can be considered to be an informal way of ensuring social protection (Costantini 2015) through which refugees tactically solve their housing problems with contradictory results. On the one hand, squatting implicates segregation both within the squatted buildings and in the marginal areas in which they are usually located, although in Rome proper ghettos do not exist. On the other hand, it entails integration, namely collaboration with other marginalized sectors of the urban social fabric, and empowerment, since refugees ‘learn how to squat’ (Belloni 2017) and advance their claims to the local authorities. However, Eritrean squatters’ relationship with the housing rights movements is particularly tense (Costantini 2015; Belloni 2017). Tey ofen do not share the movements’ political ideologies and values, are reluctant to engage in these activities, develop strategies to avoid them and frequently break of their relationship with local political movements. As a consequence, the majority of Eritreans live in self-managed squats characterized by national homogeneity, namely by the exclusive presence of people from Eritrea or nearby countries (i.e. Ethiopia, Somalia and Sudan).

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During my feldwork in Rome I encountered three squats of this kind,5 all of them multi-storey buildings hosting hundreds of people. All run by committees, the buildings have been totally renovated by the squatters, who turned places that were not meant to be dwellings into something like apartment buildings, constructing bathrooms, private rooms and small apartments, and also areas reserved for collective activities. Almost all of the Eritrean squatters I met complained about living in informal6 conditions, blaming job instability, landlords’ racism and institutional destitution, and told me they dreamt of having a proper place to stay. At the same time, they seemed to appreciate many aspects of this kind of accommodation. Tese aspects, I argue, are related to possibilities that the squatters have of feeling at home. Firstly, squats reproduce a familiar environment. From a sensorial point of view, as soon as you step through the front door of these squatted buildings, everything reminds you of ‘back home’ – from the smells of incense, the spice berbere and roasted cofee to the sound of Tigrinya music, from the style of clothes to the colours and the shapes of interior decorations. A squat is a place where people can speak their language, live nearby family members and re-enact sociality and solidarity with neighbours. Squatters hang out with friends and engage in leisure activities in the common areas, such as playing pool, cards and table football and watching football matches and Eritrean television. Tey reproduce a sort of urban microcosm: squats host restaurants, cofee houses and several businesses, such as shops selling food, soaps and cigarettes, but also tailors, cobblers and mechanics. It is not surprising that these squats are also places in which Eritreans living in other squats or in regular fats use to spend their spare time, in order to enjoy a certain kind of sociability. Secondly, a squat is like a home for it ofers a sense of protection against the predominant feeling of not-being-at-home in Rome. Similar to an ethnic enclave, living in a squat allows people to avoid the challenges of a foreign place with its foreign language and rules. With its solidarity and close networks, it also protects inhabitants from discrimination and racism that increasingly mark local attitudes towards black (and poor) people. Tis does not mean that there is peaceful cohabitation inside the squats, but that the tensions and conficts are somehow familiar, since they stem out of a known socio-cultural context. In this regard, it is signifcant that some dwellers defne squats as being ‘too comfortable’ as a solution, and so people are ofen reluctant to leave.

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Figure 6.1 A private apartment in a squat in Rome. Author’s photo.

Figure 6.2 A corridor in a squat in Rome. Author’s photo.

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Tirdly, if we understand home through a transnational lens, squatters are in an easier position to remain in contact with family members living elsewhere: as they do not pay high rents,7 they can easily accomplish their family duty of remitting money home, paying for family members to also migrate and visiting relatives residing in Europe and Africa. Commenting on his sister’s fancy wedding that he had paid for in Sudan, Ab, one of my research participants, astonishingly told me: ‘Tis [the squat] is like Norway’. During our previous chats, Ab had ofen compared Italy with Norway, where his brother lives and where according to him refugee reception and housing are much better than in Italy. However, this did not prevent him from highlighting the positive aspects of living in an informal settlement in Rome. Tese positive aspects did not come from the accommodation per se (i.e. its architectonic structure, location, furniture), but the geographically scattered family members he takes care of. If he is to feel somewhat at home, Ab can’t ignore his transnational afective relationships. However uncomfortable, living in a squat allowed him to save money to take care of his family elsewhere, such as paying for his sister’s wedding, thus accomplishing his responsibilities and aspirations as a migrant. Lastly, squatting is a way of dealing with precarity in two contrasting ways. On the one hand, despite the threat of evictions, squats make for a relatively stable housing solution compared, for example, with renting fats, due to the difculties of paying a monthly rent in an unstable job market and to the difusion of rents without a regular lease. On the other hand, the precariousness of living in a squat is in line with the conditions of transit that many Eritreans experience, either hoping to reach Northern European countries or because they dream of going back to Eritrea. As we point out in several chapters of this book, temporariness and the feeling of being in transit do not characterize only specifc moments in people’s migratory carrier, but ofen accompany them at all time, especially among so-called frst-generation migrants, with various repercussions on the ways in which they arrange their everyday domestic life. Eritrean squats are a concrete case in which multiple axes of inequality intersect. Te conditions for their existence include: the housing problem in Rome, which dates back to the beginning of the last century; poor housing support for refugees; and, more generally, the poor reception system for

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migrants in Italy. Tis is reinforced by the precarious and insufcient wages earned by many Eritreans due to their disadvantaged position in the regular job market, and their frequent involvement in black market jobs where they do not get regular contracts and are thus excluded from regular tenant contracts. Tis is exacerbated by landlords’ racism as well as by their being excluded, as newcomers, from social housing. At the same time, these squats are infuenced by the tight social ties existing within this ethnic-national group as well as with their transnational horizon, which, much like the everyday assemblages of a canal in Bucharest (Lancione 2018), can paradoxically make these informal and temporary settlements ‘homely’.

Conclusion Inequalities penetrate migrants’ attempts at home-making in multiple ways and through a plurality of axes related to the contradictory interlacing of both marginality and belonging to the wider social body. Te very concept of inequality has a relational dimension in itself – it always relates and refers to the possibility of ‘equality’, and thus calls into question the specifc social and political arrangements in which inequalities are produced and reproduced. Besides reviewing some key works addressing inequalities, this chapter has shown the importance of looking at the contexts of arrival, namely at local histories, social dynamics and implicit moral and symbolic frames in which migrants’ home-making occurs. At the same time, understanding migrants’ sense of home means not circumscribing the  analysis to places where migrants actually live, but taking into account  the wider transnational scenario in which their ways of life take shape, as in the case of Eritrean squatters. All of the vignettes in this chapter have shed light on the creative efects of everyday practices and their ability to produce meanings for the people involved. If we are to understand how inequalities are experienced, faced, practised and made meaningful in the process of making home, we cannot limit our attention to power unbalances or to the criticism of the predominant political and economic arrangements. Tese aspects are important but are only one step towards understanding how inequality and home-making practices

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are experienced in people’s lives. We must combine an external perspective, which investigates the planning and regulation of a space, with ethnography which ‘shadows’ daily activities, makeshif arrangements, symbolic meanings, family intimacy and people’s feelings and emotions (Scarpelli 2016). At the beginning of this chapter I argued that the lens of inequalities could not be avoided in a book on home and mobility. However, the obverse is also true: home is a key locus for investigating how inequalities and politics are interwoven in concrete lives. As Jean Comarof (1997) famously writes, to ‘rediscover the ordinary’ and to look at ‘here, rather than “out there”’ is a way in which we can address the big issues of our day, such as globalization, mobility and inequalities. And what is more ‘ordinary’ than a sense of home?

Notes 1

Mafa Capitale refers to a scandal that erupted in 2014 in Rome’s local government, which uncovered a system designed to misappropriate local public funding, including contracts to manage reception centres for asylum seekers and refugees.

2

An example is the participation of SqEK – Squatting Europe Kollective in an

3

In the last years and most notably afer the Decree on security approved at the

edited book recently published by Routledge (Mudu and Chattopadhyay 2017). end of 2018, the number of evictions is increasingly growing. 4

Palazzinaro is a derogative slang term to identify all those entrepreneurs who, since the 50s, have taken advantage of the local real estate market to make a proft.

5

I am referring to the squats Collatina and Anagnina, established respectively in 2004 and 2006 in the eastern and southern outskirts of Rome, and to via Curtatone, settled nearby the main railway station and recently evicted (Massa 2017). Each squat has its own peculiarities – in terms of history, relationships with movements, internal organizations, populations and quality of the building – which go beyond the scope of this chapter.

6

Te attitude of authorities towards squats is ambiguous and changing. For some years, some squats could be registered as a residenza (ofcial residence, an ofcial document which in Italy gives access to health care services and residence permits) by squatters. In 2014, however, this was prohibited.

7

In the three buildings, the frst squatters gained a sort of ownership right over their rooms or apartments and thus the possibility to sell or rent them to other people.

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Conclusion: Dwelling between mobility and stasis Alejandro Miranda Nieto

Te main focus of this book has been on diferent experiences of home in relation to mobility and migration. It has investigated how home becomes composed through dynamic relationships, social and personal meanings associated with dwelling and fragmented processes where mobility and immobility play a prominent role. People currently seem to be more mobile than ever before. Yet, the meanings of home tend to be constructed around specifc places, circumstances and signifcant relationships. Te interplay between home and migration is ofen fragile and problematic – a circumstance that we have used in this book as a prism through which to analyse the tension between the apparent fxity of home and the seeming fuidity of migratory experiences. In recalling the metaphor of roofs in constant transformation, the diferent cases elaborated in this book have sought to capture the sense of continuous temporariness – a feeling of being stuck in mobility – that resonates with many of our accounts. Te central argument of this book is that home, in large part, is composed by relationships and fragmented processes of mobility and stasis. In other words, home is made, unmade, searched, idealized or reconstituted through diferent (im)mobilities. Pragmatically speaking, home is a material place and a repository of artefacts and feelings. By investigating diverse ways of making home, this book has also explored how home becomes a testimony of the tidemarks of social change, a space of political interventions, a locus of inequality and struggles against inequality, an arena of gendered relationships, an intricate spatiotemporal arrangement, and a series of interrelated scales. Our investigation is not comprehensive; these are just some of the countless

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ways in which home unfolds as a social phenomenon. We have focused on the home experiences of people who emigrated from three diferent regions of the world (the Horn of Africa, South Asia and South America) to fve Western European countries. Tese contrasting cases have provided rich empirical material to address contemporary ways of homing amid mobility. Te contribution of this book does not reside in explaining where home is to specifc groups of people, but in detailing and theorizing how and why certain places and sets of relationships (rather than others) become home through processes of mobility. Home is not merely a location, but an emergence of relationships across time-spaces. From a multidisciplinary social science perspective, it would be easy to agree that home involves an ordering of social life that plays a signifcant role in patterns of movement and settlement (see, for instance, Rapport and Dawson  1998). What this book has done is to show how these processes of homemaking are accomplished, with whom, in what ways and (to an extent) for what reasons. Noticing this eventful and processual character of home can help us to take a more dynamic and nuanced approach to questions of migration, mobility and dwelling. Tis investigation therefore advances current understanding of dwelling in the context of immigration, contributing to the empirical knowledge base and theorization of home and mobility. Furthermore, we have illustrated that there is more to home than a safe haven or a site of struggle and confict. Homing has also to do with aspirations and an ongoing search for making one’s living circumstances more likeable to subjective and collective ideals of control and familiarity. Tese ideals and eforts are contradictory and messy, and the fne-grained analyses in this volume ofer insights into these complex processes of human dwelling. Te organization of the chapters provides a successive elaboration of the interplay between home and migration, and seeks to interlace diferent themes that derive from these two concepts. Chapter 1 has examined how home is represented at diferent scales and how these representations reshape the scope of people’s sense of home. Chapter 2 has focused on the material culture in domestic environments to argue that the making and unmaking of home not only compose people’s dwelling circumstances, but also shape their subjectivities. Chapter 3 has examined home-making practices in contexts of hyper-mobility and a sense of being stuck. Chapter 4 shows how home

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becomes temporalized in practice through a series of routines and thresholds of privacy and intimacy. Chapter 5 focuses on home as gendered, sexual and racialized through the examination of thresholds between private and public social life. Finally, Chapter 6 illustrates the pervasive inequalities in the experience of homemaking among many migrants, and examines migrants’ tactics to procure, negotiate and sustain a dwelling place. Tese are telling examples of how home is experienced by labour and forced migrants and, more generally, of the intimate relationships between dwelling, mobility and circulation. We have unpacked the idea that home-related processes become mobile at various scales by virtue of the circulation of people, meanings, ideas, artefacts, habits and emotions. Tese mobilities have been examined through the optic of three central themes that resonate across this volume and integrate its core argument.

Home as threshold, social change and process Home is, among other things, a site of thresholds. Tis frst theme has to do with the ways through which the material, afective, sensorial, interactional and spatiotemporal bases of home become socially structured through the exchanges between diferent sides of a border. Te two sides of any threshold are bound by diferent forms of complicity. In its literal sense, threshold alludes to the physical demarcation at the bottom of a doorway that is trespassed when entering or exiting a house or room. Te term also refers to magnitude or intensity, and to the moment in which one begins to sense or react upon something. Our use of this concept takes all these connotations into account and draws from recent theorizations of domesticity as an issue of thresholds to be constantly crafed, enacted, negotiated and struggled upon (Brighenti 2014; Boccagni and Brighenti 2017). Te explorations of local worlds of domesticity along the chapters analyse multiple thresholds, namely: the engagements with material worlds that underpin our sense of home at various scales; their demarcation through sofas and other materials that separate the common from the private, while also instantiating asymmetrical gender interactions; the household as a way of diferentiating the inside from the outside; the strategies to produce ‘pockets’ of privacy and intimacy, as

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well as distinguishing between leisure and work inside the domestic place; and the tactics to build and contest domesticity in occupied buildings. Where does home begin and end? When does it start and fnish? Tese boundaries are reconstituted through thresholds of domesticity, foreignness, privacy and publicness that establish relationships – such as those of distance and proximity – among people, materials and meanings. Our second theme refers to the ways in which social change becomes inscribed and enacted in and through people’s homes. Some of the most acute examples come from the inequalities associated with homemaking. While the cases detailed in this book vary widely, most of the experiences of our research interlocutors refect the difculties of fnding adequate accommodation and dealing with poverty and social exclusion – facts that have been extensively documented in all the countries involved in this study (see, for instance, Arbaci 2008; Doherty 2012). Te symbolic and material importance of having a home and being able to develop a sense of home is ofen confronted with the loss, lack or inadequacy of dwelling places. Tis predicament is part of the everyday life of many of our interlocutors, which partly stems from current regimes of (im)mobility (Glick-Schiller and Salazar 2013; Baker 2016), public policies and welfare regimes in Europe (Arbaci 2007), and more specifcally from discriminatory practices in housing markets and other forms of segregation (Peach 2012). While conducting feldwork in diferent countries, we have encountered experiences of vulnerability inscribed in people’s migratory experiences, their dwelling places (or absence thereof) and interpersonal relationships – as home can become a locus of gendered vulnerability for both men and women (see Meth 2014). But we also found that home is a site of aspirations. Te decoration and refurbishing of domestic spaces, for instance, are mundane examples of how the social becomes enacted through people’s memories and expectations. It is in the oscillation between hope and a sense of being stuck that home reveals itself as an entry point to the investigation of social change. Tird, we have sought to understand home as process, and not merely as a thing or condition. Investigating the practised home has led us to examine the routinely forms of its enactment, embodiment and reproduction. At a general level, homemaking can be understood as a series of activities that people do within and beyond the domestic environment. Yet, our emphasis on home-

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making processes is also concerned with what these practices do – to people, as well as environments, narratives, meanings and other dimensions of the social. In this way, home is enacted in specifc locations and at particular moments, but their accumulation extends across multiple time-spaces. In their re-enactment, transformation, disappearance, recall or resuscitation, specifc patterns of homemaking become recognizable activities that tend to endure in people’s lives. Current ways of dwelling are oriented in relation to past and future home experiences, which is why homemaking is an achievement that involves recurrence and change, as well as location and dislocation. In the course of elaborating these three themes, we have sought to bring comparativity to our cases and perspectives in the course of conducting research.

Comparing and collaborating Tis book is an outcome of about two years of collaboration in a common research project. Tis circumstance has allowed us to develop a genuinely collaborative angle to the ethnographic study of home and migration. We have focused on multiple ‘ways of homing’, developing a comparative research framework that seeks to learn from diferent case studies of people coming from three diferent regions of the world, currently living in selected countries. And while comparison is intrinsic to any form of ethnographic work, most ethnographies involving the juxtaposition of several cases only become comparative post hoc (Miller et al. 2017), afer having conducted feldwork. Tis book – as some other dissemination outcomes of our research – stems from an efort to develop a comparative and collective understanding of home throughout the diferent stages of our research project. Tis strategy is refected in the arguments of this volume, since the specifcities of our cases aggregate to produce a distinct approach for looking at mobility from the optic of home and vice versa. We contend that comparing among sites or specifc cases is not something inherent to the topics we are investigating or the empirical materials we have collected and analysed. Rather, this comparative work is the product of a deliberate juxtaposition of our cases as the project evolved. Tis is not merely an exercise of contrasting diferent experiences of home and migration, but

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an efort to make them comparable along the various stages of our research. Collaboration and comparison are outcomes of having conducted feldwork simultaneously (although mostly in diferent locations) and building a common analytical framework (Bonfanti et al. 2019). One of the most noticeable assumptions underlying our research project is that ‘ways of homing’ are indeed comparable among migrants from diferent parts of the world living in a set of countries. While our research design addresses groups of people based on their nationality or place of origin and the city in which they currently live, this way of proceeding has opened up the possibility of investigating ideas of nationhood, belonging and ethnic afliation in relation to homemaking. Furthermore, we have sought to build ethnographic work that attends to the relationships between diferent spaces, such as domestic environments and their links with public and semi-public spaces (such as public parks, places of cult, shops and restaurants). In bringing together our individual cases, we have developed a relational approach to multiple ways of dwelling in diferent places. Collaboration and comparison have therefore preceded this volume and became reshaped during its production. Tey have emerged as we were writing down our feldnotes, conducting participant observation and interviews, and particularly while meeting to discuss our fndings and experiences in the feld. Creating conditions for producing comparative and collective ethnography has infuenced each other’s choices and allowed us to listen to people’s ways of dwelling.

Listening to dwelling In analysing home as process, we have sought to advance a perspective that listens to the dynamics of dwelling. We have critically addressed the ostensible opposition between migrating and being at home in light of the experiences of people across diferent locations. In doing so, we have also shown that just as localities are not merely nested into globalism, homes are not simply nested in fxed locations, identities and belongings. Far from depicting home as a set dwelling space, the ethnographic analyses and conceptual debates in this book reveal how home in its multiple guises is almost always in fux amid ongoing quests for ontological security and determinacy. Afer having visited

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the diferent cases elaborated in this book, we hope that homemaking would now appear to the eyes of the reader as much more than forms of belonging to specifc cultural backgrounds or to singular locations. Cultural identities are crucial resources that shape our domestic lives, but attending to the scalar, material and immaterial, mobile, temporal, intersectional and unequal aspects of dwelling advances a perspective that makes justice to social forces ranging from home-making agency to social structures. As we conclude this volume, many corners of the world are facing the proliferation of discourses of the nation as a space that needs to be protected from unwanted people. Tere is nothing casual about this discursive turn in the political spheres of many countries. As we have suggested in the introduction, the social question is here, alive and problematic – and one of its facets is the increasing signifcance of the nation-as-home as an exclusionary term. As Duyvendak (2011) suggests, home is an exclusionary metaphor and, consequently, a way of diferentiating interior and exterior, inside and outside, or domestic and foreign at diferent scales. Te political motivations that inform current exclusionary discourses in Europe and elsewhere codify home as fxed place, as a property with a bounded identity, as a realm for defensiveness and as a space rooted in imagined groupisms. Tese representations contrast with those of globalism as movement, cosmopolitanism and fow. On this note, Gibson-Graham (2002: 27) reminds us of the perils of thinking of globalism and localism in binary terms. Listening to multiple forms of dwelling is a way of stepping out from such a dichotomizing approach. Listening is important because it constitutes a crucial form of human connection that is largely taken for granted (Back 2007). Hence this book represents a contribution to further studies attending to dwelling and mobility as a window to understand contemporary social transformations.

References Arbaci, S. (2007), ‘Ethnic segregation, housing systems and welfare regimes in Europe’, International Journal of Housing Policy, 7 (4): 401–33. Arbaci, S. (2008), ‘(Re)viewing ethnic residential segregation in Southern European cities: Housing and urban regimes as mechanisms of marginalisation’, Housing Studies, 23 (4): 589–613.

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Back, L. (2007), Te Art of Listening, London: Bloomsbury. Baker, B. (2016), ‘Regimes’, in N. B. Salazar and K. Jayaram (eds.), Keywords of Mobility: Critical Engagements, 152–70, New York: Berghahn. Boccagni, P., and A. M. Brighenti (2017), ‘Immigrants and home in the making: Tresholds of domesticity, commonality and publicness’, Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, 32 (1): 1–11. Bonfanti, S., A. Massa and A. Miranda Nieto (2019), ‘Whifs of home: Ethnographic comparison in a collaborative research across European cities’, Etnografa e Ricerca Qualitativa, 3: 153–74. Brighenti, A. (2014), Te Ambiguous Multiplicities: Materials, Episteme and Politics of Cluttered Social Formations, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Doherty, J. (2012), ‘Immigration and housing: North-Western Europe’, in S. Smith (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Housing and Home, 8–15, London: Elsevier. Duyvendak, J. W. (2011), Te Politics of Home, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Gibson-Graham, J. K. (2002), ‘Beyond global vs local: Economic politics outside the binary frame’, in A. Herod and M. Wright (eds.), Geographies of Power: Placing Scale, 25–60, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Glick-Schiller, N., and N. Salazar (2013), ‘Regimes of mobility across the globe’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 39 (2): 183–200. Meth, P. (2014), ‘Violence and men in urban South Africa: Te signifcance of “home”’, in A. Gorman-Murray and P. Hopkins, Masculinities and Place, 159–72, Farnham: Ashgate. Miller, D., E. Costa, L. Haapio-Kirk, N. Haynes, J. Sinanan, M. Tom, R. Nicolescu, J. Spyer, S. Venkatraman and X. Wang (2017), ‘Contemporary comparative anthropology – Te why we post project’, Ethnos. DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2017.1397044. Peach, C. (2012), ‘Residential segregation: Race and ethnicity’, in S. Smith (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Housing and Home, 132–6, London: Elsevier. Rapport, N., and A. Dawson (1998), Migrants of Identity: Perceptions of Home in a World in Movement, Oxford: Berg.

Aferword Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo University of Southern California

Inspired by careful readings, analysis and ethnography of migrant home life in multiple European cities, this book ofers a thoughtful meditation on home and migration for all students and scholars who wish to understand global migration. Te authors came together afer they were selected as the frst cohort of post-doctoral research fellows working on Paolo Boccagni’s ambitious multiyear, transnational and multi-destination ethnography of home and migration, a qualitative research project based at the University of Trento and funded by the European Research Council. For over two years this team has conducted ethnographic research on the diverse ways in which migrants construct home, focusing particularly, in this frst phase of the research, on the cognitive and emotional registers of this process. Fieldwork took them to London, Madrid, Amsterdam, Milan, Rome, Brescia, Stockholm, London and Birmingham. Tey interviewed migrants, as well as the family members who remain behind in the points of origin. As ethnographers, they sought to get as close as possible, walking with and accompanying migrants in the journey, that is, homemaking. When they reconvened at the University of Trento, they collectively developed the insights contained in this book. Tis book is the culmination not of their feldwork, but of their critical and focused refections and discussions on the conceptual foundations undergirding their feldwork, which now provide a new scafolding for next phases of research. Empirical insights are threaded throughout, but this book is neither a research monograph nor a theoretical treatise with all of the endpoints, explanations and linkages duly noted. Rather, the book is a deep refection on key points of interest in transnational migrant homemaking. It ofers a critical cartography and a compass for future development of the homemigration nexus. As I see, it is an invitation for engagement and extension. Te authors, rooted in anthropology and sociology, ofer nuanced understandings of migrant home dynamics. Tey focus attention on the quiet, quotidian practices of migrant home projects. While the headlines shout at

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us daily with sensationalized reporting on the spectacle of transnational migration (e.g. wall building, capsized rafs, refugees in transit), the chapters here turn our attention to otherwise inaudible, discreet quotidian practices, the under-the-radar daily goings-on of migrants seeking, making and sometimes enjoying home. Many innovative formulations unfold here. A creatively observed chapter focuses analytic attention on three mundane objects – the sofa, the wrapped package and the online webcam communicator – to suggest the ways in which migrant subjectivities and feelings of belonging are shaped by home possessions. Another chapter refects on the clashes of daily schedules and temporalities, and the problems of socially synching old practices of daily domesticity and replenishment with the demands of new regimes of labour. An instructive chapter on inequalities reminds us of both generational and gender divisions within migrant homes and the intersectional inequalities that both enable and constrain migrant home-making practices. For the most part, the refections focus inward, on interior home-migration processes and relationships, even as these span nation-states and temporal distances. While the chapter on ‘scales’ of home reminds us that ‘home’ is not necessarily a smaller unit nested into larger scales of neighbourhood, region, nation or globe, one outcome of the approach in these chapters is that the signifcance of larger macro processes and dynamics falls out of view. Given the current historical epoch, bringing back the historical and macro should be of urgent concern. Te Trento research group began in 2017, an historical moment fraught with intensifed global dangers and contestations. While environmental degradation and ongoing permanent wars provide both the backdrop and some of the impetus for global migration, the current global epoch is one where authoritarian governments of the right have risen to new prominence, fuelled by swelling tides of radical right populism and racialized nativism. It is an historical moment characterized by both agentic migrant eforts at making, transnationally extending and maintaining home, and also by statewide coercive eforts to unmake immigrant homes. And here I deliberately use the word ‘immigrant’ rather than ‘migrant’ to suggest not the fniteness of settlement, but rather the long-term rooting down and claims-making of millions of foreign-born residents who have made their homes in places and nations other than where they were born, regardless of legal authorization.

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Te book’s conclusion ends with observations noting the rise of ‘exclusionary discourses in Europe and elsewhere’ that codify home and nation as a site of exclusion. Tis is irrefutably true. But the movements of exclusion that we see around the world today, both in the past and in the present, go far beyond the discursive. Tey include the implementation of state power to undo immigrant homes. State-enacted programs to eradicate migrant homes are not a new thing. We can think of many historical precedents: the pogroms and the Holocaust, where massacres of Jews began with forcible removal of people from domestic dwellings to the labour camps and killing centers; the ‘repatriation’ of the 1930s in the United States, where more than a half million Mexican immigrants and US-born Mexican Americans were rounded up and deported to Mexico by a consortium of federal and local state police, social workers and sometimes assisted by Mexican consulate bureaucrats; the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War in the Western regions of the United States, when US citizens of Japanese origin were forcibly removed from their homes and neighbourhoods, relocated to remote rural areas and incarcerated in camps. Tese incidents are not confned to a remote corner of history. Approximately 5 million immigrants have been deported from the United States during the last twenty years (Human Rights Watch 2017), the majority of them Latino working-class men, constituting a gendered racial removal program (Golash-Boza and Hondagneu-Sotelo 2013) that has exerted legal violence (Menjivar and Abrego 2012), creating new types of coercively separated transnational families and jeopardizing if not totally upending migrant-home projects. Border walls are in fortifcation mode around the globe. We see multiplying sites of detention, deportation and refugee camps; the symbolic and policed walls of the interior of nations of migrant destination; new surveillance measures; and the transformation of transit nations into zones of migrant stoppage. Te celebratory tone of the most recent era of globalization has ended, and while the new global regime remains emergent and contested, it is clear that protectionism, right-wing populism, racialized nationalism, xenophobia and the scapegoating of immigrants for all economic and social ills are now a pervasive force. To be sure, this is not a linear or universal process, as there are mobilizations, social movements and challenges to these tendencies and to the scapegoating of immigrant ‘Others’. And it is worth noting that this tide

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of exclusionary forces extends beyond Western Europe or the Global North to include the Global South. In instances of South to South migrations that are centred in the more prosperous industrializing nations of Latin America, Asia and Africa, we also see migrant homes being established, undone and contested there too. Who has the right to home under these conditions? Te authors of Shifing Roofs advocate forthrightly for the right to home. But in this age of diverse mobilities and migration, we know that there are diferent types of transnational migrants. Te ‘super-diversity’ of migrants has gained currency as a general concept in the literature, and Vertovec reminds us that he introduced the term in 2007 to draw attention to ‘multi-dimensional reconfgurations of various social forms’ (Vertovec 2019: 130). Hierarchies of class and legal status are part of this array, and in this era of heightened global inequalities, to what extent do we see class, globalization and legal privileges of mobility translating into the right to home, or to multiple homes scattered around global cities? Te insights drawn from Shifing Roofs come from studying migrants who have fewer resources and tenuous claims to home. But today professionals, entrepreneurs and educational migrants make up increasingly signifcant numbers of transnational migrants. Cosmopolitan, wealthy industrialists as well as those working in global fnance and business services may enjoy access to not only the ‘fexible citizenship’ of multiple passports (Ong 1999), but also home-bases in diferent nations. Tis produces new forms of homing practices and material infrastructures: empty houses, penthouses and shell homes. Homeownership is a strategic leveraging for access to educational opportunities for children in one nation, social status in another, and augmentation of business opportunities elsewhere. Home is a site of status and leisure for lifestyle migrants, some of whom are moving from the Global North to the Global South. ‘Studying up’ the social-class hierarchy is always a challenge, but some of the conceptual oferings in Shifing Roofs as well as in Boccagni’s formulation of migrant home practices involving security, familiarity and control should be productively deployed to examine other ways in which the migrant-home nexus operates. Shifing Roofs provides a rich set of critical refections on the granular inner-workings and subjectivities of migrant homemaking. Te next stage of research will need to connect with the broader meso and macro levels, to

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see the interconnections between migrant home-making projects and macro political forces. We might ask if we can identify macro moments of aperture, and how meso-level social institutions and groups may facilitate migrant home projects. Shifing Roofs moves us well beyond the old binary of home as site of pleasure or pain, as ‘haven in a heartless world’ or as intimate zone of danger. Chockful of conceptual innovations and insights, this book will undoubtedly inspire the next round of research on these important processes. Bring it home.

References Golash-Boza, T., and P. Hondagneu-Sotelo (2013), ‘Latino immigrant men and the deportation crisis: A gendered racial removal program’, Latino Studies, 11 (3): 271–92. Human Rights Watch (2017), Te Deported Immigrants Uprooted from the Country Tey Call Home. Available online: https://www.hrw.org/report/2017/12/05/ deported/immigrants-uprooted-country-they-call-home Retrieved 14 May 2018. Menjivar, C., and L. J. Abrego (2012), ‘Legal violence: Immigration law and the lives of Central American immigrants’, American Journal of Sociology, 117 (5): 1380–421. Ong, A. (1999), Flexible Citizenship: Te Cultural Logics of Transnationality, Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press. Vertovec, S. (2019), ‘Talking around super-diversity’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 42 (1): 125–39.

Index aesthetics 48, 54, 60 afective objects 52, 65 afective relations 143, 159, 169 agency 6, 9, 39, 41–2, 54, 58, 75–6, 81, 173 Amsterdam 54–5, 175 attainment 53, 56 AV recording 42, 54, 57 bedrooms 45, 54, 99, 101–5, 126–7, 134 Blunt, Alison and Dowling, Robert 7, 16, 25, 54 borders 1, 4, 8, 22, 58, 73–4, 80, 144, 169, 177 British Asians 47, 137 Brun, Cathrine and Fábos, Anita 25, 67–8, 109 chores 80, 125, 130–2 city 7, 15, 18–20, 24, 55, 99, 119, 124–5, 143, 150–3, 172 class 11, 19, 27, 47, 51, 56, 115–18, 126– 30, 132–4, 142–9, 152–5, 177–8 commodity (ies) 43, 49, 52, 123 critical geography 16, 121 cross-temporal imagination 96, 97, 110 design 39, 43, 48, 60, 83 desires 40, 56, 77–8, 120, 131, 146, 152–5 diferences 6, 11, 24, 34, 41, 45, 51, 69–70, 76, 108, 115–17, 130–8, 146, 151 digital technologies 53, 72, 106–8 dis/advantages 5, 107, 118, 133–5, 142, 147, 161 diversities 1, 8, 11, 41, 60, 97, 115–35, 142–5, 178 domestic economy 128, 132 domestic space 5, 7, 10, 15, 17, 21–3, 39, 41, 70, 92, 95, 118, 121, 143, 148–9, 154–5, 170 domestic violence 122, 123, 134 domestication 135, 146

domopolitics 2, 11, 116, 130, 133 drawing 42, 57, 65 Duyvendak, Jan Willem 16, 71–2, 133, 173 dwelling 2–7, 10, 11, 13, 15–18, 20–35, 40, 44, 59, 68–73, 79–84, 88, 92–3, 96–102, 108–11, 117, 124–30, 133 economic crisis 100, 101, 107, 143 en-gendering 3, 115, 119 Eritrean refugees 69, 79, 143 ethnic enclave 143, 157 ethnography 11, 40–4, 48, 51–7, 116–20, 124, 131–4, 144, 149, 161, 172, 175 feminist 117, 132 Europe 11, 26, 41, 44, 69–75, 82, 108–9, 119–20, 131, 142–3, 151–2, 159, 170–7 forced migration 76–9, 85 furniture 7, 29, 41–8, 73, 80, 145, 156, 159 gender 6, 11, 15, 22, 45, 51, 69, 105, 115–20, 123, 127–30, 134, 142, 169, 176 gif 43, 49–51, 123 globalization 18, 47, 72, 144, 161, 177–8 Gorman-Murray, Andrew 23, 31, 127 hearth 121, 124, 131, 134 home as a political issue 1–2, 9, 11, 16, 20–1, 45, 77, 116–18, 127, 130, 133–5, 143, 149–52, 155–6, 160–1, 167, 173 as a site of work 11, 98–101, 106, 128–34, 170 keeping 103, 128, 131, 133 loss of 3, 8, 49, 76–8, 146, 170 politics of 11, 45, 133, 149 sense of 2, 10–11, 17–18, 20, 24–5, 27–34, 68, 72, 77–9, 93, 95–6, 108–10, 143, 146, 149, 152, 160–1

Index beyond the dwelling place 10–11, 15–17, 19, 22–5, 34, 92, 155, 170 homeland 11, 33, 44–6, 48, 50–2, 67, 77–8, 80, 109 homing tactics 71, 73, 81–2, 85, 169, 170 house of worship 7, 44, 45, 55, 148 household 3, 11, 15–24, 43, 45, 47, 49, 52, 54–5, 58, 94–9, 105–7, 110, 120, 122, 125, 127, 129, 131, 134, 153, 169 housework 131–3 housing rights 151, 154, 156 Howitt, Richard 19, 20, 32–3 inequalities 11, 50, 69, 73, 107, 133–5, 141–50, 159–61, 167, 169–70, 176, 178 interior decoration 7, 29, 39, 46, 56, 80, 82–3, 148–9, 157, 170 intersectionality 118, 142 intimacy 7, 9, 20, 27, 41, 54, 93, 96, 98, 104–5, 116, 126, 128, 134, 149, 154, 161, 169 kitchen 11, 102–3, 121–5, 134, 155 labour division 45, 120, 129 Lefebvre, Henry 18, 25, 91, 103, 150 legal status 6, 69, 151 liminality 8, 45, 67–8 London 23, 26, 47, 69, 73, 97, 100, 108, 121, 124 lounge 45, 52, 132 Madrid 10, 15, 17, 20, 27–32, 91, 93, 98–101, 107–9 maids 124–5, 128–32 Malkki, Lisa 76–7 marginality 144, 147, 153, 160 Massey, Doreen 21, 24, 94, 120 material culture 8, 10, 22, 39–44, 47, 49, 51–9, 117, 120, 124, 168 memory 49, 52, 144 migrant aspirations 2–3, 6, 11, 56, 73, 96, 124, 145, 155, 159, 168, 170 Milan 131 Miller, Daniel 3, 8, 18, 22, 39–40, 42, 52–4, 56, 58, 72, 117, 120, 123, 149, 171 mobile professionals 50, 69, 72

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mobility turn 3, 70, 116 moral stigma 147 neighbourhood 10, 15, 17–18, 20, 23, 27, 28, 30–2, 34, 117, 124, 131, 145–7, 154–5, 176–7 neighbours 23, 46–7, 132–3, 154, 157 nurture 50, 70, 119 on/of line 41, 72, 73, 82, 105 parcels 10, 41, 49–52, 58–9 percolation of time 96, 109 permanent temporariness/impermanence 24, 107, 109 phenomenology 3, 44, 71, 80, 84, 119, 144 photographs 29, 42, 44, 49 Pink, Sarah 39, 40, 54, 93–5, 120 polymedia 53 positionality/positionalities 11, 110, 118, 133 Povrzanović Frykman, Maja 40–1, 50–1, 60 precarity 143–5, 159 privacy 20–23, 27, 51, 54, 56, 83, 93, 96, 98, 103–6, 128, 156, 169–70 protracted displacement 67, 77–8, 84–5 race 11, 21, 49, 51, 53, 115–16, 118, 120, 128, 130, 134, 142, 145, 147 racism 120, 129, 131, 157, 160 reception centres 11, 67–70, 76, 78, 82–5, 141 refugee camps 11, 68, 70, 75, 78–82, 85, 177 relocation 25, 30, 79, 98 remittance house 46–7, 106 rescaling 20, 25–6, 29, 32 residential patterns 145 Rome 150–61 scale 5, 8, 10, 15–20, 22–7, 30–4, 40–1, 59, 82, 93, 116–17, 121, 130, 134, 167–9, 173 scope 20–1, 25, 27, 30, 33 self-ethnography 118 multisensoriality 57 sexual orientations 124

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sexuality 11, 115–16, 118, 124–8, 134. shifs 20, 33, 43, 48–9 shipping 50 social housing 147–8, 153, 160 social media 50, 53, 69, 71–3, 82, 85 social status 8, 143, 149, 178 sofas 41–7, 52, 59, 80–2, 103, 107, 155 South Asian diasporas 41, 59, 117, 119 Southall Black Sisters 121 spatial segregation 11, 45 squats 11, 124, 143, 151–60 standpoint 117, 135 stuf 22, 40–4, 52, 56–9, 80, 159 Svašek, Maruška 40, 48, 52, 55 synchronicity 110 temporal regimes 92–3, 95–6, 99, 101, 103, 105, 110 temporality/temporalities 8, 11, 40, 51, 79, 85, 91–9, 106–7, 110 temporalized space 103, 106

the everyday 40, 46, 48, 53, 120, 123 thresholds 7–9, 11, 45, 56, 98, 103, 105–6, 118, 121, 124, 126, 133, 143, 152, 154, 169–70 transit spaces 75 translocal 28, 40, 41, 58 transnational afective relationships 159 Tuan, Yi-Fu 15 vacillation 24, 30, 33 visuals 9, 57 vulnerability/vulnerabilities 8–9, 142, 144–5, 170 waiting 67, 75, 78, 82–3, 96, 109 webcams 10, 53–4, 59, 72 Young, Marion Iris 120, 127