To be at home: house, work, and self in the modern world

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

Machine generated contents note: To Be at Home: House, Work and Self in the Modern World -- Table of Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Foreword -- Mamphela Ramphele -- Preface -- Andreas Eckert -- Introduction: To Be at Home-House, Work and Self in the Modern World -- Felicitas Hentschke and James Williams -- -- 1. Homes and Mobility: Borders, Boundaries, Thresholds -- Shoes Painfully Small: Material and Maternal Discomfort in Cape Verdean Remittance Houses -- Heike Drotbohm -- Hostel, Home and 'Life-Rhythm' for African Workers behind the Berlin Wall -- Eric Allina -- From Forecastle to Folk Club: The Homeless Seafarer -- Jonathan Hyslop -- Kinship and Displacement in Post-War Liberia: Children's Lives in an IDP Camp -- James Williams -- -- 2. HOUSES, WORK and Everyday Life: Rhythms, Ruptures, Cycles -- Constructing Nineteenth-Century Middle Class Milieus: The Labour of Geselligkeit -- David Warren Sabean -- Home-Making among the Kel Ewey Tuareg in the Sahara -- Gerd Spittler -- Living in Homes, but What Kinds and Whose? Single Young People in Nineteenth-Century Central Europe -- Josef Ehmer -- The Place of Work and Workplace in Girls' Identities in Chinese and European History -- Mary Jo Maynes and Ann Waltner -- + Thabang Sefalafala -- -- 3c. Construction, Demolition, Relocation -- Evicted in Dar es Salaam: From Tanganyika Packers to Uptown Kawe -- Thaddeus Sunseri -- "Build us a Church and We'll Stay!": Italian Migrant Workers in Lorraine -- Felicitas Hentschke -- Remaking Homes and Reproducing Inequalities in an Eastern Indian Steel Town -- Christian Strümpell -- + Alla Bolotova -- -- 4. THE POWER of PLACE: SPACE, EXCLUSIONS, Vulnerability -- Homes and Colonial Violence: The Coolie Pondok -- Vincent Houben -- Public-Private Continuities and Alternate Domesticities -- Renu Addlakha -- Subaltern Urbanism, Or Dwelling and the Unhoused -- Anupama Rao -- + Anne-Katrin Bicher -- -- 5. Houses and Selves: Nostalgia, Imagination, Memory -- Where I Rest my Sea Legs? Bulgarian Seafarers between the Home and the Ship -- Milena Kremakova -- The Home and the Hearth: Poetic Imagination and Bhojpuriya Women -- Nitin Sinha -- A Woman and a Nation: A Story of Job and Home in China -- Ju Li -- + Sidney Chalhoub -- -- 6. HOMES AND STYLE: AESTHETICS, POETICS, ETHICS -- + Jan Grill -- + Steven Rockell -- + Nitin Varma -- -- 7. Networks, Neighbourhoods, Communities -- The Enlarged Parlour? Structures and Varieties of German Working-Class Housing around 1900 -- Jürgen Schmidt -- The Chawl and the Slum: The Transformation of Housing in Ahmedabad's Industrial East -- Rukmini Barua -- "Land of Boarding Houses": Migrant Workers and Collective Dwellings in São Paulo, Brazil, 1945-1970 -- Paulo Fontes -- The Political Work of Home-Making by Refugees and Civil Society in Berlin -- Fazila Bhimji -- -- 8. BEING AT HOME IN THE WORLD: Thinking with Houses and Homes -- The Importance of Owning a Home in Bamako, or Life after Death -- Isaie Dougnon -- From Ancestral Tablets to Patriotic Snapshots: Remembering Kinship in Rural Chinese Homes -- Charlotte Bruckermann -- Unhomely Afterlives: Reading Life-Phases through Phases of Afterlife -- Claudio Pinheiro -- + Maria José de Abreu -- -- REFLECTIONS -- On Homes, Work and Personhood -- Prabhu Mohapatra -- On Photography and History -- Alf Lüdtke -- On Why Homes Still Matter: Thoughts on Mamphela Ramphela's A Bed Called Home: Life in the Migrant Labour Hostels of Cape Town -- Frederick Cooper -- Contributor Biographies -- Photography Credits -- Index.