Abstract
The book Home: Ethnographic encounters focuses on ‘home-making’, or the experience of creating homes both materially and socially, during development field research. Additionally, the authors reflect on research ethics and practices as well as the significance of the home as a site of research. This edited collection includes 12 chapters documenting how different groups of people make and conceptualize ‘home’. Each chapter shares a first-person account of fieldwork experiences, making a home within the field, and navigating tensions arising from researcher–researched dynamics. This book contributes to debates in development studies by presenting case studies that reflect how interlocking structures of oppression in a globalizing world affect daily experiences of home-making.
The edited volume starts by problematizing the term ‘home’. The authors argue that while home can refer to a material dwelling, a range of practices, or a state of being, they choose to frame home as a site for research that creates space for understanding constructions of intimacy, gender and community, as well as the struggle for survival. The editors set out four goals— (a) to diversify the meaning of the word ‘home’ and recognize it as fundamental to a range of human lives; (b) to reflect on the production of ethnographies of (unconventional) homes; (c) to focus on questions of power and inequality in the production of home; and (d) to reconsider the ethics (more than just the practices) of doing ethnography.
When reading the book, three themes emerge—(a) the alienated/unalienated home, discussed below; (b) intervention and positionality, meaning the ethics of active engagement with research participants and the tensions arising from researcher–researched dynamics; and (c) individuality/structure, or the relationship between individual home-making practices and broader structural restrictions resulting from race, class and gender dynamics, among others. The introduction characterizes an ‘unalienated’ home as one in which the subject’s sense of self is bolstered through routine and comfort (p. 17). Conversely, the ‘alienated’ home is portrayed as a site of displacement or an object of continual improvement. The authors argue that the ‘unalienated’ home for the ethnographer results from an ‘immersion’ (passive) model of ethnography, while the ‘alienated’ home arises from an ‘active intervention’ model (p. 18). The difference in the latter, the editors argue, is that intervention involves being a participant in interlocutors’—also known as research participants and gatekeepers—efforts to ‘reproduce the ever-changing social world which makes up our ethnographic field’ (p. 18).
Sascha Roth (Ch. 2) and Susannah Crockford (Ch. 5) both address the alienated/unalienated tension. Roth finds that the gendered norms around home in Azerbaijan often clash with their family’s own views of intimacy and privacy, at times straining familial relations. Crockford also battles gendered norms as they build an off-the-grid home in rural Arizona with a male research participant, Rand, who expects Crockford to do traditional women’s work such as cleaning and doing dishes. This division of labour was an important part of creating an ‘unalienated home’ physically and ideologically for Rand, but it alienated Crockford from a sense of home. Crockford’s inability to speak out to try to change gendered power relations ultimately reminded them that, like many other authors in the book have reflected, their home was temporary and fleeting.
Several authors address the intervention and positionality theme, including Matthew Gangé (Ch. 1) and Johannes Lenhard (Ch. 7). In Gangé’s research on gay sex in Beirut, they decide to participate in the sociosexual world by being active on dating apps and forming intimate relations with interlocutors. While using dating apps is generally a discouraged practice for ethnographers, Gangé found that their own relationships helped build reciprocity and trust, and allowed them to better understand first-hand how gay entanglements are limited and stifled by the sociospatial culture in Beirut, in which queer male intimacies are tenuous under pressures of heteronormativity. In tandem, Lenhard discusses the difficulty of maintaining reasonable boundaries between their private home and the field while working with ‘homeless’ people in Paris. As they volunteered at a shelter and tried to steer their informants toward ‘normal’ lives around jobs and housing, Lenhard realized that their presence might alter their research participants’ lives in ways that the participants themselves would not want and would create a codependent relationship between them (p. 129). Lenhard sensed a need to keep their own home-making separate from their research participants since their home, like Crockford’s, was only temporary.
Other authors address the third theme, the balance and relationship between individuality and structured narratives around the home, including Faten Khazaei (Ch. 4) and Melissa Wrapp (Ch. 12). Khazaei recalls an encounter with police in Switzerland during their research analysing how the police responded to domestic violence calls. They observed the intersections between intimate and state-structured violence as police officers entered the home of a Cameroonian immigrant family and used their power to orchestrate an insensitive intervention, while also charging the victim for defending herself. In conjunction, Wrapp studies the housing customs of the Xhosa people of South Africa, in which homes are essential to ones’ sense of self, spirituality and connection to kin. They share the story of Sandla, fighting with members of his family to access his parents’ home, not as an isolated, individualized problem but as a problem situated within broader structural conditions and histories of displacement for black South Africans that also reflect the multiple meanings of home. This linking of individual constructions of home with broader social-structural narratives provides a comprehensive understanding of the ways that practices and conflicts cannot be reduced to superficial meanings.
All in all, the authors collectively define home as a process and dynamic, rather than a static and defined entity. The authors emphasize the home as an important research site, problematize the meaning of it, and explore a variety of underrepresented contexts in field research.
The edited volume provides thought-provoking anecdotes and questions regarding the ethics and practices of fieldwork. This book is an excellent resource for classes in anthropology, geography and sociology at the undergraduate or graduate level, and can be used as a series of case studies or stand-alone chapters to prompt students to reflect on questions of ethics, positionality and relationships in the field.