SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Where can one locate ‘home’ in scholarly accounts about human material and affective places of dwelling? In this, the second, roundtable exploring the relationships between home/law/language, we focus on home as the earthiest of terms linking our work on colonial archives, Indigenous relationships to land and waters, gender-variant communities in Pakistan and home(s) after home. Home’s homes have curious idiomatic histories. In English, ‘there’s no place like home’ tells us that home results from differentiating a unique, material place from the surrounding ‘mere space’, even if this involves, as it did during colonial conquest, transplanted names, laws and land use practices. The unique and private attachment to home begets the need for hospitality in the saying ‘to make yourself at home’. A host offers up, gives over, what is her own; and yet hospitality is also an affirmation of ownership and so is, perversely, inhospitable. Not just a material or jurisdictional space, ‘home is where the heart is’, something that is felt or experienced, and sometimes carried into the displacement, into the new spaces and practices of belonging. How do such attachments form? What binds us to one another in a shared sense of ‘home’ and is this different from the bonds of language or even law? What role do such subsidiary phenomena play in constituting home, and in re-constituting home after its loss?