Homeplaces by João Biehl, Federico Neiburg

A home is dismantled to make another home habitable. This is where Homeplaces begins. Spanning continents, this landmark volume brings together leading anthropologists to chart “house-ing,” the unrelenting, reciprocal process of people making houses and houses making people amid ongoing calamity. Their oikographies—vivid, writerly ethnographies of home as sense and action—blow open the fantasy of the private domicile and reveal houses as live forms: porous, incomplete, bleeding into neighborhoods, economies, ecologies, and the dead. They detonate philosophical abstractions about dwelling and technocratic assumptions about homemaking, revealing why home plays such a vital role in worldmaking. Refusing end-times thinking, Homeplaces reveals incompleteness as generative drive. The dissolution of forms, bodies, and buildings becomes the material from which people craft shelter, dignity, and transcendence. As war, climate catastrophe, and toxic landscapes dehouse the planet, Homeplaces captures the stubborn human insistence on dwelling—provisional, fierce, and alive.