Reveries of Home: Nostalgia, Authenticity and the Performance of Place

'Reveries of Home' considers understandings of home in the world today and the techniques by which homes are assured. In particular, the volume explores the relationship between the phenomenon of globalisation and the ways in which home-making entails acts of practical and symbolic emplacement in landscapes felt to be meaningful and authentic. Home-making is a continuous work for 'place' is not a neither necessarily singular nor once-and-for-all. The places of identity, of self and society, are continually generated by acts of home-making and 'Reveries of Home' explores how homes exist in time, in moments of individual and collective performance which are both mundane and memorial. A series of case-studies, from Norway and West Africa, the mid-western USA, Egypt, Scotland and elsewhere, offer an illustrative array of homes made in rural communities and urban worksites, in personal life-histories and the policies of diasporic groups, in ceremonial revivals and mundane in postcards, house furnishings, clothes and smells.