British Expatriate Belongings: Mobile Homes and Transnational Homing

Author: Walsh, Katie

Source: Home Cultures, Volume 3, Number 2, July 2006 , pp. 123-144(22)

Publisher: Berg Publishers

Key:

- Free Content

- New Content

- Subscribed Content

- Free Trial Content

Abstract:

This article explores the mobile homes and transnational homing of British expatriates in Dubai. In the article, I analyze ordinary domestic objects that play a special role in the homemaking practices of their expatriate owners, drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic research including participant observation and home-based interviews. I argue that thinking about belonging through belongings is productive because it is empirically and theoretically attentive to the way in which the home is experienced simultaneously as both a material and immaterial, lived and imagined, localized and (trans)national space of belonging. Furthermore, the homes of expatriates make explicit the fluidity and multiplicity of home as process. This article focuses on three things found in British expatriate homes in Dubai: a painting, a plastic bowl, and a DVD.

Document Type: Research article

DOI: 10.2752/174063106778053183

The full text electronic article is available for purchase. You will be able to download the full text electronic article after payment.

$32.99 plus tax Refund Policy