Paper short abstract:

We often forgot that home is both noun and verb. This aural-visual essay experiments with a “living ethnography” to concentrate on the tension between home as verb and noun. In prying home from its built structure as house, we encounter its anti-structure in nomadism and its meaning as journey.

Paper long abstract:

This experiment of “living ethnography” questions what home is, as place and action. We often forgot that home is both noun and verb. This aural-visual essay concentrates on the tension between home as verb and home as noun, shifting the mountainous doubled humped m and its hum into rhythmic glyphs of embarkment: the beginnings of a trail, the ridges of the road ahead. Home only becomes dwelling through activities of living rather than mere settling. Asad explains (video section 1) home as a temporary nesting. Home as perch. A hovering point. Although, more anchored, Malkah (video section 2) aspires to a roaming home. “Home is a journey,” she explains. For the exiled Walter Benjamin, (video section 3) home was the briefcase containing his Passages work, the notebooks more commonly known as the Arcades Project. As a noun, home is related to origin, nationality, identity, family, the familiar. Home can be the comfort of the known, of what is visible. But home is also the invisible, the hidden, or an atmosphere – “the smell of the nest” (Bohm). Home is our bodies (as nests), what we carry within as we move on. To wrestle with its meaning, this essay pries home from its built structure as house to encounter its anti-structure, as an assemblage of floating parts, moveable and transient: nomadic. This means we must do away with not only notions of homeland, but also of home as fixed places.