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This is the introduction to the second part of a special section that spans two issues of Hau (14 [1] and 14 [2]). The articles in the special section focus on home and home-making and all that this entails for Muslims who have left their homes or cannot be fully at home in their home places. Across countries and continents, across sects and in different local contexts, with diverse histories of migration, the articles explore what home is and what it means, as a material place in lived experience and as an imaginary place, often remembered or felt as loss. Home is an ideal underpinned by home-making practices and experiences, and thus by affect, dispositions, and emotions. As a consequence, home is always structured and embodied, but also a creative and dynamic act of dwelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Here we introduce a special section that spans this and the next issue of Hau. The articles in the section focus on home and home-making and all that this entails for Muslims who have left their homes or cannot be fully at home in their home places. Across countries and continents, across sects and in different local contexts, with diverse histories of migration, the articles explore what home is and what it entails, as a material place in lived experience and as an imaginary place, often remembered or felt as loss. Home is an ideal underpinned by home-making practices and experiences, and thus by affect, dispositions, and emotions. Thus, home is always structured and embodied, but also a creative and dynamic act of dwelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do people make themselves at home in situations of movement, dispersal, and marginalization? Migration scholars have destabilized the idea that a home is bound to a dwelling, and developed more processual ways of conceptualizing home. In this article I bring this research agenda into conversation with the anthropology of events, to conceptualize social events as a diasporic home-making practice. Methodologically, I demonstrate how event filmmaking, a genre of ethnographic filmmaking, can be used as a research method in event studies. To develop this conceptual and methodological contribution, I draw on my experiences while making a film about the Vohra families reunion, a community event for Indian Gujarati Muslims (Vohras) in the United States and Canada. I interpret the reunion's potential as a home-making practice in the light of the social position of Muslims as a religious minority in the United States, in India, and in the Indian diaspora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Egyptian communities in Milan are among the oldest and largest migrant communities in Italy, their history dating back to the 1970s. Following in-depth ethnographic research, this article explores their members' representations and understandings of home, examining also Egyptian women's practices and role as driving forces underlying home-making processes. Moving from the Egyptian migrants' translations of casa , Italian word for "house, home," the article tries to disentangle the multifaceted meanings attached to the notions of balad (country, hometown, village), bayt (house), and waṭan (nation), which hold different social, political, and religious connotations and reflect different levels of integration in Italy. The research took place during the protracted lockdowns in Italy following the outbreak of the COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic, and therefore delving into the meanings of "home" has meant unraveling how the pandemic situation has increased the domestic care burden on women and how gender relations have changed under such unprecedented events. This article corroborates the hypothesis that care practices and home-making processes are key sites where society reproduces itself, and that accelerated social and historical transformations make gendered care practices within the home more explicit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the polyvocal and inherently contested arena of Palestinianness as a moral place of belonging, for which I suggest the term "home" as an anthropological category denoting affective places of belonging for a given social group. This minimalistic definition is intended as a heuristic site from which to explore modes of inhabiting a moral destination. The ways in which Palestinianness is conceived and negotiated among refugees and other Palestinian communities living outside of today's Palestinian territories are thus understood as processes of home-making. In this respect, the article considers the definition of a "homeland" in relation to Palestinian experiences and expressions of displacement and discusses to what extent the terms diaspora and exile characterize the Palestinian dispersion. It suggests that these experiences and expressions highlight the importance of affect and problematize a fitting subjunctive definition of home as an anthropological category. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I revisit my earlier project on local poetry practices by Japanese ‘war brides’ from the Second World War and explore a creative, transnational home-making activity by focusing on one of my informants, Fuyuko Taira's senryu poetry. Drawing on theories of global space and diasporic home-making practices, I suggest that her engagement in senryu involves a transnational spatial practice through the use of familiar everyday language. While the experience of displacement among Taira and other so-called ‘war brides’ cannot be understood without a consideration of socio-historical and economic constraints that characterized their emigration, my aim here is not to analyse how Taira's senryu simply reflects her diasporic victimhood but to explore how she exercises her creative agency to make her new home familiar and habitable by engaging with the everyday poetry practice of alternation between ‘pause’ and ‘move’ in the midst of changing landscapes. I argue that to a member of the Japanese diaspora like Taira senryu can be thought of as a different mode of experiencing at once the local and the global in an organic way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For U.S. Jewry in particular, the question of a Jewish homeland is vexed. Does "homeland" refer to Zion, a Biblical promise arguably actualized in the nation-state of Israel? Or is the world of Eastern Europe, of Yiddishkeit, the Jewish homeland for U.S. Ashkenazi Jews? If so, then the Shoah shattered forever the hope of return. To what extent does the U.S. Jewish experience challenge the traditional opposition between the lack associated with diasporic existence and the plenitude associated with the homeland? Such theoretical/historical questions are evocatively staged in Rebecca Goldstein's "Mazel" (1995). "Mazel" productively shifts our attention from a singular, authentic Jewish homeland to the processes of Jewish home-making. Goldstein's emphasis on home-making not only prioritizes the feminist politics of home but also offers an alternative to theoretical and cultural narratives that can only imagine the relationship between diaspora and homeland as one of opposition and hierarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]