Abstract
Discussions on the human ‘home’ and related categories always oscillates between emotionally charged categories of belonging and more practical reasonings about the location of persons and groups in the world—one argument today being represented by the ‘invention of tradition’ approach, the other recently tending towards sociobiological and ethological claims about the existence of a human instinct which orientates us towards total ‘environs’ or natural habitats. This article enquires into very different ways of constructing material and spiritual homes, trying to show that the striving for a ‘home’ might be a human universal, but that, on the other side, the ideal is never totally realized, as human fragility and dispersal drives us always and again away from our homes. In the era of ‘moving targets,’ anthropological fieldwork has partly lost its central referent: the small group presumably inhabiting a restricted area since immemorial times. However, we should acknowledge that humans all over the world are struggling to recreate homes under the impact of growing mobility and globalization. The anthropological field therefore re-emerges over again, sometimes ‘under fire,’ sometimes through more peaceful visits of anthropologists to other people's homes.
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