ABSTRACT
A focus on materiality is itself critical to an analysis of the social relations of the home. Once one acknowledges the degree to which the home itself is both a site of agency and a site of mobility, rather than simply a kind of symbolic system that acts as the backdrop or blueprint for practice and agency, then the rewards of this focus upon material culture in trying to understand the social relations that pertain to the home become apparent. This chapter muses across home interior decors and exterior facades, under the magnifying glass of anthropological literature. It focuses on items that recurred in South Asian diaspora homes, but were nonetheless consistent across other migrant home spaces, as the cited literature indicates. Home possessions make a boundless repertoire for cultural analysis and reveal that inert materiality does not deny but is the very scaffold of mobile lives.
