The Anatomy of Houses. Materialities of Being at Home

This thematic section presents three articles that ethnographically explore – at a global level – how houses and their materiality modify the world and deal with its transformations. The articles cover a very broad geographical spectrum, addressing three countries (Laos, Bolivia, and Tunisia) on three different continents. The research was conducted at different times, between 2012 and 2020, before the Covid 19 pandemic exploded. All the essays show the centrality of the house and its material dimension in the construction of individual subjectivity and community bonds, beginning from an awareness that the house, in the three different contexts investigated, represents “a foundational unity of community”.