Julie Botticello
MPhil/PhDUniversity College London: Material Culture Anthropology
cello99@dircon.co.uk

Lagos in London: making a home in the diaspora

This research focuses on the concept of home and its (re)creation among migrants/diaspora populations from Nigeria living in south London and the role of objects in this process.

West African migrations are considered relatively stable compared with migrations from other groups, due to the idea that when west Africans move, they bring along their social structure. This notion of a transported social structure has implications for the material domain and particularly for the domestic environment. Taking an objectification perspective to material culture, where personhood and material objects are understood to be mutually constitutive of one another, what objects are present in the domestic environment, their physical properties, what they are understood to mean, what they do and how they are used will all be of particular relevance to understanding how a home is created amongst persons living in one place but continuing to relate to another.

During fieldwork (commencing June 2005), these ideas will be explored using an ethnographic methodology of participant observation, both in people’s homes and in the local area, with informal interviews and the creation of a material and photographic archive as its methods.