Places become fixed locations with unique and unchanging characters when people and cultures are understood as localized and belonging to particular places. Contesting the latter view, Malkki (1997a: 72) asserts, “to plot only ‘places of birth’ and degree of naturalness is to blind oneself to the multiplicity of attachments that people form to places through living in, remembering and imagining them”.




Liisa H. Malkki is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University. Her research interests include: the politics of nationalism, internationalism, cosmopolitanism, and human rights discourses as transnational cultural forms; the social production of historical memory and the uses of history; political violence, exile, and displacement; the ethics and politics of humanitarian aid; child research; and visual culture.







“Home is where one is an ‘insider”.







Recent research on refugees indicates that the experience of displacement can also result in the remaking of self and seems to agree with the possibility of “making a new home”.

It also reveals itself contrary to the general conclusion that “normal life” can only be restored when a displaced persons return to their root or place of origin. This latter perception however fits well with the current international refugee policy that favours repatriation of refugees and asylum seekers as the best durable solution.