On Being Back, and Being Home

Abstract

This flash ethnography explores the concept of home against the backdrop of the recent spectacle of building destruction and the forceful removal of street vendors enabled by the local government in Kathmandu, Nepal. Rituals provide the structure and stability of what one calls home. Home, and being able to feel home, are not experienced uniformly, especially by people who continue to be questioned about where home is—through the violent disruption of space in which one conducts everyday rituals of livelihood, and the erasure of markers in one’s mental map. It explores how being able to feel and call a place home is changed or severed by the forced inability to continue or renew rituals.