Home

Abstract

It was the processes of vulnerability and interpretation that created the conditions for the privileged migrants in Xiamen to reconsider notions of ‘home’. ‘Home’ is conceptualized here as a multi-tiered and flexible category which refers not only to the city or region one belongs to but also to a wider notion of national belonging, and wider still, to a notion of being from ‘The West’. The notion of ‘home’, and the levels of abstraction it encompasses, functions as a moral category which holds a regulatory function, in the sense that it represents familiar structures and moral order. This regulatory nature of ‘home’ is reconsidered and re-engaged with at the same time that the concept of ‘home’ is constructed and imagined. In this way, the interpretive processes of repositioning the self within a moral landscape are productive of social structures and are an element of structural articulation.