MAKING HOME IN OKLAHOMA: AFGHAN MATERIAL CULTURE AND THE AESTHETICS OF BELONGING

Abstract

This work explores how the Afghan community in Oklahoma City creates home and belonging after displacement. Drawing on Sandra Dudley's (2010) work on how displaced communities seek to make spaces "feel right" through sensory and aesthetic practices, I examine how Afghan families materially and sensorially reconstitute home after the sudden rupture of the 2021 Kabul airlift. Through ethnographic examination of domestic spaces, clothing practices, foodways, and digital materiality, I show how the sensory dimensions of material culture, the textures of carpets, the sounds and smells of pressure cookers, the visual aesthetics of dress, and the sonic world of TikTok videos become the primary terrain through which displaced communities negotiate belonging on their own terms. Every day, sensory and material practices reveal creative agency where families exercise control over how home should look, smell, sound, and feel. This research contributes to broader anthropological conversations on displacement and material culture by attending to a community whose experience of sudden, total rupture, followed by rapid resettlement, differs from gradual migration or protracted displacement in camps, revealing how the specific temporality of displacement shapes the sensory and material negotiations through which home is remade.