This essay explores the changing meanings of the traditional Korean fireplace (agungi)—from an ordinary yet sacred place overseen by household deities in the 1950s to a target of state-led modernization in the 1970s—as relationships between households, local environments, and spiritual cosmologies were radically transformed.

Vines and lizards clamber over the white washed walls of a courtyard home in the Indian city of Aligarh, where the artist Zarina was born and raised. Learn about Zarina’s childhood home, her experiences as a refugee after the 1947 Partition of the Indian subcontinent, her studies at Aligarh Muslim University, and her life as an artist in New York City.

How do survivors of a state atrocity recall its traces? In the drawings and stories of Wan-soon Ko, a Jeju islander who lived through the violence of Jeju 4.3 (Sasam) that unfolded between 1947 and 1954 in South Korea, “householding” became a practice of repair.

This piece traces the work of ritual in everyday life through an ethnography of Jesa—Korean ancestral rites—among North Korean migrant women living in South Korea. While rituals are often seen as inherited collective practices that socialize individuals into traditional values, the author invites you to consider the unfolding of ritual in the absence of a familiar collective and amid the constraints of state-planned housing.

What is it to household under circumstances of hunger and impending displacement? By foregrounding the lives of villagers affected by an unfolding multibillion-dollar land acquisition project in Maharashtra, householding comes into view as a process that emerges from the everyday practices of married women whose ongoing labor secures the saunsaar (world).

This brief reflection addresses the question “Is the household self-contained?” It does so by considering what might be thought of as a limit case—an ephemeral community of pilgrims who congregate annually for a month-long pilgrimage by the banks of the river Ganga—and looking specifically at the way relationships come to develop among pilgrims.