By this time if you have read a few of the essays that fall under the term “household,” you will have had the opportunity to see how this most mundane of words helps us understand the diverse arrangements in which people live in postcolonial India and South Korea, as in the rest of the world. You will have also seen how the household is both open to external forces, but also closes in on itself as needed by its inhabitants. For instance, you will have learned how the government of a newly created South Korea tried to reform its citizenry by changing the design of the oven located within the hearth of houses (Myung) and how the current government of South Korea continues to shape people through spatial design by means of the apartments given to house migrants from North Korea (S. Kim). We see people revisiting abandoned houses of their childhood, even in memory, to come to terms with state violence, such as in the Jeju uprising, and to placate ancestors (Y. Kim). We also see an artist draw out the subjectivity of feeling sheltered even if bound to the four walls of a house on account of being a Muslim woman in pre-partition India (Shirazi).  

No one households passively. The migrant women who occupy the apartments granted to them by the South Korean government eke out space within them for shrines to carry out the jesa or the ritual for commemorating lost ancestors—effectively bringing the past erased from their new identities into their present (S. Kim). People displaced from their lands and homes for infrastructural projects in present-day, fast-modernizing India find ways to share in daily provisioning under the rubric of saunsaar. This is a modality of existence which incorporates mundane existence and the cosmological resonances of being in the world together (Menezes). We see how people randomly put together in a tent during a religious pilgrimage in India self-organize into a household. Even in such temporary quarters, householding brings with it its usual intimacies—along with disappointments and betrayals, and spiritual insights (Joshi).  

In this rich clutch of expositions, the household is not only a material site and an arrangement of people, but also an activity. We may additionally see the household as a person. In the portfolio of the artist Zarina titled House with Four Walls, each representation of her house is also a representation of her (Shirazi). We may see the household as a religion in the way pilgrims find householding with strangers in a tent as central to making their pilgrimage a success amid the austerities that they take on (Joshi). 

What else might we see in these efforts at householding under duress or in times of disruptions?