Sandra Dudley's work is a result of the author's fieldwork conducted since 1996 among Karenni refugees on the Thai–Burmese border. The beginning of the book successfully introduces the reader to Karenni refugees by briefly recounting their history. This is certainly helpful for non-specialist readers in understanding not only the Karenni refugee situation, but also the larger refugee situation along the Burmese–Thai border. Quite importantly, by using letters from students and interviews on various topics, especially individual journeys to the camps, Dudley keeps the voices of the refugees present throughout the work. Utilising theories not traditionally associated with forced migration, like those drawn from aesthetics, a material and sensorial cultural approach, along with the phenomenological method, Dudley argues that Karenni refugees are not passive victims of their displacement.

Materialising centres around material objects and the interaction between the Karenni and their current landscape to show how Karenni refugees engage in an ongoing process of shaping and being shaped by the physical world. A driving force behind Dudley's work is the Karenni's ideas about and their developing a sense of ‘home’, since for these refugees, home is a place other than their current location. According to Dudley, by means of sensory experience, memory, nostalgia and practice, the Karenni attempt to create their pasts in the camp to make it feel more like home; this is done while simultaneously recognising it can never be fully completed because home is located in the past, inside the Karenni State in Burma.

Furthermore, using J. Davis's notion of the ‘bond of suffering’ (p. 43), Dudley illustrates that seeing and being reminded of one's own suffering and journey to the camp connects individual, displaced Karenni and forges among them a sense of shared history. Importantly, the material and visual forms of the bond of suffering create deep connections between the various groups of Karenni. Dudley does a thorough job of looking at the various material and visual aspects of the Karenni by covering the many facets of the refugee camp, including various types of women's dress, food, T-shirts (to which she applies a deeper meaning), photographs, weaving and house building. All these share in making the pre-exile past an active agent in the refugee camp, and combine to make the camp more like ‘home’, and as Dudley says, feel more ‘right with the world’ (p. 4).

One of the main conversations in the book centres around women's dress — including the importance and comfort of dress just after arriving in a refugee camp, what constitutes ‘traditional dress’, the social status of particular dress, knowledge of particular types of dress, and personal stories stimulated by unique dress. Another major theme throughout the book is food, a dynamic visual and sensorial experience for the Karenni. That is, the public act of eating, sharing a table and food conjures up stories and memories from home.

Dudley also conducts extensive descriptions and discussions surrounding two festivals. These continue traditions in the new landscape of a refugee camp, providing stimuli for people to remember and communicate about pre-exilic times, and in some ways allowing the Karenni to return to a past way of life. The dïy-küw, or sticky rice festival, marks the halfway point in the work surrounding rice farming, where the hope for a successful harvest is celebrated. Food and drink prepared during the festival are given meaning by triggering individuals to recollect the past. Dudley focuses on the conversations of people reminiscing and comparing stories of past dïy-küw festivals in their villages back in the Karenni state. The ka-thow-bòw, a New Year festival similar to the Buddhist New Year festival, creates a Karreni ritual space in a new setting and brings the Karenni community together around it. Thus, these two traditional festivals, now relocated with their participants, link past villages in the Karenni state to the refugee camp. Dudley's deep ethnography of clothing and religious ceremonies adds a variety of evidence to her overall, convincing argument.

My primary critique rests in some of Dudley's extended discussions that seem peripheral to her main argument. For example, the third chapter's analysis of travel and somatic experience of journeying to and from the camps seems to be of secondary importance to the overall focus and strength of the work, which is indeed in the material and visual aspects of the Karenni camp. While aspects of dress and food are introduced very briefly in chapter two, the book gradually builds up to chapters four and five where most of the material aspects are covered. This layout may cause some readers to become anxious to reach her primary evidence at the end of the work. Nonetheless, I believe this work will be beneficial for people in the fields of anthropology, forced migration studies, archaeology, cultural studies, art history and visual culture.