Paper short abstract:

Drawing on fieldwork in a Kurdish village in Iran, I discuss examples of forms of (im)mobility that help me show how the village’s landscape, shaped by its historical, social, and more-than-human surroundings, affects the subjects’ ontologies and turns mobility into a highly demanded commodity.

Paper long abstract:

In my paper, I point to the dynamics that paved the way for the creation of a landscape that has turned a Kurdish village in Iran, where I stayed for my ethnographic fieldwork (June 2021-June 2022), into a Bourdieusian field of power in which the ultimate capital is desired mobilities. The fragility of the infrastructure of the Village, i.e., transportation, telecommunications, and roads, has been conceptualized by some as illustrative of a history of de-development in Iranian Kurdistan, home to one of the most impoverished nations in Iran. I show that this fragile infrastructure is combined with, at times, immobilizing mountainous terrains and practices from the state, which I conceptualize as colonial lockdown, aimed at halting political and social mobilities of the Kurds in recent history. However, this landscape is not always immobilizing. As I show in the example of cross-border contraband commerce in the Village, the landscape paves the way for a coerced, redirected form of mobility conducive to the needs of the state and the country’s middle- and upper-level strata. I also argue that the landscape makes mobility a point of contention in the Village, as the case of a group of feminists fighting for mobility justice, among others, illustrates. The landscape of (im)mobility, striated by intersected markers of ethnicity, class, gender, and (not-a-world-system-theory) center/periphery, creates a particular mobility regime that supports some mobilities with a certain speed, affects who and what can move, and sustains power relations that afford mobilities and are partly afforded by mobilities.