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- Convenors:
-
Patrick Laviolette
(FSS, MUNI, Masaryk Univ.)
Tatiana Argounova-Low (University of Aberdeen)
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- Stream:
- Everyday Life
- Location:
- Aula 28
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 17 April, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
This panel explores both the transformative powers of trails, paths, roads, passageways, and the assemblages of humanoid-hybrids that travel along (or get stuck upon/within) these 'earthly structures from below'.
Long Abstract:
"Chthonic ones are not safe; they have no truck with ideologues; they belong to no
one; they writhe and luxuriate in manifold forms and manifold names in all the airs,
waters, and places of earth" (Donna Haraway 2016: 2).
We invite papers focussing on the infrastructural connections and transformations that passageways of all sorts (trails, shipping lanes, road networks, flight paths) have on the world inhabited by human and non-human animals. Presentations demonstrating the transformative power of travel connections are most welcome; as are those that question how such connections create innovative engagements, thus playing a part in producing new cultural, socio-political, economic and environmental impacts.
We would particularly like to hear about the transformative potentialities of vehicles and the surrounding systems of auto-mobility that support our love/hate, or our ambivalence/indifference, for roads and cars. In addressing the amorphous nexus of ties that exist between vehicles and infrastructure, as well as the social lives, cultures and lived environments of hyper-mobility, or everyday micro-journeys, we hope the panel will provide some cross-cultural histories for how tracks change.
Looking forward too, the panel shall equally try to gain a vantage point for a broad perspective on our long-term relationship with transport infrastructures, helping to assess their impact upon both the built environment and the planet's ecosystems. We approach such themes broadly, following various manifestations of the 'Chthulu' and the 'AnthrObscene', as antidotes to the human centredness of thinking along the more banal/simplistic lines of the 'anthropocene'.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 17 April, 2019, -Paper short abstract:
This paper is about roads as dangerous and uncanny spaces. We explore these spaces inhabited by various beings, hidden people, evil creatures , ghosts, and other chtonic beings. We analyse narratives from Iceland and Siberia and ask whether the road is a perfect chthulucene.
Paper long abstract:
Roads are dangerous sites. They might look pristine and smooth, but there are various hidden risks and dangers on the roads. In this paper we will consider not the dangerous driving but slightly different kind of risks and dangers. In Iceland such risks will be presented by 'hidden people', in Siberia by abaahy and in Donna Haraway's writing these will be 'chtonic' that present menace.
This paper will bring different cultural realities about such chtonic creatures and will enquire: why do roads present such spaces which hidden people and abaahy, all things chtonic find suitable to inhabit? Is the road a perfect chthulucene? And if so, why?
References:
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-3-319-74687-6_3.pdf
https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do;jsessionid=2C8931CBAF1F930AAFEDA41C171BBDE6?uin=uk.bl.ethos.412326
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0015587X.1976.9716030?journalCode=rfol20
Paper short abstract:
The paper focuses on a women's motorcycle club in Delhi - the Bikerni - to explore, from a gendered perspective, the subjectivity-making potential of roads and bikes both locally and transnationally.
Paper long abstract:
The paper investigates the experiences, practices, identity configurations, and ideologies of the members of a women-only motorcycle club in Delhi, the Bikerni. Drawing from feminist geography and mobility theory, in the paper the road is explored as an avenue for self-expression over models of womanhood and femininity, and the bike as the medium through which the she-centaur is brought to life. This both imaginary and real creature, half human and half machine, resonating of Haraway's cyborg, cruises through often contradictory understandings of the self that find reconciliation in the "mud" (Haraway 2016) of the everyday. Sexuality, gender, family relationships, and careers are transformed thanks to the temporary manifestations of the she-centaur, an alter-ego who shapes the subjects in new and yet familiar ways. Mobile subjectivities (Ferguson 1995) stem out of processes around geographies of power that mark the often ambivalent boundaries of patriarchy, neoliberalism, consumerism, and postcolonialism, and that link the members of the Bikerni to a broader, transnational community with its own rules and ideologies that reinforce and shape those very same subjectivities. In a city that has gained the reputation of being India's rape capital, and where women's mobility encounters obstacles and limitations, the experiences of the Bikernis reveal how roads are more than just dangerous territory: they exist within a network of thoroughfares where transcultural practices are shaped locally and recast globally.
Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on changing modes of transport, from horse-drawn wagons to motorised trailer homes. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, it explores the intersections of lanes and motorways, and the impacts of modern vehicles and transport infrastructures on traditional patterns of nomadism.
Paper long abstract:
Diverse ways of travelling, from horse-drawn wagons to motorised vehicles, and the modification of landscapes as a result of improved transport infrastructures have had a dramatic effect on the lives of nomadic populations.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper explores the transformative powers of vehicles and transport infrastructures from a nomadic perspective. It describes traditional modes of transport, and shows how the advent of motorised vehicles have positive and negative impacts on mobility, and on individual and group relationships with established lanes and tracks. These tracks and lanes resonated with familial and community relationships and demonstrated long-standing links to particular landscapes.
Motorised vehicles have greatly enhanced an individual's ability to travel greater distances, and promoted greater cultural, social and economic innovations. Paradoxically, the modernisation of transport infrastructures have led to loss of mobility for some individuals and groups. The control and restriction of geographic space, growing economic prosperity and infrastructural developments have influenced concepts of living space and ideological representations of nomadism. This study also examines issues of marginalisation, and demonstrates how transport infrastructures affect different communities.
Paper short abstract:
The presentation is devoted to the using cars by Vyngapur Forest Nenetses who live in Western Siberia. Now, they occupy lands free from industrial developments between roads, oil and gaz stations. The construction of the road network made yesterday's reindeer herders get behind the wheel of a car.
Paper long abstract:
The industrial development of the Pur District was begun in 1965 when the Gubkinskoye oil and gas condensate field was struck on. After 12 years a railway connecting the towns Tyumen, Surgut and Novyi Urengoi was built. New working settlements appeared along the railway. It was in 1977-1982. All new settlements have transport, oil and gas extracting and gas processing character. Today we can say that most towns and settlements of workers that appeared in the Iamal-Nenets Autonomous Okrug in the last third of the 20th century are located on the territory of native residence of Vyngapur Nenetses. Ddifferent phenomena and changes in economy of Forest Nenetes have occurred from the beginning of industrial development. The first is using the modern transport infrastructure and new types of transports. The roads have become as a main transport routes (they were the rivers in previous time). The network of paved roads eliminated the former isolation of Nenets households in the summer from the towns and settlements of workers. With easy transport access, there is no need to make large supplies of food. To move between settlements and camps, between the camps they use its own transport, shift buses, taxis. Sledges are used as a trailer for a snowmobile and a car. They go by car to get water, check reindeer, go fishing, and do other things. The car takes the place of the sacred sledge near the chum at the camp.
Paper short abstract:
The paper focuses on the changes in everyday commuting patterns during the post-transition-period Estonia. By taking a phenomenological approach, the paper focuses on the social and cultural production of translocal mobility and place-making practices on the micro-level.
Paper long abstract:
The paper focuses on the changes in everyday commuting patterns in Estonia after the restoration of independence in 1991. The 1990s were a period of major political, economic, social and cultural changes throughout the Eastern Europe. The post-socialist restructuring of the economy that meant replacing a planned economy with a market economy led to job losses in industry and agriculture. Whilst in cities, lost jobs in industrial sector were replaced by new vacancies in the service sector; in rural areas, however, the loss of work exceeded the creation of new jobs.
Adaptation to the rapid economic shifts brought about, among other things, significant changes in inhabitants' daily commuting patterns. The constant growth of distance between home and workplaces became one of the emergent trends. On the one hand, the decrease of transport infrastructure outside urban areas was accompanied by the loss of population in the periphery and moving of the population to the cities and suburban areas. On the other hand, unprecedented possibilities to consumerism entailed the Europe's greatest increase in car ownership.
The paper takes the phenomenological approach and treats the social and cultural production of everyday (im)mobility and place-making practices on the micro-level. Focusing on the everyday long-distance commuting patterns of Estonian rural and suburban inhabitants, the paper analyses people's subjective attitudes towards these patterns and particularly the role of car in these processes.
Paper short abstract:
Saigon Bus mass transit system demonstrates the transformative powers of vehicles and transport infrastructures. Moving beyond the human-centredness of the auto-anthropocene, this paper asks in what ways are human and abiotic actors entangled in co-producing normative and subversive social lives?
Paper long abstract:
Saigon Bus, the mass transit system operating in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, demonstrates the transformative powers of vehicles and transport infrastructures on social lives. The emergence of an efficient and accessible city-wide bus network over the past decade has a broader impact than simply mitigating congestion and enabling circulation. In an earlier paper on subversive uses of mass transit I argued Saigon Bus is a multi-sited, mobile public space that, in addition to generating infrastructural and material transformations, has opened up new social spaces for stranger-interaction and new ways for metropolitan citizens to be mobile. This second paper moves beyond the human-centredness of the auto-anthropocene to reconceptualise Saigon Bus as a more than human facilitated transport system. Drawing on long term ethnographic fieldwork among undocumented migrants, upwardly mobile residents and mass transit riders, I explore ways of being on/off track with Saigon Bus. In the globalised context of post-authoritarian Ho Chi Minh City, I consider in what ways do abiotic actors of mass transit and metropolitan traffic enable human riders to challenge or reject a patrilineal heteronormative social track and experience alternative or subversive practices and behaviours. More broadly, I ask in what ways are human and abiotic actors entangled in co-producing future social lives?
Paper short abstract:
If 'roads and vehicles are principal artefacts in shaping the Anthropocene', which Anthropocene transport methods can a Baltic states anthropologist justify sharing bodily experience with?
Paper long abstract:
This paper deals with the experience of travelling in which our human 'selves' have choices in which we can decide to unite our embodied experience with other things and persons. Rejecting the airborne unification, it focuses on experiences of the bus present and rail future of the E67 corridor (the 'Via Baltica'), the terrestrial supply line between the Baltic states and the rest of the EU. This is not simple, however, and an air rejecting anthropologist faces issues, symbolic of those of Baltic anthropology, 'separated' from the European 'mainland'. Related to such embodied choices, 'human' with 'machine' and '(rail)road', I discuss these symbolic and practical aspects based on current political developments in society and outwith. These include EU funding issues, as well as the impact that special political geography, represented, for example, by Nato's so-called 'Suwałki gap', has had on Baltic international relations and senses of self, whether in person or mediated by vernacular mappings of these routes and their bodily reprecussions. In practically relying on public transport infrastructure in what seems to be a form of dissidence with regards to the normal hate-carbon-use-carbon-nonetheless academic mobility, I discuss how journeys on buses and trains (over which we have little control) can highlight affective disconnectedness experience of peripheral European anthropologists. Further, based on subversion of normal transport practice, I show how it is possible to make such journeys 'doable', and how transport bricolage becomes important for mobility in an aviation-favouring world where future mobility must move from solely airplane-human assemblages.
Paper short abstract:
Shipping is often referred to as an invisible industry, but ship tracking websites show the sea as speckled with dots that crisscross the world. My paper takes ships as human-machines/social assemblages that provide a lens to the changing infrastructure of mobility that connects the global economy.
Paper long abstract:
Shipping has often been referred to as an invisible industry, but on ship tracking websites the sea is speckled with tiny dots that crisscross the world map and converge along defined routes that look like ant-paths. But far from small, these dots represent ships that can be the length of the world's tallest skyscrapers. While the number of people onboard rarely exceed 20 persons, the ships' capacity for carrying goods exceeds our imagination. The largest containerships today can carry up to 20,000 shipping containers. Imagine overtaking 10,000 trucks on a high-way. That would be the cargo of just one fully loaded ship.
My paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork on this invisible industry, and on the life-worlds of the people who live and work inside these moving machines for months on end, forming human-machine assemblages that change over time and have their own stories and life-stories. Infrastructural transformations, such as containerization and the development of specialized ports and terminals have enabled the volume of goods to increase dramatically. These transformations have also had an enormous impact on the everyday lives of the people who work to transport the goods and have changed the nature of their work, their relationships with their ships and with their shipmates.
This paper looks at ships as human-technological assemblages and as social worlds, and takes ships as lenses for looking at transformations of shipping as an infrastructure for mobility that forms the connections of the world that undergird the current global economy.
Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on time spent on boats sailing at sea. In the process of dwelling all crew members attend to one another in the performance of their tasks. Whenever they are sailing, they voyage in a place.
Paper long abstract:
In performing tasks together, not only do crew members become aware of their necessities on board, but they also inhabit the boat as a home. A taskscape can be understood as the total ensemble of tasks, in their mutual interlocking, that make up the pattern of activity of a community (Ingold, 1995). The boat, as a complex interweaving of 'shared intentionality' (Tomassello, 1999), becomes a dwelling place.
Due to the fact that the process of dwelling is fundamentally temporal, the journey entails a release in time, a becoming. Becoming is the movement by which the line frees itself from the point, and renders points indiscernible (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980). There is a sense of rest in this world in which all around is in movement (Gladwin, 1964).
Sailors call the boat a time machine. Whenever they are sailing, they voyage in a place. Voyage in a place is the name of all intensities (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980). On the boat, proximities foster dialogue as well as nonverbal exchanges of many kinds, and thus nurture interpersonal reciprocity (Casey, 1993). The time on board is defined by the opportunity that must be seized, the kairos; that point where human action meets its natural rhythm (Vernant, 1983) together with its environment.