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.