Syllabus: The Folklorist and The Highway: On Traffic, Migration, and Other Sorts of (Im)mobilities 2016 (original) (raw)

'Because Life it selfe is but motion': Toward an anthropology of mobility

Over the last two decades, mobility has gained new prominence within anthropology, particularly in theories of globalization, immigration, and subjectivity. At stake in all of the recent ethnographic and archaeological work on mobility is not just how anthropologists conceptualize mobility, but also how we conceptualize the political. Many discussions of mobile subjects have seemed to challenge traditional understandings of the political that are synonymous with a monolithic state and a stable, sedentary subject population. Yet, we maintain that there are still challenges to a coherent anthropological theory of mobility and its relation to the political. To address these challenges, we forward a conceptual framework of mobility that is grounded in the practices, perceptions, and conceptions of movement entwined with processes of emplacement. Illustrated by case studies from the Late Bronze Age (1500 – 1150 B.C.) South Caucasus and nineteenth-century Nova Scotia, the conceptual framework that we detail understands mobility as a mediator between political subjects and political institutions, thus making it possible to examine how subjects and institutions are continuously remade in relation to each other.

The Philosophy of Movement: An Introduction (University of Minnesota Press, 2024)

University of Minnesota Press, 2024

Why are city dwellers worldwide walking on average ten percent faster than they were a decade ago? Why are newcomer immigrant groups so often maligned when migration has always constituted civilization? To analyze and understand the depth of the reasons, Thomas Nail suggests that it serves us well to turn to a philosophy of movement. Synthesizing and extending many years of his influential work, The Philosophy of Movement is a comprehensive argument for how motion is the primary force in human and natural history. Nail critiques the bias toward stasis at the core of Western thought, asking: what would a philosophy that began with the primacy of movement look like? Interrogating the consequences of movement throughout history and in daily life in the twenty-first century, he draws connections and traces patterns between scales of reality, periods of history, and fields of knowledge. In our age of rapid movements shaped by accelerating climate change and ensuing mass global migration, as well as ubiquitous digital media, Nail provides a contemporary philosophy that helps us understand how we got here and how to grapple with these interlocking challenges.

Violence and Movement: Conflict, Genocide and the Darker Side of ‘Travel’

Interlitteraria, 2021

Abstract: Travel is often thought to be an adventure, an exploration, a way of knowing self and world, a break from the stresses of everyday life, a vacation. But there can be a dark side to travel, as in voyages that are part of invasion, conflict and enforced transport. Here, I wish to concentrate on conflict, domination, murder and genocide and do so, at various moments, by referring to the Norse sagas, including the encounter with the Skrælings in the New World and, more briefly, Columbus’ and the Spaniards’ violent treatment of the Natives in the New World and the German transport, torture and murder of Jews in the Shoah, or Holocaust.

Anthropological takes on (im)mobility: Introduction

Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 2011

In this introduction, we outline the general conceptual framework that ties the various contributions to this special issue together. We argue for the importance of anthropology to “take on” mobility and discuss the advantages of the ethnographic approach in doing so. What is the analytical purchase of mobility as one of the root metaphors in contemporary anthropological theorizing? What are the (dis)advantages of looking at the current human condition through the lens of mobility? There is a great risk that the fast-growing field of mobility studies neglects different interpretations of what is going on, or that only patterns that fit the mobilities paradigm will be considered, or that only extremes of (hyper)mobility or (im)mobility will be given attention. The ethnographic sensibilities of fieldworkers who learn about mobility while studying other processes and issues, and who can situate movement in the multiple contexts between which people move, can both extend the utility of the mobilities approach, and insist on attention to other dynamics that might not be considered if the focus is first and last on (im)mobility as such. In this special issue, we do not want to discuss human mobility as a brute fact but rather analyze how mobilities, as sociocultural constructs, are experienced and imagined.

Intersecting Mobilities: Beyond the Autonomy of Movement and Power of Place

Borderlands, 2022

It is widely understood that we live in a world where people, goods, species, and things of all sorts are on the move, and that the politics around mobility and its regulation and meaning are critical to contemporary political and social life. Human migration has been globally intensive for well over a century; industrial economic production, consumption, and trade move goods around the world; transportation infrastructure moves all sorts of cargo around, human and nonhuman; regular and irregular ecological processes and changes are creating new patterns of nonhuman movement; variants of viruses race around the world; even geological elements are far from static. This special issue tackles the challenge of thinking about mobility, not only in its individual instances where it is treated in self-enclosed containers, and not only in its usual contrast to place, ground, sedentarism, and static forms of being; but rather, in the terms of the generative forces created when multiple mobilities come together and cross paths, for better and for ill-in short, intersecting mobilities.

Mobilities and Peace

This article considers how an increasingly visible set of mobilities has implications for how peace and conflict are imagined and responded to. We are particularly interested in how these mobilities take form in everyday actions and shape new forms of peace and challenge existing ones. The article considers fixed categories associated with orthodox peace such as the international, borders and the state that are predicated on territorialism, centralised governance, and static citizenship. The article can be read as a critique of liberal peacebuilding and a contribution to current debates on migration, space and the everyday. Through conceptual scoping we develop the notion of mobile peace to characterise the fluid ways in which is being constructed through the mobilitiy of people and ideas. Abstract This article considers how an increasingly visible set of mobilities has implications for how peace and conflict are imagined and responded to. We are particularly interested in how these mobilities take form in everyday actions and shape new forms of peace and challenge existing ones. The article considers fixed categories associated with orthodox peace such as the international, borders and the state that are predicated on territorialism, centralised governance, and static citizenship. The article can be read as a critique of liberal peacebuilding and a contribution to current debates on migration, space and the everyday. Through conceptual scoping we develop the notion of mobile peace to characterise the fluid ways in which is being constructed through the mobilitiy of people and ideas.