Introduction: Mobilities in Contemporary and Historical Archaeology (original) (raw)
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Introduction: Mobilities in Historical and Contemporary Archaeology (with Mary C. Beaudry)
…imagine a world of incessant movement and becoming, one that is never complete but continually under construction, woven from the countless lifelines of its manifold human and non-human constituents as they thread their ways through the tangle of relationships in which they are comprehensively enmeshed. Ingold, 2011 : 141 This collection of essays draws inspiration from current archaeological interest in the movement of individuals, things, and ideas in the recent past. Movement is fundamentally concerned with the relationship(s) among time, object, person, and space. Contemporary scholarship has highlighted the enmeshed nature of people and things (Olsen, 2010 ), with a particular focus on temporality as an expression of overlapping durational fl ows . In our globalized world, archaeologists of the recent past are faced with a proliferation of movement episodes that shaped and are shaping the archaeological record (cf. .
Keywords of mobility: A critical introduction
Keywords of mobility: Critical engagements, 2016
As a concept, mobility captures the common impression that one's lifeworld is in fl ux, with not only people, but also cultures, objects, capital, businesses, services, diseases, media, images, information, and ideas circulating across (and even beyond) the planet. While history tells the story of human mobility, the scholarly literature is replete with metaphors attempting to describe (perceived) altered spatial and temporal movements: deterritorialization, reterritorialization, and scapes; time-space compression, distantiation, or punctuation; the network society and its space of fl ows; the death of distance and the acceleration of modern life; and nomadology. The academic interest in mobility goes hand in hand with theoretical approaches that reject a "sedentarist metaphysics" (Malkki 1992) in favor of a "nomadic metaphysics" (Cresswell 2006) and empirical studies on the most diverse kinds of mobilities (Adey et al. 2013), questioning earlier taken-for-granted correspondences between peoples, places, and cultures. The way the term is being used, mobility entails, in its coinage, much more than mere physical motion (Marzloff 2005). Rather, it is seen as movement infused with both self-ascribed and attributed meanings (Frello 2008). Put differently, "mobility can do little on its own until it is materialized through people, objects, words, and other embodied forms" (Chu 2010, 15). Importantly, mobility means different things to different people in differing social circumstances (Adey 2010).
Theorizing mobility through concepts and figures
Tempo Social, 2018
As a concept, mobility captures the common impression that one’s lifeworld is in flux, with not only people, but also cultures, objects, capital, businesses, services, diseases, media, images, information, and ideas circulating across (and even beyond) the planet. The scholarly literature is replete with metaphors trying to describe (perceived) altered spatial and temporal movements: deterritorialization, reterritorialization, and scapes; time-space compression, distantiation, or punctuation; the network society and its space of flows; the death of distance and the acceleration of modern life; and nomadology. Scholars have used figures of mobile people, too, from nomads to pilgrims, to describe both self and other in the social sciences and humanities for a long time. Taking the societal implications of various forms of mobility seriously and not as a given, the critical discussion of mobility concepts and figures presented here helps us to assess the analytical purchase of the conceptual perspective of mobility studies to normalize movement within the single category of “mobility.”
'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.
This is the introductory chapter of a peer reviewed volume. This volume consists of selected papers from the Graduate Archaeology Organisation at Oxford Conference held 4-5 April, 2008 at Hertford College, University of Oxford that explored the premise that archaeological contexts are the result of dynamic cultural, taphonomic, and environmental processes involving mobility, transitions, and culture changes. The fourteen papers in this volume present new innovative research and perspectives into mobility in archaeology, thereby showcasing an inter-disciplinary dialogue between Classical and Prehistoric archaeology, each employing different methodologies to discuss mobility and change, but also how scientific investigations can highlight the less tangible aspects of societal changes these over time.
Mobility and agency: movement and people
2013
Processes resulting from and in turn (re-)shaping translocal connectivities and entanglements in economic, political and cultural contexts have significant impacts upon the social dynamics within and between the groups involved.1 Thus they also affect the everyday lives of people. While such processes undoubtedly have a long historical dimension, they have intensified since European colonial expansion and industrialisation and acquired new dimensions »globalisation« processes since the late decades of the 20th century.2 First steamers, railways, telegraph and telephone rapidly in creased the speed, quantity and quality of travel and communication; then a further shift accompanied the invention and mass production of aeroplanes, computers and mobile phones. Yet we must be cautious not to ascribe too mono-centric a position to overarching Western paradigms and narratives of (first) an expansive imperial agenda, i.e. seeking to extend one’s own markets and political terrains at the cos...