Download RECONSIDERING THE BICYCLE: An Anthropological

RECONSIDERING THE BICYCLE:
An Anthropological Perspective on
a New (Old) Thing
CHAPTER ONE:
Anthropology, Bicycles, and Urban
Mobility
© Routledge 2013
KEY IDEAS
• Tracking the new uses and upheaval of meanings surrounding bicycles
in urban areas.
• Anthropology of mobility.
• “Critical estrangement” and other methodological concerns.
© Routledge 2013
Whoever Would Have Thought…?
“Whoever thought it would come to this? Our cavalcade grows
exponentially! Hath you seen it? On the roadways of every city there
are bicyclists emerging again after a century in the shadows. We are
here to claim what’s rightfully ours: respectful free movement on
streets everywhere. In Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Dallas too, and
Bellingham, Grand Rapids, and Los Angeles even!”
--Boneshaker, bicycle ‘zine, 2011
© Routledge 2013
© Routledge 2013
General Motors Ad, 2011
BACKLASH!
© Routledge 2013
An Upheaval in Meanings
From bicycles as toys, recreation, and sports…
…to bicycles as useful, quick, healthy, inexpensive, technologically-simple,
efficient, and even enjoyable means of getting from point A to B.
Especially in flat and dense urban areas where distances are short and traffic
congestion bad.
And the bicycle as a tool of socio-political, environmental, and cultural
change.
© Routledge 2013
Background Conditions
• Hyper-automobility, especially in the U.S.
• Governmental concerns about reducing health and transportation
expenditures.
• Municipal concerns about traffic congestion, emissions reductions,
and quality of life competitiveness with other cities.
• Public health concerns about sedentary lifestyles and obesity crisis.
• Everyday concerns about the consequences of petroleum and
automobile dependency.
© Routledge 2013
Anthropology of Mobility
Some key questions:
• Why is it “natural” that when people need to go somewhere they get in a
car, while for others it might be by foot, on a bus, a subway, or by twowheeled vehicle?
• What social, ideological, historical, environmental, and institutional factors
and norms shape a decision to drive, walk, or ride, or alternatively, prevent
people from doing any one of these things?
• How might these same factors pattern how people might actually perceive,
experience, and practice these things in their everyday lives?
• What are the consequences of the ways people move around on: their
physical bodies, social identities, perceptions of themselves and the places
they live, ideas about what is right or wrong, ideas about space and time,
and the way their communities are socially and spatially organized?
© Routledge 2013
Anthropology of Mobility
TRANSPORTATION VS. MOBILITY
“Transportation” is the act of carrying or conveying something or someone,
especially “passengers,” emphasizing speed and efficiency.
“Mobility” is a change of condition that has three interdependent
dimensions--movement, networks, and motility—in which:
• Movement involves circulation through physical and/or social space.
• Networks are those frameworks and infrastructure, themselves often immobile, that
enable and limit mobility.
• Motility is the actual capacity an actor has to move or be mobile.
© Routledge 2013
Anthropology of Mobility
• There are diverse modes, skills, technologies, and infrastructures
related to movement.
• Different mobilities carry the potential for knowing, sensing, and
interacting with the world in specific ways, and are closely associated
with certain practices of life.
• How people move around presupposes, reflects, and generates social
and political struggles.
© Routledge 2013
Anthropology “At Home”
What defines ethnographic fieldwork is not necessarily geographic
displacement…
…but the deliberate work of creating contacts and interactions that yield
meaningful insights into human lives without assuming the ethnographer
stands apart from those processes.
• The “field” is not a given place to which anthropologists travel and “immerse”
ourselves.
• Fieldwork is open-ended, episodic, and fluid.
• The division between the ethnographer and the informant can get blurry as we meld
our personal and professional roles and identities.
• Informants are often friends, neighbors, associates, and contacts with whom we
might have intermittent, serendipitous, diffuse, and even sometimes ephemeral ties.
© Routledge 2013
“Critical Estrangement of the Lived World”
The work of taking the familiar and taken-for-granted and making it
seem strange, “of deconstructing its surfaces and the relativizing of its
horizons”…
…with the goal of understanding the social, cultural, and historical
conditions that give rise and help sustain a particular set of ideas,
meanings, objects, or social practices.
© Routledge 2013
Discussion Questions
• How do the meanings you have about bicycles compare or contrast
with the meanings of the bicycle in the GM ad? Why?
• Discuss some of the differences between how a traffic engineer who
specializes in designing road infrastructure to keep traffic flowing and
a cultural anthropologist would approach the bicycle.
• How can we as anthropologists step back from what we take for
granted and make critical sense of a mundane object like a bicycle?
© Routledge 2013