Abstract
It is now five years since Sheller and Urry (2006) published their summation of an emergence across the social sciences of the ‘new mobilities paradigm’. Sheller and Urry posited then that a form of interdisciplinary convergence was occurring centring on interests with mobility. Research that took mobility as its object and topic, they argued, had demonstrated that the world is increasingly defined by, and realized in, the movement and circulation of people, goods, materials, and information across and within different spatial scales. Of course, to claim a ‘new’ paradigm one must also demonstrate that what has gone before was, or has come to be seen as, an inadequate or outmoded rendering of knowledge and methodology; thus, they argued, the social sciences had hitherto been characterized by ‘static’ forms and arenas of inquiry. The article was intended, and succeeded, as a consolidation of that convergence and the outlining of a future programme of novel theory and method which would replace the formerly ‘immobile’ sociology. In this essay, via a review of three edited collections, I consider the development and, arguably, the proliferation of that paradigm and ask the question: how far does mobility get us? Of course, one is immediately prompted to ask a second question: how far toward what? For those whose lives may be studied and described within the new mobility paradigm, the question is loaded and the answers multifarious. For some, mobility brings success, security, and hope. For others, mobility is a burden and their constant movements get them precisely nowhere. For the social scientist, the question ‘how far does mobility get us?’ is best answered by considering what analytical concern underpins the contemporary attention to and, perhaps, fetishization of mobility?
To provide a brief answer to the latter question at the outset, more often than not, research addressing mobility of the kind collected in the books is concerned with the relationships between mobility and movement and knowledge and experience. This, broadly phenomenological, orientated, conceptual coupling of movement and knowledge is also often couched in wider debates centred on two distinct yet interrelated questions. The first concerns how the world is known, experienced, and becomes organized by people on the move in the course of their lives (people getting to work, moving between places, people mobile in producing performances of various kinds, for example) and the way in which the movement of people and things within the world affects social organization (immigration, information exchange, global economies, social networks and movements and so on). The second question concerns the way in which moving with people, places, and things affords social scientists a different orientation and, perhaps, closer knowledge of the groups and settings, people and practices, in which we have a professional interest.
The three collections discussed in this essay are all primarily concerned with movement and mobility across a range of scales and temporalities within (or maybe better, through and across) a range of contexts. 1 The books are differentiated in that two (Ingold and Vergunst’s Ways of Walking and Kirby’s Boundless Worlds) are drawn from anthropological and ethnographic research and the third is broadly sociological in orientation. The two anthropological collections focus on the first of the concerns identified above: the knowing ways in which people move and the form of knowledge produced in movement (they may be differentiated, however, by a further broad distinction which operates within the social sciences in that the first volume is primarily conceptual in its treatment of its empirical materials and the second is more explicitly political in its remit and scope). The broadly sociological collection, edited by Fincham et al. (Mobile Methodologies), is concerned with the latter of the two concerns: the methods with which sociologists might better capture and represent the (mobile) social worlds and practices to which they attend. Taken as a collection of collections, then, the books reviewed in this essay capture the current enthusiasm for mobility, mobile methods, and movement in, through, and with the social world and, in doing so, address a number of key issues in relation to the mobility paradigm, and the social sciences more broadly.
Ways of Walking: The Ancient Mobility Paradigm?
The collection edited by Ingold and Vergunst sets a standard for work on what it is to walk and to know place and the relationship between the two. The work of the editors can be found at the heart of contemporary debates and research regarding mobility, knowledge and perception. For the editors and authors, being in the world comprises movings and pathways through it; not in passive fashion, where body and mind stand in opposition to landscape and environment, but in a reflexively connected manner where movement itself is a form of thinking, knowing, and perceiving. This phenomenological orientation positions walking as central to the way in which humans come to be in and know the world they inhabit (to be understood as conceptually distinct from the western preoccupation with occupying). Further, walking is not taken as a singular instance of practice, isolated from the surrounding flow of activity, but is, importantly, positioned as a fundamental human modality. As argued by Ingold, and demonstrated via the ethnographic examples collected here, life is not lived in moments nor in centres nor nodes but rather along pathways; the world we inhabit is not known as a network of As connected with Bs but comes to be known as a series of journeys, one constantly lapsing in to another. In short, to go is to know and, in Ingold and Vergunst’s (p. 5) words; ‘Movement, here, is not adjunct to knowledge … Rather, the movement of walking is itself a way of knowing.’ In following these first steps, the collected papers (originally presented at a seminar simply entitled ‘the walking seminar’ at the University of Aberdeen) proceed along different paths through a wide-ranging series of contexts and cultures. The theme that connects the research collected here, over and above the substantive concern with walking, is the relation of the particular local cases (it doesn’t get much more localized than walking) with the overarching and significant theme of what it is to be human as experienced and narrated in movement. The concern of anthropology to document and represent both the local and the ubiquitously human is certainly captured by this grounded approach to mobility, and an attention to walking provides a particularly compelling case.
Attending to walking as a meaningful act of perception and communication is perhaps best illustrated by Vergunst’s chapter ‘Taking a Trip and Taking Care in Everyday Life’. Here Vergunst presents ethnographic material which may be read as trivial by some, pedestrian in both senses of the word, describing the potential pitfalls of walking (slipping, tripping, and getting lost) in various terrains and the relationship of the body to the landscape it moves through in relation to an attempt to understand the emotionality and sensuousness of walking. The import of the essay is in its drawing attention to the way in which ‘each step produces a distinctive relationship through which the walker comes to know something of their textual environment’ (p. 115). Moreover, the chapter urges for an extension of the understanding of the location of emotion from the mind, to the body, and on into the environment. Walking, as demonstrated by the authors of the many interesting ethnographies collected here, is thus an essentially human practice, and the local, pedestrian, grounded pathways taken akin to life itself.
Boundless Worlds: The Politics of Mobility
The collection edited by Peter Wynn Kirby starts off in strident fashion, describing a project intended to shake off some of the unfortunate and ‘brutal’ associations that the term ‘space’ has had within the social sciences and within European history in relation to the way in which ‘Cartesian-influenced conceptions of space and linked technologies of power … have etched political notions of segregation, domination, and control onto the surface of the world, reshaping the globe itself to Western specifications’ (pp. 2–3); strong stuff indeed, which can be read as a contemporary attempt to further distance anthropology from a colonial legacy within the current ‘spatial turn’ across the social sciences. In doing so, the collection introduces a politicized dimension to considerations of mobility and, equally, if not more significantly, a consideration of the ways in which boundaries are produced, maintained, and negotiated. The collected essays are concerned to demonstrate not only the ways in which spaces and territories are created in power-ridden moments of division but, further, the way in which these moments are constantly made and remade in human circulations. The goal of the collected essays is, then, to challenge the often too casual use of the term ‘space’ and engage in critical fashion with the politics of demarcation.
The challenge to ‘space’ as a concept is taken up most directly by a contribution from Ingold, again, in a provocatively titled paper ‘Against Space’. Carrying on the call for an attention to the local and grounded movements at the heart of the human experience from the previous edited collection, this paper sets the tone for the rest of the collection in resisting the temptation to mobilize ‘space’ as a theoretical gloss device (supported by its equally powerful material counterpart, the map). Ingold identifies a ‘logic of inversion’ within modern thought which acts to render life, and the world in which it is lived, as enclosed within boundaries rather than lived along pathways. Knowledge too is inverted by this same logic to become place-bound, rather than profoundly place-binding.
Following this positioning, the collected papers proceed (appropriately enough) to cover a good deal of ground along the pathways travelled by their informants. Here we find the universality of spatial boundaries and, via an interrogation of the ‘topo-strategies of denizens’, an account of the manner in which these boundaries are for the most part a matter of situated actions, and the recognition or not of these boundaries in the everyday lives and experiences of the groups inhabiting (or moving through and across) the particular setting(s). This observation does not necessarily pose a problem for the title of the book, Boundless Worlds, nor Ingold’s deconstruction of the logic of inversion. The argument presented by the volume as a whole offers an anthropological account of what it is to live in a contemporary, and contradictory, world of movement and boundaries. The collection takes the reader to a range of diverse settings in which the politics of boundaries (or lack of boundaries), movement and spatiality are everyday concerns for inhabitants, thus providing a detailed ethnographic, local, indigenous depiction of many of the topics which trouble analysts and theorists.
This, then, is the contribution of the volume beyond the sum of its parts; to present the reader with ethnographic material from which to consider the complexities of contemporary socio-spatial organization without recourse to abstract theorization. This is not to say that the volume is atheoretical. Pedersen’s chapter, for example, provides an illuminating example of the way in which current debates and framings of spatial organization and theory that draw a distinction between the sedentary and the nomadic (epitomized by the Chicago School and theory of Deleuze and Guttari, respectively) is experienced on the ground. For the Duxa of Mongolia’s Xövsgöl province, a people constantly on the move, familiar western topological concepts of spaces and boundaries have little pragmatic resonance. Theirs is a form of inhabitation, movement, and conceptualization of a world not composed of an economy of spaces (comprised of boundaries and definite spaces) but rather a ‘multitude of spatial centres – or focal points – from each of which a (potentially) infinite spatial realm takes its beginning’ (p. 143). The volume presents material with which to ‘think spatially’ from ‘traditional’ and ‘advanced’ contemporary societies and from drawing on historical documents in addressing relations of territory, spatiality and power (see the chapter by Michael). In this sense, and as summarized by Kirby, the collection continues in the anthropological tradition by maintaining a healthy scepticism of the many potentially universalizing concepts at the centre of the ‘spatial turn’, by insisting on addressing complex processes via an attention to indigenous experience and perspectives; an aim it achieves with aplomb.
Mobile Methodologies: Researchers on the Move
The majority of contemporary mobilities research is conducted from a ‘post-disciplinary’ position or, certainly, by researchers working across previously established disciplinary boundaries, and the collected papers in Mobile Methodologies combine to provide a discussion of primary methodological questions relating to epistemological, ontological, and ethical concerns in contemporary mobilities research. This makes it fairly hard to summarize the book as taking a particular ‘position’, but it means that the book may find wider application due to its consideration of a number of methodological issues at the heart of social scientific research.
As discussed in the introduction to this essay, the new mobilities paradigm (to which this book contributes in terms of a detailed consideration of methodological issues in mobilities research) posits that sociology was previously a static affair signified by a lack of research which considered movement and, also, a lack of research which was itself mobile. These two claims underpin the rationale for contemporary mobilities research and yet, in the manner that it is cast in this collection at least, there appears to be an appeal to something quite old and traditional (fieldwork and knowledge produced by ‘being there’) on the one hand, whilst methodological ‘innovation’ and the suggestion of a novel area of inquiry are weighed on the other. Although the various approaches brought together in this book may be slightly confusing to the novice ‘mobile methodologist’, the divergent approaches in the collection are, in fact, its strength. The considered discussion of a range of methodological techniques and epistemological foundations presented make the book a significant, wide-ranging contribution to discussions on the design, conduct, and analysis of mobilities research. In this sense, the key question which the chapters address is, how best to know on the go?
An interesting contribution that addresses this issue in a very literal fashion, yet seems to go against the ethnographic impulse of the rest of the book, discusses the practicalities and ethics of ‘in-vivo sampling of naïve drivers’. The methodological issue addressed is that previous studies of drivers’ behaviour have been too intrusive to the everyday non-observed practices of the person behind the wheel. Walker took to his bicycle and, aided by a range of sensors, recorded some 2300 times the distance left by drivers as they passed him. Walker concludes that this type of research allows access to the type of driving behaviours that people may wish to suppress when they know they are under observation: speeding, carelessness, inconsiderate behaviour, and so on. Walker’s concern is that the presence of the observer (whether in human or technological form) exerts too great an effect on the behaviour of the observed. A rebuke of the ‘observer affect’, which would be offered by ethnographers such as Stephens and Delamont, would be that the prolonged engagement with informants means that even the most concerted efforts to manage presentation of self gives way to a dramaturgical exhaustion and the mask begins to slip.
The issue of ‘being there’ and the resultant analysis of observed behaviour is dealt with in a different fashion by Eric Laurier. The ethnomethodologically inspired approach applied by Laurier calls for mobility to be understood as a practical accomplishment and discusses the relationship of observer to the local in a manner not dissimilar to that discussed in the anthropological collections. Laurier discusses Clifford Geertz’s (1988) rendering of the relation between knowledge near (the knowledge of the ethnographer as a result of being there) and the forms of representation with which the ethnography gains authenticity, and, in doing so, considers the analytic affordances of the camcorder as a means to obtain an ‘absent-presence’. Video proffers an approach to capturing (mobile) practice in which ‘events are apparently disclosing themselves to the camcorder without the ethnographer having to do anything’ (p. 111). This, in a positivist observer mode, offers immediate authenticity to the materials gathered. However, what Laurier’s approach demands, grounded in Harvey Sacks’ approach to the study of conversation, is a high degree of analytic patience with the empirical materials, to return again and again to the same strip of activity in order that we might slow ourselves down from stepping too quickly toward theory and abstraction from the just what and just how of what it is the people in the videos are up to. This approach is an offer to take a rest from theorizing spatial practice and awaken a wonder in the everyday, mundane practices in which mobility is accomplished; an offer which is certainly a welcome counterpoint to approaches which, even when grounded in fieldwork, resort to professional theorizations of the phenomena at hand.
Conclusion
Summarizing a theme that cuts across the numerous chapters contained within these three edited collections is no easy task. Nevertheless, to return to the initial framing of the essay and the current centrality of the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ within the social sciences, a key issue that the various authors more or less directly address is ‘how is it, in the contemporary, complex world, that social scientists can keep up?’. If keeping up with our participants is the challenge then this it is not such a very new one, and certainly not for ethnographers. An answer that is provided by the ethnographic work in the collections discussed here is that, by addressing matters of spatial organization, movement and mobility, and inequalities and boundaries via an attention to practice, the local, and the everyday (and by giving theory a rest), we might be able to slow things down a little.
Like the Batek forest walkers in Lye Tuck-Po’s ethnography (in Ingold and Vergunst), social science appears to be at a point of (possibly resolving) a tension between moving forward and pulling back. To return to the eponymous question of the essay we can perhaps answer slightly differently and say that an interest in mobility may not need to get us anywhere at all; we may well end up back where we started but, certainly, if we take care, our path will have brought us closer to the social worlds through which we travel.