Cultures of Motorway. Localities through Mobility as an Anthropological Issue

Most of anthropologist remember famous (and strongly controversial) Clifford Geertz’s question: “What does ethnographer do?” – he writes (Geertz 1973: 19). In this volume we would like to introduce an another formula: What does ethnographer do? – he or she is in constant move. To be much less ambiguous: ethnographer drives a car. He or she uses motorways, roads, and parking spaces. He or she is a consumer of petrol/gas stations, car washes, roadside bars or restaurants and sometimes motels. Finally, he or she is a user of road sings, traffic lights, telephone booths and so on. For a discipline whose central professional rite of passage is fieldwork identifying as a permanent movement between “orbis interior” and “orbis exterior”, there has been little a self-consciousness about the cultural consistency of this movement and its consequences. Taking it into consideration, presented volume can be comprehended as an attempt to deal with the issues of movement, notions of place and space, car cultures, cultural landscapes of road, roadsides and motorway, and above all cultural dimensions of social (local and global) practices and mechanisms connected with contemporary means of mobility.
The volume consists of two parts. The first one entitled “Motorways, people, and values” provides an ethnographically-informed (based on fieldwork research) calibration our main perspective on means of mobility, transport and movement. The second one – “Roads, cars, and mobility” presents complementary views from extra-anthropological perspectives significantly reinforcing and extending the idea of cultures of motorway.

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