Driven to sanity: An ethnographic critique of the senses in automobilities

Abstract

This article reviews critically approaches to embodiment and the senses in contemporary automobilities research, highlighting particularly their critical representation of sensory disengagement in driving. In contrast, through passenger-seat ethnography conducted in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the article explores the roles of sensory engagement in driving in ameliorating post-socialist and post-war unease concerning namely identification, mistrust, insecurity and estrangement. Globally cars are the largest single item of consumer expenditure after housing, and the consequences of this are manifold and devastating. In this context it becomes pressingly important to understand why people drive as much as they do and, as part of this, how driving makes us feel. In order to achieve this automobilities research must, I argue, stand back from its disposition of critique and develop a more thoroughgoing ethnography of driving. Anthropology is beginning to provide this, albeit sparsely and belatedly. This article represents a contribution.

Why Marx Was a Bad Driver: Alienation to Sensuality in the Anthropology of Automobility

“…Likewise, there is a small body of anthropological literature on the social relations between drivers/passengers and other drivers/passengers (Yazici, 2012), between drivers/passengers and the milieus they pass through (Klaeger, 2012), and between drivers/passengers and the "moorings" (Hannam, Sheller, & Urry, 2006) that enable automobility, such as roads (Dalakoglou & Harvey, 2012;. To an even lesser extent, there is a very small body of anthropological literature on the interiority of the car-for example, the social relations between drivers and passengers, the non-driving behaviours of drivers (such as mobile working) and, the focus of this article, the emotions and feelings experienced whilst driving (Bishara, 2015;Dawson, 2015a;Yazıcı, 2013).…”

“…Firstly, despite conceptualization of the senses as an interconnected web of perceptory apparatuses, a commonplace representation in automobilities studies is that car driving involves disengagement of the senses from one another (Dawson, 2015a: p. 6). For example, Urry describes the driver's body as being, "fragmented and disciplined to the machine, with eyes, ears, hands, and feet, all trained to respond instantaneously and consistently" (Urry, 2006: p. 23).…”

Mobile Meat Puppetry? Ruined Infrastructures, Embodiment and Agency in Driving

“…Driving is a practice governed by locally shared rules that are un-reflexive (Thrift, 2004). In turn, traffic can be experienced as like a community based on embodied knowledge (Dawson, 2017a), and movement on the roads a kind of choreography (Thrift, 2004). In Bosnia, where ruins rather than new infrastructures dominate the automobile landscape, such knowledge comes particularly to the fore.…”

“…In Bosnia, where ruins rather than new infrastructures dominate the automobile landscape, such knowledge comes particularly to the fore. Importantly, emerging from automobility in the Socialist era, it is a pan-ethnic knowledge (Dawson, 2017a). Thus, driving on Bosnia's ruined roads entails, then, in many ways a profoundly bodily experience of persisting Yugoslav communality (Dawson, 2017a).…”

“…Implicit within each of the above is an emphasis on an agential driver-a driver that is attuned and sentient (Dawson, 2017a), and who, as a kind of automobile flâneur (Dawson, 2015), engages sometimes in acts of resistance (Dawson, 2017a;Dawson 2017b). In this article I explore some of the material grounds for such agency.…”