Inside and Outside the House

Abstract

This article presents a narrative of urban mobility and desire, and critically examines recent ethnographic approaches to subjectivity and “becoming” among rural–urban migrants and in urban life. Lately, ethnographic approaches to urban lives have emphasized mobility over fixity and sought to describe possibility and potential, even in cases of extreme abjection, in part inspired by the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. I examine the strengths of this “vitalist” approach to urban ethnography through an extended analysis of a fragmentary narrative of urban mobility, setting it in a wider context of political change in Delhi to show that both the reality and the interpretation of these events depend upon the prior occupation and affective shaping of distinctive urban places, or milieux, and the ongoing conceptual structuring and discursive elaboration of political meanings. I argue that such affective structures and urban mediations deserve more attention in ethnographic accounts of migratory desire and becoming.

Affective Infrastructures of Immobility: Staying While Neighbors Are Leaving Rural Eastern Siberia

“…Coincidentally, high mobility rates do not mean that moving happens for good reasons. 3 Moreover, “ethnographic vitalism” empathizes an “affirmation of life, potentiality, becoming” (Coleman 2016, 986), and thus sees living in one place as a journey, an exercise of “mobility” between potentialities of “staying” and “going.” Confinement does not associate with free becoming, and yet it can be (Coleman 2016, 700), immobility, likewise.…”

“…Limits of mobility are the ways in which people assert their own freedoms or identity (Coleman 2016, 702); Rodion moving to his homeplace was something springing from and constitutive of who he was. Recalling Anosovo of the 1960s, Rodion flared up.…”

“…. .milieu” (Coleman 2016, 703). Elena spoke with a disbelieving horror of the times in Anosovo when her children had to use self-made lamps as the diesel generator powering the village broke by the end of January, “as usual.” They made candles out of animal fat that they called “fattings” ( zhiroviki ).…”