On the Road: Polish Modernization from the Perspective of the Anthropology of the Motorway

How “Poland Entered Europe”

“…However, above all, we worked with a wide variety of groups of people, including local authorities and activists, local entrepreneurs and contractors (e.g., owners and directors of motels, roadhouses, bars, brothels, and agritourism farms), drivers and tourists, owners and workers at petrol stations and motorway service centers, and other inhabitants of selected towns, villages, and settlements. 8 As our research area stretched more than one hundred kilometers, we faced many challenges, including having to regularly move from place to place. Although modern mobility dominated the zone, this was, paradoxically, no easy task, and it entailed our entire team being forced to use bicycles and taxis, hitchhike, and even to walk along the dangerous waysides, benefi ting from the kindness of people we met along the way.…”

Tripe Soup at the Service Area: Thoughts on an Infrastructure of Meaningful Sociality

“…However, this understanding of service areas has itself recently undergone some changes. For example, Giulio Giovannoni (2016) describes those along Italian highways as meeting places and subcultural spaces, while Waldemar Kuligowski and Agata Stanisz concede that the habitual performances of drivers allow for a critical reflection on modernisation processes (Kuligowski and Stanisz 2015;Kuligowski 2019). Their contributions also pave the way for a more sense-oriented approach, which has been applied in the broad field of mobility studies but not in the context of petrol stations and service areas, 'meaningful sociality'.…”