Hitchhiking

Hitchhikers once queued up along Australian roadsides; now they are rarely seen. Increasing car ownership, cheap air travel, and a growing ‘culture of fear’, reinforced by widely publicised rape and murder cases, have all played their part in this decline. The figure of the hitchhiker continues to have strong cultural resonance nevertheless, and the practice may yet see a resurgence. This paper examines some of the recurring motifs and paradoxes in the memoirs and anecdotes of American, European and Australian hitchhikers past and present. It focuses in particular on the way their sense of risk is mitigated by following certain ‘rules’, either their own or those passed on by other hitchhikers.

Practice-led-ReSearch exploring hitchhiker's relationship with the digital platforms: BlaBlaCar (www.blablacar.com), Hitchwiki (www.hitchwiki.org), Couch Surfing (www.couchsurfing.com), TrustRoots (www.trustroots.org) and HitchGathering (http://hitchgathering.org).

« La pratique de l’auto-stop appartient à la multiplicité des genres d’expériences pouvant être traversés par une intentionnalité humaine, et en tant que telle, elle doit faire l’objet d’un questionnement ». Bien sûr, cette affirmation, énoncée ainsi par les philosophes Hervé Décaudin et Fabien Revard dans leur ouvrage <i>Tôt ou tard. Politique de l’auto-stop</i> [2011 : 18], ne peut que trouver un écho positif chez les anthropologues, habitués que sont ces derniers à devoir défendre la légitimité d’objets pouvant paraître à première vue ne pas mériter d’étude. Ce que nous proposons ici est de tenter de saisir quel peut être le bénéfice de l’étude de l’auto-stop pour l’anthropologie, non pas en affectant un rôle bien déterminé à chacune de ces deux entités – l’anthropologie d’un côté en discipline scientifique, l’auto-stop de l’autre en objet docile « posé sur une paillasse » [ibid. : 18] – mais en postulant une interaction, presque un échange de bons procédés, entre les deux.

Whether too much or the wrong kind, constraining Indigenous mobility is a preoccupation of the province of British Columbia. The province remains focussed on controlling Indigenous mobility and constructing forms of contentious mobility, such as hitchhiking, as bad or risky. In Northwestern British Columbia hitchhiking is particularly common among Indigenous women. Hitchhiking as a mode of contentious mobility is categorically named as " bad mobility " and is frequently explained away as risky behaviour. Mobility of Indigenous women, including hitchhiking is deeply gendered and racialized. The frequent description of missing and murdered Indigenous women as hitchhikers or drifters fosters a sense that " choosing " a bad mode of mobility alone is the reason that these women disappear. This paper will identify how hitchhiking, framed as contentious mobility, supports the construction of missing and murdered Indigenous women as willing, available and blame-worthy victims. Morality is tangled up with mobility in the province's responses to Indigenous women who hitchhike. This paper engages in a critical discourse analysis of billboards posted by the province of British Columbia along the Highway of Tears that attempt to prevent women from hitchhiking. This paper will identify the point of convergence between contentious mobility, violence against Indigenous women and larger questions of colonialism and the negotiation of racialized and gendered power imbalances through the province's constraining of Indigenous mobility. Résumé. Excessives ou mal ciblées, les tentatives visant à restreindre la mobilité des Autochtones dans la province de Colombie-Britannique sont une source de préoccupation. La province s'efforce à contrôler la mobilité des Autochtones et à présenter les formes de mobilité controversées, tel l'auto-stop, comme des pratiques indésirables ou risquées. Au Nord-Ouest de la Colombie-Britannique, l'auto-stop est une pratique tout particulièrement courante chez les femmes au

Fenomen autostopu nie zawiera się w oficjalnym obszarze zainteresowań jakiejkolwiek dyscypliny, przez co (do tej pory) ma efemerydalny charakter. W niniejszej książce autor stara się zobrazować, uchwycić i opisać przeszłość polskiego autostopu w całym zakresie medialno-literackim.

Treść prezentowanej książki oparto na przekazach medialnych, analizie czasopism z czasów PRL-u, na łamach których poruszano tematykę autostopową (m.in. „Dookoła świata", „Motor", „Sztandar Młodych") oraz utworach literackich, gdzie „podróż za jeden uśmiech" była motywem przewodnim.


„Sam wybór tematu będzie zatem dla jednych ważny i poważny, dla innych - błahy i zasługujący najwyżej na jakieś publicystyczne omówienia. Jedni uznają, że temat podjęto za późno, inni - że za wcześniej, gdyż należałoby się nim zająć dopiero wtedy, kiedy opracuje się zagadnienia ważniejsze, a przynajmniej te, które stanowić będą naturalne »naukowe prequele« tego konkretnego zagadnienia. Część uzna, iż praca stanowi dopiero świetne wprowadzenie do tematu, część - że jest to już bardzo dobra synteza. Taka polifonia głosów mogłaby peszyć autora, ale dowodzie jednocześnie, iż poruszył on temat istotny, ciekawy i żywo obchodzący czytelników". - z recenzji prof. dr. hab. Michała Błażejewskiego

Researchers  engaging  with  spatial  anthropology,  spatial  ethnography,  or  spatial  humanities  are  drawing  new  methods  from  a wide range of fields such as autoethnography and  gonzo  ethnography.  Malla,  Kholina,  and Jäntti’s paper on Urban Hitchhiking as a method seems  to  respond  to  Law’s  observation  that  research needs  to  ‘work  differently  if  it  is  to  understand  a  networked  or  fluid  world’  (Law  2004: 3). Law’s concept of ‘methods assemblages’  questions  how  to  develop  methods  that  work  in    and    ‘know’    multiplicity,    indefiniteness,    and  flux  (Law  2004:  14).  Rather  than  having  a  ‘fertile  obsession’  (Lather  1993)  with  validity,  greater  methodological  eclecticism  seeks  to  provide more concern for the character, nuance, messiness,  and  complexity  of  daily  human  life.  While  standard  research  practices  often  mean  discounting  many  actions,  interactions,  impressions,  experience,  movements,  symbols,  beliefs,  and  practices  to  achieve  consensus,  Malla  et  al.  react  to  a  city  full  of  complexity,  with  varying  types  of  spaces,  boundaries,  networks,  movements,  practices,  interactions,  and meanings.

Alienation, dependence, fear, sociability, protest, time and mobility—these are all hitchhiking themes. This chapter questions how breaks of convention, such as those which exist in hitching a lift, impact upon the sensing of place and the encounter with roadscapes. As a method of travel, hitching ruptures normative journeys, whereby destinations are no longer extensions of the present. Hitchers act on a compelling need to move in an intensely free yet highly constrained manner; to seek heights of physical and mental experience and to do so as if travel, perhaps even life itself, were fleeting opportunities. Roads, vehicles and bequested transport are part of that opportunity. Impressionistically inspired, this chapter concludes the monograph by providing an existential framework for how to approach this fleeting and obscure topic.

Ümit Aksoy felsefe doktorası yapıyor. Henüz ortaokulda iken başladığı otostopa yirmi yıldan fazla devam etti. Hatta otostopun kitabını yazdı. “Her Şey Biraz Eksik, Otostop Hariç” isimli romanı 2016 senesinde Raskol’un Baltası tarafından yayımlandı.“İnsan bazen bir fren sesine âşık olabilir!” Diyen yazarla otostop hakkında konuştuk. Beğenilerinize sunarız.