Movement, mobility and identity
Anthropology studies cultures and communities, but people have always moved around, so one anthropologist has taken his research on the road in cars and on buses
CHRIS HATZIS
Eavesdrop on Experts, a podcast about stories of inspiration and insights. It’s where expert types obsess, confess and profess. I’m Chris Hatzis, let’s eavesdrop on experts changing the world - one lecture, one experiment, one interview at a time.
[Traffic, tram, street sounds]
CHRIS HATZIS
What does public transport have to do with anthropology? Well, quite a lot actually. So says Professor Andrew Dawson, Professor and Chair of Anthropology at the School of Social & Political Sciences, University of Melbourne. Andrew’s made his way from England via all sorts of places - Ashington in Northern England, Bosnia, right through to Melbourne where he's lived for around 15 years.
Mobility, migration and identity feature heavily in all of Andrew’s work. Most of his research is done in cars, or on buses with people. He’s even titled one of his works “Why Marx was a bad driver: Alienation to sensuality in the anthropology of automobility.”
Professor Andrew Dawson sat down in one spot long enough to chat to our reporter Steve Grimwade.
STEVE GRIMWADE
I feel like should be doing this interview in the back of a car. I think that would be the way we should conduct this interview. In fact, from now on we're going to conduct all our interviews in cars, to get the most out of people. Now, prior to coming on air we've been discussing mobility and the fact that that is at the heart of all your work. I'm interested - what brought you to come to mobility. Why does that interest you most? What is it about you that drives your interest in mobility, that drives your research?
ANDREW DAWSON
Well a number of things really, one of them is a very, very simple practical story and it's actually why I got into anthropology in the first place. When I was a kid, I used to move around the country, had no money, the only way I could do it was by hitchhiking. I realised pretty quickly that people who pick you up, they usually want to talk, they usually want to talk about themselves, and you could always get an extra mile or two out of them if you could keep the conversation going. That made me a particularly adept social researcher, but especially in anthropological research, because anthropology is - it's not an interrogative social science, it's not about asking questions very much. It's about eliciting, making people comfortable, making people speak and opening up their worldview to you.
So, I think that's the first reason why I got into mobility. Part of it is also an intellectual thing. Like a lot of people, I've been concerned that the social sciences have been traditionally quite sedentary. So, for example, anthropologists are interested in cultures and they're in communities, but often they see cultures and communities as outcomes of people living in places. The fact is that people have always been mobile, and increasingly are mobile, especially with globalisation. So, we have to change the way we think about our objects of study. Communities and cultures also as being not just outcomes of dwelling, but the movement through them too.
Then a third thing is it's a moral reason why I got into mobility, which is just feeling ill at ease, especially with the way that refugees are treated, and feeling from an early age that movement, putting one's foot in front of the other foot, is an intrinsically natural thing. Putting up borders and stopping that seems to me to be intrinsically wrong, it's that the root of nationalism, which is frankly I think one of the most insidious ideologies of the modern age, which leads to the death of many people. So, my reasons are methodological, life experience, driven, theoretically driven but above all politically driven, that's why I'm into mobility.
STEVE GRIMWADE
I'm picturing you as a young man hitchhiking and finding your way in the world via conversation and listening to people. I think what I'm interested in is the idea of what comes first, the anthropologist or the person, and I suspect it's you at the heart of your research is your point of view. How do you distinguish between your own drives and point of view and letting someone talk?
ANDREW DAWSON
There's a lot of nebulous distinctions that we live by. One classic one in academia is the difference between reason and emotion. If that distinction had any credibility, Marx would never have written, okay? Marx wrote good work, not just because he was a fabulous political economist, but because he was driven by a sense of injustice that he felt when he saw poverty all around him. It's the same with me, disclaimer here, I'm nowhere near the stature of Marx.
STEVE GRIMWADE
You've got a lovely beard though.
ANDREW DAWSON
Oh thanks, absolutely, that's right, and paunch too. But the original question is what drives you? What drives me is part, excuse the pun given my interest in mobility, but I can't really make a distinction between the man as an emotional being with passions and political concerns and also the academic who is coldheartedly and with reason and rationale developing important theoretical and empirical works. To me they're indistinguishable.
STEVE GRIMWADE
I should tell the listeners that there was a very serious look on your face when you were saying that, Andrew.
ANDREW DAWSON
Yeah, right.
STEVE GRIMWADE
I suspect I have a whole host of nebulous questions with regards to anthropology, and I apologise for that ahead of time. Because I always tried to understand this science against my own rational view of the world and measuring and data and things like that. So, maybe I'm going to go back to a place where you studied from the mid '80s to Ashington. Ashington's potentially an unremarkable little town in Northern England, three miles away from the North Sea and facing towards Norway. It was once known as the biggest coal mining village of the world, but deindustrialisation changed that. Now you've done a number of different studies across time and instead of gathering huge amounts of data, at one point you're talking to one woman. You're talking to a woman by the name of Elizabeth [Ord] in the latter years of her life, about aging and dying. Why? Or how did you come to meet Elizabeth?
ANDREW DAWSON
I came to meet Elizabeth through doing Ashington, and I came to Ashington through a particular means which was... anthropology traditionally has been the study of other cultures so to speak. Then in the '70s and '80s there was a critique of that, and that critique said this is an endeavour which is intrinsically colonialist in many ways. It's about time people started getting back not to looking at the other, but to looking at themselves. I am from Ashington, my family are a coal mining family, my father did pretty well, he went into management and got out of the industry, but my family are coal mining people and footballing people So, this for me was doing anthropology at home as part of the post-industrial critique.
The interest in focusing in on the micro comes from a number of different angles. One of them is to do with the fact that it was at home it's very hard to generalise and talk big picture about your home because you're just so intimate with all the people who are there, so partly it's an outcome of that. But it's also partly a political choice in the sense that big theories for me have always run the risk of doing violence to individuals, this creative, unique agential human beings. So, it was that that drove me towards looking at individuals like Elizabeth Ord. But also, it's partly a stylistic thing. I think that if you want to tell a big picture, I think that you can present those arguments much more effectively through the intimacy of talking about individuals, because people relate to individuals, they relate to human beings. So, it's partly a communicative strategy that I'm choosing as well.
STEVE GRIMWADE
What was it that got you out of coal and was - I mean you're probably a child of the '80s I'm guessing?
ANDREW DAWSON
Yeah, that's right.
STEVE GRIMWADE
So, I mean you're coming out of high school and coal is probably finishing up around this time in Ashington.
ANDREW DAWSON
What got me out of it?
STEVE GRIMWADE
Yeah.
ANDREW DAWSON
Just one simple thing which was the Bosnian war. When I was a kid, my parents had this love of Yugoslavia, we used to go on coastal holidays down there every couple of years.
STEVE GRIMWADE
No family background in that space?
ANDREW DAWSON
Only in that my father had some friends from within the non-aligned movement, he was a socialist who - and Yugoslavia was a leading light, so we'd sometimes go down and visit them. But Yugoslavia was a big place for British mass tourism in the '60s and '70s. So, we used to go down there and then collapse of communism came, none of us expected it in 1990, 1991, and lo and behold this place that I associated with sunbaking and nights out at discos had become a killing field. So, it was deeply personal for me, and there was also a sense of “oh, Andy, you're not a real anthropologist because you study Britain, you've got to study the other.” So, I chose a damn difficult other, I chose Bosnians, they have a very difficult language, Serbo-Croat.
So, it was almost like a rite of passage into anthropological manhood for me, going over there. But a choice that I definitely really I’m pleased I made; it's been a wonderful experience.
STEVE GRIMWADE
Is there something about covering the contemporary with regards to anthropology, that is new or newer than was expected from an anthropologist? Or was it always contemporary?
ANDREW DAWSON
No, that's a really good point. I mean I think there's been historically a division of labour in the social sciences with sociology does the West, anthropology does the rest. Sociology was associated because of that with change, it was the discipline that looked at why things changed and how things changed. Anthropology on the other hand was seen often as the opposite, it was the discipline that looked at why things stayed the same. Many of its early theories were about things staying the same, such as functionalism. If you take one little bit of a society out, the whole thing will crumble, we look at stasis and the lack of change.
But it's moved on since then and I think that probably more than any other discipline I know, anthropology is super contemporary, because it's all about this intimate engagement with a group of people over many years. You're trying to capture their world view, how they view the world, and you let them tell you what's important. Ordinary people are on the cusp, they're on the wave of what's happening, so you're forced always to be on the wave of what's happening. Like with my research with Bosnia, academics mostly are writing about conflict, but the conflict happened 20 odd years ago, anthropologists aren't doing that anymore, I'm looking at the redevelopment of the tourism industry there.
STEVE GRIMWADE
That's what you're doing now?
ANDREW DAWSON
Yeah, I'm just going off there in two weeks' time actually to carry on this very interesting project.
STEVE GRIMWADE
It's interesting having these embedded relationships in these spaces. I guess you get to know a lot of the people on the ground. How does that shape your research?
ANDREW DAWSON
Knowing people on the ground shapes your research in several ways, the first one is that you feel a kind of moral duty to represent them as accurately as you possibly can. You also feel aware of an ethical responsibility to not say things that could harm them. But also, it can make you uncritical of them, and that's something that I'm always struggling with. Because the people that I work with in Bosnia are Serbs, who by and large were the aggressors in the Bosnian war. I work with people who will defend the strategy of ethically cleansing Muslims, they'll even defend the strategy of raping Muslim women. So, that I find difficult, and that's a struggle. Seeking to represent the logic of their world view, but at the same time be critical of it.
STEVE GRIMWADE
What are you hoping to do now returning?
ANDREW DAWSON
I've got an interesting summer ahead. I have to give you a bit of background on the project for it to make sense. As I said, most people when they write about Bosnia, they see it as a place for just looking at conflict. I'm looking at the development of the tourism industry there. I'm working in three places, all of them in the ethnically cleansed parts of Eastern Bosnia, where there was a population prior to the war of about 80 percent Muslims, now it's down to about five or six per cent, it's predominantly Serb area now. One place I'm working in is a ski resort that in the war was where the siege of Sarajevo was conducted from. Another place I’m working is a white-water rafting centre, a place of great fun, but in the very river where most of the dead bodies were dumped during the war.
Another place I’m working in is a health spa where women go particularly for the amelioration of reproductive disorders, because the waters are seen as fecund. But this was also a rape camp during the war, precisely because the waters were seen as fecund. Because Slavic people believe that the women make no biological contribution to the identity of the foetus, it's men who do. So, a Serbian person raping a Muslim woman is seen as him making a Serbian body within a Muslim woman. So, what I’m interested in looking at is how that dark secret of the horrors of the past percolates through - dark public secret if you like, because local people know it all, know this. How it percolates through in the presence within the tourism encounter.
Now, the research will be carried out almost exclusively on buses. As I told you before, I’m particularly interested in mobility. The buses that bring tourists from Sarajevo to - which is a Muslim-dominated area, to these Serbian-dominated tourist sites. Now the reason this happens is because of a strange contradiction in the peace agreement. What happened in the peace agreement was that Serbia was given the territory that it conquered, but on the other hand Muslims were said you can return to those places from where you've been displaced. Of course, it's difficult for them to return because they'd be going back to a place where they're not welcome, but these are their only properties.
So, what they do is they fail to sustainably return. They take properties back, they maybe make a livelihood from those properties, but they live in other parts of Bosnia where they're safe. So, what you have is Muslim tourist operators bringing people down to these Serbian areas, and these Serbs are hiring the land from Muslims in these areas to operate things like the white-water rafting ventures. Now, here's the thing, the real secret on these buses of course is that the young men and women are wondering, are some of them the offspring of the rapes that took place in this area. So, there's a constant sense that these people who I'm working with may actually be my brothers and sisters, even though they're ethnic others.
It's that horrible nightmarish public secret and how it percolates through in the present, that I'm looking at in this new project.
STEVE GRIMWADE
It's devastating stuff. The tourists themselves, are they Muslim? Are they just generic tourists from anywhere else in the world? Are there a certain type of person that's going back?
ANDREW DAWSON
They're from all parts of the world and they're from all levels of ignorance and awareness of what happened in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Last year I picked up three young Swedish hitchhikers in this area, and we had a fantastic conversation about ethnic conflict in the area, and about an hour into it I realised that we were talking about two entirely different ethnic conflicts. I was talking about the struggles between Muslims and Croats and Serbs, and they were talking about Game of Thrones, which is because there's numerous film sets for Game of Thrones in this area. They had no knowledge at all of the ethnic conflict that took place there.
STEVE GRIMWADE
It sounds like you're almost talking about the mobility of the stories themselves, the way we reflect upon places via narrative as well. I don't know where to go on that topic, it's so not fraught, but it's as you say it's dark. How do you take self-care in regards to being in these spaces and talking about these things? Is that something you think about?
ANDREW DAWSON
Yeah, I mean it was tricky early on because Serbs especially felt let down by the West, they saw themselves as allies in the Second World War. Then lo and behold, when Kosovo kicked off, NATO bombed Belgrade and they felt let down. They would also say we're ethnically cleansing because we're protecting Europe against the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, which was crazy. So, in the early days as a British man going there, there was a lot of hostility towards me. But Bosnian people are remarkable, they're so used to living with conflict and they're so used to the need to just get over it and often move back to where they've been ethnically cleansed from and live next to neighbours who've even killed members of their family.
They have this amazing capacity for just getting on. I feel part of that getting on, I don't feel even vaguely threatened at all now, and also, they're very familiar, it's just Andy, and Andy the anthropologist, crucially, which means that I don't go and ask pointy questions. The typical anthropological fly on the wall, hanging out, just talking about everyday life, watching as much as asking.
STEVE GRIMWADE
We're beginning to talk about xenophobia in a way, maybe we can go back to Ashington again, this town in Northern England. One of your studies was based, it was actually around the topic of hating immigration but loving immigrants. Indeed, I think that title comes from a conversation with an individual in Ashington.
ANDREW DAWSON
Yes. That paper came out of a particular moment in British history, the 2017 general election when the Conservative Party decided that they could increase their majority by capturing the vote that they'd lost to the United Kingdom Independence Party. One of the ways they saw doing this was by upping the ante in terms of anti-immigrant rhetoric. They went to the Northern Heartlands with this anti-immigrant story, anyway to cut a long story short, they nearly lost the election in the end. They lost the majority and we've seen the chaos that's ensued as a consequence of that, with the debate surrounding Brexit.
What I'm arguing in this paper is that they made this fundamental error which was to represent the British working class in places like Ashington, post-industrial communities, who voted in large numbers for Brexit and voted in large numbers for Brexit precisely because they saw it as a way of ending the free movement of people. But they misconstrued this as being an anti-immigrant, a racist, xenophobic sentiment, when in fact it's not at all. Most people in this area, they have a sense of themselves as being immigrants. These towns like Ashington emerged just in the industrial revolution from migrants coming from lots of places.
They're steeped in socialist internationalism, they often value immigrants very highly because they see them as people who move in order to work, unlike the indolent unemployed youth of the post-industrial era from these kinds of local communities. So, really what they're talking about is not a hatred of immigrants, what they hate is immigration, which is something different. The reason they hate it is because they see it as part of a trend to excuse governments from investing in local communities, investing in local capital. Why do it when you can just bring somebody in from elsewhere? So, that's essentially what that work's about, kind of redressing this narrative that's coming through especially in parts of the Labour Party in Britain, that maybe the Labour Party should becoming more nationalistic, should be becoming dare we say it, even more xenophobic.
It doesn't ring true with what working class people in Britain are about. They're okay with immigrants, they live next door to them.
STEVE GRIMWADE
Having been in Australia in Melbourne I believe for almost 15 years, we pride ourselves as being a multicultural city and a multicultural country, what's your reflection on that?
ANDREW DAWSON
It's a very left field reflection, I hope you don't mind. I mean I just feel debates about ethnicity and multiculturalism is a kind of territory that I don't want to go into. I don't think I've got the background. However recently I've just written a paper about multi auto culturalism, with…
STEVE GRIMWADE
Hold on, multi auto culturalism?
ANDREW DAWSON
Yeah, with my colleagues Jenny…
STEVE GRIMWADE
I've got cars from around the world?
ANDREW DAWSON
No, what it's about is…
STEVE GRIMWADE
Sorry, bad joke.
ANDREW DAWSON
No, what it's about is, this is work I've been doing with a guy called David Ashmore and Jenny Day, who's in architecture. As you know, I'm interested in mobility, most of my research is done in cars, on buses with people. There is a concern by transport authorities in Australia at the moment that especially with infrastructural investment, anger and tension on the roads is going to increase inexorably in coming years. Indeed, after gender, car-bike relations is the second most discussed topic on newspaper blogs in the whole of Australia. Now the standard way in which you think about these tensions is we all know it, the concept of road rage, which comes from psychology. Here I start to think about Bosnia.
If I spoke about what happened in Bosnia as a form of rage, an abhorrent state of mind, you'd think I was mad. The troubles that happened in Bosnia came from long histories of colonial expansion and so on, deep-seated conflictual social relations. Maybe we should think about roads in the same way, is what we're saying. Let's not think about what's happening on the road somehow is just an outcome of an abhorrent state of mind, but of specific social conflicts that take place. We have done a study looking at how in many ways what happens on the roads between car drivers and cyclists, mirrors what happens in situations of ethnic tension.
There’s stereotyping, there's a hierarchising of which vehicle should have precedent on the road, in the way that ethic groups hierarchise each other. The usual fix for these kinds of conflicts is given by engineers, segregation, let's build bicycle lanes. Of course, one of the dangers of that is that you can't build bicycle lanes everywhere. If you normalise the sense that the road should be segregated where they're not segregated, then you increase the dangers 10-fold sort of thing. We're saying let's start thinking about the roads in the way that we think about ethnic context. Let's think of them as multi auto cultural spaces where drivers and cyclists have different identities, these different identities, cultural identities emerge from the particular vehicular affordances of their vehicles, whether bikes or cars.
Let's start talking about solutions, not by infrastructural fixes but by developing a sense of different road users beginning to recognise each other. Now we can do that in various ways, we can do that through legal fixes, for example instead of having uniform laws for how vehicle conduct should take place on the road, have laws of variability that recognise these affordances. Cars don't have to act in the same ways as bicycles and vice versa. Also, educational systems should transform in a way to promote recognition. So, when we learn how to drive a car, we learn how to drive a car. What we would argue that in learning how to drive a car, you should also learn how lorries work, and bicycles work, so you have appreciation of them, a tolerance of them, a respect for them, too.
STEVE GRIMWADE
If we speak about these two main ethic groups, car drivers and bicyclists. What do car drivers hate most about bicyclists?
ANDREW DAWSON
Ha. Many, many things. We identified I think, I don't have the specific typologies here, eight key negative stereotypes that car drivers have of cyclists. But the key one I think is the sense in which cyclists are freeloaders. Now there's a long story to this, above all of this they're freeloaders. If you think about cars, the roads, there were spaces for all kinds of people in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. You'd have pedestrians, cyclists, the earlier versions of cars, horses and carts, market traders there. Then what you've got was a segregation of the roads, market traders were moved off. Then a further segregation, you got footpaths. There is the drive increasingly towards roads being for cars and lorries and buses, a kind of an apartheid if you like, an infrastructural apartheid. Sorry, I'm getting ahead of myself…
STEVE GRIMWADE
Play it out, keep going.
ANDREW DAWSON
Now, one of the consequences of that is that of course car drivers are taxed, you know there's the vehicle tax, registration and so on, and cyclists aren't. But a lot of car drivers have this sense of “well that means we pay for the roads, and cyclists don't.”
STEVE GRIMWADE
That's the laziest excuse in the world.
ANDREW DAWSON
Of course, it's totally lame isn't it. The fact is that taxation in general pays for the roads. So, that's the common stereotype which is embedded in notions of basically roads being for cars.
STEVE GRIMWADE
Is there a moral angst there as well that car drivers want to be angry at cyclists for being uppity and not driving polluting vehicles and all the rest of it? Is there some sort of contest there?
ANDREW DAWSON
Yeah, where do I begin?
STEVE GRIMWADE
That was a yes or no question.
ANDREW DAWSON
Bringing it back to ethnicity again, the common notion of how ethnicity operates is that the more different the ethnic groups culturally, the greater the conflict between them will be. In the Australian terms, the bigger the difference, the bigger the biffo, if you want to put it quite simply. But the reality is that - which a lot of anthropologists have demonstrated, is that actually tension is greatest when there's great similarity between people, but where they're forced to come apart. So, for example the tension in Yugoslavia for me is really all about the fact that they're all Slavs, even though they're Muslims and Serbs and Croats. They were forced to move apart with the rise of nationalism, and the hatred was strong because at that moment they were seen always as one group appropriating the other group's properties, symbols and so on.
It's the same with the roads. You go on the roads, it's seen as a common good, but when somebody comes and carves you up on a bike when you're in your car, it feels like theft of my property. That's one answer to it. What I would say, there's lots of moralising goes on in what people term road rage. What I would say about it is the form that that moralising takes, the idiom if you like of the rage is very different between different places.
Just to give you an example, I've lived in London most of my life, I used to cycle on the streets in London all the time. Typical manoeuvre I would do would be whip down, if I see the red lights come on, I'd quickly swing into the pedestrian crossing and cross the road to keep going. Car drivers irritated would usually shout out the window, “get off your bike, you latte-drinking XXX.” Okay, latte-drinking, what's that? It's a reference to class, right? That's the typical idiom used for expressing rage against other vehicular users in Britain.
First time I did it in Melbourne on Rathdowne Street, angry car driver presses his horn, opens his window and shouts at me, “what are you doing, mate? Don't you know pedestrian crossings are for feet, roads are for wheels, all right?” Entirely different idiom. The idiom there is I would expect it's about rules. One thing I've learned in Australia since I've been here is that, sorry I hope I’m not insulting you if you're an Australian, it's not meant to be an insult.
STEVE GRIMWADE
We're a convict society, go for it.
ANDREW DAWSON
Is this sense of that we're a larrikin society, we're a bit crazy, we're a bit rule-breaking, as opposed to you Brits with your stiff-upper-lipped way of going about things. But the reality is Australia was an enlightenment project where colonists came here and they made a modern bureaucratic rule-bound society of the kind that they couldn't do back in Britain because it was such a mess. I would argue, and I'm arguing with some quite more important scholars than myself, such as Michael Herzfeld at Harvard here, that that conflict on the roads and the idiom of the rule for articulating conflict, is a particular Australian thing to do with its history of how colonialism took place here. Whereas in Britain, conflict's about class, Britain is the ultimate - sorry, I'm waffling.
STEVE GRIMWADE
No, we love a good waffle. I'm interested, what's the most interesting thing you've overheard in a car, bus or taxi?
ANDREW DAWSON
Wow. It's not so much overheard but seen and sensed. It was a woman who I used to passenger with regularly in Bosnia who was fervently anti-nationalist, a good communist. She felt nationalism creeping into her life, even through her husband who came to her and said “it's about time that we had a child, a child for the nation.” Because at these times even nationalism made its way into reproductive politics, you had one Prime Minister saying the foetus is a Croat too. She would get in her car to escape this; it was a moment of escape for her. But the key thing that I sensed from here when she was driving, the pleasure she got, sheer pleasure from driving. In a life that was really tough and distressing for her was this feeling of changing the gears and accelerating and wrestling with a cronky old Yugo engine that would fall apart and threaten to stall at any moment. She revelled in the joy of being able to control this relic of a vehicle.
What it was about for her, I felt and I'm convinced, was this sense that for once I am totally in control of my body and everything that's around me. While with the creeping nationalism that's even taking over women's bodies through fertility politics, that kind of control is being denied to me. It was a sense of driving being really genuinely empowering for somebody.
STEVE GRIMWADE
When you have us think about mobility, what do you want us to think about?
ANDREW DAWSON
Good point. Several things, one is I want people to take mobile experiences much more seriously than they have, at a simple empirical level for example there's been very few social scientific studies of driving, and yet the purchase of cars is the second, well expenditure on vehicles and petrol and so on, is the second highest form of expenditure that there is after housing. I want them to keep that in mind. I want them to keep in mind that life isn't all about being in places, it's about moving through places too, and that's as constitutive of social life as anything else. But lastly and most importantly, I want - and this is the anti-nationalist in me coming out, I want people to appreciate, especially at this time of heightened nationalism and anti-immigrant policies and so on and so forth, that moving is absolutely natural, it's part of the human condition, unfettered movement.
STEVE GRIMWADE
Professor Andrew Dawson, or Andy the Anthropologist, thanks very much for coming in.
ANDREW DAWSON
Thanks ever so much, mate. OK.
CHRIS HATZIS
Thank you to Professor Andrew Dawson, Professor and Chair of Anthropology at the School of Social & Political Sciences, University of Melbourne. And thanks to our reporter Steve Grimwade.
Eavesdrop on Experts - stories of inspiration and insights - was made possible by the University of Melbourne. This episode was recorded on June 14, 2019. You’ll find a full transcript on the Pursuit website. Audio engineering by me, Chris Hatzis. Co-production - Silvi Vann-Wall and Dr Andi Horvath. Eavesdrop on Experts is licensed under Creative Commons, Copyright 2019, The University of Melbourne. If you enjoyed this episode, drop us a review on Apple Podcasts and check out the rest of the Eavesdrop episodes in our archive. I’m Chris Hatzis, producer and editor. Join us again next time for another Eavesdrop on Experts.
One of anthropologist Professor Andrew Dawson’s research papers is titled ‘Why Marx was a bad driver: Alienation to sensuality in the anthropology of automobility’.
The name gives an insight into his interest in the way movement, mobility and migration informs cultures and communities around the world.
“Anthropologists often see cultures and communities as outcomes of people living in places. The fact is that people have always been mobile, and increasingly are mobile, especially with globalisation. So, we have to change the way we think about our objects of study,” says Professor Dawson.
By joining people as they move around in cars or on buses, he gets a unique understanding into why they’re moving in the first place; toward or away from something.
“Moving is absolutely natural, it’s part of the human condition, unfettered movement”.
Interview recorded: June 14, 2019.
Interviewer: Steve Grimwade
Audio engineer, producer, editor: Chris Hatzis.
Co-production: Silvi Vann-Wall and Dr Andi Horvath.
Banner: Getty Images
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