TY - JOUR
T1 - 'Because life it selfe is but motion'
T2 - Toward an anthropology of mobility
AU - Lelièvre, Michelle A.
AU - Marshall, Maureen E.
N1 - Funding Information:
This article emerged from a conference paper given at the 2010 meeting of the American Anthropological Association and benefited from the thoughtful comments of the discussants – Ulla Berg, Claudia Chang, and Adam T. Smith – as well as from discussion with the co-participants. We would like to thank colleagues who read and commented on later versions of the paper, including Elizabeth Fagan, Rebecca Graff, and Melissa Rosenzweig. The research presented in the case studies was supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Program, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Whatcom Museum, the Nova Scotia Museum, the Heritage Division of the Nova Scotia Department of Communities, Culture and Heritage, the University of Chicago Division of Social Sciences, and the University of Chicago Department of Anthropology. We are indebted to all of the people and organizations who have facilitated our projects, including the members of Project ArAGATS, particularly Adam T. Smith and Ruben S. Badalyan; the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography in the Republic of Armenia; Kelly Knudson; staff at the Confederacy of Mainland Mi’kmaq, the Nova Scotia Museum, Library and Archives Canada, the Canadian Museum of History, the Nova Scotia Archives; the Diocese of Antigonish Archives; and the chief, council and members of the Pictou Landing First Nation. Finally, we wish to acknowledge the anonymous reviewers and the editors and editorial staff at Anthropological Theory for all of their helpful work. In particular we would like to thank Nina Glick Schiller for her careful reading and suggestions for the article.
Publisher Copyright:
© SAGE Publications. © The Author(s) 2015.
PY - 2015/12/1
Y1 - 2015/12/1
N2 - Over the last two decades, mobility has gained new prominence within anthropology, particularly in theories of globalization, immigration, and subjectivity. At stake in all of the recent ethnographic and archaeological work on mobility is not just how anthropologists conceptualize mobility, but also how we conceptualize the political. Many discussions of mobile subjects have seemed to challenge traditional understandings of the political that are synonymous with a monolithic state and a stable, sedentary subject population. Yet, we maintain that there are still challenges to a coherent anthropological theory of mobility and its relation to the political. To address these challenges, we forward a conceptual framework of mobility that is grounded in the practices, perceptions, and conceptions of movement entwined with processes of emplacement. Illustrated by case studies from the Late Bronze Age (1500 - 1150 B.C.) South Caucasus and nineteenth-century Nova Scotia, the conceptual framework that we detail understands mobility as a mediator between political subjects and political institutions, thus making it possible to examine how subjects and institutions are continuously remade in relation to each other.
AB - Over the last two decades, mobility has gained new prominence within anthropology, particularly in theories of globalization, immigration, and subjectivity. At stake in all of the recent ethnographic and archaeological work on mobility is not just how anthropologists conceptualize mobility, but also how we conceptualize the political. Many discussions of mobile subjects have seemed to challenge traditional understandings of the political that are synonymous with a monolithic state and a stable, sedentary subject population. Yet, we maintain that there are still challenges to a coherent anthropological theory of mobility and its relation to the political. To address these challenges, we forward a conceptual framework of mobility that is grounded in the practices, perceptions, and conceptions of movement entwined with processes of emplacement. Illustrated by case studies from the Late Bronze Age (1500 - 1150 B.C.) South Caucasus and nineteenth-century Nova Scotia, the conceptual framework that we detail understands mobility as a mediator between political subjects and political institutions, thus making it possible to examine how subjects and institutions are continuously remade in relation to each other.
KW - Mobility
KW - Nova Scotia
KW - South Caucasus
KW - politics
KW - subjectivity
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84959318751&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.1177/1463499615605221
DO - 10.1177/1463499615605221
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84959318751
SN - 1463-4996
VL - 15
SP - 434
EP - 471
JO - Anthropological Theory
JF - Anthropological Theory
IS - 4
ER -