Researchers, supervisors, institutions and funding bodies have consistently shun such a sustained project.
It is worth noting that despite a dozen English language BA/MA dissertations on the practice, there are still few completed doctorates. If one anthropological task is to rescue cultural meaning from activities, events, peoples and practices that are disappearing, then it is certainly time for a concerted anthropology of hitchhiking to manifest itself in more than student projects. Indeed, this discipline has traditionally been concerned with societies and behaviours that are not just eccentric, but which are often heading towards extinction, or a radical transformation that effectively signifies the end of their authenticity as unique topics worthy of investigation for their own sake.
Anthropology is perhaps one of the better places from which to examine hitchhiking for a number of methodological and conceptual reasons. As such a residue, it carries on questioning the status quo, maintaining critical, marginal, liminal edges by continuing to challenge social dogmas. It stands as a retro survivor to the counter-culture movements of the 1960s and 1970s. As a social statement applauding randomness and adventure, an activity that is effectively an instantiation of pure trusting, hitchhiking inverts the logic of succumbing to the cultures of fear, individualism and neoliberalism.
0 kommentar(er)
