Transport

Transport and transportation—the means of moving people or non-humans via train, air, bicycle, boat, car, or other modes of mobility—is an incredibly rich and arguably underacknowledged anthropological area of study. Think about the social relationships or motives that might arise during a bus or airplane ride. What are the unwritten rules for behaving in dense traffic? What are the roles of class and capital in relation to sitting in different parts of a vehicle? Who are you going to meet, and can you easily get there? This entry investigates the rise of transport studies in anthropology, foregrounding the importance of ethnography, and highlighting three broad areas: first, it outlines historical and theoretical approaches to transportation, showing that changing transport technologies shape human sociality and group behaviour and that transport is profoundly affected by dynamics of capitalism. Second, the entry focuses on the vital contribution of ethnographic work related to transport and vehicles, which have shown that transport is an important locus for the production of culture. Finally, it presents work on (im)mobility and access, showing that human access to and experiences of transport differ vastly, and its environmental impact is of increasingly greater consideration.