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The first English-language social science book to comprehensively explore hitchhiking in the contemporary era in the West, this volume covers a lot of ground-it goes to and fro, in an echo of the modus operandi of most hitchhiking journeys. As scarification, piercings, and tattoos move from the counter-culture to popular culture, hitchhiking has remained an activity apart. Yet, with the assistance of virtual platforms and through its ever-growing memorialisation in literature and the arts, hitchhiking persists into the 21st century, despite the many social anxieties surrounding it. The themes addressed here thus include: adventure; gender; fear and trust; freedom and existential travel; road and transport infrastructures; communities of protest and resistance; civic surveillance and risk ecologies.
List of contents
Start -- The Auto-Stop Diaries.- Chapter 1: Getting to the Other Ride.- Chapter 2: Dividually Driven.- Chapter 3: Carporeality, Carhesia / Whereupon the Road to Erewhon.- Chapter 4: Motorised Flânerism.- Chapter 5: Guides to the Uncanny-scapes.- Chapter 6: Thumbbuddies on the Auto Ban.- Chapter 7: The 'Carthulucene' at the End of the Road - Lost in the Ruptures Not Taken.- Fine -- Waiting for Volvo.
About the author
Patrick Laviolette holds a PhD in Anthropology from UCL. He is the co-editor of the Berghahn periodical the
Anthropological Journal of European Cultures (2019/23)
and the author of
Extreme Landscapes of Leisure (2016) and
The Landscaping of Metaphor (2011).
