SI Articles

The Paskowitz legacy would fit well into Cody Rodriguez's article ‘#Vanlife’. This article provides an ethnographic case study based in the United Kingdom on a topic that so far has drawn sparse anthropological interest (Martínez and Laviolette 2024). Grasping issues such as the home, transience, as well as materials of resistance, it speaks to broader fields of research such as architecture, sociology, mobility and media studies. Rodriguez situates the work by linking the van-life phenomenon to general issues of uncertainty and the 2008 financial crisis. The analysis is partly based on the author's own experiences as a van-lifer, adding a personal touch to the text, since we find several instances where the article takes the shape of a travel memoir. Due to a fieldwork period that overlapped with the COVID-19 pandemic, however, the online empirical data that he presents pushes the article into the realm of digital ethnography.

A similar type of case study in this special issue (SI) – also grounded in both a British setting and the personal lifestyle experiences of the author – is the article by Ben Bowles on narrowboat living. Here he offers us the idea of ‘communities of practice’ as a means for analysing such lifestyles, conceptually framed via the work of social anthropologist Jean Lave and educational theorist Étienne Wenger. Additionally inspired by Tim Ingold's reflections on dwelling and enskilment, Bowles’ piece mostly tackles issues to do with everyday embodiments of class. It additionally takes up such issues as do-it-yourself or DIY cultures, perceptions of itinerancy and micro-political gestures of resistance.

Mirroring Rodriguez's digital ethnography article, Jenny Ingridsdotter and Emelie Larsson (2023) discuss media representations of off-grid communities in Northern Sweden. By looking at online influencers, their article unravels the tension between escape and the need for on-grid connectivity via social media. Indeed, technology has always been part of counterculture movements, even the back-to-the-land ideologies of the 1960s and 1970s. Here the authors demonstrate how DIY expressions relate to such countercultural values. Even though they might not consider themselves countercultural, the influencers of the study are drawing from such imaginaries. Also, their relationship with forests / forest bathing is linked to counterculture. The article asks whether there is a mixture of rural, back-to-the-land and off-grid imaginaries overlapping here, along with imaginaries relating to ‘digital nomadism’. Other significant themes to emerge from this article are gender, consumerism and neo-colonialism.

The SI also ventures into the multi-sited field of the Via Alpina, a hiking trail in the Alps that traverses eight countries. The article by Jonathan Atari and Jackie Feldman (2023) uses semi-structured video interviews, a questionnaire and personal experience to illustrate how white, privileged, Western Europeans use long-distance walking to temporarily escape the rat-race pressures of modernity. Their off-grid lifestyles are therefore perhaps best described as liminal. Indeed, the tourism and pilgrimage literature by Ning Wang, Victor Turner and others that Atari and Feldman use to ground their arguments is most apt. The back-to-nature justification put forth by participants is something that the other articles in this SI share. Yet it is the elements of both danger and solitude that (perhaps expectedly) I personally find to be the most compelling finding to their conclusions. This is so not only because such features relate closely to some of my own research interests on existentialism and extreme activities. Rather, it is because solitude and perhaps danger too are characteristics which are not often expected from participants in off-grid scenarios. That is, those who frequently seek communities of like-minded values are not especially in search of communing with nature alone. And even though there is considerable overlap with off-grid communities and adventure-seekers, many generally wish to shun any excessively risky behaviours which might jeopardise the legitimacy and/or success of their cause.

Finally, O'Regan's (2023) introduction paints the picture of various off-grid phenomena whilst proposing the transitions necessary for the counter-imaginaries to take hold on increasingly wider sectors of society. His approach and his choice of contributors is deliberately interdisciplinary. Yet social anthropologists, folklorists and ethnologists will find much value in considering the shifts of resistance strategies that the SI presents. And the general views that many of us share about the current crisis state of the planet will resonate with the research material that the collection's five articles present. As mentioned above, O'Regan contextualises the SI and his examples with reference to the notion of polycrisis. He relates this to a broader concern over collective imaginaries in order to establish a comprehensive framework in which the study of off-grid phenomena can exist. As such, the SI of AJEC 32 (2) outlines an intellectually stimulating rationale for why it matters now more than ever to have some concerted effort in understanding such marginal communities as off-gridders.

Mobility Fetishes

Now please indulge me as I shift gears for a moment to conclude with a short overview for how the ‘Off Grid’ SI relates directly to my own research on the materiality of car cultures, hitchhiking and adventurous/alternative lifestyles (Laviolette 2020). In the theoretical formulations pioneered by Igor Kopytoff (1986), objects have individual socio-cultural biographies. Kopytoff scrutinises things while reconciling what may be colloquially termed ‘vulgar’ materialism with a perspective that attributes agency to objects. Within Occidental society, a distinct demarcation prevails between the realms of non-human tangible entities and individualised human subjects. Kopytoff posits that this conceptual polarity, characterising individualised persons and commoditised things, is a recent and culturally exceptional development. This dichotomy, labelled as ‘humancentric bias’, restricts our understanding of the multi-faceted dimensions of artefacts, limiting our insights into their intricate roles in the realm of more-than-human entanglements (1986: 64).

Hence, let me offer my own off-grid and now off-road object biography. Alfred is a specific vehicle, a ‘car-tefact’ which has allowed me to undertake auto-ethnographic research in the Baltics. It is a burgundy Toyota Previa. The claret colour of this van is reminiscent of that which adorns the cover of several editions of The Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels 1848). The eight-seater multi-purpose van came into existence in 1997, and I bought it on eBay in 2010 from a private seller based near Düsseldorf. It was then taken from Rostock to Tallinn, via a ferry trip, passing through the Baltic Sea to Helsinki. For several years, it was driven around Estonia and Latvia; borrowed for moving purposes; camped in at music festivals; driven by dozens of people and taken for on-the-road field trips such as the one described in these very pages of AJEC (Martínez and Laviolette 2016). Eventually, after a few years of use and abuse, its rear axle started to jam. And it was only then, to mark the demise, that I christened it as ‘Alfred’ – the name inspired by Alfred Hitchcock, Alfred Gell and of course, given the colour, Friedrich Engels.

During his non-use lifespan, the ‘ownership’ condition of this van changed twice, once legally and once ecologically. As I moved abroad at the beginning of 2019, Alfred remained standing in an outdoor residential car-park for several years. Here he was invaded by multiple non-human agents since his last ride, back in late 2015. Gradually, this street vehicle, forgotten by humans, mutated into a static van coveted by Tallinn's flora and fauna, welcoming for moss and perfect as a target for sea birds. New ‘passengers’ thus stepped on board, unaware of the political and epistemic repercussion of their transgression. Despite its apparent shutdown, things continued to happen in and through Alfred, full of activity and exchange. Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, he was also used as a storage space. Finally, he was legally sold in 2022. By that time, he was a proper ruinscape. Hence, his final price was 200 euros, cash in hand, in addition to the labour of removing him from a snow-filled dormitory car park in mid-winter.

The cultural biography of things thus serves as an approach that intricately explores the social history of artefacts, inherently entwined with the spatial-temporal conditions of their existence. Now if we consider off-grid lifestyles, not just as a type of ideological thought process, but as a kind of spatio-temporal thing with some unique attributes, then it is possible to biographise in tangible form the many alternative ways of coping with polycrisis and exiting normative infrastructures. Such biographies encompass a wide spectrum of a thing's social agency, spanning its production, possession and cyclical facets of reuse. Indeed, Kopytoff reminds us that commodity fetishism, as described by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1848), entails ascribing socially manifesting agential impacts to the object world.

Hence, contrary to misconceptions, commodity fetishism is not an act of sacralising or attributing inherent importance to objects, since value transcends their intrinsic qualities, exerting profound influences on their social life. Alfred Gell's personal encounter with this influence is exemplified when, compelled by intents to theorise quickly, he drew on musings over the animism he directed towards his Toyota car, called ‘Olly’ (a name perhaps inspired by the car's colour). It is in these early passages of a now-classic monograph that he begins to outline ideas of personhood and passive agency (1998: 18–19) – that is, things as prosthetic components of human action.

This underscores how such ‘commodities’ (materialised concepts such as alternative lifestyles included) hold the power to shape social status and prestige in historical contexts. The original meaning of fetishisation thus stands for overcoming structural dualities, where the sole object is itself fetishised. And so, in my opinion, it is the fetishisation for various types of off-grid lifestyles that the five articles in the SI of AJEC 32 (2) capture so well in their individual ways.