Hitchhacking, Passenger Ethnography, and Four-Wheeled Hospitality

in Ethnologia Europaea
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Francisco Martínez Researcher, University of Murcia, Spain pacomartinez82@gmail.com

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Patrick Laviolette Researcher, Freelance 246133@mail.muni.cz

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Abstract

This article proposes hitchhacking as a way of problematising contemporary mobility and as a practice of what we call “passenger ethnography”. To this end, we review some of the literature on hitchhiking and hosting, offering empirical examples from artistic projects and field vignettes in Estonia, Russia, and Finland. We also reflect on how hitching can be experienced as a means of knowledge production. Accordingly, we discuss how travelling together by car provides a particular type of socialisation. Finally, we refer to hitchhiking as a form of gift-giving in which no direct reciprocation is required. The article's key contributions are thus threefold: (1) to rethink the transgressive and heuristic potential of hitchhiking in the present; (2) to reflect on the methodological implications of doing ethnographic research on/in vehicles; and (3) to reconsider mobility disruptions in a context of extensive digital technology usage and novel forms of datafication and accountability.

The gambling propensity is another subsidiary trait of the barbarian temperament

   —Thorstein Veblen, “The Belief in Luck” (1899: 127)

So begins Thorstein Veblen's “The Belief in Luck”, the eleventh chapter of his classic work The Theory of the Leisure Class. It is an apt passage for our purposes here for a few reasons. First, luck and travelling by the wits of one's thumb are seen as inherently and intricately related, despite the realisation that there are some skills connected to one's success with this form of transport. Second, the activity of hitchhiking in the second half of the twentieth century is one in which there has been an increasing trend toward catering for the privilege of the emerging leisurely middle classes, at least in the Western world. Third, despite this trend, there is nonetheless a lingering and pervasive sense that hitchhiking is both useless as well as infused with various connotations of the perverse and the debased, especially when framed within current surveillance capitalism (Zuboff 2019).

We might concede, nonetheless, that hitchhiking creates a stage for unusual behaviours and odd relationships, correlated with a sense of initiation and feeling of freedom while identifying personal limits. Hitchhiking is a form of suspension or magical realism akin to types of behaviour that are carnivalesque in the Bakhtinian sense (Bakhtin 1984: 90), wherein chaos, humour, and various manifestations of the absurd emerge. Elements of inversion and artistic expenditure are also present in hitchhiking, productive of novel perspectives on social relations, time and the landscape, thus constitutive of alternative cultural expressions.

Moreover, we have noticed over the years that some non-native English speakers confuse the idiom “hijacking” with “hitchhiking”. Such a “mistake” or misunderstanding is the trigger for this article. Hearing such a switch on numerous occasions got us thinking that perhaps some logical thread could link such diametrically opposed activities. Hijacking is an illegal, parasitical, occasionally violent or even terroristic procedure to commandeer by force a personal, public or company vehicle (Fig.1). It is a form of piracy, either used for theft or political ends (Koerner 2013: 8). Contrarily, hitchhiking1 refers to the act of freely soliciting and giving a lift on a motorised device that moves individuals from point A to point B.2

Figure 1.
Figure 1.

Hijacking Hotspot, R511 in Gauteng, South Africa (Olga Ernst, 2019. Wiki Commons file) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en.

Citation: Ethnologia Europaea 54, 2; 10.3167/ee.2024.540203

We thus suggest that the neologism “hitchhacking” could exist between these two idioms in order to unpack certain forms of refusal and epistemic potential. As we are experiencing novel forms of surveillance, datafication, and monitoring, new ways of being de-noticed, illegible, and de-algorithmed are invented in a responsive way. In this sense, hitchhacking has more to do with cultural creation than to confrontation, using strategic ambiguity to render certain things opaque (Peacock 2024; Martínez Forthcoming). So, this article elaborates a framework for understanding hitchhacking as an analytical device for the transgressive practices of mobility in the present, as well as a reconsideration of its heuristic implications.

Hitchackers practice hitchhiking with overtly political and subversive intent. In doing so, they manifest a refusal to occupy the subject position offered to them, exploring and testing different limits instead in a playful yet critical way. Since hitchhikers interact with a diverse range of people during their journeys, they not only are hacking physical spaces but are equally involved in a process of social equivocation. Indeed, what characterises hitchhackers is that they make use of space and time in ways that may not align with the envisioned use by institutional policymakers and planners. We thus refer to hitchhacking as a form of geo-social hacking, moving away from the normative while embodying the transgressive potential of such a gap practice (Martínez 2019b).

Ever since Gabriella Coleman's (2012, 2014) pioneering anthropological research on computer hackers and the Anonymous Movement just over a decade ago, the notion of hacking (at least in pop culture) has proliferated into everyday speech. It now includes anything from tips for improving one's health, all the way through to suggestions for success in dating/sex, as well as mechanical repair and maintenance. Body-hacks, cooking-hacks, driving-hacks, self-defence hacks – indeed even ethnographic-hacks – it seems that if someone has any shortcut or life advise these days, these are now perfectly well understood under the terminological rubric of the verb “to hack”. More recently, Hannah Knox has referred to the practice of hacking as providing a different entry point to field research:

In some ways, anthropology in the mode of the hack makes more central what ethnographers have always known: that knowledge production is collective; that truths are stabilized as a result of social practice and not as a result of their inherent “truthfulness”, but that neither are these stabilizations disconnected from the substance out of which they are made. (Knox 2021: 124)

So, let us begin with two short snippets which are not quite drawn from a specific field research project, but which are not ethnographically unrelated either. In 2011, a few months after moving from New Zealand to Estonia, Patrick Laviolette attended a fancy-dress faculty party in Tallinn wearing his pyjamas. These were semi-concealed under a bath robe, with a towel flung over his shoulder. The theme of the evening was “dress yourself as someone from your fieldwork”. Many attendees had correctly guessed that he had chosen his outfit based on the fictitious anti-hero Arthur Dent, the famous protagonist from Douglas Adams's well-known parallel universe The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979). Now part of what was being hacked in this case are the clichéd expectations that fieldwork attire should be something like a grass-skirt, or some traditional folklore garb as worn by farming peasants. Or even that one's informants need to be living people, rather than literary characters.

Douglas Adams himself was a self-admitted computer nerd, and as a set of sci-fi novels, the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has many references to technological hacking (Adams and Davies 2023). For instance, when the Heart of Gold spacecraft, upon which Arthur and his fellow colleagues are travelling, is set to visit the planet of Magrathea, it is confronted with an automated message which addresses them, claiming that the planet was “temporarily closed for business” (Adams 1979: 84). Given their persistence in not turning back, the planetary defence system fires two thermonuclear missiles at them. The Heart of Gold's guidance system is jammed/hijacked/hacked by this process, so that the passengers must resort to manual navigation. After several evasive manoeuvres, it becomes clear that they will not be able to escape these two heat-seeking assailants. As a result, despite the repeated protest of his companions, Arthur decides to hack the attack by using the ship's inbuilt Infinite Improbability Drive. The result is that the missiles are immediately transformed into a bowl of petunias and a sperm whale, allowing the ship and its motley crew to avoid destruction.

Now roughly a decade before this ethno-party in Tallinn in November 2002, Patrick visited the site of Ground Zero in Manhattan. Approaching the “graffiti wall” that had marked a portion of the commemorative site for over a year, he asked someone to take a photo of this event. Unprepared as to what to write on this official tagging wall, the infamous words “Don't Panic,” which adorn the cover of Adams's fictional electronic space travel guidebook were all that came to mind. This was well before the “Keep Calm and Carry On” meme had been launched into popular usage, inspired by an old unused British poster design from the 1930s, before the Second World War. Both statements are invaluable advice to hitchhikers, given the problems they face when trekking through countryside roads and motorway infrastructures. Of course, in light of being shortly after a terrorist hijacking that led to the destruction of the World Trade Center, either comment could be seen as being rather irreverent, or in questionable taste. The point here, however, is that scribbling “Don't Panic” at a site of violent mass murder, as a commentary for local residents and international visitors to publicly witness, might be considered by some as a form of hacking social niceties and political correctness.3

These short sequences capture an increasing sense that hacking can be associated with hijacking and hitchhiking. Certainly, forms of sociopolitical transgression have been changing over the centuries, and the practice of hitchhiking – not free of contradictions – might have lost part of its past popularity, at least in Western societies. Still, some of us experience hitchhiking as victory over fear and dominant conventions. Because this practice is not just about mobility and economising, but also about opening the door to other forms of human interaction, a socialisation of a different kind if you wish. Risk is certainly an important part of the appeal, embracing open-ended encounters and a sensorial awakening, which includes the possibility of failure and of wasting hours and hours, as we will see below.

As a critical exploration into mobility studies, this article reconsiders the key issues of doing anthropological research within motor vehicles: hospitality, exposure, risk, confined observations, and embodied imagination therefore all feature as methodological themes. Fieldwork overall is a relational activity, one permeated by hospitality, trust among strangers, and multisensorial observation, which is participatory at its core. In the case of our proposed style of “passenger ethnography”,4 research unfolds depending on the generosity of random drivers who make a stop on their way in order to give an unfamiliar person a lift. Then, they both share a reduced space for a while, on the road yet apart from the rest of the world, somehow, knowing that they are going to be together for a limited time and quite probably never meet again.

The hitchhiker thus travels by the assistance of drivers in a way that some might find resembles a parasitic relation. Yet since it is not necessarily antagonistic or based on manipulation, that is, merely treating the host as a source of mobility, one can instead see this as a more symbiotic form of adapting and re-appropriating transport systems from within. Nevertheless, symbiosis is not a perfect analogy either since the fleeting form of relation that is created between hitcher and passenger does not tend towards equilibrium. Indeed, the latter hacks the given system precisely because he or she is violating the logic of calculative exchange. Moreover, symbiosis would not indicate that the relation incorporates the vehicle into its functioning. Hence, a mechanical/material “four-wheeled parasitism” is a more apt metaphor because of the productive effects that are potentially present for both parties – providing information and novelty in exchange for energy and shelter.

Our take on parasitical relations is thus in line with Michel Serres's (1982: 23) usage of the term, not simply taking without giving but redistributing existing resources, while irritating the system and stimulating action. In this vein, parasitism is different from predation, as it is placed within the framework of guests and hosts (i.e., hospitality). Still, the host has control over the space in question; but also, the host is morally obliged to use that masterful capacity of giving and accommodating to allow strangers in, even ones who might ruin the very space of hospitality (Derrida 1994).

A passenger in the world

In a study of the arrival of the first engine vehicles to Santiago de Chile, ethnologist Tomás Errázuriz (2023) refers to the figure of the passenger as the one who travels in a vehicle without belonging to the crew and has a temporary position. To be a passenger is, therefore, by definition to be in a somewhat liminal state. This points to a specific temporal and social position, limited in time and dependent on others. Alas, being a passenger has not been considered as a constitutive element of identity (at least, within national or ethnic rhetorics). Even if travelling makes possible new forms of relating, as well as unexpected encounters, the condition of passing has been presented as something irrelevant and functional.

Despite this, the condition of being a passenger is not monolithic and has undergone important transformations, both in terms of comfort and safety, as well as in its use of technologies and ways of sharing (Fig.2). For instance, Georg Simmel (1997: 215–226) studied how moving favours individualisation. Cases such as the pilgrim, the traveller, the mendicant, or the merchant show how individual/group distinctions are linked to an experience of displacement. Another widely recognisable type of passenger is the hitchhiker, perhaps because of their rather eccentric behaviour. Most people can cite multiple films, songs, books, and stories by or about hitchhikers. Nevertheless, engaging in this practice (which some consider heroic and some others idiotic) imprints its own effects on the behaviour of those who choose to immerse themselves in this practice.

Figure 2.
Figure 2.

Francisco driving through Sillamäe (photo by P. Laviolette, 2013).

Citation: Ethnologia Europaea 54, 2; 10.3167/ee.2024.540203

In any case, hitchhiking is an experiment in vulnerability that redistributes the sensible across space and time (Rancière 2006), a testing exploration that establishes new connections and disruptions across the public sphere. Likewise, it is not exempt from precarious moments of solitude and exposure, as it involves wandering with waiting, as well as inwardness and awkwardness with others. Indeed, on the road, one is exposed to undesigned conversations, listening to different accents or languages and learning with people along the way. Such experience can potentially provide insights into the human condition of being a passenger, tapping into people's feelings and knowledge in a semi-private way (Fig.3).

Figure 3.
Figure 3.

On the road to Narva, East Estonia (photo by F. Martínez, 2013).

Citation: Ethnologia Europaea 54, 2; 10.3167/ee.2024.540203

As research collaborators on a number of occasions (e.g., Martínez and Laviolette 2016, 2019), this time we have chosen to reflect on how we decided to embark on co-auto-ethnography – namely two moments of short yet intense fieldtrips in Estonia (one from Tallinn to Narva, on the Eastern border with Russia; another from Tallinn to Viljandi, in the South of Estonia). We were sitting next to each other in a burgundy van, seeking to pick up any hitchhikers surfing the asphalt in northeastern Europe. Francisco took on the role of being the active driver, while Patrick played the idle passenger part since he was the one who was originally doing research about the topic. As we failed to encounter hitchhikers on these two field trips, we gave time to each other, adding an unexpected auto-ethnographic layer to the research. So, our travelling had a purpose, but the mission failed, and what remained was the opportunity to experience time and social relations differently in the space of a van.

Patrick falls asleep, so I try not to disturb him and turn down the radio (the music sounds like Fleetwood Mac, it must be Rumours). After midnight, after a few hours of driving, it's me who is about to fall sleep, so Patrick keeps talking to entertain me. I think he has never talked that much to me. And probably he is doing it so that I do not fall asleep. We chat about our family relations, about the people we met at a random party in Viljandi, and about power games in academia. We don't talk with hitchhikers because we failed to meet them on the road this time, so I guess it's a bit of a failure. Patrick says that he has met several hitchhikers in Estonia, but the autumn season is not favourable for the practice at this latitude.

I start thinking how unfortunate it would be if this fragile vessel we drive broke down. The road gets darker and darker, surrounded by autumnal trees in Estonia and a decreasing moon phase. Then, we are silent for a while, and things start to feel a bit uncomfortable. Suddenly, my thoughts go to Patrick's eccentric outfit, as he has been wearing flip-flops. Of course, I don't say anything about it. (FM Fieldnotes, 22 September 2013)

Besides this bit of awkwardness, in the kind of suspension that we activated during our excursions, we got to know each other better. Even if willingly, ours was an undesigned relationality, exposed to the serendipity that supports the emergence of multiple cross-cutting conversations across diverse contexts (Lederman 2013). Alas, an issue to consider is that hitchhiking does not always involve linguistic exchange; in these cases, body language and music compensate for the lack of talking or a limited verbal exchange. When talk does occur, and it is often the main reason for drivers to give a lift – in order to entertain themselves – the discussion might be banal too. Such small talk or chit-chat occurs in this somewhat unique unidirectional space, in which eye contact is often avoided despite sitting next to each other.

Side observation, accidental intimacy, and undersigned relationality certainly condition the possibility of field research, they are nonetheless not new phenomena in anthropology. Still, passenger ethnography offers the opportunity for musing on the intensity of short exchanges in a car as a research tool to grasp immediate intimacy. Furthermore, the experience of four-wheeled hospitality can help the ethnographer's rapport because such up-close talks have the potential to act as a confessional or quasi-psychoanalytical interviewing technique (Drew et al. 2022). Indeed, there are a multitude of reasons why people take on hitchhikers.5 Giving a lift is a form of gift exchange, yet one that does not necessarily involve direct reciprocity (besides some eventual entertainment). In other words, there is no immediate counter-gift here. If there are feelings of obligation on the hitchhiker's part, these are toward a larger, more amorphous community. Hence, this four-wheeled hospitality extends the Maussian ideas of a gift becoming a total social act through a counter-gift (Mauss [1925] 2016: 7), since there is no guarantee of subsequent reciprocation.

Palm down or thumb up

Hitchhiking combines lived research with intensive sharing and what is known in German as Sehnsucht – a yearning for ideal alternative experiences – a longing for something intangible that expresses a dissatisfaction with the present. This was indeed noted by Patrick Laviolette (2020) in his ethnography of the practice in Europe. The act of hitchhiking allows us to experience the world anew through an adventurous mode of embodying the here and now. When a commuter gets in the vehicle, they are often already thinking about the destination, about reaching the final point and getting out of the vehicle. That is not always the case for the hitchhiker, unless they feel threatened, of course. In turn, hitchhiking combines fragments of mobility and standby. Thus, those engaged in this practice assume that waiting periods and spending time with strangers in random cars might be more important than moving efficiently. And here we are not merely talking of the free mobility, but of a will to embrace risk and adventure.

Moments of surprise and discovery thus play out against hours of waiting. Ultimately, we are talking of an anthropologically invested time, one that is rich in learning since the social experience of time and mobility is a process that creates certain realities and not others. Also, it gives access to multiple ways of using a car as an ethnographic device and to ways of having conversations that are other, indeed in settings that are not designed for that. Nonetheless, we are aware that hitchhiking may appear unpractical and useless to some, characterised by excess and unproductive expenditure (Bataille 1985). Nonetheless, our point is that it does make possible experimental engagements in time and sociality through a four-wheel quasi-parasitical symbiosis since drivers make room and space for an intruder despite not seeing a clear benefit.

Travelling together by car is a particular form of socialising and of doing research, eliciting information that is prompted by features such as boredom, the landscape and accidental intimacy (Drew et al. 2022). Hitchhiking in Russia is an example of this. Huge distances, hostile weather, unpopulated areas, difficult language . . . alas, far from dissuading the intimate-remote character of the activity, all these challenges intensify it. The combination of intimacy and logistic organisation of hitchhiking in Russia was shown by anthropologist Terje Toomistu in the exhibition Soviet Hippies (Estonian National Museum 2013). Starting in the 1970s, hippies across the Soviet Union had a well-arranged supporting systema, an underground network of hitchhiking and couch-surfing parallel to official forms of mobility, highly multicultural yet with Russian as a lingua franca.

Toomistu has herself hitchhiked several times in Russia, visiting the Caucasus, Urals, and Northwest region. She was travelling with two friends – both girls. She reflects on her journeys thus:

That made it a bit more complicated, as not so many cars can fit in three travellers. But we surely felt more secure than hitching alone. Well, when we were hitchhiking in Komi, we were a bit hopeless, so we decided to split the group and I was alone. I got a ride with a truck driver and we had amazing conversations all along the night towards Moscow. I was also sleeping at the back towards the morning. Although I trusted him, I was still conscious enough to have a pepper spray in between my underwear. Of course, nothing bad happened, he was very friendly and nice to me . . . Everytime I raised the thumb, an almost infinite number of ways and encounters open. Each stopping car, which I climbed in, took the lead of my destiny, opening doors and with them new realms of intimacy . . . It seemed to me that Russians like to share their life, emphasising what they value, what they like and dislike, making them often sounding like philosophers, but from real life, not from some drowsy libraries. (email conversation)

Toomistu adds that “hitchhiking in Western Europe is more complicated, as hitching on highways is not allowed and you have to run between petrol stations. However, in Eastern Europe you can stop the cars wherever, which makes it more flexible and perhaps enjoyable”. Concluding, she mentions how “people still remember the old times when hitchhiking was favoured with a sense of collective environmental responsibility and support for vagabondage, hence drivers keep picking up travellers by the road” (email conversation).

Between 2005 and 2008, Francisco also engaged in hitchhiking in different Russian cities. Palm down or thumb up, the fare depended on the gesture one does by the road. The latter expresses a will to pay some amount of money for the ride, while the former is meant to be free. For instance, he recalls one evening when he rose up his thumb several times in St. Petersburg with Nastia, a friend who loves unexpected encounters and risk. Even if they had money to pay a taxi, she insisted on hitchhiking to make the evening more adventurous. And so it went, as they were jumping from one car to another as all the bridges to the Vasilyevsky Island were up while attempting to cross.

When Francisco lived in Moscow over twenty years ago, he was mostly using paid urban hitchhiking, in the sense of stopping common drivers and offering small amounts of money for taking him somewhere close to his point of destination. Back then, many people gave a ride this way. The fee was mostly used to cover the petrol, and due to the spontaneity of the fare, people entered into conversations about random things. Having been born in Spain facilitated breaking the ice, since everyone seemed to know something about his country – from the Republican motto No pasarán! to the singer Raphael or the football club Real Madrid. Incidents and anecdotes accumulated, some of them funny, some others less so.

Once, Francisco jumped into a car with only 120 rubles ( = 3 euros) left in his pocket, after spending the evening in a club called Propaganda. To make things worse, it was raining. He stood by the road for almost half an hour, trying unsuccessfully to convince someone to give him a lift to Prospekt Vernadskogo (Southeast of Moscow) for such little money. Finally, a clapped-out Lada stopped and the driver, a middle-aged man with golden teeth and not very clean clothes, agreed to drive him home. It is worth noting that the driver was not the talkative type and only opened his mouth twice to repeat: “The money is with you, isn't it?” They had not even come out of the boulevard ring of Moscow when the car ran out of gas. The driver, unruffled, said that he had no money so in order to keep driving, the fee had to be paid in advance. Not only that, but the car also had to be pushed for half an hour to the next petrol station. That evening, Francisco thus experienced one of the sharp contrasts of a global metropolis such as Moscow, from the reality of the liberal, privileged class to that of those who survive doing the jobs Russians do not want to do.

Epistemic exploration

Anthropologists draw on strange forms of relationality as part of the ethnographic method, a lived form of research that consists in constructing relations with people (often complete strangers) in unknown situations. Ethnography thus is intrinsically relational and permeated by hospitality. Both hitchhiking and picking up hitchhikers are also characterised by the capacity to listen and to host, being favourable to the stranger – to whom we might tell our deepest secrets precisely because they are close to us only for a short while. Hence, it is strangeness and transitoriness that make us feel nearer to someone who is actually far from us (Simmel 1950). The sense of accidental intimacy is reflected in this fieldnote of Francisco's fieldwork in Eastern Estonia:

Julia kindly gives me a ride to the supermarket in Kohtla-Järve. On the way, she asks about the purpose of my stay and I say that I'm preparing an exhibition at the Mining Museum. Julia works as an English language teacher in Jõhvi and is the community manager of an NGO called People with Purpose. The ride lasts merely half an hour, but Julia has already invited me to visit her in Jõhvi. I ask her about the possibility of bringing up positive changes in the region, and she explains that “to do things here you have to be a bit sly”, and that people are busy finding solutions for everyday problems and have no time to imagine things otherwise (FM Fieldnote, 5 June 2021).

This spontaneous encounter helped Francisco make it to the supermarket on time but also to get to know Julia and her insights about the region. In this sense (having a pre-determined destination and trying to be faster than by foot), Francisco experienced hitchhiking but not hitchhacking. For the latter, the researcher must learn how to create glitches within the mobility system and introduce breakdowns within the temporal organisation of our societies. Nevertheless, as an adventurous practice of embracing thresholds, bonds, and memorable encounters along the way, hitchhiking entails particular heuristic potentials. Drawing on Marcel Mauss again, we can also talk of carporeality, a site-specific corporeal engagement within vehicles.6 This particular form of socialising is also permeated by a conditional hospitality, trust and storytelling, elements that play an important role in the making of our ethnographies and in how a situated self can narrate the unfolding encounters.

Vehicle travel in general reveals diverse perspectives by which people embrace and are affected by their surroundings, as well as how considerations of perception and positionality might be altered phenomenologically (Laviolette 2018). Yet while hospitality protocols tell us when we have arrived and how long we can stay (Candea and da Col 2012; Shryock 2019), the landscape informs us of passing and of leaving. Observing the changing landscape through the window while being close to a stranger for a while, the hitchhiker threads their way through the world moving with others, wayfaring different paths and being responsive to the landscape. This practice allows us to experience the world anew through an adventurous mode of embodying the here and now. As passengers, hitchhikers depend on drivers in order to reach their destinations, developing a genuine sense of trust in people.7 Trust occurs in the process, in the laws and transport codes, in the very running of the vehicle, as well as in a sense of mutuality between driver and passenger. That is, in an understanding of the roles and good faith of provider and recipient.

The hitchhiking process involves a two-way risk encounter, voluntarily undertaken by both passenger and driver. Overall, we are talking of a trans (passing through) process,8 a non-linear trajectory that eventually triggers self-assessment. In this vein, Tim Ingold (2007: 75) distinguishes between regular transportation, following a straight network of pre-established connections; and wayfaring, as an embodied experience of place-to-place motion in which each point of movement is an engagement with the world. During the wayfaring dislocation, the hitchhiker embodies a particular form of epistemic availability, exposed to changing social and environmental conditions. Hitchhiking is also a great way to meet people, whether they share our worldviews or provide an ontological counterpoint challenge.

Field research is also reliant on the good will, kindness, and patience of our informants. Indeed, ethnographers are ordinarily embedded in many different types of situations that could be labelled a codependent relationship of researchers with interviewees and various gatekeepers. This is why anthropological training provides competencies that embrace transgressive sensitivity as well as the acceptance of self-limitations and incompleteness of knowledge. It is in this way that we also put forward hitchhiking as a particular form of undertaking fieldwork, combining displacement with reflexivity yet favouring epistemic exploration instead of an analytical explanation.

In a hypermodern context whereby our surroundings have been reduced to spaces of transit, passing through from nowhere to nowhere (Bonnett 2014), experimental wandering and incidental disorientation might acquire a critical dimension, we argue. By standing along the roadside and exposing oneself to unexpected encounters, hitchhiking allows practitioners to retrain their embodied imaginations and to interact with a wide variety of informants spontaneously (Laviolette 2020). In this sense, we see this article as a call to action for more research and an appeal to trust those researchers interested in exploring alternative forms of mobility (Laviolette and Sirotina 2015; O'Regan 2023). As such, it can question normative mobility genres with liminal features of criticality and edginess in order to challenge some of the prevailing social dogmas and dominant notions of usefulness of our current age. Hitchhiking still maintains its criticality, its edginess and its liminal aspects in order to continue the challenge towards prevailing social dogmas. This practice of experimental mobility fosters newness in the sense that every travelling companion is a stranger.

Yet travelling by hithchiking can just be as thrilling as it can be slow and dull. Comfy or painfully laborious, it combines precarious moments of solitude with instances of exposure and intense sharing. One can get easily bored by the roadside. Or worse, hungry, cold, tired, and existentially frustrated with humanity. Impatience is a significant hurdle to successfully voyaging in this manner. Moreover, hitchhikers are not the complete owners of their own time. Yet there is a feeling of not being owned by time either.9 Traditionally, the notion of stoppage has been connected with ideas of being tied, blocked, or fallen. Yet while hitchhiking, stoppages can operate as disrupting techniques that entail critical epistemic potential in a context of social acceleration. Likewise, in anthropology, having time is a sign of ethnographic quality, an ingredient of the maturation of ideas and of attuning, despite causing insecurity, anxiety and irritation in some instances of uncertainty, exposure, and lacking control over the unfolding of events (Bandak and Janeja 2018; Martínez 2019a, 2021).

Also, we have found several artistic examples of this form of graciously giving without return (Mauss 1925); a useless expense that most often leads to a transgressive spectacle (Bataille 1985). For instance, Tuuli Malla, Anna Kholina, and Lauri Jäntti (2017) have used stillness as a device for engaging with strangers when they placed themselves on a pedestrian route of Helsinki and held out a sign which read: “May I walk with you for a while?” The artists describe their experiment this way: “We are trying out what happens when we encounter a stranger. But urban hitchhiking is more than a talk with a stranger. It is a drift in city space guided by interaction with another person, a constructed situation where the randomness of encounter confronts the intimacy of the interaction” (Malla et al. 2017: 41).

Hitchhiking destabilises straight lines and uniform, chronological rhythms, entering into a space–time of various overlapping moorings and speed (Hannam et al. 2006). This form of getting lost is, first of all, a way of going around in company, exposing ourselves through time, putting our habits in a pause by the changing rhythms, continuities and discontinuities of hitchhiking. This aspect is highly significant for our era. Besides exploring alternative forms of knowledge-making and of getting lost, the hacking ethos refers to alternative ways of being political. As we see it, hitchhacking is a concept infused with potential critique against social acceleration. In this sense, it parallels surrealist ideas such as la dérive and les détournements – as unplanned, experimental, and emotionally distorting journeys through urban spaces whereby getting lost is acceptable – facilitating the mobilisation of our senses and guarding practitioners against social conventions (Debord 1967).

Hacking and resistance

As adventurous forms, both hitchhiking and hitchhacking are means of exploring and challenging everyday negotiations at the margins of the normative. These practices obtain their analytic framework at the interplay of many important sociopolitical themes such as ecology, hospitality, mobility, sociality trust, and time. Hitchhacking would also emphasise the acts of sharing space, time, and open-source information. If anything, one is advised not to enervate hackers since, despite many having strong codes of ethics, some do indeed enjoy and/or are prone to revenge (Blankenship 1986). This practice occurs within a shared micro-landscape, in (bodily) interaction with the surroundings of a driver (possible co-passengers), a vehicle and a roadscape network. Anxiety, risk, and trust, as well as reward and liminal experience allow for both an embodied and cognitive process of mobility that is somewhat spontaneous but not haphazardous due to its regulation by social norms of behaviour for interactions between strangers (Krawinkler 2013).

In this vein, Emma Cocker (2011) proposes practicing stillness as a mode of hacking societal norms, while diverting hegemonic trajectories and sense of order. Hackers challenge the existing power geometries by play, supporting open-source knowledge and attempts to break systemic rules (Zook and Graham 2018). Hitchhacking, therefore, belongs to actual practitioners testing material and immaterial limits through leisuruous risk taking, what Stephen Lyng (1990) refers to as “edgework”. As physical space is normatively coded, it can thus be hacked – explored, infiltrated, re-coded in the same ways as hackers do.10 Based on different expeditions, geographer Bradley Garrett (2013) proposes that urban explorers should be considered “space hackers”, since urban exploration (urbex) is, first of all, about trespassing closed-off spaces, precisely because they are forbidden and simply for the joy of doing so.

In Weapons of the Weak (1985), political scientist James Scott highlights the importance of mundane forms of resistance when direct confrontation with authorities or elite conventions is impossible or ineffective. Dissonant practices, he argues, can offer self-assertion and resistance to hegemonic discourse without becoming visible and despite escaping from public notice. These hidden scripts comprise actions such as sabotage, false compliance, dissimulation, gossip, or social withdrawal. In parallel, Michel de Certeau (1984: 97–98) studied how the walker becomes a hacker of urban spaces by not relating to the street grid in predictable ways, by improvising, taking surprising turns or creating shortcuts. New configurations and possibilities abound through physical journeys and urban itineraries, paving the way for creative re-appropriations and exploratory practices of individualisation that contribute to interrogating actual power structures.

More recently, anthropologist Carole McGranahan (2016) examined forms of refusal among Tibetan refugees to show how acts of negation can generate cultural expressions of critique, questioning institutionalised expectations and models despite not engaging in open confrontation and resistance. Last but not least, cultural theorist Clare Birchall (2021) proposes radical secrecy as a way of interrupting the prevailing abuses of transparency and resisting the current explosion of accountability models and datafication. To deal with them, she distinguishes between three masking practices: secrecy, by keeping certain information from becoming public; privacy, a dimension of the self that is free from intrusion; and opacity, which denotes a position of illegibility.

It is in that context that hitchhiking is rendered as a mobile practice of refusal shaped by opportunity and timing. As border transgressors and spatial hackers, hitchhikers practice tactical forms of defiance, disruption and transgression while trying to find themselves. Yet more than a contestation of social order and the state, our conceptualisation of hitchhacking also refers to a form of agency, one that tries to explore what is beyond, activating one's embodied imagination and releasing oneself from temporal and social controls. Still, the political dimension of hitchhiking, as both four-wheeled hospitality and a way of testing alternative forms of sharing and standing in the world, has not been studied, at least to our knowledge.11

We are aware, nonetheless, that in certain eras and places (e.g., Europe in the 1970s), hitchhiking was a popular form of mobility that was to some extent encouraged by state institutions (Mahood 2018). At the same time, this contemplative mode of mobility has not been accessible to everyone for different reasons. For instance, here we have in mind refugees, migrants, and people with limited physical abilities, as outlined just over a decade ago in a special issue of this very journal (see Merkel and Körber 2012). Thus, hitchhiking as a form of political leisure, manifests – if anything – the availability of time and taste to do so: elements that are traditionally a mark of distinction for the upwardly mobile middle classes.

Nevertheless, we propose hitchhacking as distinct from the traditional practice of free, thumps-up mobility that has been used first and foremost to travel from one place to another. Ultimately, hitchhackers problematise prevalent notions of usefulness and productivity by distorting hegemonic codes of conduct – initiating a journey without a clear goal. The concept refers to a meandering exploration of paths within the purview of the extraordinary and non-habitual – by obfuscating surveillance and “parasiting” a system for a purpose different than that originally intended. Therefore, although hacking was initially a term referring to the corruption or illicit use of computer codes, it also refers to an unorthodox (often creative) distortion of any closed system (Taylor 2000).

Not unlikely, here we present hitchhacking as a moment of analytical creativity and ethnographic experimentation by purposely getting lost, one which opens new questions about how contemporary anthropological knowledge might be formed (Knox 2021). Notwithstanding their experimentality, hitchhackings entail a methodological potential. This practice offers a particular way of being in time, characterised by slowing down the social pace of things in unconventional ways. Hitchhacking can therefore distinctly combine mobility, storytelling, and encounter.

Take the following example from the German Netflix series Biohackers.12 In the final programme of the first season (S1, E6), simply called “Fate”, we follow the main protagonist Mia on the journey of a train that has just been the target of illegal genetic experimentation. During this cliffhanger episode, she is on a train subjected to the release of a deadly toxic virus spread through genetically modified mosquitoes. She survives this attack unscathed, for reasons she is soon to discover. Even though the train has been stopped and placed under quarantine, she attempts to flee, aware that she is being set up. Attempts are initially made to restrain her by the authorities, who suspect her of being the culprit and are unaware that she has instead discovered the source of a dangerous attempt to hack the public's safety by a rogue group of scientists. Under duress, she nonetheless manages to break the train window's safety glass and jumps out. Hopping over the rail line fence, she finds a road where she sticks out her thumb. Even though it is already fairly late in the evening and thus dark outside, only a handful of cars pass her by before she gets a lift and escapes the search. As a suspect fugitive in this case, Mia is both hacker and hitchhiker, despite not being the cause of the biochemical hack – the real social threat of this plot.13

Despite being a pop culture example, this sequence not only captures a link between hacking and hitchhiking, but also shows how the latter embodies a deep play that has more to do with epistemology and wondering than with hedonism. Such a means of transportation shapes how we experience where we are, hence a shift in our form of mobility allows us to change our perception of the environment too. Since roads and vehicles have the power to profoundly change society, we argue that the ways we are on the road and in a vehicle have political potential. Thus, how we move through space is not merely a question of convenience or efficiency. It can also be a subversive practice that allows us to learn how we stand in the world by making relations happen. In doing so, our forms of mobility host the potential to entail a refusal to be part of hegemonic conventions beyond traditional discussions of resistance.

Conclusion

Anthropology is one of the better places from which to examine the cultures of ride-sharing and hitchhiking for a number of methodological and conceptual reasons. This discipline has traditionally been concerned with societies and behaviours that are not just eccentric but that 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. If one of our tasks has been to rescue some cultural meaning from activities, events, peoples and practices that are disappearing, then it is certainly time for a concerted anthropology of hitchhiking, the reconnetion of critical mobility studies with practices of refusal, and a reconsideration of passenger ethnographies.14

This article has echoed how practices of hitchhiking raise important questions about who we are, wherever we are. This shows that, once again, going to places is more important than arriving at them. One's form of movement, of passing through this world, can also be a means of making knowledge and refusing the status quo. Indeed, one of the singularities of hitchhiking is to throw a significant amount of adventure and newness into the mix, so that boredom is rarely a feature that is spoken about with regard to the practice. Hitchhikers stand beside the point, often without clear purposes, reminding us of eccentric potentiality that there are different ways of existing through time and space. In enacting a meantime, it creates an available erstwhile that appears rather fruitful for field research. Hitchhiking thus involves a form of social hacking, penetrating into strangers’ car journeys. The kind of meanwhile that hitchhackers generate is a particular modality of relatedness, one that keeps alive the possibility of adventure and the possibility of meeting strangers in an open-ended way.

Acknowledgements

Martínez's work was supported by the European Union [ERC, WasteMatters, grant number: 101043572] and the MICIU/AEI /10.13039/501100011033 & the FSE+. Laviolette's work for this essay was partially supported by the RAVE Project (funded by the Czech Science Foundation / LA Grants GF22-37628L).

Notes

1

Also known under such terms as autostop, trampen, sharing, pleading, begging, one can choose from a range of terminologies with particular nuances.

2

Often via a set of unpredictable point C detours and dérives (Debord 1967).

3

In hindsight, one could push this further to say that the point being made was that the tag was an anti-fear-mongering statement – a reaction against the War on Terror rhetoric of the time, as promulgated by the likes of George W. Bush.

4

Georgina Drew et al. (2022) explore the idea of “passenger ethnography” via the interesting methodological idiom of “drive and talk”, reminiscent of much work on go-along interviewing.

5

In a war context, such as the one in Ukraine, a new phenomenon has appeared, one of “transporters” – people who have taken it upon themselves to drive to safety those who wish to escape the conflict (Connolly 2024).

6

Originally, Mauss (1950: 366–383) referred to a form of embodied learning related to how our gestures connect to a nexus of interactions involving body, environment, and transport technologies. Both the car and the road can be simultaneously a creative and a constraining research device; they allow for a flood of goods, ideas, peoples, but do so in a particular way, and there are also instances when what we experience is congestion and overflow (Laviolette and Argounova-Low 2021).

7

Though there are obviously some interesting gender issues here, such matters are beyond the scope of our reflection and are better explored in Gao et al. (2020) and Noske (2018), for instance.

8

Liminality serves to examine the role of individual agency within periods of transformation, correlating conscious cathartic experiences with the notion of “I pass through” (Turner 1982; van Gennep [1909] 1960).

9

There are therefore analogous parallels that we can make with the slow movement as well as Eastern philosophy, which Jonathan Purkis (2022: 41) aptly draws upon in a recent social history of hitchhiking.

10

As we learn in Hacking at Leaves (2024), Johannes Grenzfurthner's most recent documentary, the “nerd culture” publication 2600 Magazine: The Hacker Quarterly was founded in 1984. It thus celebrates its fortieth anniversary this year and whether one is prone to accepting certain conspiracy theories or not, it is difficult not to suspect that there must have been some Orwellian inspiration.

11

While hitchhiking, one has to use whatever resources are at hand, catching opportunities on the fly (Lévi-Strauss 1966; O'Regan 2015; Purkis and Laviolette 2024).

12

This series was created by Christian Ditter in 2020, see Biohackers. Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biohackers (accessed 18 November 2024).

13

In fact, quite the opposite. Her position is that of attempting to disrupt or indeed hack the biohacker's plans to carry on with illicit and immoral genetic experiments. In German, hitching is called trampen, and Mia's rapid getaway from the quarantined train is clearly a spontaneous form of trampen – something she would have learnt to be socio-culturally possible, regardless of being from the Generation Z age range.

14

There are many reasons for why hitchhiking is a rather poorly explored type of displacement in mobilities scholarship, namely, its unpredictability, do-it-yourself character, and increasing marginality. Also, its opposition to neoliberal notions of productivity, transparency, and accountability; and its unconventional sociality. Despite occurring internationally, hitchhiking is diverse in its regional forms of expression, making it awkward to broach conceptually. Still, because of its ties to environmental issues and sustainable forms of mobility, to sharing economies, to slowing down social experience, as well as an expression of trust and adventure, we find the practice relevant intellectually (Laviolette 2020; Purkis 2022).

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Contributor Notes

Francisco Martínez is an anthropologist dealing with contemporary issues of material culture through ethnographic experiments. He works as Ramón y Cajal Senior Research Fellow at the University of Murcia, Spain. In 2018, he was awarded with the Early Career Prize of the European Association of Social Anthropologists. Francisco has published several books, including The Future of Hiding (Cornell UP, 2025), Ethnographic Experiments with Artists, Designers and Boundary Objects (UCL Press, 2021); and Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia (UCL Press, 2018). He has also curated different exhibitions. For more info, see https://fran-martinez.com. Email: pacomartinez82@gmail.com; ORCID 0000-0003-2113-9987

Patrick Laviolette is interested in the poetic, cooperative and practical dimensions of human ecology. With a concern for past, present and future material imaginaries, his research straddles between the eclectic and eccentric. He is currently pursuing an intellectual biography on Raymond Firth. As disciplinary service to anthropology, he has been the co-editor of SA/AS and AJEC, and co-edits the series Politics of Repair (Berghahn Books). https://www.berghahnbooks.com/series/politics-of-repair Email: 246133@mail.muni.cz; ORCID 0000-0003-1042-7043

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  • Adams, Douglas 1979: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. London: Pan Books.

  • Adams, Douglas & Kevin Jon Davies 2023: 42: The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams. London: Unbound.

  • Bakhtin, Mikhail 1984: Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

  • Bandak, Andreas & Manpreet Janeja (eds.) 2018: Ethnographies of Waiting. London: Bloomsbury. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003085317.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Bataille, George 1985: The Accursed Share, vols 1 & 2. New York: Zone.

  • Birchall, Clare 2021: Radical Secrecy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

  • Blankenship, Loyd (The Mentor) 1986: The Conscience of a Hacker. Phrack Inc. 1(7): 310.

  • Bonnett, Alastair 2014: Off the Map. Lost Spaces, Invisible Cities, Forgotten Islands, Feral Places, and What They Tell Us about the World. London: Aurum.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Candea, Matei & Giovanni da Col 2012: The Return to Hospitality: Strangers, Guests, and Ambiguous Encounters. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18: 119. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2012.01757.x.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Cocker, Emma 2011: Performing Stillness: Community in Waiting. In: David Bissell & Gillian Fuller (eds.), Stillness in a Mobile World. London: Routledge, 87106.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Coleman, Enid Gabriella 2012: Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

  • Coleman, Gabriella 2014: Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous. London: Verso.

  • Connolly, Kate 2024: “Tribute to Ordinary People”: Ukraine Drama In Her Car to Air across Europe. The Guardian, 21 February 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/21/tribute-to-ordinary-people-ukraine-drama-in-her-car-to-air-across-europe.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Debord, Guy 1967: La société du spectacle. Paris: Buchet-Chastel.

  • de Certeau, Michel 1984: The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.

  • Derrida, Jacques 1994: Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

  • Drew, Georgina, William Skinner & Douglas K. Bardsley. 2022: The ‘Drive and Talk’ as Ethnographic Method. Anthropology Today 38(3): 58. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8322.12725.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Errázuriz, Tomás 2023: Conductores, Pasajeros, Peatones. Santiago de Chile: ARQ.

  • Gao, Xiongbin, Scott Cohen & Paul Hanna 2020: Hitchhiking Travel in China: Gender, Agency and Vulnerability. Annals of Tourism Research 84journal (article 103002). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2020.103002.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Garrett, Bradley L. 2013: Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City. London: Verso.

  • Grenzfurthner, Johannes, dir. 2024: Hacking at Leaves (108 mins). Vienna: Monochrome.

  • Hannam, Kevin, Mimi Sheller & John Urry 2006: Editorial: Mobilities, Immobilities and Moorings. Mobilities 1(1): 122.

  • Ingold, Tim 2007: Lines: A Brief History. London: Routledge.

  • Knox, Hannah 2021: Hacking Anthropology. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 27(S1): 108126. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13483.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Koerner, Brendan 2013: The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking. New York: Crown Publishing.

  • Krawinkler, Stephanie A. 2013: Trust Is a Choice: Prolegomena of Anthropology of Trust(s) Heidelberg: Carl-Auer International.

  • Laviolette, Patrick 2018: Huizinga Goes Tombstoning with the Devil. In: Adam R. Kaul & Jonathan Skinner (eds.), Leisure and Death: An Anthropological Tour of Risk, Death, and Dying. Louisville, CO: University Press of Colorado, 7794.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Laviolette, Patrick 2020: Hitchhicking: Cultural Inroads. London: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48248-0.

  • Laviolette, Patrick & Tanya Argounova-Low (eds.) 2021: Auto-Anthropocenes (Special Issue). Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 29(4): 10081017. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.13112.

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