Vehicles : cars, canoes, and other metaphors of moral imagination

224 Pages·2014·2.254 MB·English

by  Handler, Richard, Lipset, David

VEHICLES

Vehicles
Cars, Canoes, and Other Metaphors
of Moral Imagination
b b b
Edited by
David Lipset and Richard Handler
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N E W Y O R K (cid:127) O X F O R D
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Published by
Berghahn Books
www.berghahnbooks.com
© 2014 David Lipset and Richard Handler
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages
for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book
may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information
storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented,
without written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Vehicles : cars, canoes, and other metaphors of moral ambivalence / edited by
David Lipset and Richard Handler.
pages cm
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-78238-375-8 (hardback : alk. paper) —
ISBN 978-1-78238-376-5 (ebook)
1. Vehicles—Social aspects—Case studies. 2. Transportation—Social
aspects—Case studies. 3. Material culture—Case studies. I. Lipset, David,
1951– , author, editor of compilation. II. Handler, Richard, 1950– , author,
editor of compilation.
GN438.V45 2014
629.04’6—dc23
2013050719
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Printed on acid-free paper
ISBN: 978-1-78238-375-8 hardback
ISBN: 978-1-78238-376-5 ebook
b
CONTENTS
List of Figures vii
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction. Charon’s Boat and Other Vehicles of Moral
Imagination 1
David Lipset
Part I. Persons as Vehicles
Chapter 1. Living Canoes: Vehicles of Moral Imagination among
the Murik of Papua New Guinea 21
David Lipset
Chapter 2. Cars, Persons, and Streets: Erving Goff man and the
Analysis of Traffi c Rules 48
Richard Handler
Part II. Vehicles as Gendered Persons
Chapter 3. “It’s Not an Airplane, It’s My Baby”: Using a Gender
Metaphor to Make Sense of Old Warplanes in North America 69
Kent Wayland
Chapter 4. Is Female to Male as Lightweight Cars Are to
Sports Cars?: Gender Metaphors and Cognitive Schemas
in Recessionary Japan 88
Joshua Hotaka Roth
Part III. Equivocal Vehicles
Chapter 5. Little Cars that Make Us Cry: Yugoslav Fića
as a Vehicle for Social Commentary and Ritual Restoration
of Innocence 111
Marko Živković
vi CONTENTS
Chapter 6. “Let’s Go F.B.!”: Metaphors of Cars and Corruption
in China 133
Beth E. Notar
Chapter 7. Barrio Metaxis: Ambivalent Aesthetics in
Mexican American Lowrider Cars 156
Ben Chappell
Chapter 8. Driving into the Light: Traversing Life and Death in
a Lynching Reenactment by African-Americans 178
Mark Auslander
Afterword. Quo Vadis? 194
James W. Fernandez
Notes on Contributors 209
Index 211
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FIGURES
1.1. Murik canoes docked along the shore of at a rural market
off the Sepik River, August 2012. Photo: David Lipset. 26
1.2. Dama’ii Mask, 1982. Photo: David Lipset. 27
1.3. Human canoe-bodies getting into a second canoe, 1988.
Photo: David Lipset. 29
1.4. A mask mounted on a cane “canoe” frame, 2008. Photo:
David Lipset. 31
1.5. Lizard canoe prow, 1988. Photo: David Lipset. 33
1.6. A bus named after a lineage outrigger, 2010. Photo:
David Lipset. 38
1.7. The model canoe being brought to present to Sir Michael
Somare, 2008. Photo: David Lipset. 39
3.1. Texas Raiders. Photo: Kent Wayland. 72
3.2. China Doll. Photo: Kent Wayland. 73
3.3. Yellow Rose, Today. Photo: Kent Wayland. 74
3.4. Man-Woman Control Box. 83
4.1. Danger map. Photo: Joshua N. Roth. 92
4.2. No sidewalks in the 2000s. Photo: Joshua N. Roth. 93
4.3. A husband and a wife. The yellow license plate indicates a
K-car. Photo: Joshua N. Roth. 95
5.1. Trabi as an extended wedding limo in Kusturica’s Drvengrad
on Mokra Gora, Serbia, 2007. Photo: Marko Živković. 113
5.2. Trabi and Fića on a Belgrade street, 2003. Photo: Marko
Živković. 113
5.3. A rigged-up cart on a Belgrade street, 2013. Photo: Marko
Živković. 121
viii FIGURES
5.4. Lined-up Fićas of the Fića Lovers Association at the 2008
Fićiad in Šabac. Note both the souped-up cars and those
more or less faithfully restored to their “factory condition.”
Photo: Marko Živković. 123
5.5. The Fića-shaped glass bottle for brandy displayed
prominently in a Yugo-nostalgia exhibition in Belgrade,
2013. Photo: Rea Mucović. 125
6.1. “Public Servant.” Woodcut by Ding Cong, Zhoubao 23
(Feb. 9, 1945). 138
6.2. “Impatience” (Ji bu ke nai 急不可耐). Cartoon by
Zhang Leping, Sanmao the Vagabond, vol. 1 (1948). 139
7.1. “Gypsy Rose” on display at the Petersen Automotive
Museum. Photo: Petersen Automotive Museum,
Los Angeles. 159
7.2. “Chavez Ravine” on display at the Petersen Automotive
Museum. Photo: Petersen Automotive Museum,
Los Angeles. 160
7.3. Mr. Cartoon’s Lowrider Ice Cream Truck on display
at the Petersen Automotive Museum. Photo: Petersen
Automotive Museum, Los Angeles. 161
7.4. Alamo truck mural, San Antonio, Texas. Photo:
Ben Chappell. 164
7.5. Smile now/cry later truck, Austin, Texas. Photo:
Ben Chappell. 167
7.6. Zapata/luxury truck, Houston, Texas. Photo:
Ben Chappell. 171
8.1. Moore’s Ford reenactment, July 2009. Photo:
Ellen Schattschneider. 187
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As ethnographers, and members of a discipline in a perpetual state of
intellectual crisis, most of us live amid, or perhaps at the forefront of,
change. Nevertheless, the inspiration for and development of this vol-
ume, which focuses on the metaphoric value of vehicles for identity, his-
tory, and society, arose from an abiding kind of creativity, a kind that
utilized a conventional anthropological practice.
It originated from radical, cross-cultural comparison. Email exchanges
took place between the co-editors, David Lipset and Richard Handler,
concerning, on the one hand, Erving Goff man’s work on changing con-
cepts of the person found in traffi c rules, traffi c, and vehicles in mid-
twentieth-century North America, and, on the other, canoe metaphors for
personhood in Melanesia. This virtual dialogue in turn yielded the realiza-
tion that symbolic anthropology, material culture studies, semiotics and
metaphor theory had not recognized the signifi cance of transport vehi-
cles as a category of metaphor for moral thought.
Deciding to explore the empirical and analytic value of this insight,
we recruited junior fi eldworkers who had done research in sites around
the world to write essays analyzing vehicles as signifi ers of moral order
and/or disorder. And we asked a distinguished scholar, James Fernandez,
to write an afterword. The rich, fi ne-grained quality of the chapters, as
well as their manifest thematic integrity attested to the fruitfulness of the
vehicle metaphor.
We would like to thank several people who inspired, read, and com-
mented on individual chapters: Carole Atkinson, Daphne Berdahl, Elaine
Engst, Beth Notar, Ami Terachi, Gloria Tsang, and Wu Han.