The mobilities turn and archaeology: new perspectives on socio-political complexity in thirteenth-century northern South Africa
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This paper applies insights from the ‘mobilities turn’ (Hannam et al. 2006 Hannam, K., Sheller, M. and Urry, J. 2006. “Editorial: mobilities, immobilities and moorings.” Mobilities 1: 1–22.[Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]) or ‘new mobilities paradigm’ (Sheller and Urry 2006 Sheller, M. and Urry, J. 2006. “The new mobilities paradigm.” Environment and Planning A 38: 207–226. doi: 10.1068/a37268[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) to the archaeology of social complexity in thirteenth-century southern Africa. To date, research on this topic has typically tended to emphasise the role of mooring and place, with movement only regarded parenthetically. In contrast, the mobilities turn views mobility as a fundamental way of existing in the world, whereby movement, as well as stillness, are practices imbued with representation and meaning. This interpretive frame is brought to bear on new research conducted on a concentration of sites in the Maremani Nature Reserve, as well as previously published material from the sites of Stayt and Mutamba, South Africa. Our results illustrate the manner in which political power intersects with the mobility of people, objects and ideas and show how the mobility of people and things was active in the creation of communities at multiple spatial and conceptual scales. The diverse communities that occupied the Middle River Limpopo Valley were co-constituted within a complex network in which peripheral sites played an important role in maintaining political centres. The paper explores how communities articulated with the ‘imagined’ community of Mapungubwe through shared practices and material culture.Keywords:
Mobilities
In this Thinking Space essay, we explain why the COVID-19 pandemic makes mobilities research more important than ever. In a time when mobilities have been reconfigured so dramatically, perhaps even leading people to value mobility differently, we need concepts and theories that can help us to attend to and navigate this new situation. Our contention is that mobilities research must recentre the region. Building on earlier work in the mobilities paradigm, we suggest ways that regionality can be conceptualised, and argue that mobilities in our part of the world take distinctive manifestations that warrant our attention. Our essay concludes by pointing to new directions for mobilities research from our region.
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This first report on mobilities outlines some aspects of research on mobilities that differentiates it from and connects it to earlier, ongoing geographies of movement such as transport geography. In the context of a world on the move it seeks to bring us up to date with the mobilities turn and make a case for mobility research as a project which focuses on the universal but always particularly constructed fact of moving. Mobilities research is compared to and differentiated from work in transport geography, arguing that mobilities research takes a more holistic view that allows it to make some previously unlikely connections.
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Abstract This article reviews the current state of the research on mobile cultures by situating it within the sociology of mobility, or mobilities. The review focuses in detail on empirical research on the social and cultural aspects of transportation. The study of transport in daily life, or the study of mobile cultures, is reviewed with a particular attention to issues of time and space, as well as the social problems and social inequalities generated by dominant patterns of mobility. It also discusses the mobility turn in sociology and the growth of a new mobility paradigm influencing important shifts in sociological theory and research methodology. It defines the field of mobilities as the study of the social aspects of movement, including the movement of people, material objects, information, and capital – both in the material and the virtual sense. Mobilities for instance may include phenomena as migration, transport, travel and tourism, wireless and portable communication technology use, the social organization of transportation and communication infrastructures, and regional and transnational flows of capital and material things.
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Scholars have scrutinized the state-centered and sedentarist foundations of social sciences that pitch 'mobilities' against 'places' by arguing that places and mobilities always co-constitute each other. Contributing to this debate, this article deploys the concept of 'regimes of mobilities' to study how mobilities are not only 'placed', but also entangled in, and shaped by, different power systems. By regimes of mobilities we understand all the mechanisms that differentiate mobilities into categories and hierarchies. This article argues that linking the concept of regimes of mobilities to the study of places can help illuminate how the ordering and differentiation of diverse forms of mobilities play out in the everyday realities of particular places. We empirically demonstrate this argument through the study of outdoor markets in three European countries: the United Kingdom, Switzerland and the Netherlands. We delineate different regimes of mobilities that together shape both access to, and the production of, markets. We conclude that the concept of regimes of mobilities helps to identify this intersection of multiple systems of rules, regulations and norms. Hence, the concepts allows one to direct attention systematically to the different power systems that affect the supposedly 'mundane' mobilities that constitute place and the skills required to navigate the related dynamics.
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This chapter attempts to highlight global mobilities from several perspectives: the effects of global mobilities, the current overall geographical patterns of global mobilities and the relationships among the five major global mobilities: commodities, people, capital, information and knowledge. The chapter further attempts to portray briefly the features of the connected globe. The observations, which are made throughout this chapter, are based on the conception that the five leading global mobilities involve varying scales of the strata of human life: nations for trade, companies for trade, tourism, finance, information and technology, and individuals for tourism, finance, information and knowledge. The chapter begins with a review of some major impacts of global mobilities and it continues with geographical and mobility patterns for global mobilities. The highlighting of the interrelationships among global mobilities follow these two expositions. The chapter concludes the comparative discussions of global mobilities with a brief presentation of some major features of the interconnected globe.
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