Framing “immobility” as already containing mobility, this research asks why people stay in conditions of economic disadvantages and social abandonment even when they have tangible opportunities to leave. Based on ethnography conducted in Eastern Siberia, this research investigates how people throughout the region maintain connections to one place: the village of Anosovo. I argue that the notion of “affective infrastructure” can encapsulate a multiplicity of ties connecting people to places. Affective infrastructure refers to the capacity of “hard” infrastructural agglomerations—such as pipes, wires, and buildings—to evoke feeling, and to the “social” infrastructure such as kinship ties, memories, attachments, and human–nonhuman relationships. Seeing people as always already included in the agglomerations of affective infrastructures opens the space to see them pinned down to the place even as their neighbors leave while the hopes for improvements of conditions are bleak.
AhmedSara. 2013. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. NY: Routledge.
2.
AllisonAnne. 2013. Precarious Japan. Durham: Duke University Press.
3.
AndreottiAlbertaGalèsPatrick LeFuentesFrancisco Javier Moreno. 2013. “Transnational Mobility and Rootedness: The Upper Middle Classes in European Cities.” Global Networks13 (1): 41–59.
4.
BakhtinMikhail. 1984. Rabelais and His World. Indiana University Press.
5.
BennettJulia. 2014. “Gifted Places: The Inalienable Nature of Belonging in Place.” Environment and Planning D32 (4), 658–71.
6.
BerlantLauren Gail. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
7.
BerlantLauren. 2016. “The Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Times.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space34 (3): 393–419.
8.
BogdanovAndrey. 2015. “On Science of the Future” in “On the First Socialist Tragedy.” In Molecular Red Reader, compiled by WarkMcKenzie. London: Verso.
9.
BrunerJerome. 2004. “Life as Narrative.” Social Research71 (3): 691–710.
CaseyEdward S.2001. “Between Geography and Philosophy: What Does It Mean to be in the Place-World?” Annals of the Association of American Geographers91 (4): 683–93.
12.
ColemanLeo. 2016. “Inside and Outside the House: A Narrative of Mobility and Becoming in Delhi.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography45 (6): 692–715.
13.
CollierStephen J.2011. Post-Soviet Social: Neoliberalism, Social Modernity, Biopolitics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
14.
CollinsFrancis L.2018. “Desire as a Theory for Migration Studies: Temporality, Assemblage and Becoming in the Narratives of Migrants.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies44 (6): 964–80.
15.
CarlingJørgenCollinsFrancis. 2018. “Aspiration, Desire and Drivers of Migration.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies44 (6): 909–26.
CoulterRoryvan HamMaartenFindlayAllan M.2016. “Re-thinking Residential Mobility: Linking Lives through Time and Space.” Progress in Human Geography40 (3): 352–74.
18.
CresswellTim. 2012. “Mobilities II: Still.” Progress in Human Geography36 (5): 645–53.
19.
DavydovVladimir N.2018. “Mobility as the Reflexive and the Creative Processes: Use of Infrastructure by the Evenkis of Eastern Siberia.” Ural’sky istoricheskii Vestnik. 24–30.
20.
DavydovVladimir N.2017. “Temporal’nost’ peremeshchenii na Severe i v Sibiri: pragmaticheskoie ispolzovanie antropogennogo landshafta i refleksivnaia mobil’nost’ (po materialam polevikh issledovanii 2007-2016 gg.)” (“Temporality of Moving in the North and Siberia: Pragmatic Usage of Anthropogenic Landscape and Reflexive Mobility [Based on the Fieldworks 2007-2016].”)Radlovskii sbornik. 2017. 107–16.
21.
DawsonAndrew. 1998. “The Dislocation of Identity: Contestations of ‘Home Community’ in Northern England.” In Migrants of Identity: Perceptions of Home in a World of Movement, edited by RapportNigelDawsonAndrew. Oxford, UK: Berg.
22.
DeleuzeGillesGuattariFelix. 2009. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Penguin Books.
23.
DuffCameron. 2010. “On the Role of Affect and Practice in the Production of Place.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space28 (5): 881–95.
24.
EasthopeHazel. 2009. “Fixed Identities in a Mobile World? The Relationship between Mobility, Place, and Identity.” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power16 (1): 61–82.
25.
FischerPeter A.MalmbergGunnar. 2001. “Settled People Don’t Move: On Life Course and (Im-)Mobility in Sweden.” International Journal of Population Geography7 (5): 357–71.
Grzymala-KazlowskaAleksandra. 2018. “From Сonnecting to Social Anchoring: Adaptation and ‘Settlement’of Polish Migrants in the UK.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies44 (2): 252–269.
29.
JakobsonRoman. 1987. “On a Generation That Squandered Its Poets.” In Language in Literature, edited by PomorskaKrystynaRudyStephen, 273–300. Harvard University Press.
30.
HannamKevinShellerMimiUrryJohn. 2006. “Mobilities, Immobilities and Moorings.” Mobilities1 (1): 1–22.
31.
HarveyPenny. 2018. “Infrastructures In and Out of Time: The Promise of Roads in Contemporary Peru.” In Promise of Infrastructure, edited AnandNikhilGuptaAkhilAppelHannah, 80–101. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
32.
HarveyPennyKnoxHannah. 2012. “The Enchantments of Infrastructure.” Mobilities7 (4): 521–36.
33.
HarveyPennyKnoxHannah. 2015. Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Enterprise. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
34.
HumphreyCaroline. 2005. “Ideology in Infrastructure: Architecture and Soviet Imagination.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute11 (1): 39–58.
35.
KhanNichola. 2016. “Immobility.” In Keywords of Mobility: Critical Engagements, edited by SalazarNoel B.JayaramKiran, 93–112. New York: Berghahn Books.
36.
KnoxHannah. 2017. “Affective Infrastructures and the Political Imagination.” Public Culture29 (2): 363–84.
37.
KruglovaAnna. 2019. “Driving in Terrain: Automobility, Modernity, and the Politics of Statelessness in Russia.” American Ethnologist46 (4): 457–69.
MahAlice. 2009. “Devastation but also Home: Place Attachment in Areas of Industrial Decline.” Home Cultures6 (3): 287–310.
43.
MalinowskiBronislaw. 2014. Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. NY: Routledge.
44.
MassumiBrian. 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
MolloyRavenSmithChristopher L.WozniakAbigail. 2011. “Internal Migration in the United States.” Finance and Economics Discussion Series. Washington, D.C.: Divisions of Research & Statistics and Monetary Affairs, Federal Reserve Board. Accessed April 9, 2019, from https://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/2011/201130/201130pap.pdf
PlatonovAndrey. 2015. “On the First Socialist Tragedy.” In Molecular Red Reader, compiled by WarkMcKenzie, 32–4. London: Verso.
49.
PreeceJenny. 2018. “Immobility and Insecure Labour Markets: An Active Response to Precarious Employment.” Urban Studies55 (8): 1783–99.
50.
ProteviJohn. 2009. Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
51.
RacineJean-Luc, ed. 1997. Peasant Moorings: Village Ties and Mobility Rationales in South India. New Delhi: SAGE Publishing.
52.
SageJoannaEvandrouMariaFalkinghamJane. 2013. “Onwards or Homewards? Complex Graduate Migration Pathways, Well-being, and the ‘Parental Safety Net’.” Population, Space and Place19 (6): 738–55.
53.
SalamehFranck. 2019. “Rootedness and Exile: Holocaust and Aftermath.” In Lebanon’s Jewish Community: Fragments of Lives Arrested, 77–100. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.
54.
SalazarNoel B.SmartAlan. 2011. “Anthropological Takes on (Im)Mobility.” Identities18 (6): i–ix.
55.
SchweitzerPeterPovoroznyukOlgaSchiesserSigrid. 2017. “Beyond Wilderness: Towards an Anthropology of Infrastructure and the Built Environment in the Russian North.” The Polar Journal7 (1): 58–85.
56.
ShahAlpa. 2010. In the Shadows of the State. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
57.
SimoneAbdouMaliq. 2004. “People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg.” Public Culture16 (3): 407–29.
58.
Ssorin-ChaikovNikolai V. 2003. The Social Life of the State in Subarctic Siberia. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press.
59.
StolerAnn Laura. 2004. “Affective States.” In A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics, edited by NugentDavidVincentJoan, 4–20. Oxford: Wiley.
60.
StreetAlice. 2012. “Affective Infrastructure: Hospital Landscapes of Hope and Failure.” Space and Culture15 (1): 44–56.
UrryJohn. 2007. Mobilities: New Perspectives on Transport and Society. Furnham: Polity Press.
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
