Why did the Anthropologist Cross the Road? Hitch-Hiking as a Stochastic Modality of Travel

Abstract

Alienation, dependence, fear, sociability, protest, time and mobility – these are all hitch-hiking themes. This paper questions how breaks of convention, such as those which exist in hitching a lift, impact upon the sensing of place and the encounter with road-scapes. As a method of travel, hitching ruptures normative journeys, whereby destinations are no longer extensions of the present. Hitchers act on a compelling need to move in an intensely free yet highly constrained manner; to seek heights of physical and mental experience and to do so as if travel, perhaps even life itself, were fleeting opportunities. Roads, vehicles and bequested transport are part of that opportunity. Impressionistically inspired, this paper explores some of Britain's cultural narratives of hitch-hiking. Through descriptions which are largely auto-ethnographic in character, it considers a number of poetic and political themes related to the alternative modalities of experience involved in thumbing a ride.