Traversing: Embodied Lifeworlds in the Czech Republic

by Susanna Trnka

Overview

Traversing is about our ways of seeing, experiencing, and moving through the world and how they shape the kinds of people we become. Drawing from concepts developed by two phenomenological philosophers, Martin Heidegger and Jan Patočka, and putting them in conversation with ethnographic analysis of the lives of contemporary Czechs, Susanna Trnka examines how embodiment is crucial for understanding our being-in-the-world.

In particular, Traversing scrutinizes three kinds of movements we make as embodied actors in the world: how we move through time and space, be it by walking along city streets, gliding across the dance floor, or clicking our way through digital landscapes; how we move toward and away from one another, as erotic partners, family members, or fearful, ethnic "others"; and how we move toward ourselves and the earth we live on.

Above all, Traversing focuses on tracing the ways in which the body and motion are fundamental to our lived experience of the world, so we can develop a better understanding of the empirical details of Czech society and what they can reveal to us about the human condition.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501749230
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	05/15/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	222
File size:	3 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Susanna Trnka is a social and medical anthropologist at the University of Auckland. Her previous books include One Blue Child and Competing Responsibilities.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Movement, Technology, and Culture in the Making of (Czech) Lives
1. Footsteps through the City: Social Justice in Its Multiplicity
2. Digital Dwelling: The Everyday Freedoms of Technology Use
3. Ballroom Dance and Other Technologies of Sexuality and Desire
4. The New Europeans: Twenty-First-Century Families as Sites for Self-Realization
5. Making Moods: Food and Drink as Collective Acts of Sustenance, Pleasure, and Dissolution
6. Reconnection: Between the Power Lines and the Stars

What People are Saying About This

C. Jason Throop

A vital contribution to the field of phenomenological anthropology, Traversing deftly traces the contours of life in the contemporary Czech Republic along its worldly, finite, embodied, and technological dimensions. Trnka brilliantly interweaves ethnographic and phenomenological insights together as she uncovers the complex existential realities that condition our multiple emplacements in time with others.

Tufts University Sarah Pinto

A lucid and theoretically compelling account of contemporary Czech life, written with warmth and a welcoming curiosity about human experience and attuned to the qualities of movement that infuse everyday ways of being.

Amy Speier

In this beautifully written book, Trnka deftly weaves over thirty years' worth of ethnographic work in Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic into an astute argument for the importance of bodily engagements with technologies, nature and the world.

Sarah Pinto

A lucid and theoretically compelling account of contemporary Czech life, written with warmth and a welcoming curiosity about human experience and attuned to the qualities of movement that infuse everyday ways of being.

Tufts University SarahPinto

"A lucid and theoretically compelling account of contemporary Czech life, written with warmth and a welcoming curiosity about human experience and attuned to the qualities of movement that infuse everyday ways of being."

Jason C. Throop

"A vital contribution to the field of phenomenological anthropology, Traversing deftly traces the contours of life in the contemporary Czech Republic along its worldly, finite, embodied, and technological dimensions. Trnka brilliantly interweaves ethnographic and phenomenological insights together as she uncovers the complex existential realities that condition our multiple emplacements in time with others."