VEHICLES Vehicles Cars, Canoes, and Other Metaphors of Moral Imagination b b b Edited by David Lipset and Richard Handler berghahn N E W Y O R K (cid:127) O X F O R D www.berghahnbooks.com 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 b 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 b 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.