Immobility

This chapter explores the relation of forms of immobility to mobility, through examples relating to transnational migration, progress, labor, and the market. It provokes connections between anthropological readings of immobility’s spatio-temporal, political, economic, and human dimensions in these fields with wider developments in the social sciences. It additionally explores some intensities of passion (grief, hope, waiting, feeling stuck) generated in the valuation of immobility as both positive and negative. It argues for ways immobility can encompass modes of resistance, refusal, or freedom, or signal the painful limits of individual autonomy. One overarching question concerns ways the immobile becomes positioned as ‘either-or’ a form of life or death; some conceptualisations are proposed that might transcend these divisions