Utilizing Bourdieuʹs concept ofhabitus(1977) I make two related ethnographic-theoretic points in this chapter. First, it orients my discussion of how canoes are metaphorically deployed as moral bodies among the Murik of Papua New Guinea (PNG). And then second, I adapt it to elucidate a characteristically postcolonial circumstance, namely, how this localhabitusinforms the way modernity is perceived and morally evaluated.

To begin: a brief methodological aside abouthabitus. It consists in self-evident, routine practices, forms of comportment, and commonsensical assumptions or ideas through which actors unconsciously reproduce fields of inequality in society. Now I admire Bourdieuʹs theoretical...

In email conversations that preceded this volume, David Lipset and I were discussing Erving Goffmanʹs descriptions of vehicles. David told me that when he was learning to drive in 1967, he inherited Goffmanʹs late-1950s black Volkswagen beetle from his father, who had bought it second-hand from Goffman when they were colleagues at Berkeley.¹ This anecdote sent me back toBehavior in Public Places, to one of the few vignettes in the Goffman corpus in which an interacting ego is the driver of a car. Goffman is analyzing ʺexposed positions,ʺ in which individuals cannot protect themselves from being engaged by strangers....

Fifi,Goodtime Gal, andMiss Mitchellare just three of the more than one hundred aircraft flown by the Commemorative Air Force, a World War II heritage group in the United States, yet those three names evince a distinctive feature of how the groupʹs mechanics and pilots relate to the aircraft: the planes are female.¹ This metaphor is long-standing; it parallels the common gendering of automobiles and reflects centuries of gendering ships. Despite this deep tradition, the metaphor is not dead, or even sleeping. Indeed, borrowing meaning from the domain of women shapes both work on and with the aircraft...

As a young adult, Koji dropped out of Japanʹs most prestigious engineering program to work as a mechanic for the Mazda racing team. The team was a perpetual underdog in the Le Mans 24-hour endurance race but, in 1991, came from behind to beat the favorite Mercedes Benz team. Just one year later, however, Mazdaʹs team was disbanded, a casualty of the recession that hit Japanese automobile manufacturers in the early 1990s and rule changes at Le Mans limiting the power of Mazdaʹs rotary engine. Koji has gone on to have a successful career as a software programmer, but he...

On a hot summerʹs day in Valencia, a few years after General Francoʹs death, the eponymous hero of Graham Greeneʹs novel,Monsignor Quixote(1982) worries about the fate of his old Seat 600. He prays to God that the little car may survive him and hopes that unlike many of his unanswered prayers this one does get ʺlogged in the Eternal ear.ʺ He cannot bear the thought that his Rocinante, as he calls the car in memory of his ʹancestor,ʹ Don Quixote, will rust on a scrap heap: ʺHe had sometimes thought of buying a small plot of land and...

In the spring of 2008, while doing research in the southwestern city of Kunming, I met a young Chinese man in his twenties called ʺJohnʺ (an English name he had chosen for himself). I struck up a conversation with him about his car—a silver sports coupe that he had parked on the street near my apartment. His car had been modified (gaizhuang guo) with a front hood cover, fancy hubcaps, and various decals, and he was polishing it lovingly while he waited for his girlfriend to get off work. Over the next months I had the opportunity to interview...

Lowriders are cars customized within a particular tradition of popular aesthetics identified with Mexican Americans. The characteristic modifications of a lowrider include replacing the suspension with shortened springs and hydraulic cylinders powered by additional batteries in order to raise and lower the car at the driverʹs will. Hydraulics, along with particular custom wheels, are the most basic markers of lowrider style, but lowrider cars are also typically decorated with elaborate custom paint jobs and accessorized interiors. Such adornments constitute a distinctive lowrider aesthetic, the boundaries of which are subjects of debate among participants in lowriding (also called lowriders). Such debates...

Since 2005, a multiracial group of activists has gathered each July to reenact the mass killing of four young African-Americans. Hundreds of supporters watch the amateur performers reenact the key events associated with the lynching; in the late afternoon, at the culminating moment of the reenactment, a sedan arrives at an isolated bridge, carrying the four African-American victims and a driver, playing the role of a local white farmer. A group of reenactors, playing Klansmen, emerges from the woods and wrestles the screaming victims out of the automobile and down the embankment, where they are repeatedly shot in front of...