Vishnu and the Art of Motorcycle Driving: Toward an
Anthropology of Traffic
R. Thomas Rosin
Expressive triumphs of sparkling wit mark each occasion spent with Gerald
Berreman. Yet this oral legacy of humor, so readily transmitted and ubiquitous in
daily contact with Gerry as teacher, fellow advocate, or adversary, is not so readily
discovered in his voluminous writings.'
In acknowledgment of his social grace and sparkle, I have dared to submit a
reformulation of a paper initially presented at a Kroeber Anthropology Society
Meeting years ago, where as speaker I enjoyed the laughter of colleagues. More
serious (Rosin 1996, 1998) and published (2000) works have spun off from this initial
presentation. Yet the role of humor remains, in the enlightened rush of self
recognition, or in the gasp of a new perspective suddenly grasped. The tale well told,
the finely articulated punch line, the triumph of real persons over the arrogance of
caste or class privilege, the keen sense of timing and poise-a remarkable artfulness
of delivery conjoined with the rush of insight at the instant of getting it-such have
been the pleasures expected in a meeting with Gerry. Unlike this paper, however, his
delivery is immediate-his humor quick, never needing to hesitate for a scholarly
introduction.
Introduction
Roadway traffic is a social field distinct from the sedentary environs through
which it passes. It has a setting, with boundaries, rules, and rights of access, whose
definition and clarity vary from culture to culture. The pathways and stations of its
members are an outcome of the physical constraint and opportunity of roadway and
vehicle, rules, idiosyncratic features of capability, judgement, and fearlessness, and
consummate values fulfilled through the driving process. Furthermore, traffic is
interactive, involving most crucially the mutual communication and interpretation of
intent. While we in the United States tend toward a rule-abiding program of
privatized driving, with road instructions encoded in road stripes, signs, and signals
and concretized in buffers, barriers, and guardrails, traffic in India is pre-eminently
interactive and reactive.
It is not surprising that Anthony Wallace (1972), in an early article in the
anthropological literature on American automotive driving, focuses on the standard
driving rules, technical driving operations, and the route-analyzing his problem in
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terms of the cognition and activity of the individual, rather than in terms of the
symbolic interaction of many participants, as I propose to do here. His analysis is
embedded in the cultural presuppositions of individualism projected into folk
conceptions about the nature of traffic commonly shared by the American public.
For anthropology, Paul Hiebert (1976) integrates symbolic interactionist
theory with the physics of everyday life in his comparative study of traffic in India
and the U.S.; for sociology, Dannefer (1978) treats traffic as a context for social
action. Our emphasis is to unite further the intentional with the physical in the study
of traffic:
From the western sociological perspective, traffic is of particular
interest for it is in traffic, at excessive speeds, where the intentional
merges with the inertial-where the intentional actions by men in
culture, as transmitted through their motor vehicles, now becomes the
momentum of mass accelerated beyond anyone's immediate control.
In traffic men and women enter the physical world of inertial bodies.
[Rosin 2000:396]
Traffic as a flow in energy and mass must be increasingly constrained and
isolated from sedentary society, with pathways precisely delineated, if this flow of
accelerating momentum is not to deteriorate into mishap and mayhem. As I have
argued elsewhere,
the street is becoming increasingly a locale for the catastrophic and
tragic, the venue in which life plans and purposes are brought to an
abrupt end, a final marking of a life with its ultimate fate. [Rosin
2000:390]
Accordingly, I stress the emerging nature of the street as a venue in which the
individual must evaluate uncertainty and access risk in a context demanding incisive
and continuous decision-making and near-spontaneous action. By focusing on the use
of a vehicular and roadway technology, increasingly shared globally, the
anthropological study of traffic should highlight universals in behavior as well as
cross-cultural differences in intention, interpretation, interaction, and the management
of risk. As an arena in which there is an acceleration in the momentary juxtapositions
of innumerable lives on their separate, and often opposed, trajectories, traffic provides
texts from which to read a people's conceptions about chance, fate, and human
destiny.
In 1982 a research proposal to study how cross-regional differences in
adaptation and social organization impact land reform brought me to conduct a half-
dozen tours through scores of villages in every district across the sweep of Rajasthan
State in India (Rosin 1994). The art of driving my Enfleld motorcycle became central
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to my survival. The understandings presented in this paper were hard won from
moments of elation, and of terror, on the roadways of India. The quickened pace of
modem traffic confronts us all with the temporality and fragility of our own lives.
Such considerations invite either the sobriety of tragedy or the release of humor.
Having survived the roads of India,2 I have sought the latter for my style of
presentation.
A Symbolic Interactionist and Physical Interpretation of Traffic
An anthropology of traffic should begin with the cultural presuppositions that
define the roadway and traffic. The core concepts of purity and pollution, so central to
the understanding of social interaction in India, prove central to understanding its
traffic. The Basic Proposition: The center of the road is the locus of greatest purity,
with pollution increasing as one proceeds to the road edge (Rosin 2000).
This proposition rests upon a culturally recognized process of transformation,
churning (Rosin 2000:377-38 1). When applied to an understanding of traffic, we
derive an equation only recently explicated for Indian civilization: traffic chums filth,
purifying it into dust (Rosin 2000:392).
Vishnu churned the Sea of Milk, creating amrita, the drink of immortality.
The housewife chums curd, transforming it into buttermilk and its purified distillant,
clarified butter or ghee. In a similar manner there is the churning of waste and debris
into dust. Churning is the process in culture that transforms substances to higher states
of purity.
Sweepers (mehtariya) in India do not simply remove filth and wastage, rather
they shuffle it, sweep it, and pile it up for it to be trampled and redistributed again.
Fitting it is that in English they are not called garbage men, trash-haulers, cleaners, but
sweepers, for it is the sweeping process, the process of churning, that is the
transforming act. Just as municipalities in the U.S. spray dirty water into the air in
their sewage treatment plants, aerating water, as it were, to cleanse it, so does the
broom, the hoof, and the tire throw up dirt in the traffic lanes of India, purifying it into
dust.
Accordingly, all human and bovine traffic gravitates to the center of the road.
It is a testimony to the purity and intelligence of the cow, that she too seeks the road's
center. The center is favored, for impure substances are not deposited there, and
because there the churning by traffic is most intense. One may observe throughout the
villages and towns of India that women select dust and sand for scrubbing and
purifying water buckets from the center of the lanes passing by their homes. They
seek the spot churned by traffic.
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The outskirts of the lane may be used for pollutive activities. One does not
walk the outer edge of dirt roads when entering or leaving villages, for here in the
darkened hours before dawn, many have relieved themselves as the first step in their
daily ablutions.
There are no marked lanes on the traditional roadways of India. When the
road is empty of others the center is taken; as others join the track there must be a
yielding of space. If all are heading in the same direction, the entire roadway will be
occupied. Even in cities such as Jaipur, the provincial capital of Rajasthan State,
major traffic arteries can become one-way streets temporarily, until opposed traffic
appears to make a claim upon the roadway. (See rule 4 in Hiebert 1976:332)
One yields the road in recognition of the persuasive claims of occupation
asserted by others. One must interpret the intent of all others, and successfully
communicate one's own intent. We are dealing not with rights, but with their
expression, with preemptive claims persuasively embodied in the physical fact of
bodies with mass and velocity.
Traffic consists of the pathways of objects that must be appraised both in
terms of their physical, as well as their symbolic, characteristics of intentionality. For
a participant in the flow, appraisal may shift between the physical and the symbolic,
as the communication of intent may be suddenly displaced by the physicality of
momentous bodies, moving rapidly toward impending doom. In fact, trafflc may be
only second to sex as a common sphere of life in which the bases of interaction may
oscillate so rapidly between the symbolic and the physical. (No wonder voluptuous
ladies, and we hope handsome men, advertise automobiles in western culture. There
are similarities in the experience that body and car each have to offer: the physically
arousing and arousable person and the energized and intentional vehicle; intentions
irrepressibly transformed into embodied desires, momentous vehicles in the course of
their opposed, yet complementary trajectories. At the fmal point, just before climactic
impact, or impactive climax, there is a promise of the loss of self.)
The twentieth century revolution in physics hinged in part on the recognition
in relativity theory that the dimensions of space and time must be conjoined. All
observations are made in a time/space continuum. Just as physics must consider the
position and momentum of an object in relation to position and movement of the
observer, and link the events of action and observation in tenns of the speed of the
impulses that communicate between the two (Einstein 1920), so must we consider
traffic in relation to the linking dimension of volition (Parsons 1949). Objects in
traffic observe and interpret the intent of others, communicate their own intent, and, in
turn, mutually influence one another's actions and intentions. Traffic entails a
continuous conversation of intent. Although horns, hand gestures, signals, and shouts
may inform,3 the traffic object in motion or rest is itself the main vehicle of
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communication. It is, in semiotic terms, a sign, "a distinctive union of signifier and
signified, not reducible to either alone" (Barthes 1972:111-7).
Intent in traffic is the expression of a total physical body that must be assessed
in terms of its mass, penetrability, velocity, rate of acceleration, previous course,
apparent rate of acceleration, and/or direction. From this information, one interprets
its inertial state, its trajectory, and the alterations possible in its pathways, which may
be expected or enforced. I coin my terms below, of course to amuse, but also to
achieve a union of physical and symbolic interactional concepts, as they may be
applied to an understanding of traffic. We may speak of three kinds of intent: inertial,
trajectoral, and stubborn arrest. At this juncture in the investigation, illustration is
more appropriate than definition:
The inertial intent of a concretized shrine in road center is near total.
Sideswiping the edge of the shrine over time, as bus and truck drivers attempt, might
soften the corners, but clearly the bulk of the shrine is there to stay. It cannot be
cowed to move on. The inertial intent of a speeding, overloaded truck, taking over
road center, also proves total: one either moves over, yields, or is totaled.
Trajectoral intent refers to the curve of the flight path projected by a vehicle
as it weaves in and out of traffic, regaining and losing road center. In each culture one
expects particular kinds of curves. It is in the assessment and enforcement of
trajectoral intent that the Indian driver is the master of all cultures of traffic. A deft
driver calculates the trajectory of oncoming cars in order to anticipate where down the
road they may be forced back out of road center. One swings into the center of the
road early to enforce their timely withdrawal: for a moment two opposed vehicles
occupy the center. (Those who live to drive may boast about their mastery in timing;
monuments of lingering wreckage, awaiting the dismantling craft of salvage, attest to
those less competent.)
So that you may not be deceived to think intent expressed by mass, velocity,
or acceleration dominates the road, let me illustrate the concept of stubborn arrest. If
a saddhu, a religious mendicant, lodges himself on a Banyan tree root at the roadside,
and if you threaten, cajole, or even beat him, but he refuses to get up, he is in stubborn
arrest. Let him be, you can not budge him. You must go around.
In normal traffic, participants must assess at each moment the inertial and
trajectoral intent of scores of others-trucks, buses, cars, carts, camel caravans,
pedestrians, cows, dogs, pigs, and temples, shrines, and sanctuaries-stopped or
moving, sideswiping, on-going, or on-coming. This is a very taxing activity, this
figuring out the taxis (Greek, for "position, order, arrangement") of so many
intentional objects in a moving field of objects.
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As speed increases, the number of objects up the road to be assessed increases
dramatically. However, as one approaches the speed beyond volition, one no longer
needs to assess others. Rather, they are forced to measure your mass and velocity as
inertial, and beyond alteration. Your intentions have become the physical rocketing of
your vehicle. So launched, they perceive your flight as beyond their influence since it
is beyond your control. They yield. Any conversation of intent would occur without
effect. In using the phrase speed beyond volition, the pivotal consideration is not the
possibility of willful control of one's own vehicle, but rather whether other agents in
traffic recognize the possibility of a mutual monitoring and communicating to
influence your volition and action. (Unlike the much-touted speed of light, previously
treated by physical scientists as absolute, the speed beyond volition is relative.) The
possible degree of influence over another vehicle depends upon the distance, speed,
and nature of that vehicle, the traffic channel, and the conditions and instruments for
communicating.
Clash and Crash: Competition for Space within Traffic
To take to the road, to enter traffic, is to claim and take possession of public
space. Conflicting claims or clashes of intent to occupy the same space at the same
time require immediate resolution. Clashes of intent may become crashes. (The
distinction in outcome, "clash" or "crash," may only be a matter of articulation, lateral
or vocalized, the amount of friction, or kind of fricative, made in passage, quick as the
wind, on roadway or palate4.) Hiebert considers such conflict over space in the traffic
of Hyderabad:
The primary question is who has right-of-way. The answer is based
on complex calculations in which each player makes his move in
response to the actions of others on the basis of certain immediate
rules. [1976:329]
Two of the rules Hiebert analyzes state that players with high status take
precedence over those with low status; those with high inertia, over those with low
inertia. He cites rules to signal intention to pass on-coming and overtake on-going
vehicles, with precedence ordering traffic so that vehicles with high status or inertia
take road center, competing for space with those of similar rank. Unresolved is the
weighing of the different ranks of precedence: "Status is technically more important
than inertia....However, inertia commands a great deal of respect" (1976:331). The
resolution of this issue requires a broader and more dynamic analysis than the one
conducted by Hiebert.
One may analyze rules regulating and ranking relative access to the road, and
record codified traffic laws written by municipal or state governments, but such rules
and laws may prove but props in the dynamics of traffic in India. Rules defining
allocations are not binding unless they are enforced by barriers, effective traffic
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police, or by the counter-claims of opposed and on-going traffic. My effort here is to
go beyond the rules describing competency, accomplished by Hiebert, to suggest an
analysis of performance, wherein our interest is not the grammar of driving skills, but
the conversations of intent and strategies of interaction that involve displays of status,
courage, irrationality, and stubbornness, as well as non-volition. The resolution of
clashes of intent is a matter of considerable importance, for to take the road and force
another to yield is an act asserting dominance.
As members of an hierarchical society Indians, particularly of high status,
may attempt to extend their authority and rights to participation in traffic. Yet,
indeed, traffic is a distinct social field, separated by mass and velocity from the
sedentary environs through which it passes. Those who ride the heaviest and fastest,
and, today, the most impenetrable vehicles (e.g., buses and trucks in India, the Sports
Utility Vehicle in the U.S.) may assert dominance in a manner that conflicts with their
status in the hierarchy of sedentary society. Such violations of sedentary authority
and proprieties of deference can only be redressed and punished when the violator is
brought into rest, or arrested, from traffic. ("Arrest" in Middle English means "to stop
the course of.. .a thing in motion," Oxford Universal Dictionary 1955:1, 100.) We
have long recognized this fact in the U.S. in the use of the term "arrest" to refer to an
officer pulling someone from the everyday traffic of life. Once arrested, vehicle
occupants return to the sedentary society that happens to surround the road at that
point.
If unarrestable, one need never submit to sedentary society. Trucking crews
criss-crossing the Indian subcontinent may make this choice-never to rest. They
might achieve total dominance of the road, if it were not for the reinforced provincial
border crossings, where lines of hundreds of trucks are held captive by border
officials. In many developing countries, sedentary society may have the legal, but not
the physical, power to "arrest" the interstate trucking on their roads. In such cases,
tuckers may become renegades.5 They assert dominance in the interactional, and
often international, field of traffic, never submitting to the authority of the various
sedentary societies through which they pass.
To extend one's status to influence one's position within traffic would require
effective communication of that status. In India, ownership of a car alone is a
statement of status, but in the past the lack of vehicle variety complicated
communicating the gross difference in actual rank among those driving, or being
driven, in cars. Subtler features must be used to indicate status: the newness, the shine
and polish of a vehicle, the costume of the chauffeur, the accoutrements of the
curtains, or as Kathie Zeretsky (personal communication) points out, the use of special
colored lights, as in New Delhi, flicked on to indicate that an elite is approaching.
Truckers and bus drivers recognize that it signals the vehicle of an important politician
or administrator, one who could make trouble for them, and they yield accordingly.
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The use of the car as a vehicle communicating the status of the driver in the
U.S. is too obvious to require further explication here. The highways here are, indeed,
a stage on which to present and celebrate before a broad public of strangers the
putative prestige of the usually unseen, or at least unknown, occupants. Fine hotels
and restaurants may stage the embarking and disembarking from traffic, when others
may view elites in the context of leaving their prestigious vehicles.
To the role of status, momentum, and impenetrability in the clash of traffic,
one must add maneuverability, or the demonstrated control over trajectory, as it may
be communicated through the design and operation of the small sports car. The
semiotics of the vehicle, at rest and in motion, is a major study in its own right, with
obvious implications for the study of contemporary culture, as suggested by Barthes in
the "The New Citroen" (1972:88-90).
To manage traffic to their own advantage, individuals may use a variety of
strategies. I pick out for description two strategies essential to working the roads of
India. We would expect such strategies in the culture of traffic to rest upon general
presuppositions of the society at large. In these two cases, the essential
presuppositions are that 1) even the elite or the powerful must yield in the face of
necessity, and 2) the low in status may coerce others to view and acknowledge their
presence, and, in so making their reality known, can claim the minimum required for
their continued survival.
Staging and communicating a situation of necessity: A driver and crew may
transcend the conversation of intent, in which some adjustment to the intention of the
other is expected. One may use the circumstances, if available, to stage a situation of
necessity. The common maneuver is to pass another on-going vehicle (in India on
their right) so that one takes over road center. Once one is in the process of passing, a
situation of necessity is created, for one can no longer yield to the side for on-coming
traffic. They must yield. Your intentions are a fait accompli. Choice of action is
replaced by the physical constrictions of the situation. The moving setting of two on-
coming vehicles abreast communicates. One cannot be cowed into yielding, for no
alternative actions are possible. The human element of choice has been removed from
the situation.
Caravan Hopping: Perhaps the most joyous moment in passage is caravan
hopping. One has suffered the forced slow-down of traffic. An on-going vehicle in
front chooses to create a situation of necessity by boldly passing the slower vehicles.
After honking wildly, they move out to the right, taking over road center. As they pull
abreast of the vehicle they are passing, on-coming traffic is forced to yield. Now is the
time to hop the caravan. Quickly, one pulls in tightly behind the passing vehicle,
entering the situation of necessity before they should leave it. Each vehicle behind
you in tum joins in tightly. The caravan is now created, each member in sequence
dominating road center as they pass, while the on-coming traffic is nearly halted or
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thrown off to the shoulder of the road. For a moment there is the joy realized in
spontaneous corporate action, when the other side must yield and witness your
success.
As evening approaches, the darkening of the roadways affords opportunities
to a communicate a status, a momentum, or a degree of impenetrability that is higher
or grander that one's vehicle and person may warrant when viewed in the bright light
of day. As mentioned above one might use colored lights to emulate the vehicle of a
political elite. Far more promising is the strategy Gerald Berreman recalls in a recent
correspondence. He managed to project the headlights and trajectory of his jeep to
simulate a truck worthy of dominating the road.
I was driving my family and another from Dehra Dun to Delhi in an
old Jeep station wagon-a trip of about 8 hours on a rough, dusty
narrow but metalled, two-lane "highway," populated by the full
panoply of Indian traffic. I was constantly driven off the road by the
trucks that dominated the road, and into all of the impedimenta that
occupy its margins. Tired and frustrated as darkness enveloped us, I
realized that just as I could see only their lights, their drivers could
see only mine. Somewhat tentatively, I experimented by changing
my driving strategy from veering away from a pair of headlights
bearing down upon me, to veering toward them. As I had thought
might happen, the truck-its driver unable to distinguish the elevated
lights of my Jeep from those of another truck-verred away from me.
I soon grew confident of my new-found dominance on the road, and
proceeded gleefully into Delhi without leaving the pavement, a trail
of trucks left behind to negotiate their way back to the pavement from
which they had retreated in fear of my assertive behavior, its fakery to
be discovered, if at all, only in their rear view mirrors. [letter to
author, 8/27/01]
Under cover of darkness, such strategies of courageous deception attest to the primacy
of communication in this imminent domain of interactive traffic.
Encroachment and Eminent Domain: Competition for Space between
Trffic and Sedentary Society
Traffic marks the landscape by the friction or impact of use. Special
preparations of the surface with cobbled stone, or more recently asphalt and concrete,
may identify its pathways. Yet the use or reservation of such a roadway for traffic
remains a contested matter in many nations. Traffic in India often must contend with
a diversity of claimants and a multiplicity of uses-sharing its place with, or next to,
fresh water conduits, rain run-off, sewers, public displays, commerce, children at play,
and ruminating cattle. To understand this contest between traffic and sedentary
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society would require an ethnography of the road and its uses, based upon
observations of the full daily cycle:
Consider the roadway at its darkest hours, cattle sleeping, taking
warmth from its sun-heated asphalt. Before sunrise its edges serve
elemental needs. At sunrise, it is a track for middle-class joggers,
then a bathing spot for early risers. Flower and vegetable sellers mark
out their spots with burlap bags, but soon yield as a growing tide of
traffic at 10 a.m. pushes back the sedentary occupants. But, with the
waning of traffic in the midday heat, cattle and men with string cots
move in from the edges in the shadows of trees to reclaim it for a
snooze. A truck parks so its mechanics may begin hours, even days,
of repair. A flood of traffic in evening waxes then wanes, as the night
fires of families move in from the edges for eating and sleep.
Yet recording a full day would prove inadequate, for the arts of encroachment
and reclaiming public land for interests private and familial, commercial or religious,
involves years of commitment, patience, and persistence. Consider this case observed
over a decade on the edge of the Sawai Mansingh Highway in Jaipur, Rajasthan:
The religious mendicant began his roadside shrine as abut a small
sacred campfire (dhuni) for his all-night devotional singing,
expanding it soon to include a small altar to the God Hanumanji, then
constructs a bench of stone to store and keep pure his water in jugs,
from which he began serving passing pedestrians. A garden is
planted to cultivate holy basil (tulsi) and flowers as offerings at the
altar. An awning on poles is erected to give protection to the cots
arranged for his devotees. Finally the congregation enlarges the
sacred place by encircling the altar with temple walls.
In 1982, when Jaipur City tarred-over a parallel side road, its width was narrowed in
half at this point in order to skirt around this sacred complex. Here is a strategy of
encroachment that almost proved irresistible. In the late 80s, however, the
municipality reclaimed the street one morning, in a surprise attack with bulldozer and
police, for uses profane.
Evolution and Development of Traffic
Although traffic is sufficiently ubiquitous that modern folk think they agree
on the kinds of events to include under its label, a cross-cultural and cross-species
perspective might highlight inadequacies in our unanalyzed folk conceptions. It is
among the social insects, ants and termites (H6lldobler and Wilson 1991:285-6), that
one perceives a flow of traffic comparable to that of humankind in that there are
defined pathways, bi-directional movement, with a frantic coming and going, bottle-
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necks, and occasional intersections to confuse. All features are enhanced by a certain
density of endeavor in a restricted setting. The movement observed is not to hunt, to
gather, or to mate, but to carry and to relocate. Traffic is associated with "going about
business," rather than actually "doing business." It emerges among commoners in
stratified societies busy with the tasks of life.
Traffic among humankind is an emergent phenomenon. We must link it with
the increasing density of human settlements, in which the daily and seasonal round
brings together a multitude conversing and dispersing. Such a unidirectional,
nonlineal, oscillating flow we can expect to occur among densely settled hunting and
gathering peoples, with a lineal pattern emerging on game trails or trade routes which
are intensively, seasonally used.
The larger and more dense the settlement, the greater the potential flow of
traffic. As domesticated animals enter the human settlement, the congestion only
increases the flow. Traffic par excellence emerges with the population concentrations
associated with civilization. The internal circulation of their populations in urban
centers creates traffic. Such urban clusters are linked by roads to hinterlands of
villages and hamlets and by trade routes to other regions. But such linkages in
themselves may not generate traffic. A network of roads that militarily and politically
links culturally disparate regions, as occurred in Inca civilization, may in fact be so
regulated, that the flow pattern will not have the randomness, multiplicity of
directions, nor density we would expect of traffic. As Kantner (2001) argues for the
prehistoric Chaco Anasazi roadways in the southwest of the U.S., the linkages they
afforded seem to serve religious and political, rather than economic, functions. A
degree of liberated commercial activity, involving numerous exchanges, would
generate the kind of multi-directionality we associate with contemporary traffic.
Lineal movements in a single direction constitute a migration, an exodus, a
march, a procession or parade, or more recently, a demonstration. While any one of
these movements may be a constituent part of traffic, contributing to the experience of
confusion it has to offer, they do not constitute traffic. Processions and parades
normally stop traffic, for the multitudes must stand back to witness and to celebrate.
In archaic civilizations the potentates of state and temple, with their retinue, would
preempt the roadway. Tribute in goods and persons flowed in processions to the
center.
It is a sign of our new age that the roadways can be taken over by the laboring
masses or the dispossessed, in strikes and demonstrations, not to celebrate the social
order, but to protest it. Others must stand back and witness, often entertaining
attitudes of dismissal or contempt for the disenfranchised, who for once preempt the
road. Their preemption is a symbolic inversion of the traditional use of the road to
stop traffic as a display celebrating authority.
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Crowd activities on the roadways, indeed, are powerful indicators of the
popular attitudes that may or may not impart legitimacy to a regime or an institution.
For traffic to stop voluntarily for state authority there must be broadly dispersed
popular attitudes of respect, awe, or fear. The spectacle of a royal procession in the
princely states in pre-Independence India was sufficient to stop traffic.6
With the formation of the Indian Union, and the accession of the princely
states of Rajputana to the new nation, the royal procession became replaced by the
state parade of politician, bureaucrat, and military hardware. Throughout India today
such parades, tarnished and made dull by the personal style and self-interest of the
politicians, are witnessed by crowds who are increasingly difficult to keep in line. On
the other hand, traffic stands back and yields readily for wedding processions, as each
family assumes, as their right, the entering of the city lanes to display the bridegroom
on horse or elephant, with wedding band and kinsmen, who increasingly include the
bejeweled and beautifully dressed ladies of the family. For while the modern state is
not protected by pervasive attitudes of respect, the family in India does remain the
focus of approval and the level at which propriety and ethical action remain possible.
It is through the progressive isolation of traffic from its sedentary
surroundings that traffic emerges as an independent sphere of causality forcing
modifications upon its environment. As the lethal impact of modern traffic increases,
it is perceived as a necessity to diminish its costs in lives and to mitigate its effects on
sedentary society. The modern state creates agencies devoted to traffic management,
but all too often it is not only traffic that is mediated and regulated, but also the
sedentary environs which are modified and redesigned.
Hiebert points out the development in the U.S. of third-party mediation of
traffic through laws segregating kinds of traffic, light signals regulating movement,
marked lanes, and specially designated roadways routinizing the options and paths of
vehicles. He is properly cautious in considering this an evolutionary development,
from the immediate transactions of traffickers interacting directly with one another, as
is found in India, to the mediated transactions "that standardize and depersonalize
interaction," as is found in American traffic (1976:334).  As he points out,
"introducing mediate transactions is a way, but not necessarily the only way of
creating order in increasingly complex traffic" (Hiebert 1976). While he is stressing
the differing cultural presuppositions, or principles creating order, which may be
brought into play in effecting traffic solutions, one should stress also variations in the
nature and flow of traffic. Such variations in traffic are related to speed and range of
speed among participants, their density and diversity; the restrictiveness,
interconnectedness and multiple functions of the roadway; the nature of the regulated
and unregulated exchanges/interactions between traffic and sedentary society; and,
most importantly, the degree of freedom in choice and possibilities of action by
participants. The latter is central to an understanding of traffic, for traffic is the
aggregate outcome of the actions and interactions of its individual participants.
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As traffic becomes emergent and generative in human society, a people's
conception of individual autonomy, choice, and social responsibility may have a great
deal to do with their experience and expression as drivers on the road. Teenagers are
socialized to their roles and responsibilities as citizens in the U.S. today, not in the
traditional civics classes, but through programs in driver's education. For many of
them, to be out there in society is to be there in traffic, as Friday and Saturday night
main street cruising demonstrates.
What traffic has to offer the individual in America is the right to overtake and
be overtaken; the opportunity to display a vehicle and its maneuverability; a chance to
beat time; unlimited choice of pathways spanning the continent; momentary contact
with a multitude of others, most of whom are unlikely ever to become significant or
binding upon one; and the exhilarating control over speed and trajectory as one tests
fate and confirms one's grip on life. Once in traffic, one has the obligation to be
attentive and engaged. One's involvement with life is guaranteed for a while.
But as traffic has evolved over the last century, with an increasing mass of
vehicles on the roads, moving at accelerating velocities-with individuals managing
parallel, interweaving, and diametrically opposed pathways, as well as right angled
crossings, and round-abouts-there has been a corresponding intensification of
attention, focus, and adherence to one's initial intentions to get there. The balance of
embodied and energized selves sharing for a moment the roadways of the world has
become fragile. Such accelerating mass and energy, matched by the increasing
intensity in intention, must be increasingly constrained, to prevent the physical, and
potentially fatal, contact among participants. "But as kinetic energy increases, so
must the constraints, if the system is not to break down into catastrophe" (Rosin
2000:400):
Traffic as kinetic power is constrained by curbs, guided by
conventions, rules, and common courtesies.  Such containment
affords efficiencies in coordinated movement, harmonies in
reconciled wills, a taming of self interest to accommodate one's
movement to that of others. As coordination and responsiveness to
one another intensifies, so may speed and the flow of people to fulfill
their diverse interests. [Rosin 2000:400]
The worst moments of traffic occur when vehicles, animals, and
pedestrians collide. A chaos of twisted vehicles and bodies, a loss of
human purpose and aspirations, an over heated tumult, marked by the
internal anguish of particular lives lived, suffered, and at this very
moment lost. [Rosin 2000:390]
Accordingly, as one anticipates enter of traffic, there may be an evaluation of
uncertainty, an assessing of risks, and efforts to manage and mitigate risks to self and
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others. Even in this age of such computerized simulations as Advanced Traffic
Management Systems (ATMS), sensors, large data banks, and Traffic Bureaus
overseeing the flow in whole cities. a vast literature of books and journals on
transportation, accident analysis, and safety,7 the very use of such monitoring,
information processing, simulation and control, so Nagel and Rasmussen have argued
(1994:222), will not remove the unpredictability of traffic: "the system as a whole
will be driven closer to criticality, thus making predictions [of travel times] much
harder." I would argue further, not only travel time, but risks and catastrophe also are
implicated when a system of flow moves toward criticality. Roadway and vehicle,
while increasingly a means to realize individual choices and intentions, are as well
threats for those who use them, to the continuance of any and all intentions.
Traffic as Text: The Generation and Expression of Conceptions about
Chance, Fate, and Human Destiny
On the roadway, the union of human and machine is nearly complete.
Thereon one is submitted to the hazards of the accelerating velocity of mass that
exceeds the limits of one's relatively fragile body structure and tender parts.
To enter traffic is an immersion, a submission to noise, smells,
repugnance, jostling, the breathlessness of rapid acceleration, sudden
fear, and, in the worst case scenario, an alteration in pulse and breath
in the panic of recognizing immediate danger. There is recognition,
once so immersed, that one's fate is caught up in a swirl of encounters
with a multitude of others, each met for a moment on pathways to
their own destinies. [Rosin 2000:378]
Destruction, injury, and death enter as possibilities to interrupt the daily
routines of life. What sphere of daily life could better provide expressions and actions
that might reveal the deep structure of a people's conceptions about chance, fate, and
destiny? Too often the "text" from which investigators seek answers to these
questions are those tomes of philosophy and religion written in the security and quiet
of the cloister or the study, isolated from the flow of life. Investigate the roadways;
make traffic your text.
It is too easy to point out that nearly each public or commercial motorized
vehicle in India has a shrine to a patron deity or saint on its dashboard; that flower
boys hang around truck stations on the roadside to sell wreaths of flowers each
morning as offerings; that incense is lit as the ignition is first fired each day; that an
invocation (pranam) is given by a driver as he takes over the wheel. Clearly, the
divine is propitiated or invoked to protect one's fate on the road.
Furthermore, when to enter the flow, what day of the week, the direction
chosen, the very time of day at which to embark, are important considerations in
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South Asian civilization. Such matters are submitted to astrologic and calendric
considerations. Herein are conjoined the flows, pathways, and orbits of persons, the
respective life course of each, the moon and the planets (see Rosin 2000:378), with
both safety in travel and success in enterprise at stake.
To illustrate the potential richness of this sphere of activity for investigation
let us shift attention to our own culture. Consider, for a moment, what is meant by
accident in the U.S., a word derived from the French, accidens, means "falling
chance"-the Latin ad combined with cado means "to fall" or "befall." An accident
is an event that befalls you. I suggest that the earlier usage in American English refers
to a chance happening, beyond either the workings of causality or human choice and
responsibility.
To what extent has our conception of accident been shaped by four
generations socialized to the motorized vehicular traffic of the roadways that
increasingly encircle our homes, our offices, our markets, our friends and relatives,
and our places of recreation? An "accident" today is an event not of chance, but of
physical causality and human action, for which responsibility, accountability, and
possible culpability must be established.  Vehicular design, production, or
maintenance may be at fault; road design and maintenance could be inadequate; a
driver could be disobedient of law, ill coordinated from drink or drug, or poor in
judgement-only the weather causing "hazardous driving conditions" provides the
residue of chance in the encounter. No one escapes the net of responsibility, for all
are morally implicated in the creation of individual destiny. So develops our culture's
conception of the individual and the events that just might twist or turn his or her
expected life course. Unforetold and unfortunate events now become matters for
courtroom litigation.
The lore of the courts, accident attorneys, insurance agencies, as recorded in
traffic officer reports, judgements, and settlements, give to our culture's notion of
time, chance, and fate "a clarity, which is not that of an explanation but that of a
statement of fact" (Barthes 1972:143). The notion of causality in nature is applied to
the realm of individual action so that accountability exists not as an underlying ethic
of our culture, but rather as a part of a "background which is already naturalized"
(1972:142). Chance is disentangled into its causes. We are dealing with myths grand
in scale that lay the groundwork for our understanding of human action and events in
nature.
Epilogue
In conducting my tours through rural Rajasthan, I did not submit my fate to
destiny unprotected. The tours by motorcycle covered six thousand miles of dirt
track, village lane, and truck-dominated highway, with my research assistant Sukhdev
Sharma straddling the cycle behind me. From the outset I planned to avoid risks by
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consummate skill, vigilance, quick reflexes, and a sharpened sense of responsibility to
limit speed and submit my cycle to rigorous standards for maintenance.
I was to avoid distractions on the road-until I met, at an unbanked, sharp
turn of the road, a shepherdess8 of the Rebari caste in a long flowing, swishing skirt,
wearing a cowry-braided belt about her waist. Here was our first accident, 45 minutes
after departure-after my assistant had warned me that this day would be inauspicious
to launch a tour in the direction proposed.
As we gathered ourselves from the tarmac (and I repaired my broken
accelerator cable with a paper clip and adjusted myself to steering skewed handlebars
with a torque to the right, giving the illusion that I was steering right into on-coming
traffic), my assistant wisely ordered us that night to a famous Vishnaivite temple in
Diggi. (He felt his life and limb were at stake.) At dawn he did his daily ablutions,
bathed in waters chilled by winter, prayed at the temple, then completed his daily
meditations at our campsite. That afternoon at a most auspicious phase of that day,
satisfied that his austerities and devotions would gain us safety in travel, as well as
success in our enterprise, he said we could now resume our travels. For eleven days
we had numerous serendipitous encounters (see Rosin 1994; 1995:24-6).
Nevertheless, on the last day of this initially inauspiciously launched tour, just six
hours before our last scheduled interview, we had our second and final accident,
driving into water buffalo. A herd had opened up and then unexpectedly closed back
upon us, locking us into the center of the herd, at the center of the road. (My assistant
suffered a probable hairline fracture of a long bone in his foot.) After these events I
had no choice but to commit the time of our future departures to his astrological and
calendric judgements and to conduct the tours in a manner to assure the sanctity of his
daily Vaishnaivite worship. Astride our motorcycle, he bore across his forehead the
red and white vertical stripes, the tilak or insignia, of his morning worship to Vishnu.
And so I dedicate this paper to Lord Vishnu and to His dedicated servant,
Sukhdev Sharma. I am happy to be alive.
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland
1972 Mythologies. Annette Lavers, trans. New York: Hill and Wang.
Beck, Brenda E. F.
1976 The Symbolic Merger of Body, Space, and Cosmos in Hindu Tamil Nadu.
Contributions to Indian Sociology 10(2):213-243.
Berreman, Gerald D.
1966 Anemic and Emetic Analyses in Social Anthropology. American
Anthropologist 68:346-54.
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1968 Is Anthropology Alive? Social Responsibility in Social Anthropology.
Current Anthropology 9:391-396.
1969  Academic Colonialism: Not so Innocent Abroad. The Nation 209(16):505-
508.
1978  Himalayan Research: What, Whither, and Whether. In Himalayan
Anthropology: The Indo-Tibetan Interface. J. F. Fisher, ed. Pp. 67-74. The
Hague: Mouton.
Dannefer, W. Dale
1978 Driving and Symbolic Interaction. Sociological Inquiry 47(1):33-38.
Drury, David
1981  Driving in Kanpur. Personal correspondence.
Einstein, Albert
1920 Relativity: The Special and General Theory. Robert W. Lawson, trans.
London: Methuen.
Kantner, John
2001 Sipapu-Evaluation of Chaco Anasazi Roadways.
[http://sipapu.gsu.edu/roads] 2/12/2001. (See bibliography on Chacoan
roadways.)
Hiltebeitel, Alf
1976 The Ritual of Battle: Krishna in the Mahahabharata. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press.
Hiebert, Paul
1976 Traffic Patterns in Seattle and Hyderabad: Immediate and Mediate
Transactions. Journal of Anthropological Research 32(4):326-336.
H6lldobler, Bert(hold) & Edward 0. Wilson
1991  The Ants. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Nagel, Kai and Steen Rasmussen
1994 Traffic at the Edge of Chaos. In Artificial Life IV: Proceedings of the
Fourth International Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living
Systems. Rodney A. Brooks and Pattie Maes, eds. Pp. 222-235.
Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Parson, Talcott
1949 The Structure of Social Action. Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press.
Rosin, R. Thomas
2000 Wind, Traffic and Dust: The Recycling of Wastes. Contributions to Indian
Sociology (n.s.) 33(3):361-408.
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1998   Street and Traffic in the Study of the Commons. Presentation for the
Panel: Urban Commons, at Crossing Boundaries. Paper presented at the
7th Common Property Conference of the International Association for the
Study of Common Property, Vancouver, B. C., June 10-14.
1996   The Street as Public Commons. Paper presented at the University of
Wisconsin Conference on South Asia, October 18-20.
1995   An Ethnographer's Perspective on the Groundwater Crisis: A Longitudinal
Case Study of a Rajasthani Village. In Groundwater Management: The
supply dominated focus of traditional, NGO and Government Efforts.
Marcus Moench, ed. Pp. 5-41. Oakland, CA: Pacific Institute.
1994   Locality and Frontier: Securing Livelihood in the Aravalli Zone of Central
Rajasthan. In The Idea of Rajasthan: Explorations in Regional Identity.
Karien Schomer, L. Rudolph, J. Erdman, and D. Lodrick, eds. Vol. 1, Pp.
30-64. New Delhi: Manohar and American Institute of Indian Studies.
Smith, Brian K.
1989 Reflections on Resemblance, Ritual, and Religion. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Wallace, Anthony F. C.
1972 Driving to Work. In Culture and Cognition: Rules, Maps and Plans. James
P. Spradley, ed. Pp. 310-326. San Francisco: Chandler.
1 The titles of his works that are humorous alert us to articles that critically challenge the
profession: "Anemic and Emetic Analyses in Social Anthropology" (1966), "Is Anthropology
Alive? Social Responsibility in Social Anthropology" (1968), "Academic Colonialism: Not so
Innocent Abroad" (1969), and "Himalayan Research: What, Whither, and Whether" (1978). In
the recent (April 6, 2001) University of California at Berkeley conference which celebrated his
decades of critical inquiry, teaching, and research, Berreman in his culminating conversation
with the audience, playfully re-titled his now classic "Behind Many Masks." May the editors
use this occasion of afestscrift to inscribe into print such delightful examples of his verbal
virtuosity. His humor is readily found, however, in his correspondence, as I have quoted
below. We find an example of his keenness to articulate in works, as well as construct in
action, the amusing twists and possibilities of daily life, in a manner to discover, as well as to
test, the limits in human interaction. Herein is a humor of discovery, conjoined with
empowerment, to shift the balance among the weak and the powerful.
2 The Statesman (June 1, 1982, p. 4) reports:
"In 1979, the rate of accidents per 1,000 vehicles was 9.4 in France, 13.7 in West
Germany, 4.8 in Sweden, 14 in the USA, 10 in Japan, and 34.6 in India."
"Against the casualty rate of 55 (per 1,000 vehicles) in India, the deaths in France in
1979 were 4.8, 4.9 in West Germany and 3.3 in the USA."
The India Express (May 17, 1982, p. 3) reports on the nature of the threat to both pedestrians,
bicyclists, and those riding scooters, and, I would add, motorcycles:
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"Delhi accounts for the highest number of road accidents in the world, according to
Mr. A.K. Banerjee of the All India Institute of Medical Science here ... the worst
sufferer was the pedestrian. Out of 663 deaths due to head injuries in 1981, 246
victims were pedestrians, while 137 were victims driving cycles."
"Regarding accidents caused by vehicles, buses caused 194.. .and only 45 mishaps
were due to cars... 87 persons sustained injuries due to scooter mishaps..."
Thanks to Zaretsky and Berreman for bringing to my attention these news items, documenting
the risks confronting those using the roads during my period of field research.
3 CfHiebert 1976:331-2 on the use of signals in India, which are most important but not
primary in the communication of intent. The horn in particular is used not only to
communicate specific intent but to alert others to your presence, which they must then read
correctly. Such sounds, even from behind, marking distance and rapidity of approach, are
important messages, as is the insistent, unbroken duration of beeps that indicates stubbornness.
Furthermore, as David Drury points out in his correspondence, each kind of vehicle is signified
by the sound of a different kind of horn:
The sound usually does tell you...the approximate size of the thing that's coming up
behind....Bicycles and bicycle rickshaws have pleasant tinkling bells; bullock carts
have big bulbous brass hand-squeezed horns;.. .scooters and mopeds, ...ugly little
buzzers; motorcycles, ...more melodious buzzers; ...cars, ...smooth two-note horns;
...trucks, ...either the standard low air-horn or an ear-shattering high-pitched blast of
a whistle.... [Drury:1981]
Reflecting on the effectiveness of the trucker's horn for communicating to and influencing the
drivers of scooters just ahead, he remarks, "...being blown out of my seat is a mark of driver
courtesy and safety...."
4Among person, social order, and cosmos, Hindu thought encourages finding analog or
homology (Beck 1976; Hiltebeitel 1976; Smith 1989) as a means of apprehending the relation
between the knower and the known, the speaker and the spoken, the outer sound and the inner
meaning.
5The film "Road Warriors" celebrates such renegades who achieve dominance in the
aftermath of a failed nation-state.
6 On the streets of the once regal city of Bikaner, we witnessed in 1979 the final demise of
regal authority. Although the Raja of that region had given up his title and crown soon after
Indian Independence, the pageantry of the city continued to focus on the royal family, whom
the public regarded with love and respect. On the occasion of Gangaur each year, the streets
would fill with people to witness the royal procession. In recent years, however, the crowd
was becoming increasingly unruly. That year, 1979, the royal family, sensitive to the changing
attitudes, sent the royal carriage drawn by horses, but empty without its lord. As the
procession approached, the crowd would not stand back. Pandemonium broke out. Traffic
swamped the procession. For a moment, it had appeared that the crowd was joining the
procession to celebrate themselves, as might be appropriate in a democracy, but the ensuing
confusion of a multitude, each presenting self and ignoring others, ended the public ceremony.
7For example, Pergamon or Elsevier publish the Journal of Safety Research, Accident Analysis
& Prevention, the Journal of Transport Management, Transportation Research Journal Series,
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Safety Science, Transportation Policy, and various Proceedings from international conferences
on transport Research, transportation, and traffic theory.
8A trope in the oral literature and song of Rajasthan is the prince distracted by the
shepherdess. As an "orbiting" Fulbright foreign scholar on motorcycle I appear to have
exhibited the same proclivities.