Special isssue

In an increasingly hyper-connected world, the static positionality of individuals in their localities seems to become the exception rather than the norm. In this article, I intend to answer questions about mobility and itinerant lives by following the phenomenon of “vanlife” across national borders in South America. During the pandemic, anthropologists, among other scientists, have improvised new fieldwork methods, and I was one of them. I turned this lifestyle into the subject of my research and turned anthropology into a mobile practice. Anthropologists have always depended on mobility by doing fieldwork in faraway places and have developed mobile roots, at least during parts of their academic careers. Nevertheless, the discipline paradigm has remained essentially sedentary. In this paper, I investigate how the discipline core must be re-thought if one rejects the epistemological privilege of the sedentary society. I show how some classical concepts of ethnography fail to function when applied to constant mobility, and social structure takes a backseat while individual agency comes to the forefront. To establish the concept of “survival capital,” this ariticle surveys Pierre Bourdieu’s framework
of capitals by applying it to people on the move and investigates the social and cultural substances of the mobile dwelling lifestyle.