Traversing is a beautifully-written, modern ethnography that takes the goals of classic ethnography to heart—the author selects “mundane” moments of Czech lives and examines them as “extraordinary” moments that “constitute what it is to live a life” (4). Through six chapters, Susanna Trnka explores six ordinary activities to illustrate how we “traverse” through our lives. “Traversing” is the process of how we see, experience and move through the world, and develop as persons.
To accomplish this objective, Trnka takes concepts developed by Martin Heidegger and Jan Patočka and puts them into dialogue with anthropological scholarship. The author positions her work in the increasing interest in Heidegger's work in anthropological scholarship, to which she adds Patočka's understanding of movement, inter-relationality, and self-transcendence. Using Czech society as her field site, Trnka provides an insightful glimpse into the human condition and helps us unravel a bit more of the tangled webs of social life today by answering the question “what is it to be human?” (19).
Each chapter starts with an illustrative vignette that introduces the everyday experience of that chapter's theme. Trnka decidedly places her work in the twenty-first century starting with the example of GoogleMaps as a simulacrum of “being there” to exemplify embodied sensorality and how we use perceptions, touch, and movement to understand the world. The introductory chapter continues to root the book in Heidegger's and Patočka‘s works, outlining how both philosophers focused on the quotidian of human lives as a means to understanding broad scapes of human existence. Trnka further defines traversing as “an embodied practice” (3), placing importance on spatiality, temporality, and inter-relationality, all of which are threads found through the following six chapters. For those unfamiliar with Heidegger and/or Patočka, the introduction serves as a foundation for understanding their works.
Chapter 1 takes the reader through Prague, Ostrava, and Česky Krumlov as Trnka describes that traversing through these cities, Czechs create both senses of belonging and exclusion as they commemorate and mark places of historical significance. As Trnka walks through these cities, her companions attempt to anchor themselves through relating places to important times and events, while evoking anti-Romani and anti-Muslim sentiments. The focus of Chapter 2 is virtual spaces and how they allow us to (re)make ourselves through their opportunities and challenges. In this chapter, Trnka focuses on the relationship between access to the Internet and concepts of “freedom,” using examples from teenagers learning English through video games to middle-class professionals seeking separation between public and private spaces to retirees maintaining family connections through social media.
In Chapter 3, we become grounded through the rite of passage of ballroom dance lessons, through which young people learn the heteronormative social rules of “appropriate” sexuality. Rooted in Patočka's concept of inter-relationality, this chapter moves from the public ballroom to private domestic spaces and links to Chapter 4's focus on families. Trnka starts Chapter 4 discussing how new reproductive technologies shift norms of parenting, leading to further discussion of how women self-realize through motherhood. Again, using Patočka's concept of inter-relationality in understanding how parents “find themselves” (177) through relationships with their children, Trnka also invokes temporality in examining the dynamic nature of “family.” The concept of exclusion reappears in an examination of interethnic marriages and multiethnic children.
The examination of family continues in Chapter 5 with a focus on sociality, specifically through food and drink, which help us stay rooted in the mundane while also transcending to the universal. Food is inter-relational through its symbolic consumption, which Trnka explores from a variety of angles. Consuming Czech dishes and beer constitute performing Czechness and those who do not imbibe represent something alien, regardless of the reason for one's diet. Trnka links the consumption of alcohol to temporality as ways to mark or control time.
The final chapter centers on the Czech's love of nature. A large portion of the chapter focuses on how the chata is an escape from one's regular activities and a different form of habitus. Yet, even this interaction with nature is mediated through technology. At the same time, Trnka reminds us that “[o]ur understandings of “nature” are always cultural” (182). The author concludes saying that traversing grounds us, compels us, and propels us as it helps us navigate our human experiences. In conclusion, Susanna Trnka makes abstract philosophical thinking tangible through reiterating and reviewing the philosopher's works at relevant moments and connecting them to applicable examples of lived experience. I recommend this book to anyone interested in contemporary ethnography or phenomenology.
