Reconnection

This chapter concludes with an analysis of Martin Heidegger, Jan Patocka, and Václav Havel's exhortations on actively envisioning and embracing a world without advanced technology. Indulging in the many pleasures of the great outdoors, the chapter also examines how nature and “the natural” give a different sort of bodily knowledge of who people are. It talks about “Indian camps” that mimic the heavily romanticized and fictionalized lifeways of Native American tribes to the industriousness of a relaxing visit to the familial “chata” or country cottage. It also talks about Czechs in their outdoor pursuits and questions whether the realities of living close to nature can indeed transport people to a deeper understanding of what it is be alive. The chapter explores the possibilities and limits of the acts of beauty and violence, dissolution and transcendence that make up everyday living.

Movement, Technology, and Culture in the Making of (Czech) Lives

This chapter outlines the ways of seeing, experiencing, and moving through the world and the kinds of persons people become through them. It explains the process known as traversing, which was drawn from philosophical concepts developed by two phenomenological philosophers, Martin Heidegger and Jan Patocka. With the ethnographic analyses of the lives of contemporary Czechs, the chapter examines how embodiment is crucial for understanding “being-in-the-world.” Specifically, it focuses on three kinds of movements made as embodied actors in the world: how people move through time and space, how people move toward and away from one another, and how people move toward themselves and the earth they live on. It highlights the significance of both spatiality and temporality, considering how movement varies across different moments in the body's temporality or life course.