Azadirachta indica A Juss Como Fuente Bioinsecticida.

Anthropologists have long experienced the challenges of fieldwork with nomadic peoples like pastoral herders (Gooch 2008:67-79), hunter gatherers (Brody 2001), tourists (Salazar 2011, Graburn 1983:26-27) walkers (Vergunst 2011) and recreational vehicle travellers (Counts and Counts 1992:156-157). I also faced the challenge of capturing the fluidity of my transient subjects (Jain 2009:92). My experiences as a mobile researcher travelling to the field, travelling to/with my subjects, travelling across disciplines (D'Andrea et al. 2011:153) was a central part of the research process as I embodied both roles; mobile researcher also journeying (Jain 2009:96).

I traveled to sites to study my informants as they travelled to their favourite sites as tourists, travellers, gypsies, or neo-nomads. Crang asks how “to respond to this situation where we are travelling to learn about people who are travelling and learning?” (2011:207). To answer his question he sought to avoid analysis based on simple comparative representations by deciding to weave together dichotomies

through his ethnography, so his findings were not too strictly separated. D’Andrea has also called for the integration of such dichotomies as the specific and the generic, and the trivial and the significant, in mobility research (D'Andrea et al. 2011:157). Crang’s examples of pleasurable activities versus serious study and pursuit of ‘deep’

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resonated with my own situation. I was trying to find out what my participants were doing and why, while they were simultaneously learning local history, local flora and fauna and local economic structures (for example one couple visited Stockton mine). Even as I was collecting academic data, it was usually a pleasurable experience. I was staying in beautiful places, passing through attractive landscapes, walking on beaches or in bush and generally partaking in the leisure practices of the movanners

themselves which was not a hardship and certainly not in the traditional spirit of adversity associated with anthropological fieldwork (Crang 2011:206-208).

As previously mentioned, many of the interviews I conducted occurred when

informants were sedentary at the point of interview; they were at home, house sitting or ‘parked up’. Irving’s work on extracting interior dialogues of informants reminds us that ethnographic data gleaned from a sedentary informant can vary from that which emerges if the same informant was mobile, especially when recounting feelings and memories of a journey, however, both data sets are still relevant (Irving 2011:15-21). Although Irving is concentrating on the interiority of emotions of illness being brought to the surface through the mobile performance undertaken by his informant re-

walking a road, it is a good example of time/space compression in mobility as the contrast of his informant’s experience of the length of the road on the different days is striking and was dependent on her internal emotional state.

The concept is applicable to memories and emotions of a movanner’s journey told from the sitting room of a house being transformed from those invoked and narrated by actually reliving the physical journey of sites and landscapes, from the driver’s seat of the motor home. The empirical data collected while mobile, Irving reminds us, is fluid and contextual, dependent on the action it was collected through such as sitting or driving (Irving 2011:21-22). It is one of the challenges of a mobile ethnographic study to recognise that a sedentary approach is not going to be enough to understand the complexities of mobile lives and to find methods that will help with knowledge production that perhaps combines traditional and innovative practices (D'Andrea et al. 2011:150-151, Büscher et al. 2011:1-2).

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Keeping this in mind, in many instances I relied on my informants’ sedentary

narrations to grasp their mobile experiences, conversations with informants who were stopped during their journey, or participant observation. However, with two

participants I also collected quantitative data using GPS. This provided not only statistics about times and kilometres, but a complementary layer to their previous narratives of similar journeys and to my observations from being on the road with one of them. Vergunst sees technology and ethnography as a complex interplay and while technology sometimes upsets the traditional ethnographic observation it also enables, through viewing technology as ‘techniques’ (culturally learned skills), another level of insight into the social aspects of mobility through the use of technology by both researcher and researched (2011). My dependence on technology disrupted my own research at times as I struggled to synchronise various devices necessary for my own potential mobility and data collection. Technology is more than simply a tool for mobility studies and my experiences with the different technologies of both senior movanners and researcher (especially GPS and mobile phones) reflected Vergunst’s view and became an important part of this thesis, discussed in detail through the following chapters.

The post-journey discussion, as the GPS data was downloaded and revealed to the informant, added a further layer to the data collected. This combination of

quantitative and qualitative data collected while sedentary, as a fellow traveller in a van, and when I was absent from the van (through the GPS), added the necessary depth for a good mobile ethnographic outcome as one cannot be on the road with informants all the time. It also reflects a call (D'Andrea et al. 2011:154, Büscher et al. 2011:2) that the theoretical component of a mobility study be interwoven with the methodological component in order to generate both the quantity and quality of data necessary to answer relevant and also unanticipated questions. Irving argues for the researched to be involved as their own subjects of study, rather than the objects of it (2011:20) and when I reviewed the GPS tracks of each key informant in their presence, it generated discussion, awoke memories and new stories about that trip, reminded them of photos

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taken which they then produced, and on a few occasions unequivocally showed them places they had been that they had forgotten about.

My age (not as old as most of my informants but old enough) facilitated both access to senior movanners and the ensuing relationship that developed with my two key informants. As I studied senior movanners however, I realised I did not want to situate myself in this age category by being mistaken as a movanner and took the first

opportunity to make it clear to others that I was researching the lifestyle.

Undoubtedly, however, the lifestyle is attractive to me sometime in the future and this feeling became stronger the more times I hired a van and experienced the movanning life. Before reviewing my particular research methods and my multi-modal approach to data gathering, I will explain who my key informants, Barb and Peter are, and outline essential details about the Freewheeler’s club, in the following section.