De-obviating modernity? New Travellers changing culture and making new temporalities

Abstract (English)

New Travellers are an alternative mobile community who grew out of the British counterculture and free festival movement of the 1960s and 70s. Fifty years later, despite targeted government policies, violence and oppression which sought to 'break' this community, they continue to endure as a now intergenerational group.

My ethnographic and insider engagement with New Travellers revealed that their rejection of modernity has resulted in intergenerational ways of being and knowing that differ to those of mainstream society. However, it has been difficult to capture this through the conceptual field of anthropology; in this sense, there are a plethora of frameworks through which to explore 'non-westerners' undergoing westernised 'culture change' (Robbins 2004) but little through which to capture 'EuroAmericans' developing such things as non-modern temporalities. This presentation will ask how such processes may be captured through ethnographic theory, in doing so I will propose an extension to Roy Wagner's (2009) use of obviation by putting forward my concept of 'de-obviation'. This will be employed to capture how, rather than making a break with (obviating) their past as other groups are seen to do when undertaking culture change, New Travellers looked back to the past (de-obviating) to inform their shared norms, values and practices, and how, in doing so, they formed non-modern kinds of temporality, through such things as pagan spirituality, living close to/with the land, and developing communal relations with each other.