Page - 26 - in >mcs_lab> - Mobile Culture Studies, Volume 1/2020

26 Mobile Culture Studies | >mcs_lab> 1 (2020)Johanna Menhard | Entanglements on and with the street “What does it mean to be oriented? How is it that we come to find our way in a world that acquires new shapes, depending on which way we turn? If we know where we are, when we turn this way or that, then we are oriented. We have our bearings. We know what to do to get to this place or to that. To be oriented is also to be oriented toward certain objects, those that help us find our way. These are the objects we recognize, such that when we face them, we know which way we are facing. They gather on the ground and also create a ground on which we can gather. Yet objects gather quite differently, creating different grounds. What difference does it make what we are oriented toward?”1 This text presents itself as a story of a journey. A story of different gathered experiences, with no end. A journey is itself always a story without an end: Ina-Maria Greverus writes in Anthro- pologisch Reisen, that travelling has – like telling a story – never an end because eventually the story will be continued by the added experiences of other travellers and storytellers.2 This story is about ethnographic explorations on the streets and the entanglements of bodies in motion with smartphones. It is about orientation on the streets and within one’s research field. It is about relationality, human-smartphone intra-actions, and the question of how this relationship and entanglement can be approached and framed theoretically. Spring 2018: City streets or somewhere to start from … In the middle of my master’s degree, I attended a one-year research project seminar. It was titled “Die Straße: Ein Stadtraum in Bewegung” [The Street: An Urban Space in Motion] and was part of the master’s programme in European Ethnology at the University of Graz. The goal of the project was to complete an individual ethnographic research project about urban streets (or a related topic) within a year. As a matter of bad timing, I was quite tired of urban anthropology and the focus of our readings at that time – just half a year before I had taken part in another seminar on streets in urban anthropology and the subject seemed exhausted to me. Frankly, I was exhausted myself and simply didn’t know what to face, what to do, which way to turn. What kind of urban anthropology would I like to do? To what would I like to orient myself? What was the street, that so-called urban space in motion? I felt somehow lost and without orientation, without commitment to head on to this or that street, this or that way of reading the city, this or that political gathering on the streets. I had this subtle feeling that something was missing in the discussion, but it was impalpable. For a while I wandered around – on the streets, in the woods, in buildings, in gardens and parks; I read and kept bits and pieces of my readings in my mind3 – a wild mixture of Michel de Certeau’s chapter on walking in the city in The Practice of Everyday Life,4 Ina-Maria Greverus’ on being an anthropologist in the city5, 1 Sara Ahmed: Orientations. Toward a Queer Phenomenology. In: GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12 (2006) 4. pp. 543-574, here p. 543. 2 See Ina-Maria Greverus: Anthropologisch Reisen. Münster: LIT 2002, pp. 1-2. 3 Notes on literature, 20.03.2018. 4 See Michel de Certeau: Walking in the City. In: Michel de Certeau: The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press 1988, pp. 91-110. 5 See Ina-Maria Greverus: Stadtgedanken. In: Ina-Maria Greverus, Über die Poesie und die Prosa der Räume. Gedanken zu einer Anthropologie des Raums (=Trans 10). Berlin: Lit 2009, pp. 226-300.