Page - 56 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 3/2017

56 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 3 2o17 Agata Stanisz | Tractor unit acoustemology very favorable at the time and partially or completely blocked the transit process. Rain and gales destroyed its continuity: fruits could not be picked so transporting them did not make sense. In this situation, the daily life of a tractor unit driver (and mine) mainly consisted of pausing, waiting for further instructions, loading, unloading, documents, the end of a pause and the end of the rain. It was about waiting in specific places characterized by specific visual and acoustic, cultural and social features: parking lots, bushes, the middle of fields, industrial zones, ramps, queues, ferries or harbor customs borders. At the same time, the route I had taken was very clearly characterized by locality. A tractor unit cab is literally a home or a place where and through which drivers manifest and preserve their cultural identity. I was simultaneously mobile and immobile, whereas my research became translocal and unpredictable. Most of the time, I had a very confusing feeling that I was at the same time not moving from the place I was in and being in a place that was on the move. The moments when I was moving were rare and inevitably, specifically localized. Although I had not set off with a specific theoretical project on my mind, except for a plan of checking whether it was actually possible to practically apply the anthropology of sound, it was still very important for me from the very beginning to systemize my research activities, which I decided to carry out on three levels: classical one – fieldnotes and field diary, visual one – photography, and audioethnographic one – field recordings. I had not planned to conduct any interviews and I was rather leaning towards multisensory experience and ethnographic im- mersion (Helmreich 2007, 621-641; 2010, 10; Thibaud 2011) consisting in hearing, feeling, tasting, smelling and observing. I also assumed my material would be “depersonalized”, exclud- ing subjective perspective of the drivers. I thought that collecting their stories would result in merely a set of anecdotes, impressions and fragmented narrations. The specific nature of my field was not conducive to ethnography in its classical understanding. The chosen documentation method emerging from fieldwork knowledge is consistent with the empirical data published in Transportodrone blog, which is a chronological, multilayered record of my first 21-day journey. Each day is presented in a form of field notes, photographs, a description of collected sounds and audio files, together with maps of places, where the record- ings were made. This multi-layer nature of the data simultaneously reflects three ways in which I experienced the field. For three weeks, I lived on about three square meters with my driver. We were constantly in each other’s company because of the places where we paused and weather conditions (pouring rain, tornadoes, low temperatures). This is why I got immersed in the field very quickly. Tractor unit driver’s routine, including its acoustic dimension, became my routine and my daily life. I was exclusively in male company of drivers, workers from factories, processing plants and wholesale warehouses where we loaded and unloaded the carried goods. I observed men. I went for walks or shopping with them. I cooked, ate and drank whiskey with them. I exchanged CDs and talked about some silly things with them. Sometimes I photographed them. I observed how they were working, pausing, what they were wearing, how they were managing their time, communicating with their families, I checked what type of (if any) community they were forming. I also experienced all sorts of treatment: as a sexual object, quasi-daughter, colleague, a person who should be pitied because of her unidentified occupation of an anthropologist and also, by mistake, as another professional driver.