Page - 59 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 3/2017

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 3 2o17 Agata Stanisz | Tractor unit acoustemology 59 of not so much the drivers’ community, but rather their activities, events which they co-created and took part in. Since my goal was to make an attempt to describe with sound the daily life of this occupational group, every sound that I heard and decided to register could turn out to be important. This audioethnography of a kind was actually my conscious, and thus selective, ac- tive and in-depth listening, sensitive to the presence and significance of sound. Therefore, I did not restrict myself to registering composed sounds (music), speech and narration, but I rather focused on general acoustic environment, even if it contained tractor unit engines roaring mo- notonously, the motorway humming, boiling water bubbling or the belts fastened on the loads creaking. Ethnography should study the sounds that people hear every day because this is one of the ways they discover, experience and exist in the world. According to Steven Feld, a place is created the moment sounds are produced and present (Feld 2004, 465). Regardless whether sound is particularly appreciated in a given culture or not, including it in the notion of habitus widens the perspective applied by anthropology to look closer at certain phenomena and cul- tural activities. A tractor unit is a three-square-meter space, which becomes a place carrying a certain value and significance owing to certain appropriating activities, both symbolic and material. A tractor unit cab is often interpreted as an extension of the driver’s body (Laurier 2007; Laurier et al. 2008, 1-23; Merriman 2007, 1-23; Sheller 2003) it is not only a tool intended for mobility (Cresswell, Merriman 2011, 7-9; Normark 2006, 8-10) or a workplace, but also a recurrent dwelling. Drivers themselves call their cars homes on wheels. Moreover, these moving houses constitute specific points where strategies characteristic for transnational relations are put in practice. Drivers are constantly in touch with their families and friends, calling or contacting them on the Internet, and their cabs which they appropriate, are filled with material manife- stations of the homes which they have left their roots in. The mentioned cyclical nature of this appropriation stems from the fact that, in the case of the company whose tractor units I was travelling in, setting off on a new journey (which takes three to four weeks with a one-week break) equals entering a different three-meter space from the previous one as each time the dri- vers are assigned a new tractor unit. The company which my drivers work for owns 130 tractor units and about 200 semitrailers. The semitrailers are sometimes pulled by tractor units that do not belong to the company, but are leased by the drivers. This means that every few weeks the drivers have to recreate their workspace and dwelling. In practice, this reproduction always follows a certain pattern where an identical set of accessories is used. Drivers domesticate these spaces with a local set of objects, such as spotted, striped or flowery sheets, small rugs, cushions of different shapes, stuffed toys (sometimes with regional symbols or shapes), family photo- graphs, plastic bowls where they wash themselves, fragrant gadgets, laptops with wallpapers always presenting their homes or the local landscape. They do not enter the cab in shoes, but in slippers, they drink from mugs presenting their children, eat from plates that are a part of the tableware left at home. The interiors of their cars are cleaned every single day: they beat dust out of the rugs, clean it from the furniture and sweep out the cabs. It happens very rarely in Europe that a driver is at the same time the owner of a tractor unit, which excludes the possibility of personalizing the unit on the outside. In contrast to the well-known in the pop culture American trucks, the European ones do not have any individual character: they are neither painted in an original way nor ornamented with additional lighting,