‘Nobody ever cuddles any of those walkers’: the material socialities of everyday mobilities in Santiago de Chile

ABSTRACT

In this article I bring forward the notion of ‘material socialities’ to make sense of the sensory and affective relationships between walkers and the materials of places that emerge in everyday walking practices in Santiago de Chile. Materials not only make possible everyday movement in cities, as they have been usually addressed by mobilities studies, but they are also constitutive of mobile experiences and practices in sensory and affective ways. Based on ethnographic fieldwork I undertook in Santiago between 2015 and 2016, I describe relevant materials for those people who walk habitually in a context of urban sociospatial inequality and I distinguish forms of socialities related to walkers’ feelings of being welcomed or repelled by the places in which they walk. By detailing how materials of places create forms of sensory and affective socialities through habitual encounters, my article enlarges the conceptual toolbox of mobilities to consider materials as constitutive elements of mobile practices and, in this way, I respond to the call made by mobilities’ scholars for a more materially sensitive approach to envisage the complexities of mobile situations.

KEYWORDS:

• Walking
• material socialities
• urban materials
• senses
• affectivities

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading; their rich and valuable insights were fundamental in bringing this paper to publication. Thank you to Gerardo Mora for his support during the fieldwork and comments on the earliest version of this article. I greatly appreciate too the generous and helpful feedback by Myriam Houssay-Holzschuch and Russell Hitchings on previous drafts of the paper. I am deeply thankful to Andrew Harris and Filipa Wunderlich who guided me through this research process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Although there is a ‘conceptual space’ between the concepts of sociality and sociability (Amit et al. 2015, 13), here I review literature that talks either about sociality or sociability in walking without marking strong differences between those works.

2. Comuna is the smallest political and administrative territorial division in Chile.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo (ANID) PFCHA/DOCTORADO BECAS CHILE/2013–72140132.