Microbus crashes and Coca-Cola cash

Marketing car love in an age of fear: an anthropological approach to the emotional life of a world of automobiles

“…These investments include maneuvering for US manufacturers' access to domestic markets around the world, investments which have left most of them with few or weak mobility options besides the car. Journalists have also started using this emotional language -positing a naturalized romantic attachment to the car -to explain 2 See Moodie (2006) and Lamont and Lee (2015) for striking analyses of the relevance of the emotional stance towards the car crash dead for our understanding of contemporary modes of governance. the massive shifts underway in the US mobility system.…”

Tubarão and Seu Lázaro’s dog: Spectacular and banal violence in a Brazilian favela

“…Ethnographers of violence in Latin America have often connected the more visible forms of violence to a larger, less visible, context of deprivation and marginalization. For instance, Ellen Moodie examines how some forms of death in El Salvador, such as those killed in the country's civil war, receive widespread attention, while other fatalities, such as those killed in traffic accidents, are seen as 'ordinary' (Moodie, 2006). Moodie points out that traffic fatalities are just as structurally determined as other forms of death.…”

The U.S. car colossus and the production of inequality

“…As Mark Lamont (2010) and Ellen Moodie (2006) have pointed out, neoliberal regimes of governance overdetermine this focus in car safety campaigns and attempts at legal redress. Lamont (2010) compellingly argues that the global car safety campaign that the UN and World Bank have waged in the global South has hived off the developing world as having a "different kind" of public health problem than the developed world has, one treated more as a problem of bad governance (corruption in road building, ineffective licensing practices, etc.)…”

“…The automobile provides vivid insight into all five phenomena as well as into their relationship. Valuable interdisciplinary work emerging from a variety of fields, from urban planning to environmental history and material culture studies, has submitted the car to a rigorous sociological imagination, 1 and anthropologists have begun to join in this work (Lamont 2010;Masquelier 2002;Miller 2001;Moodie 2006; see also Vivanco 2012). Most of the work in transportation studies, strictly speaking, however, has been dominated by a physical and social engineering perspective and has left relatively unexplored the fundamental effects of transit policy and practice on people's lives and their shaping of the possibilities for social justice.…”