Siberian Automobility Boom: From the Joy of Destination to the Joy of Driving There

Abstract

On summer Fridays, hundreds of people from Novosibirsk, Siberia undertake an eight-hour drive to the Altai Mountains only to drive back on Sunday. Rather than mountaineering, many of these tourists spend their time there relaxing in a sauna or preparing barbecue, i.e. doing things they could easily do much closer to their hometown. Exploring this somewhat bizarre pattern of weekend travel ethnographically, while simultaneously placing it in the genealogy of (post-)Soviet holiday-making and desire for cars, this article aims at a deeper understanding of the (leisure) automobility boom in the context of changing habits of travelling in contemporary Siberia. During the course of the analysis, the neologism car-hold, an analogy of household, is proposed to depict the hybrid collective of humans and non-humans held by the car. The article further argues that there are unfolding relations between the entities forming a car-hold and its changing environment that generate an altered emotional geography of the weekend drive to Altai as opposed to routine driving.