LIFE AND THE ROAD: Vehicle Dwellers and the American Dream
Hovedinnhold
Master's thesis submitted at the Department of Social Anthropology, autumn 2024.
By: Marte Bruem Olsen
Supervisor: Professor Don Kalb
This thesis is an ethnographic study of ‘vehicle dwellers’, more typically known as ‘vanlifers’, living on the road full-time in the southwest of the United States of America. The empirical material of this thesis is based on six months of conducting participant observation amongst ‘vehicle dwellers’, following their movements, interactions and everyday struggles as well as achievements by taking on the role of a vehicle dweller myself. As research of ‘vehicle dwelling’ still is scares, the aim is to contribute to understanding the particular circumstances of people who live out of vehicles in the United States, and the historical and structural context of the phenomenon.
The growing ‘trend’ of alternative housing options, like vehicle dwelling, must be contextualized by the exacerbated precarity of affordable housing in the United States. My interlocutors expressed that the possibility of buying or renting a home either felt unattainable or not worth the cost, not only monetary cost, but the cost of time spent working to make rent. Increasing cost of living and ground rent combined with stagnant wages and alienation experienced by my interlocutors leads them to feel discontentment, provoking them to create an alternative - vehicle dwelling. By turning precarity to their advantage, through low-cost living and prioritizing mobility over security, they attempt to gain back some of their autonomy over their movements and work-life balance. In the pursuit of ‘freedoms’ through the processes of struggles and collaborative efforts of creating an alternative, they grapple and contend with the ideology and idealization of the American Dream, renegotiating what it means to live a good life in America today, and seeking out how this may be achieved. In their efforts to navigate the forces of capitalism through strategies of resistance and accommodation, they from community among other vehicle dwellers built through networks of social relationships spread across large distances, as well as online on social media. Understanding the complexities of community formation that go beyond geographical localities and the ways in which they are built and maintained will be explored through the scope of solidarity, and the points of tension between solidarity and individualism. In this way ‘vehicle dwellers’ struggle against alienation and neoliberalism and the associated constrictions of capitalist society, both on and off the road. The thesis directs particular attention towards the motivations, struggles, and creative strategies of individuals seeking autonomy and freedom by turning to vehicle dwelling.
