I don’t study those things, but I know people who do, like Sarah Rebolloso McCullough, who studies the history and practice of mountain biking. I don’t focus on gender, but I read the work of Elly Blue, a writer trained in anthropology who explores gender and many other issues in bicycling as a zine publisher. And I haven’t done fieldwork about the history of the larger urban biking movement in the U.S., but Zack Furness has. My individual project connects with a community of practice made up of these folks and many more.

In addition to providing an ethnographic subject that connects me to existing theoretical conversations in anthropology, studying bicycling has meant tracing the contours of an emerging field. For many years, transportation researchers have used quantitative methods to study bicycling and to make recommendations about infrastructure and policy. The study of bicycling as a social and cultural phenomenon is a newer endeavor whose beginning is marked most clearly by the 2007 publication of Cycling and Society, edited by Dave Horton, Paul Rosen, and Peter Cox. Many of the essays in that volume used qualitative methods and ethnographic engagement to analyze the meanings of bicycling in various contexts, paving the way for more research in this vein.

Now, if you think of studying bicycling and culture as nothing more than studying “bike culture,” i.e. bike messengers or freak bikers or dudes in spandex or whatever dominant image that calls to your mind, I would agree that there’s not much meat for a community of scholarship there. The thing is, humans incorporate bicycles into their everyday lives in very different ways; it makes a lot more sense to talk about bike cultures. In the Netherlands or Denmark, people might say that there simply is no bike culture; it is an unremarkable thing to ride a bicycle. And the funny thing is, because those countries are seen as highly desirable by many bike advocates, they sometimes talk about a future where there is no bike culture.

But in anthropology we don’t think that’s what happens, right? We don’t necessarily think that the globalization of trends and ideas and values leads to an inward convergence of all diversity into one singularity; we leave room for multiple cosmopolitanisms, for situated knowledges, for subaltern heterotopias. This attention to context is an important contribution anthropology can make to the study and design of bicycling and its enabling technologies. What is most significant to me, though, is that anthropology is good for tracing the effects of power, and there’s a helluva lot of power happening as raced, classed, and gendered bodies, on and off bicycles, circulate in shared, historied streets.

In the bike world, there is a lot of crossover between advocates, practitioners such as urban planners, and scholars. An anthropology of bicycling, then, has the potential to cultivate new links between theory and practice. Recently I got to interview Kim Fortun about the future of anthropology, and she commented that, “one of the ways we’re going to have something to contribute to the communities we work in is if we continually refine our skills as cultural analysts by subjecting ourselves to the evaluation of others in our community.” Fortun has been deeply involved with creating The Asthma Files, an experiment in interdisciplinary, collaborative research on the public health problem of asthma. That project creates a space where different scholars share their data, and it creates an archive of knowledge in the process.

An anthropology of bicycling could take shape online in a similar way, though I have encountered scholars who have lingering concerns about sharing their work, and for good reason. Personally I decided at the beginning of my dissertation project that it was more important to me to develop my voice as a mixed race bike advocate than to preserve my anonymity as a researcher, so I’ve been tinkering with how to share my data online for awhile. This summer I made an experimental website called Seattle Bike Justice to share data from my interviews with leaders in Seattle’s communities of color. A more advanced example of an online repository of a bike researcher’s data can be found at Sarah McCullough’s Mountain Biking History & Culture Archive. Her archive shows the potential for ethnographers to document cultural life alongside the people they study, co-producing useful repositories of knowledge.

Following the U.K.-based Cycling and Society group’s model, McCullough and I started a research listserv this spring called Bicicultures to bring together people in the Americas who are paying attention to bicycling in local contexts. We’ve yet to figure out how to use the growing list as a public resource, but it’s a start.

For many bike activists, the primary goal is getting more people to think of bicycling as a mode of transport rather than a pastime for eccentrics, and they see bike infrastructure projects as a way of reaching this goal. But if ideas about appropriate uses of streets have to do with habitus, it is also useful to look at what happens when normal street conditions get disrupted by events, changed travel expectations, and even disaster.

In 2007, I moved from Portland, a city where bike commuting is somewhat unremarkable, to Los Angeles. At first I lived in Long Beach, which had the same gridded blocks as Portland, and was of a similar size, so it seemed like biking there would be great. What I learned, though, was that the shape of the city did not suggest bikeability to lots of people. Biking on narrow neighborhood streets filled with large SUVs, I quickly figured out that motorists saw me as a nuisance rather than a fellow road user. “Hipster” bike commuters like me were more and more common in LA, where bicycling had long been an endurance sport or a burden of poverty, but we were not necessarily welcome.

Feeling anxious about biking on LA streets, I was intrigued to learn about the ciclovía in Bogotá, Colombia, which closes about 70 miles of streets to cars in the central city every Sunday. This Streetsfilm by Clarence Eckerson introduced me and many others to the ciclovía:

By “opening” streets to pedestrians and bicyclists, a ciclovía invites people to break with their daily transportation habits. For people who regularly use marginalized forms of mobility on car-dominated streets, ciclovías can be a real treat. For people who regularly drive, they can be an opportunity to experience, perhaps for the first time, the fun of bicycling in their city.

During my fieldwork in Los Angeles, I co-founded CicLAvia, which is (you guessed it!) a ciclovía in LA. It has been pretty neat to witness the enthusiasm these street events provoke in a city like LA. I don’t know whether they have caused more people to bike commute, but in May the New York Times credited CicLAvia with changing the negative dynamic between drivers and bicyclists. Maybe giving people a chance to learn what it feels like to ride a bike in the street at an event can shift what modes of transport people expect to see on the streets during the week.

When I was in London this September, I talked to some bicycling scholars there who said that the summer influx of Olympics tourists may have caused more people to try biking to work. The government warned commuters to expect delays and advocates offered guides to cycle commuting. On all the underground and overground lines I rode, I saw signs advising people to “get ahead of the games” and plan their travel carefully. This was a case where the street conditions hadn’t necessarily changed, but people’s expectations about other modes of transport had. Will this have a lasting effect on cycle commuting in London?

What happens when transportation habitus is disrupted by disaster, like what many people affected by Sandy are experiencing? In the other cases, where planned events changed street conditions and expectations, people may have been annoyed by inconvenience. However, losing mobility through disaster means panic. For families that had to stop driving temporarily because their car was destroyed or because gas stations ran out of fuel, or for people that rely on transit to get to their jobs, I can see why bike commuting might not feel like a fun alternative. At the same time, people in New York’s bike community have been using bicycles to help out with relief, showing how these flexible machines can help people adapt to new conditions. It’s a reminder that people who are already using bikes are examples of green infrastructure themselves.

I was thinking about how to start talking about bicycling and anthropology on Savage Minds when I saw this post on Gizmodo about bicycling through lower Manhattan during the hurricane that inundated the east coast of the U.S. earlier this week. This is what Casey Neistat saw while he was exploring via bike during flooding on Monday night:

This footage is exciting, and heartwrenching. Seeing New York City in a crisis is scary, even for those of us who don’t live there. And in light of the longstanding attempts to deny climate change, water lapping against the iconic urban density of Manhattan says something frightening, to me at least. But another statement the video makes is that a bike can take you places other forms of mobility sometimes can’t.

Back in 2009, I was taking a graduate class on “concept work” and Chris Kelty came to visit. I had a chance to babble a little bit about my dissertation project studying bicycling in Los Angeles, and Chris speculated that bicycling could be a way of hacking urban space. This made a lot of sense to me. When you are doing an ethnographic study of one mode of transport in a city where another mode of transport reigns supreme, you notice things that are otherwise hard to see. Living among bicyclists in Los Angeles meant that I learned short cuts and the locations of tunnels under freeways, found out how to avoid major streets and still get across town, and questioned the dominant academic view of Los Angeles as a postmodern non-city.

The bicycle can be an experimental tool for ethnographic work. In my case, studying the social/cultural life of bicycling worlds, this was front and center in my fieldwork life. But I know many other people have found examining the bicycle as an object and bicycling as a practice productive while studying other topics more directly. For example, Wiebe Bijker’s writing on the development of the safety bicycle has given insight into the social construction of technology. And Robin LeBlanc called her 1999 book about Japanese housewives’ political engagement Bicycle Politics because she found that her mode of transport during fieldwork gave her a useful metaphor for the limited (but existent) political power of the women she studied.

“The world we see at a given time is chosen for us by the transportation we use to get there,” LeBlanc commented in her introduction. Has bicycling gotten you into new worlds, as an ethnographer or in other areas of your life?