‘It’s Only Us, Hyenas, Who Profit Out of It’: Wrecked Cars, Leaked Humans, and the Death of the Person-car paper in Journal of Material Culture

Mašek, Pavel (2021) ‘It’s Only Us, Hyenas, Who Profit Out of It’: Wrecked Cars, Leaked Humans, and the Death of the Person-car. Journal of Material Culture, 1–16. DOI: 10.1177/13591835211055709

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/13591835211055709

Abstract

In this paper, based on long-term fieldwork at an auto salvage yard, the author draws an analogy between human bodies and car bodies. The yard took in wrecked cars in which people sometimes died. As cars and humans are divisible individuals comprising a complex of separable parts – which, therefore, can be dismantled – their bodies, as assemblages, might share a similar fate; their organs and spare parts can be disassembled and used in different contexts. However, humans and cars are not only assemblages in and of themselves; they create an assemblage together. The human body is a part of the material world; its boundaries are flexible. Thus, material objects can be incorporated with bodies to such an extent that a subject identifies with her embodied objects. Therefore, the author argues that cars might be considered humans’ second bodies and the relationship between humans and cars can become an assemblage that constitutes a ‘person-car.’