- Title
- Consorting with 'others': Vagrancy laws and unauthorised mobility across colonial borders in New Zealand from 1877 to 1900
- Creator
- Coleborne, Catharine
- Relation
- Studies in Imperialism
- Relation
- https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526126382/
- Publisher
- Manchester University Press
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2020
- Description
- Historically vagrancy was defined by the problem of those unwelcome, mobile transients who 'stopped' in settled places. In the early modern worlds of England and parts of Europe, localities were places symbolically bounded and fixed by relations of power, kin and family networks, as well as tradition and memory. The perceived threat of the free movement of the mobile people who moved between these localities as mendicants, pedlars or healers signalled a fear of social change and the dissolution of social borders. This was evidenced by laws regulating vagrancy, and through the many categories becoming visible to lawmakers by the eighteenth century. Such movement seemingly threw accepted systems and structures of local power into question. It was their motility, the potential for vagrants to move across boundaries-social, spatial, legal - that signalled their dangerousness. It is a paradox that vagrants were most feared for their out-of-place identities, because they were prosecuted in places where they stopped. When understood through the 'mobilities turn', as described by sociologists and geographers, vagrants become symbolic of the production of social relations, and also represent the impact of social distancing; in addition, they exemplify the fluidity inherent to cultural practices of nomadism. Their experiences offer us a glimpse of the role of liminality in defining mobility. As Tim Cresswell puts it, 'mobility seems to have a furtive and transgressive character to it', much like the historical figure of the vagrant.
- Subject
- vagrancy laws; colonial borders; New Zealand
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1442101
- Identifier
- uon:41611
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781526126382
- Language
- eng
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