Speed in the anthropology of movement

Speed is capable of transforming phenomena and creating new ones. Under the influence of speed, or rather a range of different speeds, things, communities, space, time, as well as their functions and relationships are transformed. The article illustrates this through examples dating back to ancient times (including the emergence of mobility and the cult of speed becoming globalized), which turned out to be recurrent, yet making us think about this all as innovation. Speed, or rather a range of velocities, determines ethnic identity of different communities, as can be seen in the case of steppe and tundra nomads. The main coordinates of speed, space and time, did not always correspond to their characteristics in classical physics, that is, objectivity and independence from each other and from the observer. The nomad mentality (and probably that of ancient homo mobilis) reveals a model of space and time fused and subjective. The general theory of relativity is based on comparable principles. The most recent incarnation of spacetime has become the cyber world. A significant role in the ancient matrix’s revival was played by the cinema, which developed technologies for compressing time and space-the screen-time differs from the real one in that it allows to squeeze years and centuries into minutes, and the same can be done with space. In the online reality, the speed of messages, reactions, decisions and actions differs from that in the offline one. Cyber speed allows us to reduce gigantic spaces and time arrays to moments, while speed itself escapes the limits of human sensations and control. We feel it only through the tension along the WWW’s “lines of force” and through the temperature of its “heating nodes”.

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