A meandering celebration of the indirect and unforeseen path, revealing that to err is not just human—it is everything. This book explores how, far from being an act limited to deviation from known pathways or desirable plans of action, wandering is an abundant source of meaning—a force as intimately involved in the history of our universe as it will be in the future of our planet. In ancient Australian Aboriginal cosmology, in works about the origins of democracy and surviving disasters in ancient Greece, in Eurasian steppe nomadic culture, in the lifeways of the Roma, in the movements of today’s refugees, and in our attempts to preserve spaces of untracked online freedom, wandering is how creativity and skills of adaptation are preserved in the interests of ongoing life.
Astrayis an enthralling look at belonging and at notions of alienation and hope.
Eluned Summers-Bremneris a senior lecturer in the English Department at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She is the author of
Insomnia: A Cultural History, also published by Reaktion Books.
"Moving from the ancient Aboriginal cosmology and Eurasian steppe nomadic culture to the Romany peoples and the movements of today’s refugees, this alluring-sounding history examines ideas of belonging, alienation, and hope."
"Summers-Bremner’s delightfully distracted cultural history of wandering, Astray, endeavors to teach us the value and meaning of errancy in the warming worlds of late capitalist technocracy. . . . Summers-Bremner’s history of wandering seeks not to romanticise anarchy or formalise chaos, but to quietly and rationally defend our abiding need for democracy, sanctuary, origin, errancy, and meaning. . . . The nomadic germ that Astray excavates across a dazzling range of materials emerges instead as the essence of an older, richer, and potentially life-saving form or feelinlƒz
![Astray: A History of Wandering [Hardcover]](/itemImage/2/1/1/0/2_5391710.jpg "Astray: A History of Wandering [Hardcover]")