One of the principal ways of thinking about mobility in the modern Western
world is to see it as a threat, a disorder in the system, a thing to control.
Th is lies at the heart of James Scott’s observation that modern states have
preoccupied themselves with the ordering and disciplining of mobile peoples.
Th ink of the role of the outsider in modern life—a constant source of
anxiety with a whiff of “elsewhere” about her. The drifter, the shift less, the
refugee and the asylum seeker have been inscribed with immoral intent. So,
too, the traveling salesman, the gypsy-traveler, and the so-called wandering
Jew. These have all been portrayed as figures of mobile threat in need of
straightening out and discipline.