Traversing is about our ways of seeing, experiencing, and moving through the world and how they shape the kinds of people we become. Drawing from concepts developed by two phenomenological philosophers, Martin Heidegger and Jan Patočka, and putting them in conversation with ethnographic analysis of the lives of contemporary Czechs, Susanna Trnka examines how embodiment is crucial for understanding our being-in-the-world.

In particular, Traversing scrutinizes three kinds of movements we make as embodied actors in the world: how we move through time and space, be it by walking along city streets, gliding across the dance floor, or clicking our way through digital landscapes; how we move toward and away from one another, as erotic partners, family members, or fearful, ethnic "others"; and how we move toward ourselves and the earth we live on.

Above all, Traversing focuses on tracing the ways in which the body and motion are fundamental to our lived experience of the world, so we can develop a better understanding of the empirical details of Czech society and what they can reveal to us about the human condition.

Susanna Trnka is a social and medical anthropologist at the University of Auckland. Her previous books include One Blue Child and Competing Responsibilities.

A lucid and theoretically compelling account of contemporary Czech life, written with warmth and a welcoming curiosity about human experience and attuned to the qualities of movement that infuse everyday ways of being.

C. Jason Throop, University of California, Los Angeles:

A vital contribution to the field of phenomenological anthropology, Traversing deftly traces the contours of life in the contemporary Czech Republic along its worldly, finite, embodied, and technological dimensions. Trnka brilliantly interweaves ethnographic and phenomenological insights together as she uncovers the complex existential realities that condition our multiple emplacements in time with others.

Amy Speier, University of Texas, Arlington, author of Fertility Holidays:

In this beautifully written book, Trnka deftly weaves over thirty years' worth of ethnographic work in Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic into an astute argument for the importance of bodily engagements with technologies, nature and the world.