The Devotions of Restoration: Materiality, Enthusiasm, and Making Three “Indian Motocycles” Like New

Abstract

Amid growing attention by geographers to materiality, emotion, and work, we draw together practices of making and communities of enthusiasm to autoethnographically trace the restoration of three Indian motorcycles, revealing restoration as a dynamic aesthetic and political practice that links restorers to communities of enthusiasm as well as to the agentic materiality of the things they restore. Restoration, we show, is a culturally and geographically situated skilled practice that links material agency to labors of love and devotion. Such devotion to things, in turn, suggests a provocative counternarrative to the unsustainable throwaway society of the Anthropocene. Emotional labor, material devotion, and handcraft skill could, we suggest, proffer positive pathways as we endeavor to make, restore, and, indeed, sustain our material world.