The Aftermath of Montreal’s Horse-Drawn Carriage Ban: An Ecological Description of Loneliness

Loneliness is gaining attention in anthropology, largely through phenomenological approaches. Based on fieldwork with Montreal’s horse-drawn carriage drivers, and inspired by Whitehead’s ontological principle, I propose to study loneliness using ecological description, a mode of analysis that understands living beings through two kinds of reasons: traceable causes and an organism’s situated orientation. The coming into force of the by-law banning carriages in late 2019 allows me to analyse how the singular calèche choreography of people, animals, and things fell out of rhythm, and how this rupture registered in the groom Hughes and the carriage driver Jerome as loneliness and related negative emotions. Jerome’s orientation after the rupture redistributed relevance within his ecology; he sought copresence and response through practices of belonging. Politics enters the analysis as traceable events rather than as explanatory abstractions. Jerome’s story reveals how healthcare relations, with their institutional obligation to respond, were what remained when the calèche ended.