Frugal continuity describes the capacity of a mobile practice to persist because its material requirements remain below the threshold at which logistics begin to dominate experience. It is not minimalism as style, nor scarcity elevated into virtue. It is an operational relation between what must be carried, what can be encountered locally, what can be repeatedly restored, and what must remain cognitively available for the field to continue. The distinction matters because mobility research often treats the observer’s support system as external to method. Yet every sustained sequence of walking, travelling, documenting and comparing depends on food, shelter, washing, communication, charging, transport and rest. When these are reduced to manageable routines, they cease to interrupt fieldwork and become its enabling substrate.

Movement produces knowledge when transitions remain permeable. Mobile-methods scholarship establishes that walking, following and travelling alter the research encounter itself: perception is reorganised through rhythm, distraction, bodily effort, orientation and the unforeseen. The methodological problem is therefore not how to remove contingency but how to preserve enough openness for contingency to become evidence. A fixed route can suppress the very phenomena that make movement analytically productive, while unlimited improvisation can dissolve comparability. Frugal continuity operates between these poles. It keeps the observer materially light enough to adapt while maintaining recurrent practices—notes, photographs, rest, nourishment, digital work, sleep—through which one episode remains commensurable with the next. Everyday infrastructure is the hidden architecture of this persistence. A café can function as workstation, observation point and temporal hinge; a supermarket converts carriage into local replenishment; a laundromat transforms a very small wardrobe into a long-duration system; a modest hotel restores the body; a regional train carries the field through settlements that a faster connection would erase. Guma’s mundane temporalities are particularly important here because they relocate infrastructure in repetition, repair, waiting, maintenance and ordinary use. Such episodes rarely appear as “findings”, yet they determine whether observation can continue with sufficient attentional quality. Infrastructure becomes epistemic when it alters the duration and continuity of exposure. Sufficiency gives this practical economy a conceptual precision that lifestyle minimalism lacks. To have “enough” is neither to maximise resources nor to minimise them absolutely. It is to maintain an adequate scale relative to a purpose. In mobility research, that means enough clothing to preserve bodily equilibrium, enough technology to document and work, enough connectivity to navigate and communicate, enough food and rest to sustain attention, but not so much equipment that transport, guarding, packing and accommodation become the dominant organisation of the journey. The same principle can be extended from the observer to mobility systems themselves: accessibility and wellbeing must be preserved while energy and material demand are constrained. Sufficiency is therefore a relational threshold, not an aesthetic preference. Prolonged comparative fieldwork makes this threshold visible because accumulation changes the observer. Earlier sites remain active in memory, novelty declines, categories stabilise and the speed of recognition increases. These gains are accompanied by risks: familiarity can become premature closure, bodily adaptation can conceal fatigue, and logistical fluency can make the enabling infrastructures disappear from analysis. Frugal continuity therefore requires periodic recalibration. The field remains open only when maintenance is treated as part of observation rather than as lost time. Eating, washing, waiting, resting and reorganising equipment are not interruptions to comparison; they are operations that preserve the capacity to compare. Socioplastics can use this principle at the level of corpus and archive. A field becomes durable when it retains enough traces to reconstruct relations without allowing documentary accumulation to overwhelm legibility. Frugal continuity therefore joins material mobility to archival economy: select, maintain, revisit, repair and recirculate. Its force lies in showing that epistemic abundance can emerge from material restraint. Many observations may be produced from few possessions; many comparisons from recurrent routines; many conceptual transitions from infrastructures that remain ordinary and almost invisible. What frugal continuity adds to Socioplastics is a theory of persistence in which knowledge grows not by carrying everything forward, but by maintaining the minimal conditions through which the field can continue to move.