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A 3-day seminar on the sociality of walking, hosted by the Department of Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen.
This seminar took place on 12-15th September 2005. The papers are to be published by Ashgate Publishers in July 2008 as 'Ways of Walking: Ethnography and Practice on Foot'
Walking around is fundamental to the everyday practice of social life. For the greater part of history, and today in much of the world, almost all human activities have been carried out on foot. It is thus above all by walking that humans inhabit their environments. While walking has rarely been a topic of direct investigation by ethnographers, it is an important part of both ethnographic practice and the lives of those amongst whom the ethnographer moves. Combining discussions of embodiment, place and materiality, we are now in a position to address walking as one of the 'techniques of the body' that Marcel Mauss identified over 70 years ago. This workshop is designed to gather perspectives on walking from different geographic and cultural contexts. Using our project as a starting point, we aim to enquire into the diversity of walking practices and the variety of meanings that walking can embody.
Monday 12th September |
|
3.00pm - 5.30pm |
3.00 Tea and coffee |
| 4.00 Welcome | |
| 4.15 Tim Ingold: Thinking on one's feet: walking as a way of knowing | |
Tuesday 13th |
|
9.00am - 10.15am |
Allice Legat: Walking stories: leaving footsteps |
| Elizabeth Curtis: Walking out of the classroom: learning on the streets of Aberdeen | |
10.15am - 10.45am |
Tea and coffee |
10.45am - 12.30pm |
Thomas Widlok: A comparative view on the dilemma of walking |
| Hayden Lorimer and Katrin Lund: A collectable topography: walking, remembering and recording mountains | |
12.30pm - 1.30pm |
Lunch |
1.30pm - 5.30pm |
Countryside walk - Bennachie |
Wednesday 14th |
|
9.00am - 10.15am |
Pernille Gooch: Walking slowly in the Himalayas on the path of transhumance through a landscape of ambiguity |
| Jo Lee: Taking a trip and taking care in everyday life | |
10.15am - 10.45am |
Tea and coffee |
10.45am - 12.30pm |
Tim Edensor: Walking through ruins |
| Lye Tuck-Po: Inviting forest, foreboding trails: Walking with Batek hunter-gatherers of Pahang, Malaysia | |
12.30pm - 2.00pm |
Lunch |
2.00pm - 3.45pm |
Kenneth Olwig: Location in a global one-eyed "natural" landscape contra the peripatetic world of binocular landscape |
| Ray Lucas: Taking a line for a walk: flânerie, drifts, and the artistic potential of urban wandering | |
| Sonia Lavadinho and Yves Winkin: Enchantment engineering and pedestrian empowerment: the Geneva case | |
3.45pm - 4.15pm |
Tea and coffee |
4.15pm - 5.30pm |
Katrin Lund: Listen to the sound of time: walking with saints in an Andalusia village |
| Paul Basu: Walking stories, narrative spaces | |
Thursday 15th |
|
9.00am - 11.00am |
Discussion and departure |
Paul Basu, Dept of Anthropology, Sussex, UK
Walking stories, narrative spaces
Drawing inspiration from de Certeau and Ricoeur, this paper continues an exploration of the relationships between landscape and narrative by considering what might be called 'pedestrian narratology'. Thinking through the landscapes and storyscapes of Dunbeath Strath in Caithness, Scotland, I am interested in how the practice of walking may be understood as a spatial enactment of Ricoeur's theories of temporal narrative emplotment. I approach landscape as a space of narrative potential, where particular narratives are actualised through the spatial practices of walkers, and where certain 'narrative paths' are suggested in the landscape itself (eg. the course of the Dunbeath Water, Neil Gunn's Highland River ), whilst others are narrated, as heritage trails, for instance, purposefully articulating an itinerary of sites. I also discuss my work with Dunbeath's community museum, our creation of a 'floor map', which invites visitors to walk a 'metaphorical' path through the Strath in a manner not dissimilar to the medieval pavement labyrinths of European cathedrals. Emplotment, I argue, is related to emplacement, and in the corporeal movement through narrative space, a sense of place is born.
Elizabeth Curtis, School of Education, Aberdeen, UK
Walking out of the classroom: learning on the streets of Aberdeen
'By organising learning activities that involve active engagement with the environment, teachers will encourage their pupils to see the relevance of their studies, to themselves, to their community and to the global environment as a whole.' (5-14 National Guidelines for Environmental Studies, Learning & Teaching Scotland 2001)
Theorists and policy makers have long recognised the value of learning through direct experience. In this paper I will explore the diverse ways in which knowledge is produced and reproduced through the experience of guided walks organised by Aberdeen Environmental Education Centre. Bourdieu has suggested that 'the book from which children learn their vision of the world is read with the body,' and it is this idea which underpins early years pedagogy of play in many European countries today. Walking provides opportunities for the extension of this kind of pedagogical approach beyond the early years of school. Walking, talking, looking and listening and being out of the classroom offers opportunities for active engagement with the world, and also to create the narratives which inform understanding and knowledge within curriculum-based topics such as, Victorians, Scottish homes, and the living world in Aberdeen.
Tim Edensor, Dept of Environmental and Geographical Sciences, Manchester Metropolitan, UK
Walking through ruins
Walking is primarily performed as a linear activity, whether as part of a routine march to work or a leisurely stroll through the countryside, following a footpath or mapped route. In contrast to these path-making exercises, I consider the effects of walking through a ruin, having undertaken many journeys to industrial ruins throughout Britain over the past three years. There are two particular effects I wish to focus upon. Firstly, I will account for the structures of ruins, formerly sites that certainly did require purposive and delimited walking practices, perhaps in line with the sequential demands of production lines and the sustenance of hierarchies, and subsequently maintained and policed bodies in industrial space. With the demise of these procedures, the decay of buildings and the disappearance of preferred route-ways, the ruin increasingly takes on the form of a labyrinth in which decisions about where to go are taken according to chance, intuition and whim. Secondly, I examine the somatic experience engendered by walking through a ruin. Here, the body must improvise in accordance with the encumbrances which confront it: the slippery floor surfaces, the obstacles which block its way and the fragile structures underfoot. In this encounter with ruined space, the body is enlivened and challenged by a wealth of sensory experience - including smells, sounds and tactilities which render any aloof disposition difficult, but also conjure up a multi-sensual world. I will conclude by suggesting that walking through a ruin can provide us with a critical awareness with which to interrogate the over-smooth, regulated fabric of much urban and suburban space and manicured forms of nature.
Pernille Gooch, Human Ecology Division, Lund University, Sweden
Feet following hooves
Many different groups are engaged in various forms of walking in the mountains. In this paper I will look at one specific form of movement by foot through a mountain environment as I follow the pastoral nomadic Van Gujjars on the path of transhumance through the Himalayas of Northern India as well as on their routes of herding in the forests of the foothills and in the alpine meadows. There is the actual walk through a landscape intimately known, the phenomenological aspect as the "techniques of the body" with its specific rhythm and different ways of path making, following the tail of the slow moving buffaloes, and consisting of movements and places apprehended through an embodied knowledge by people as well as animals. This is - to quote Merleau Ponty - "the simultaneously patterning of body and world in emotion", a use of the body brought into being through a common history where movement has always been undertaken by foot at the rear of the herd as part of the great pastoral movements through the region. This is life at the tail of the buffalo providing continuity, meaning and coherence. Animals come and go, people come and go but the walk through the circle of transhumance continues and constitutes the framework within which life is lived. As a people moving through a large regional system and dependent on its natural environment for survival, a strong element of existential risk is always present as the precariousness of the nomadic endeavour where the line separating life and death is as thin as the narrowest pathway at the crest of the mountain. But walking the mountain paths also something else creeps in, hampers the step and interrupts the rhythm, as the landscape transversed it is not just the environment actually surrounding the group of herders bodily moving through it. It is also a landscape of ambiguity - of constantly changing perspectives reflecting the turbulent world in which we live. As the Van Gujjars walk through mountains that are encircled by myth, considered environmentally fragile, contested and politicised, they are confronted with a "world of discourse" that now threaten to put a final stop to the walk of transhumance.
Tim Ingold, Dept of Anthropology, Aberdeen, UK
Thinking on one's feet: walking as a way of knowing
Studies of human cognition tend to assume that thinking and knowing are achievements of a mind at rest within a body in motion. This assumption, I suggest, is founded in three related areas of technological development that accompanied the onset of modernity: in footwear, paving and vehicular transport. Together these contribute to our ideas that movement is a mechanical displacement of the body across the earth's surface, from one point to another, and that knowledge is assembled from observations taken from these points. However the striding gait, once thought the quintessential human locomotor achievement, is not typical of ordinary pedestrian movement. Far from tramping over paved surfaces in stiff boots, human inhabitants have generally made their way lightly, dextrously and mostly barefoot. Walking, in other words, is by and large a mode of wayfaring rather than transport. In transport, not only is the route is predetermined by the connection between fixed points but also, in extreme cases, the experience of the transported passenger is one of enforced immobility and sensory deprivation. Wayfarers, by contrast, work out their trails as they go along, adjusting their movements in response to an ongoing perceptual monitoring of their surroundings, and invariably overshooting their destinations. It is in these thoughtful and improvisatory movements along ways of life that inhabitants' knowledge is forged. Though the traces left in the landscape by pedestrian movement may be long lasting, or alternatively may fade as quickly as they are made, these trails remain firmly etched in the memories of those who follow them. Thus locomotion and cognition are inseparable, and an account of the mind must be as concerned with the work of the feet as with that of the head and hands.
Sonia Lavadinho, University of Geneva, Switzerland, and Yves Winkin, École normale supérieure Lettres et sciences humaine (Lyon), France
Enchantment engineering and pedestrian empowerment: the Geneva case
The main question we are trying to adress is how may practices of "walking outdoors for leisure" be transferred into practices of "daily urban walking". In this paper we develop the central notion of enchantment to characterize urban athmospheres where such a transfer may occur, thus enabling walkers to appropriate themselves these euphoric places. The idea of places conducive to interactional euphoria, as we have constructed in our previous work, is not that far from the idea of urban pedestrian enchantment. The challenge for us, however, was double. Firstly, we had to step out of the traditional equation between euphoria and leisure. My euphoric places were cast as slow, almost languid sitting or walking areas, inviting idle talk and flanerie. When us went into the study of urban walking, we opted for a functional vision of walking: feet get you to places and back. How to build a bridge between active, goal-oriented pedestrian itineraries and enchantment? Secondly, while enchantment engineers can clearly be seen at work in places such as touristic resorts or group dynamics seminars, it is harder to point out their presence in ordinary urban settings. In spectacular urban upliftings, well-known architects, urbanists or artists clearly play the role of enchantment engineers. In this article we explore the possibilities of applying the notion of enchantment engineering to the realm of ordinary urban and landscape planning.
Enchantment is a two-sided movement where those who enchant and those who are to become enchanted each play an important role. To discuss the process from the point of view of the pedestrians, we jetted down the expression of pedestrian empowerment, and were struck by the notion's capacity to capture how urban walkers are nowadays aware of the growing role they play in the city, to the point they consider themselves in some cases as an emergent specific group, with precise needs and claims. The notion of personal pedestrian empowerment enabled us to describe the way walkers actively engage both in the act of walking and the construction of their own identity as walkers.
Jo Lee, Dept of Anthropology, Aberdeen, UK
Taking a trip, and taking care, in everyday life
It seems that there is a certain fascination with mishaps in walking. But what actually happens when things go wrong? Beginning with a discussion of the English poet William Wordsworth, this paper adds 'grounded' experiences to the more common Romantic representation of walks. I explore ethnographically the ways that walking happens in the city and the countryside in north east Scotland. Some mishaps that occur in walking, including tripping, slipping and losing the way, provide the basis for discussion. While in a trip the environment intrudes overmuch into the rhythm of walking, in a slip the absence of intrusion causes a problem. Losing the way, by contrast, interrupts the rhythm of routemaking. I aim to conceptualise the walker and the environment in a such a way that allows for these mobile and mutually-embedding relations of walking to be emphasised. Walkers move through a world of textures, and in doing so they need to take care. Finally, running through these themes is the idea of 'everydayness' as a way of sensing and knowing the environment, and I end by questionning the emotionality of the everyday.
Allice Legat, Dept of Anthropology, Aberdeen, UK
Walking stories: leaving footsteps
Andrews and Zoe discuss stories and places as co-existing. They argue that for the Dogrib of northern Canada 'the place' aids both the telling and learning of stories by anchoring narrative to the landscape. They describe how 'traveling stories' usually consist of a series of place-names, which Dogrib hunters follow as they travel new trails to new destinations. I will use their writings as stepping stones - so to speak - as I consider what it means to walk in a place. I will discuss how the act of being there, the act of 'walking in the place' provides individuals with 'true knowledge'. I will also discuss how each footprint firmly planted continually creates the mental map of what is embedded in the trails. The map belongs to those who walked the places and whose footsteps are there - perhaps not seen but, nevertheless, present and remember by each successive generation. From the Dogrib perspective, culture and landscape are inseparable as the knowledge shared through stories is tied to their physical context.
Hayden Lorimer, Dept of Geography, Glasgow and Katrin Lund, School of Anthropological Studies, Queen's University Belfast, UK
A collectable topography: walking, remembering and recording mountains
As objects of fascination, mountain summits fall into an unusual category of collectables that cannot be physically moved, consumed or conventionally owned. Nevertheless, in Scotland their collection is a century-long tradition, and a popular leisure phenomenon. Drawing on ethnographic research undertaken with groups of "hill-walkers", this paper explains how collecting communities are variously organised and made mobile, how collecting happens on a micro-geography of the mountain top, and is sometimes given visual expression through photographic practice. It considers how the later inspection of a treasured collection is itself a mobile experience: one based around perceptive acts and memory work in different social settings and specific sites. Moreover, it reveals how mountain collections can be freighted with political meaning and national feeling. As a lifetime objective, the claim to have set foot on all of the highest points in the country holds a powerful territorial appeal. Feet, it seems, are unexpectedly meaningful and tactile points of connection. In short, the paper tells of people finding their partners, their remembrances of the past, and emblems for their patriotism in the walks they make to collect mountain tops.
Raymond Lucas, Dept of Anthropology, Aberdeen, UK
Taking a line for a walk: flânerie, drifts, and the artistic potential of urban wandering
I intend with this paper to explore the walking activities of artists including Dada, Surrealism, the Situationist International and Fluxus. I shall detail the use they made of the city, and the different approaches they took to this field.
This is intended to place my own work with 'Getting Lost in Tokyo' in a larger context, as part of a continuing tradition of urban wandering. By engaging with the city, we must find appropriate forms of inscription to describe what we find there, forms of inscription which differ fundamentally from picturesque landscape or renaissance court painting traditions.
Katrin Lund, School of Anthropological Studies, Queen's University Belfast, UK
Listen to the sound of time: Walking with Saints in an Andalusia village
This paper examines the relationship between the body and place through the experience of walking in a ritual context. Located in a village in Andalusia, I follow the procession of the Patron Saint during the annual village 'fiesta' and examine how the place is narrated through the bodily act of moving along the communal paths that connect the place. Recent literature on Mediterranean rituals (eg. Boissevain 1992, and his contributors) has focused on how 'tradition' has undergone a combination of decline and revitalisation that have been brought about by rapid economic changes during the later half of the twentieth century. These are studies that often claim that with the introduction of tourism, Mediterranean rituals have become a spectacle of visiting tourists, arguing that although they have undergone revitalisation their authenticity has declined. My aim, on the other hand, is to demonstrate that if the attention is drawn to the narratives that are expressed and produced during the course of the event, what becomes apparent is that this recent history of changes and transformation is an integrated part of the ritual itself. By tracing the steps of several individuals during the course of the procession I will demonstrate how taking part in the procession evokes narratives; narratives that may express displacement but, as de Certeau states, also 'organize places through the displacement they describe' (1984: 116). Thus, I show how taking part in the procession through walking, looking or, even, listening is about bringing together personal narratives and life experiences; linking one's life to 'the lives of others' (Jackson 2002), in order to gain a sense of connection and continuity.
Lye Tuck-Po, Research Affiliate, Naga Research Group and HeritageWatch. 2005-06 Asia Fellow, Asian Scholarship Foundation
Inviting forest, foreboding trails: Walking with Batek hunter-gatherers of Pahang, Malaysia
My paper explores a seeming paradox in the walking practices of the Batek of Malaysia. They are forest-dwelling hunter-gatherers who, at least in Pahang state where I have done all my work, are largely mobile. By "mobile" I mean that the Batek are ever on the move. If anyone can be said to have a walking life, it is they. The paradox is this. On the one hand, the Batek are confident and even proud of their ability to make their way around the forest. They walk with the assurance of people who are comfortably at ease in their home ambience. How then do we reconcile this confidence with the Batek's oft-heard expressions of fear-of specific dangers in the forest, but also of particular kinds of walking experiences? Listening to Batek talk about their emotions, one might even think that fear is everywhere around and apparently inside them. Fear would seem to be a distancing mechanism. But if it does deter the Batek from walking in the forest, it is operating very subtly indeed. This is the problem that I will address in this paper. I suggest that walking is one of the primary bases for interacting with the forest, but walking also engenders a respect for its dangers and accordingly caution. Where walking takes the body forward, fear draws it back, and this tug between opposing directions of movement is what characterizes these hunting-and-gathering walking practices.
Kenneth Olwig, Dept of Landscape Planning, SLU, Sweden
Fixed Monocular Scenic Landscape vs. Binocular Walkscape
One dictionary definition of landscape is: "A portion of land that the eye can comprehend in a single view." Note the singular "eye." A definition from another dictionary specifies that landscape is " a portion of territory that can be viewed at one time from one place." The eye, in other words, is fixed in space and time. These definitions of landscape are related to a scenic conception in which landscape is defined as: "a picture representing a view of natural scenery (as fields, hills, forests, water) <landscape painting> and "the art of depicting such scenery." This scenic definition of landscape as a backdrop to be viewed at a distance differs considerably from the temporal "dwelling perspective" on landscape taken by Tim Ingold, and the complementary historical "substantive" approach, that I have taken, to landscape as emplaced (and emplacing) custom. Walking is of interest in relation to these differing notions of landscape because walking involves a temporal binocular bodily movement that constitutes place, rather than a perspective from a fixed monocular position in space. Walking thus engenders a perspective on landscape as the place of dwelling for a body politic. Using the difference between the fixed monocular perspective on landscape and the multiple perspectives of the embodied binocular walkscape, I will, in this paper, explore the role of walking in place making.
Thomas Widlok, Institute for Ethnology, University of Heidelburg, Germany
A comparative view on the dilemma of walking
Walking moves us towards someplace or someone but at the same time it moves us away from where we started. This basic dilemma of walking is the starting point for this paper.
I take this intrinsic property of walking as an instance of the more general phenomenological dilemma in which turning toward someone (some place) entails turning away from someone else (some other place). Walking that involves the possibility of following an existing path and the potential of creating a path that others could follow adds another important feature to the social dimension of walking. The anthropologically interesting question that arises is how people deal with these underlying properties of walking across different social relations through their cultural practices. The two cases that I compare and contrast in this paper are both taken from the same region (northern Namibia) so that the differences observed cannot simply be attributed to differences in ecology or habitat. Moreover, I claim that the two cases represent quite different modes that are found across the globe. Broadly speaking one may be called the forager mode of walking (represented by the =Akhoe Hai//om case) while the other may be called the explorer mode of walking (represented by GPS-equipped members of the international confluence project, who aim to visit confluences of longitude and latitude). The two modes, this paper argues, are extreme points on a spectrum, created through walking, between making for (or making after) and making off (or making away), between opening and blocking a path, between making a way and making an escape. The paper ends with a reflection on the position of anthropological walking, especially when going to the field, on that spectrum.
