Ways of Walking

Ethnography and Practice on Foot

Jo Lee Vergunst, Tim Ingold, Jo Lee Vergunst, Tim Ingold

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351873499
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Despite its importance to how humans inhabit their environments, walking has rarely received the attention of ethnographers. Ways of Walking combines discussions of embodiment, place and materiality to address this significant and largely ignored 'technique of the body'. This book presents studies of walking in a range of regional and cultural contexts, exploring the diversity of walking behaviours and the variety of meanings these can embody. As an original collection of ethnographic work that is both coherent in design and imaginative in scope, this primarily anthropological book includes contributions from geographers, sociologists and specialists in education and architecture, offering insights into human movement, landscape and social life. With its interdisciplinary nature and truly international appeal, Ways of Walking will be of interest to scholars across a range of social sciences, as well as to policy makers on both local and national levels.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst

When did our walk begin? When will it ever end? We cannot remember, and will never know. Walking, in this regard, is much like talking, and both are quintessential features of what we take to be a human form of life. We are already talking by the time we realize that this is what we are doing; and only those who remain after we are gone will know which words will have been our last. So it is, too, with our first and last steps. Life itself is as much a long walk as it is a long conversation, and the ways along which we walk are those along which we live. There are beginnings and endings, of course. But every moment of beginning is itself in the midst of things and must, for that reason, be also a moment of ending in relation to whatever went before. Likewise, every step faces both ways: it is both the ending, or tip, of a trail that leads back through our past life, and a new beginning that moves us forward towards future destinations unknown. The same goes for the words we read and write. We begin to write, and you begin to read, in the thick of things, and only because we have set aside other tasks for the time being. We do not, however, travel alone. Our principal contention is that walking is a profoundly social activity: that in their timings, rhythms and inflections, the feet respond as much as does the voice to the presence and activity of others. Social relations, we maintain, are not enacted in situ but are paced out along the ground.

With this book we draw together several lines of thinking in contemporary social science: about the human body and its movements; about perception and the work of the senses; about education, enskillment and the formation of knowledge; about the constitution of space and place; about wayfaring and storytelling; and about the relations between humans and non-humans. We follow in the footsteps of Marcel Mauss who, in his famous essay of 1934 on Techniques of the Body, was perhaps the first to put walking on the agenda as a serious topic for comparative ethnological inquiry (Mauss 1979, 95-135). As in so many of his writings, Mauss left no more than a fragmentary and unfinished sketch for a programme of work that had still to be undertaken, and one that was so anachronistic in its formulation – with its lists of customs from around the world – and yet so far ahead of its time in the questions it opened up, that for long it fell on deaf ears. So thoroughly had it been forgotten that when, some four decades later, Pierre Bourdieu (1977) launched his theory of practice centred on the bodily dispositions of the habitus, few recalled that Mauss had already introduced the habitus to anthropology, as the key to his understanding of the social formation of body techniques, taking care to distinguish it from the merely idiosyncratic ‘habits’ of individuals, and illustrating it by way of a narrative of walking. Significantly, the narrative was about the arms and hands:

I think I can recognize a girl who has been raised in a convent. In general, she will walk with her fists closed. And I can still remember my third-form teacher shouting at me: “Idiot! why do you walk around the whole time with your hands flapping wide open?” Thus there exists an education in walking too (Mauss 1979, 100).

Indeed, walking is an accomplishment of the whole body in motion, as much the work of the hands and lungs as of the feet.

Of course Bourdieu’s understanding of the habitus was far removed from that of Mauss. For Mauss was still enough of a disciple of his mentor, Emile Durkheim, to give pride of place in his thinking to systems of collective representations. His point was simply that to be enacted or given physical expression, these representations must call upon some material means, and for human beings these means are furnished, first and foremost, by the body – whether or not extended by extra-somatic instruments. The body thus plays object to the collective subject otherwise known as ‘society’. Refusing such subject/object dichotomies, Bourdieu placed the habitus firmly in the space of the body’s active engagement in its surroundings, in the ‘practical mastery’ of everyday tasks involving characteristic postures and gestures, or a particular body hexis (Bourdieu 1977, 87). A way of walking, for example, does not merely express thoughts and feelings that have already been imparted through an education in cultural precepts and proprieties. It is itself a way of thinking and of feeling, through which, in the practice of pedestrian movement, these cultural forms are continually generated (ibid., 93-4).

But could we not also put this proposition in reverse, to argue that thinking and feeling are ways of walking? This would, admittedly, be to interpret the notion of walking more broadly than is usual, as a paradigmatic instance of what Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (1999) has called ‘thinking in movement’. Taking this step, however, obliges us to acknowledge that to think and feel is not to set up a relation of external contact or correspondence between subjective states of mind and objectively given conditions of the material world, but rather to make one’s way through a world-information, in a movement that is both rhythmically resonant with the movements of others around us – whose journeys we share or whose paths we cross – and open-ended, having neither a point of origin nor any final destination. Not only, then, do we walk because we are social beings, we are also social beings because we walk. That walking is social may seem obvious, although it is all the more remarkable, in this light, that social scientists have devoted so little attention to it. However to hold – as we do – that social life is walked is to make a far stronger claim, namely for the rooting of the social in the actual ground of lived experience, where the earth we tread interfaces with the air we breathe. It is along this ground, and not in some ethereal realm of discursively constructed significance, over and above the material world, that lives are paced out in their mutual relations. Thus careful, ethnographic analysis of walking, we suggest, can help us rethink what being social actually means. This is a task that remains to be done. Amidst the clamour of calls to understand the body as an existential ground for the production of cultural form, rather than only as a source of physical and metaphorical means for its expression (Csordas 1990, 5), we tend to forget that the body itself is grounded in movement. Walking is not just what a body does; it is what a body is. And if the body is foundational to culture, then walking – or thinking in movement – is ‘foundational to being a body’ (Sheets-Johnstone 1999, 494).

Ethnographers, as we have noted elsewhere (Lee and Ingold 2006), are accustomed to carrying out much of their work on foot. But while living with a group of people usually means walking around with them, it is rare to find ethnography that reflects on walking itself, least of all from the kind of comparative perspective that we offer in this book. No doubt the topic of walking figures often enough in ethnographers’ fieldnotes. Once they come to write up their results, however, it tends to be sidelined in favour of ‘what really matters’, such as the destinations towards which people were bound or the conversations that happened en route. Even multi-sited fieldwork (Marcus 1998) focuses on the sites themselves, as though life were lived at a scatter of fixed locales rather than along the highways and byways upon which they lie. But how people go along on foot (as the vast majority of human beings have done, throughout history) is important. How do they prepare and set out, and how do they carry on through places in which, for any number of reasons, it may be difficult to walk? How do they arrive? Drawing on a phenomenological tradition (Jackson 1996), we aim to embed our ideas of the social and the symbolic within the immediate day-to-day activities that bind practice and representation, doing, thinking and talking, and to show that everything takes place, in one way or the other, on the move. In describing their own trails or those of the people in many lands with whom they have walked, the contributors to this book – though they come from a variety of disciplines and represent more than one theoretical perspective – share an ambition to pay attention to experiences of tactile, feet-first, engagement with the world. By way of introduction we will go around to meet them, eventually returning, as befits a tour, to where we began.

Setting out

As we embark on our walk, our eyes are not upon a distant horizon. The first steps we take are tentative, even experimental, and time passes slowly as we attempt them. As yet unsure of our bearing or direction, each step feels like our first: a one-off that may lead to a second, a third, and so on, but that may just as well come to nothing. We do not, in other words, start to walk as the athlete starts to run, at the shot of a pistol, springing into action at the instant. For it is only after quite a few steps, when the feet have found their rhythm and the body its momentum, that we discover – without having been aware of any moment of commencement – that we are already walking. In this respect setting out recapitulates, albeit in a highly abbreviated form, what happens in infancy. The infant’s attention, too, is on the close-at-hand. Seeking to reach it by whatever means possible, he or she will improvise a mode of locomotion that mixes steps and tumbles – quaintly known as ‘toddling’ – until, after what seems like an age, it matures into a fully-fledged walk. Rarely, of course, do infants walk alone, as parents or older siblings give a helping hand. Between whiles, they may be carried, and it is surely while sitting astride or behind the shoulders of a grown-up that the infant first experiences walking as a rhythmic activity in which the eyes can set their sights on more expansive vistas while leaving the feet to look after themselves. Before that, of course, the unborn baby will have experienced something of the same rhythmic movement while carried in the womb.

Even when they have found their feet, small children’s focus on the near-at-hand and their boundless curiosity in everything in the vicinity – which they want to reach out and touch as well as look at – can continually thwart the intentions of the adults with whom they walk. Nowhere is this more so than in a modern Western city where rules of orderliness and proper conduct on the street combine with real risks from passing traffic or of becoming separated in the throng. Tightly held hands can mediate something approaching a tug-of-war in which the adult, due to superior strength and stature, invariably wins out while the child has to put one foot before the other simply to avoid falling flat on the face. For younger children, of course, the ultimate penalty for insubordination is to be forcibly strapped into a push-chair, wheeled with steely determination by the victorious adult. Older children are dragged along behind. Sociologist Michael Wolff has described how city parents treat under-sevens like baggage to be pulled like a suitcase on wheels (Wolff 1973). While the adult looks ahead, negotiating a path through eye-to-eye contact with oncomers, the child’s eyes are resolutely downcast. By the time the child has reached school age, he or she is supposed to have been trained by such discipline, and already to ‘know’ how to walk.

Meet Elizabeth Curtis (Chapter 10), as she escorts classes of primary schoolchildren by foot along the streets of the city of Aberdeen, in north-east Scotland. The purpose of these educational outings is to enhance children’s awareness of the architectural heritage of the city. They follow a pre-planned trail linking a series of sites of special interest. At each successive site they stop to make and record their observations. These may be auditory and tactile as well as visual, such as the sound of running water in a concealed gully or the texture of cut stone. So far as their teachers are concerned, however, walking itself is not understood as a practice of observation, nor do the trail booklets they use make any reference to it. Observations are to be made from a stationary position, not on the move. Walking, then, is considered simply as a means to get from one site to the next. During walks, children are expected to behave sensibly and to follow the rules of road safety. Ideally they should march two abreast in a neat line, a formation traditionally known as the ‘crocodile’. Though instructed to look and listen, attention is to be focused on traffic and passers-by, in order to avoid accident, rather than on such things as the wind, rain or sunshine, the flight of birds and the barking of dogs, puddles and autumn leaves, and the myriad trifles from snails to conkers, and from dropped coins to telltale litter, that make every street a place of such absorbing interest to the miniature detective whose eyes are still close to the ground. For every child is such a detective, especially as – unsupervised – they make their way on foot to school and back, absorbing as they do the sights, sounds, feel, and smells of their surroundings through varying weather and changing seasons.

Learning the way

The supervised heritage trail, as Curtis shows, transforms the streets into a classroom. It does so by taking outdoors an axiom fundamental to the constitution of the classroom as an indoor learning environment, namely, that knowledge is to be pieced together through the work of head and hands, from information obtained at diverse locations, rather than grown along the paths children take as they make their ways on foot, from place to place, through the world about which they learn. Such a division between knowledge and movement would seem strange to the Batek of Malaysia, forest-dwelling hunter-gatherers described by Lye Tuck-Po (Chapter 2). We come across Lye fumbling her way through the tropical forest, an environment that could not be more different from the paved streetscape of her childhood, when the jungle was remembered as an alien and fearsome place. Now, living with the Batek, she finds herself slipping and slithering through a dense tangle of roots, vines, ooze and debris, where one can never be sure of one’s footing and where to hang on to vegetation risks bringing the whole lot down on one’s head. In this highly dynamic environment nothing is ever quite the same from one moment to the next. Batek ‘train’ their children in the arts of negotiating the forest not through the imposition of discipline, or by keeping them on a leash, but rather by leaving them as much as possible to their own devices. Adults follow from the rear rather than taking the lead, and allow children to find their own ways, at their own pace, while keeping them under close but benign observation. For the Batek, as Lye shows, walking comprises a suite of bodily performances that include observing, monitoring, remembering, listening, touching, crouching and climbing. And it is through these performances, along the way, that their knowledge is forged.

Movement, here, is not adjunct to knowledge, as it is in the educational theory that underwrites classroom practice. Rather, the movement of walking is itself a way of knowing. A knowledgeable person is distinguished from a novice not by the sheer amount of information packed into his or her head – information that would in any case be perpetually obsolescent in an ever-changing environment – but by observational acuity and an awareness of the consequences of actions. Let us join Allice Legat (Chapter 3) as she walks with hunter-gatherers from the other side of the world, the Tł

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(Dogrib) people of northwest Canada, in their boreal forest environment. Here too, walking is as much a movement of pensive observation – of thinking as you watch and watching as you think – as it is a way of getting around. Someone who has walked knows the ways of the world. To know, here, means to be able to take action, with a reasonable knowledge of what its consequences will be. Knowledgeable people, in short, can tell, in all senses of the word. As discerning observers, they can tell what is going on in the world around them, such as the movements of animals or impending changes in the weather. But they can also tell the stories that, for Tł

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people, are fundamental to all understanding. And by relating their observations, taken while walking, to the appropriate narratives, they can tell what will come to pass.

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adults are compulsive storytellers. Whatever the matter at hand, they can always find a story stretching back to old times but extended and embellished through their own experience, by which its significance can be interpreted. Children grow up hearing these stories almost every day. This storytelling is not however invested with didactic purpose or understood, as it might be by Western educationalists, as a child-centred way of conveying valued knowledge and information. Stories are stories, not coded messages. As Legat shows, simply having heard the stories is not enough to make an individual knowledgeable in the sense of having the capacity to take action. True knowledge depends on the confirmation of stories in personal experience, and to achieve this one must travel the trails and visit the places of which they tell, in the company of already knowledgeable elders. Between hearing the stories and walking the land, there is therefore a transitional stage in children’s learning. At this stage children know the stories but do not yet know what they mean, and so cannot be guided by them in their action. This carries a crucial implication regarding the inter-generational transmission of knowledge, which is of great concern to Tł

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elders. It is that the continuity of knowledge can be secured only by ensuring that generations overlap in their actual experience of walking the land. An intermediate generation that has heard the stories but has not had those stories validated by experience will not be able to guide its successors. That is why Tł

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elders attach such importance to providing opportunities for yo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Before a Step Too Far: Walking with Batek Hunter-Gatherers in the Forests of Pahang, Malaysia
• 3 Walking Stories; Leaving Footprints
• 4 The Dilemmas of Walking: A Comparative View
• 5 Feet Following Hooves
• 6 Performing on the Landscape versus Doing Landscape: Perambulatory Practice, Sight and the Sense of Belonging
• 7 Listen to the Sound of Time: Walking with Saints in an Andalusian Village
• 8 Taking a Trip and Taking Care in Everyday Life
• 9 Walking Through Ruins
• 10 Walking Out of the Classroom: Learning on the Streets of Aberdeen
• 11 Enchantment Engineering and Pedestrian Empowerment: The Geneva Case
• 12 ‘Taking a Line for a Walk’: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice
• 13 A Collectable Topography: Walking, Remembering and Recording Mountains
• Index