Movements—as seemingly mundane as walking— partake in the continual construction of a place. As everyday patterns of movements (re)create spaces, walking serves as an active technique to “contribute to the ongoing formations of place” (Ingold 2011, 44). Thus the possibility to resist or subvert an external and imposed direction is also always present.
A line made by walking n(not Richard Long). Image’s Source.
Walking assumes whatever meaning one invests in it. Rebecca Solnit differentiates between kinds of walking from “practical locomotion” with a destination in mind and as a means to an end, and ‘subsets’ of walking that involve “investigations” “rituals” and walking as an end in itself (2000). As Solnit remarks, both thinking and walking in themselves and for their own sake are resistant to production-oriented systems, cast as a kind of labour which “does” nothing. Walking as resistance may also come in the form of noticing—as Moretti describes— “discordant voices, alternative visions of reality, or moments that suggest that things could be otherwise” (2016, 82).
An embodied and active imagination importantly brings these dimensions of a space into view; fragments of meaning are momentarily enlivened as one moves through them, offering hints of subaltern realities. Taking notice of the aspects which haunt social realities, absences that shadow them, and speculative possibilities that linger, are important for intervening in the transposed order and carving out forms of resistance. Cognizing social lives involves tracing historical nuances and envisioning alternative accounts of a place, informing a valuable analytical force for ethnography.
Spaces are always overlaid and filled with different memories, meanings, and histories; walking through them prompts a speculative imagination as to what is not there, what was there, or what could be there. Movement as a method is therefore conducive to the ethnographic imagination and process of interpretation and writing.
Equally, the space acts on its inhabitants and visitors, nagging at them; as Benjamin muses: “[t]he space winks at the flaneur. What do you think may have gone on here?” (1982, 419). This highlights the constructive capacity of ethnographies and writing too, as emphasizing underlying aspects of a place has brings them into being. As noted elsewhere, ethnographies create social realities rather than merely discovering them insofar as they help to discerning which stories, histories, and realities are represented and shared. In this sense, by choosing to focus on understated, marginal, or discordant realities ethnographies may partake in the continual formation of a place.
WORKS CITED
- Benjamin, W. (1882-1940) (1982 ed.). The Arcades Project. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
- Ingold, T. (2011). Being Alive. Routledge.
- Moretti, C. (2016). Walking. In Elliot, D. & Culhane, D. A Different Kind of Ethnography: Imaginative Practices and Creative Methodologies. (pp 74-96). University of Toronto Press.
- Solnit, R. (2000). The Wanderlust: a history of walking. New York: Viking.