walking near Hôtel des Invalides Paris 1972 from Wikimedia. Image’s source.
Walking at a contemplative pace lends insights into the intricacies of place. This practice offers promising potential to the aims of ethnography to craft intimate accounts, disorient and reorient the reader, and draw out new perspectives—through the surprising, spontaneous, routine, and mundane. Methodical movements through land/cityscapes prompts the re-emergence of things lost in the view from “above” (de Certeau 1984), affording the time to notice the distortions and subtleties of a space. Pedestrian views slip from the transposed “planned city” as cultural lives slip from political significance, each bleeds out from the imposed order in distinct dynamic deviations. There is, as de Certeau evokes, an “inversion” of the city’s “panopticon” which renders “a blindspot” in the “theoretical constructions” and “planning” of the place (1984). The distance and interplay between a constructed order and the corresponding spatial realities of a place are often revealed as one navigates through them. These features are important to ethnographic accounts as they illustrate the different meanings attributed to a place, thereby providing greater intimacy and awareness.
Perpetual grounded movements—which are stilled in planned projections— draw up the everyday patterns of lived spaces and make collective places what they are. As Walter Benjamin notes, “[s]treets are the dwelling place of the collective”, which are “eternally unquiet, eternally agitated” (1982, 423). Memories, symbols, political values, and cultural dimensions are anchored in places, embracing slow and immersive locomotion urges techniques of noticing them. This is an effective ethnographic strategy as it brings different negotiations of power, space, and place into view. Moving and navigating through collective places prompts us to notice the ways our actions shape and are shaped by those around us—both humans and otherwise. This provides an idea of who is in/excluded; how power is spatially distributed, expressed, or contained; and how aspects of a place might be (dis)connected to one another. The material configurations of a place direct, enable, and inhibit various movements, in doing so, they take on their own rhythm and become imbued with distinct political and cultural values. In this sense, walking as an ethnographic method partakes in the material turn, directing greater focus to other-than-human entities that structure our surroundings and experience. Walking also requires that the mind, body, senses, landscape, and others be in constant conversation with one another, relaying responses and reactions. Taking notice of these features is valuable to the immersive and intersubjective demands of fieldwork. In turn, this may also help to discern the whole of a collective/place which is greater than the sum of its parts by accounting for the exchanges between them.
Movement is also conducive to the process of thinking and writing. Wandering feeds the imagination, in expanding the view it enlivens new perspectives and spurs thoughts in different directions. Walking is an ‘imaginative’ strategy, referring–in Appadurai’s (1996) words—not to a ‘detachment from reality, but rather to a complex engagement with it’ (from Moretti 2016). As such it provides a new way of thinking, and of thinking about, in, and of a place. Walter Benjamin refers to a “walking consciousness” to which, he offers, the “[c]ategory of similarity” has “only minimal relevance”(1982, 418). The insinuation seems to be that walking demands a presence of mind and body, a naivety and open-endedness with the potential to suspend usual preconceived classificatory schemes. As Solnit evokes, “[t]he rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking” (2000, 5), a slow pace favours measured and careful rumination, affording the time to compose and recompose thoughts. Walking welcomes free but anchored thinking, not mired by the confines which so often impose themselves in states of deliberation or immobility, but grounded nonetheless in an ever-changing scene and sensory awareness. This elicits a kind of learning that goes beyond instruction and imitation to the attention required by embodied experiences and practical activity (Ingold 2011).Writing itself can be framed as a kind of “perambulation” (Pandian 2017) that carves out distinct routes around things, inflects different perspectives, explores, imagines, and frames various scenes, sometimes with a destination in mind and other times welcoming digressions.
WORKS CITED
- Benjamin, W. (1882-1940) (1982 ed.). The Arcades Project. The Belknap Press of Havard University Press.
- de Certeau, M. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. Chapter VII. Walking in the City. University of California Press.
- Ingold, T. (2011). Being Alive. Routledge.
- Pandian, A. Walking and Writing. (2017). In Pandian, A. & McLean, S. Crumpled paper boat: Experiments in ethnographic writing. (pp.68-71). Duke University Press.