Landscape Research special issue
Introduction: Routing Landscape: Ethnographic Studies of Movement and Journeying
Jo Vergunst and Arnar Árnason
Department of Anthropology
University of Aberdeen
Edward Wright Building
Dunbar Street
Aberdeen
AB24 3QY
j.vergunst@abdn.ac.uk
arnar.arnason@abdn.ac.uk
Word counts:
Text without bibliography - 3555
Total document - 3859
Introduction: Routing Landscape: Ethnographic Studies of Movement and Journeying
This special issue is about the human experience of landscape, and presents novel
ethnographic approaches from anthropology and geography.1 Taking the experience of
landscape to be based fundamentally in movement rather than stasis, the papers consider how
journeying can be both a mode of dwelling and integral to the relation between stability and
instability in landscape. A further common aim is to address political aspects of landscape,
such as access, administrative designations and land use conflict, in terms of the experiential
landscape, such as perception of time, way-finding and identity. We see these aspects of
landscape as inseparable in human experience, and a significant way in which they are
brought together is through the journeys that people make. In this introduction we set out the
overall scope of the special issue and consider the relationship between landscape and
mobilities research. We then outline some points of methodology in the papers with a view to
commenting on the means as well as the content on research, and end by summarising some
key points of each paper.
Let us start with a small ‘autoethnographic’ moment recounted by Katrín Lund in her
paper in this issue. Emerging from a Reykjavik supermarket to find the pavement impossibly
icy, she makes her way across the badly-lit car park instead.
‘With bags full of groceries in each hand, I tried to balance my body as I crossed the car
park slowly, aware of each step in terms of where I put my feet, frequently stopping
and letting surfing cars go by. I felt vulnerable in this car dominant space.’ (Lund, this
volume)
In this particular moment outside a supermarket, overlapping problems and contexts are
gathered together. For Lund the walker, the most immediate are the ice and the dark: the
simple difficulty of putting one foot in front of the other in bad weather, when burdened with
luggage. Where contact between the body and the ground cannot be trusted, movement
foregrounds itself as the very object and focus of concern. The cars meanwhile constitute a
material presence, as well as a social space, that is inherently dangerous to a pedestrian. One
form of movement comes into conflict with another. Underlying these interactions is Lund’s
own unfamiliarity with the environment and the conditions, that she identifies as a lack of
skill and practice, and could also be described as a kind of alienation (Olwig 2008, 40). The
way the journey happens, in other words, is conditioned by the traveller’s own biography:
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Lund may have been able to deal with these conditions during her previous residence in
Reykjavik, but has lost the skills during her absence and now senses the task ahead of her in
reconnecting with the landscape.
What is seemingly a momentary and unexpected vulnerability must surely be
widespread in the human experience of landscape on the move. Small mishaps and
adjustments form part of the overall rhythm of all kinds of journeys, and thus movement is
never just a repeated sequence of physical actions (Vergunst 2008). In a different setting,
Laurier and Lorimer in this issue describe the continual adjustment and responses made by
car drivers and their passengers during frequently-travelled commutes, showing how even
when the journey is ‘repeated’ each is in fact never the same. Where transport planners may
promise a modernist utopia of smooth and straightforward movement, during the journey
itself travellers know that the actual conditions along the way constantly vary and need to be
attended to, and that each iteration will differ from the last.
If we set aside the planner’s utopia in order to be attentive to the actuality of movement,
the gathering-together of material, social and biographical conditions is entirely natural and
to be expected. From the perspective of the person moving, in fact, each condition brings the
other into being, so there is no material environment that is not also social and biographical,
and while a landscape of social and biographical significance may not have a particularly
notable material characteristic it will certainly have a material presence that humans become
involved in through their social activities. Kenneth Olwig (2008) describes these ‘gathering’
qualities of landscape in relation to a specific case, the medieval Jutland Landsting, in a way
relevant to this special issue. The Landsting was literally a gathering place for people to make
manifest the unwritten, memorised law of the land (ibid. 34), itself ‘empty’ or without
specific material significance but nonetheless constitutive of the landscape as a site of human
dwelling. Drawing on Heidegger’s phenomenology and Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, Olwig
contrasts a static scenery perspective on the Jutland landscape with the ‘gathered’ landscape
of human activity based in ‘movement and process’ (ibid. 35). The point is that sites of
activity do not just gather people together in the landscape, as if landscape were the scenic
backdrop. Rather, landscape is itself constituted through the interweaving of mobile activity
and material surroundings.
A key task of the present volume is to explore this insight ethnographically – to make a
move, at least in part, from an archetypal case to the everyday. If Lund’s precarious walk out
of the Reykjavik supermarket also gathered together a political landscape, in the sense that
material and social forces made themselves felt in the context of her own biography and in
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that specific time and place, what ontological status needs to be attributed to the walk, the
movement, itself? What were that gathering’s effects and consequences? The most
fundamental question to emerge is thus as follows. What difference does it make to one’s
experience of landscape if one is journeying through it? More specifically, what can a
research focus on movement contribute to the qualitative understanding of landscape in such
a way that brings phenomenological and political perspectives together?
Landscape and mobilities
In addressing these questions we acknowledge the substantial work done by ‘mobilities’
scholars in social science over recent years. Tim Cresswell’s wide ranging On The Move
(2006) tracks the discourses of sedentarism and nomadism in social theory as two
‘metanarratives of mobility’. In the former, a focus on bounded culture, place and the ‘roots’
of social identity views modernistic mobility as a threat, either to traditionally ‘emplaced’
communities facing change, or to populations such as Gypsy-Travellers for whom travel has
been integral to their identity and are being required to sedentarise in particular ways. As we
currently write, we are witnessing the struggles of the Dale Farm Gypsy-Travellers in Essex,
England, to maintain their home as a base-for-movement in the face of local government
planning decisions. In the latter metanarrative of mobility, mobility is an exploration of
‘nomad’ or ‘smooth’ space, as termed by Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 420), and celebrated as
a mode of resistance to the constraints of ‘striated’ space where architecture and law hem in
one’s movements. This also relates to the tactics of the pedestrian compared with the strategy
of the city planner, in de Certeau’s well-known terms (de Certeau 1984). In this second sense,
mobility and an ontology of becoming can be a positive alternative to the conception of
society as a bounded and static social group (Cresswell 2006, 47). Subsequent chapters in
Cresswell’s book trace out case studies of the interplay between mobility as fact and
representation in the modern Western world. John Urry takes a similar path in considering the
‘interdependent digitized systems of mobility’ that have come to prominence in the 21st
century (Urry 2007, 15). In Urry’s account of theory in this area, Heidegger is invoked as a
‘sedentarist’, and as others have noted (e.g. Tilley 1994), it is possible to see the notion of
dwelling in Heidegger’s work as a claim for stability and tradition in a fast-changing world.
But is it the case that these threads in mobility and landscape theorising are necessarily
and always opposed to each other? Heidegger’s concept of gathering, which is integral to
dwelling, does in a sense have movement at its heart, for ‘to gather’ must also in a primary
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sense be ‘to move’. As drawn on by Laurier and Lorimer in this volume, Tim Ingold has
shown that movement of a foundational kind, or that which is basic and continuous to human
experience, is not the point-to-point transportation of modernity that sets itself in opposition
to stasis, but the irregular, occasionally paused, movement of the wayfarer along ways of life
that broadly constitutes the process of dwelling. In Laurier and Lorimer’s paper on carsharing for commuter journeys, it is the small, and indeed tiny, acts of communication and
sociability between drivers and passengers that have significance. These are often improvised
gestural routines, where hand and head movements indicate direction, or assent or dissent,
that are common enough in ordinary practice. Yet it is such gestures carried out along the
way which achieve the journey, and are as integral to it as the prior allocations of role (i.e.
who will be driver and passenger) and decisions of overall route and destination. The
movement through landscape is not after all entirely pre-planned, even in these most routine
of journeys; it rather unfolds according to the circumstances of the landscape itself – a much
broader point than the concern with commuting initially seems to relates to.
Could it then be argued that the concern of mobilities scholars with the specificity of the
20th and 21st century ‘West’ is overdone? Urry and others attempt to comes to terms with the
complexity and inter-digitated nature of modern systems of mobility, and scholars of
globalisation have explored the increased flow of people, ideas and capital in
characteristically modern forms (e.g. Appadurai 1996), both meanwhile being underpinned
by philosophers of modernity such as Paul Virilio (1986). But it would be reductive to
connect mobility and movement taking place within what we call ‘the modern era’ simply to
the social trends and processes most closely associated with that. The ethnographic tales told
here are located in contexts of sociality and embedded practice, often connected to modern
situations but, as the example from Laurier and Lorimer’s work shows, not reducible to them.
We need ways of conceptualising and analysing mobility that can attend to subjectivity and
experience, or embodiment and enskilment, in the terms relevant to those who are producing
such practices. Augé’s (1999) notion of ‘contemporaneous worlds’, drawing on Eric Wolf
and Johannes Fabian, asserts that societies are not temporally different, so the exotic ‘other’
is not the past of the Western ‘self’, but rather societies exist together in the same field of
time and space. This may be a more useful ethnographic temporality and spatiality for
mobilities research than a hard-and-fast boundary between the traditional and the modern.
What research on landscape achieves particularly well is a sense of context in the
actions of continuity and change. Through these means the ‘narrow’ tale of, to use examples
from this volume, marriage journeys in Siberia (Argounova-Low) or walking over farmland
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in Orkney (Vergunst), are connected to a multiplicity of cultural or political processes and
material practices that can very well be contemporaneous with each other, and are as much
‘traditional’ as ‘modern’. This is both in settings where the landscape can be conceived of as
a relatively stable palimpsest (Bender 1993), in which the Vergunst’s Orkney case could fit,
and in situations of movement and exile (Bender and Winer 2001), pertinent to ArgounovaLow’s Siberian ethnography. In Argounova-Low’s case, the road is the means by which
tradition and connectedness could be maintained, rather than a way for the people escape
their past. It is thus the exploration of wider context that works to shows the interconnectedness of everyday activity and social processes.
Analogies with archaeology can be drawn here, as artefacts uncovered by an
archaeologist are made meaningful through its connection with the substrate in which it has
been immersed. Ian Hodder’s (2011) discussion of ‘things’ draws attention to the
entanglement of artefacts in the landscape. For him, ultimately there is no clear-cut
distinction between the two because of the constant interchange of material and meaning. The
walls of the neolithic houses of Çatal Hüyük in modern-day Turkey are made of endless
layers of mud, which were forever on the verge of collapsing back into the land from which
they were made. Gathered up in them are the efforts of their builders to dwell there, in
movement amongst the clay pits and marshes. In the end it is not so much that a discrete
object has a context in a broader landscape or social process, but rather that the process is
gathered up within its own substance. In Çatal Hüyük, movement was the foundational
activity that formed relations with the landscape, even in the pursuit of a stable dwelling. The
artefact uncovered by the archaeologist must be seen as part of this movement, indeed a
gathering of social and environmental forces that had been keeping it in motion.
There are connections here with the roads that Argounova-Low describe in this volume,
which are made by the practice of people and animals pressing a trail into the landscape and
remembering its path. In this case the ‘thing’ is a route that is significant for the identity of
those who know it, even though in Argounova-Low’s case they are no longer able to follow
it. And while Ween and Abram’s mountain trekkers in Norway usually follow way-marked
trails, in doing so further open up the path and create a shared identity – though here in
keeping with the nation state, rather than implied in opposition to it as amongst Argounova
Low’s Evenki informants.
The broadest promise of the ‘mobilities turn’ is that it will not just seek insights into
modernity, but into the shifting sands, and muds, of materials and movement, as part of a
broader philosophy of phenomenology and politics. It would be less neat and more messy as
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a result, but perhaps in the end closer in character to the landscapes through which movement
actually happens. A contribution of this special issue is therefore to make connections
between the burgeoning mobilities literature and the potential of landscape research to bring
together humanistic themes of movement and context. The ethnographic focus on what
happens during movement is, we contend, one means by which this can be done.
Methods and the mobile techniques of research
Come back to the episode outside the Reykjavik supermarket, where Katrín Lund is sliding
across the car park. What would a photograph or a film of this landscape be like? Mostly
black, perhaps, with a few pools of artificial light coming from a supermarket sign, car
headlights, perhaps streetlights reflecting off the ice on the ground. However, Lund is relating
her experience in a written narrative, and presenting as fieldwork what becomes a duration
rather than a moment of landscape. It is worth exploring here the methodologies that
constitute ethnographic fieldwork carried out on the move. In the introduction to a special
issue on ‘mobility methodologies’ in the journal Mobilities, D’Andrea et al. (2011) explore
the methodological responses of qualitative researchers trying to capture or narrate mobilities.
For them, questions of methodology can serve to connect the ‘macro’ and ‘micro’ scales of
social science research:
‘Beyond method technicalities and meta-theoretical premises, the problem of
methodology resides in the ‘middle ground’ of research, where ways to develop
systematic interfaces between the empirical and the theoretical, the specific and the
generic, the trivial and the significant can be unbundled in order to facilitate the process
of knowledge production, testing and generalization.’ (D’Andrea et al. 2011: 157)
We share with them a methodological concern to integrate political and structural
perspectives with close-at-hand ethnography. In ethnography, it could further be argued,
methodological techniques have the opportunity to respond to and resonate with the
movements of the research subjects (Vergunst 2011). An engagement with landscape serves
to ground methodology within the actuality of real life.
Lund juxtaposes her car-park episode with two others: one of an inveterate walker and
medical curiosity from the 19th century who is destined to live in movement out on the road,
and a set of insights into the walking habits of contemporary pedestrians in Belfast. For the
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most part it is the latter of these which is closest to the traditional notion of social science
research, yet an overall focus on movement leads to the use of distinctive methodologies. The
researchers in this volume attempt to gain a sense of both the movement in the landscape and
that of the people in it. Insight occurs through different though often overlapping methods.
Vergunst and Ween and Abram describe episodes of participant observation in their papers in
which the researchers share the journeys of their informants. Travelling side-by-side, they
come to understand and literally see the perspectives their informants have of the landscapes,
whether comprising of farmland or mountainside. These papers also interweave perspectives
from wider discourses, in Ween and Abram’s case from the history of mountain trekking and
the main trekking organisation, and in Vergunst’s from nature conservation and recreational
users of the landscape. Although Laurier and Lorimer do not directly share the journeys of
their subjects themselves, they have installed a technological presence that allows the tiniest
aspects of sociality to be tracked. Such a methodology enables a different kind of story to be
told, not so much the typical or aggregate journey, but how each individual journey is
continued through small moments of skill and social interaction. For Laurier and Lorimer,
recollecting the story of different journeys happens frame-by-frame in a slow-motion replay,
while matching up the conversations of their informants with their gestures.
All the papers also attend closely to spoken narratives, generated both through
interview and in the course of everyday interaction with their informants. The narratives in
these cases are recorded in field notes and re-told in dialogue with the features of the
landscape they relate to. The narratives are often tied to historical readings of the landscape,
which again bring in diverse voices and documentary sources as well as evidence in the
landscape itself. Vergunst describes the different features of the landscape attended to by
farmers and environmentalists, for example, while Ween and Abram show the marking-out of
trekking association trail networks through the Norwegian mountains. There is a
methodological concern here with the places in their experienced or phenomenal present, and
how they have come to be as they are.
The papers overall demonstrate the effectiveness of a sustained fieldwork engagement,
in contrast to a static image or short clip of landscape. Methodologies in such fieldwork
overlap and cross-cut each other, as the researchers for the most part do not enter the field to
administer a discrete methodology and then leave again at once. Rather, a number of
methodological trails are followed during successive periods of fieldwork, and through their
engagements, the researchers contribute themselves to notions of landscape and place in their
field sites. Sarah Pink has put this in terms of ‘place-making’:
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‘We should moreover recognize that it is at least in part through our own routes and
pathways (Ingold, 2007) that we are entangled in place-making processes (rather than
simply attributing these to our research participants). This invites an exploration of how
ethnographers and research participants might be co-implicated in place-making, and
suggests the ethnographic research process can be theorized as a form of placemaking.’ (Pink, 2008: 179)
A strong thread of reflexivity thus emerges in the papers. The researchers are actively
involved in the landscapes they describe, and although they are on the move, they are not just
passing through. All are involved in debates and on-going relations with people and the
landscapes in their field sites. A correlate is that these methodologies entail a long-term
commitment to field research.
The papers
The special issue opens with Gro Ween and Simone Abram’s paper, ‘The Norwegian
Trekking Association: Trekking as Constituting the Nation’. Interweaving historical material
with contemporary fieldwork, the authors describe how moving through ‘nature’ comprises a
performance of nationhood in Norway. Jo Vergunst’s paper, ‘Farming and the Nature of
Landscape: Finding a Regional Tradition in Scotland’ is by contrast written primarily from a
local perspective, and shows how farmers perceive their surroundings as landscape to be
moved through rather than what are seen as the static constructions of environmentalists.
Tanya Argounova-Low in ‘Narrating the Road’ sets out a framework of relations in the
experience of roads and landscape that encompasses narrative, memory, knowledge and
metaphor. Her rich fieldwork amongst the Lake Yessei Yakuts in Siberia describes their
enduring recognition of kinship relations that were formed along a road now closed by an
administrative boundary. Eric Laurier and Haydon Lorimer use their paper, ‘Other Ways:
Landscapes of Commuting’, to draw attention to the intimacies of car environments and the
subtleties of relations with landscape during shared commuter journeys in Scotland. Small
and habitual gestures turn out to be central to wayfinding in a circumstance where travellers
are forced to stay together during the journey. Finally, Katrín Lund’s paper, ‘Landscapes and
Narratives: Compositions and the Walking Body’ pursues further the themes of landscape,
narrative and movement, juxtaposing compositions from Reykjavik, Bordeaux and Belfast to
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illustrate both the connections and disconnections in narrative that can occur through one’s
own walking stories.
Note
1. We gratefully acknowledge funding from the AHRC Landscape and Environment
Programme for our ‘Landscapes Beyond Land’ seminar series in 2007, where these papers
were originally presented.
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