Technology and Technique in a Useful Ethnography of Movement
Jo Vergunst
Department of Anthropology
Edward Wright Building
University of Aberdeen
Dunbar Street
Aberdeen
AB24 3QY
Scotland, UK j.vergunst@abdn.ac.uk
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Technology and Technique in a Useful Ethnography of Movement
Abstract:
Ethnographers have always had to be concerned with the movements of their informants, and this article identifies the continuing importance of bodily technique and skill in fieldwork from a mobilities perspective. It develops an approach to technology and technique from
Marcel Mauss to consider the relationship between ethnography as a technological enterprise and as a set of bodily skills. Evidence is presented on technology as ‘gear’ amongst hillwalkers in north east Scotland, many of whom adhere to a ‘low-tech’ aesthetic. Drawing inspiration from them, the suggestion is made that ethnographers should be cautious of adopting ‘high-tech’ tools for their research. Examples of GPS (Global Positioning System) use amongst the hill-walkers and in cases from the literature illustrate these themes. Finally, the article argues making the techniques of ethnographic research more broadly known might have the advantage of making the results more useable and accessible.
Introduction
In this article I consider some of the characteristics of the ethnographic research process in relation to mobility and movement.
1 My case is that ethnography is an excellent way to get at important aspects of human movement, especially in relating its experiential and sensory qualities to social and environmental contexts. However, ethnographers have the option to use an ever-greater range of technological equipment in carrying out their research. This is especially so in the realm of recording technologies (video, sound, pictures and spatial positioning / GPS) although the transformation of communication technology is also relevant and indeed increasingly overlapping with that of recording. This article will raise questions of how such technological aids contribute to social science research and particularly to ethnography. I have been inspired by a certain group of mobile people that I have worked with: walkers who adhere to a ‘low-tech’ aesthetic in hill-walking.
In his book Mobilities , John Urry is unapologetic about focusing on the modern and high-tech end of the subject: ‘So while it is true that all societies have involved multiple mobilities, I explore how the twenty-first century places interdependent digitized systems of mobility at its very core’ (Urry, 2007: 15). A system of mobility for Urry is the
‘infrastructure’ of social life, or that which predicts its course and enables its repetition (ibid.:
12). Interdependent digitized systems of mobility are undoubtedly a feature of the 21 st century, at once enabling and controlling what Szerszynski and Urry elsewhere describe as ‘a cosmopolitan mode of being-in-the-world’ that encompasses physical travel, imaginative travel (i.e. media-led), and virtual travel through information and communications technology
(Szerszynski and Urry, 2006: 115-116). However, I wonder whether the distinctions between modern and traditional ways of moving around that are often implicit in mobilities research are quite what they seem. For example, while Sidney Mintz upholds the continuing value of ethnography in a globalised world ‘in which people, capital, goods, ideas and media for transmission move across political boundaries with greater velocity than ever before’ (Mintz,
2000: 169), he notes that ‘it was research on technically simpler peoples in particular that first led our [ethnographer] predecessors to assert that it is not so much what people have that matters as what they do with what they have’ (ibid: 176). Anthropologists have tended to emphasise the continuities in social and cultural forms as much as the ruptures. In this article I argue that we need methodological tools and paradigms which can respond to modern systems of mobility but do not in themselves necessarily reify such systems.
While it would be a truism to say that the lifeworlds of researchers and their informants have changed as a result of globalisation and advances in technology, for all the reasons the above-cited authors give, I would reconnect with Urry’s point that people in every time and place will have their own ways of moving from which researchers can investigate mobilities.
Globalised systems may bring certain forms of mobility into existence – indeed, Mintz (2000) and many others define globalisation from the perspective of mobility – and yet ways of inhabiting those systems are not pre-given. For instance, in describing the ‘habitable cars’ of
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contemporary Western society, Laurier et al. find that social relations emerge not simply because of how the car environment is, but rather that the space of the car, both internally and in terms of the route along which it is driven, is shaped by the relations and intentions of those in it: the car is a ‘shared intentional space’ (Laurier et al., 2008: 18). It is what people do in and with their cars that is significant – what kind of relations they are able to engender – not
(for the ethnographer at least) the intrinsic fact that cars go fast.
Here I would like to focus on walking as a mobility common to ‘traditional’ and
‘modern’ contexts. While comparative studies of movement and mobility are still not widespread, research on walking suggests that coherent themes can emerge from a variety of situations that, while existing in the contemporary world, are not primarily defined by the modern or traditional setting. Common themes might be how a journey begins, carries on and ends, how knowledge is generated and stories told, or how objects or things are gathered and dispersed during a journey (Ingold and Vergunst, 2008). These are certainly broad themes in cultural life, but the point is that they are grounded in practical and bodily activity rather than existing ‘stratigraphically’ in a purely symbolic or cognitive realm beyond the functional concerns of the body (Geertz, 1973). Studies of pilgrimage (e.g. Basu and Coleman, 2008) demonstrate the complex interweaving of ‘old’ and ‘new’ in forms of mobility, in which every moving pilgrim is both situated in a tradition and creates his or her own symbolic time through the pilgrimage. If pilgrimage is a system of mobility, its symbolic meaning (of liminality, resolution, or a new beginning) is generated by the movement of following a path made by others and along which still others will follow in the future, which speaks as much to the modern world as the traditional.
On the other hand, I recognise along with many mobility researchers the specifically
‘high-tech’ nature of many contemporary systems of mobility, their opacity and the difficulty of understanding them in any kind of totality. For example, Latour’s multivocal rendering of a
Parisian transport-technology project in his book Aramis seems an appropriate response to the complex interweaving of mobility discourse, politics and technology. In my research with walkers in North East Scotland, which I report on in this article, informants described how walking can in part be reaction against the often opaque systems of transport, employment, technology and controlled land uses. A small example: one commuter, tired of dealing with buses – slow, expensive, with impolite drivers – started walking an hour each way to and from work across the city. For her, each walk is a performance against a difficult ‘modern’ transportation system, while remaining thoroughly contemporary and in the present itself. It is a coherent movement that criticises an often incoherent system of mobility.
The central issue for this article is how an ethnographic methodology might capture and evoke these kinds of movements and the meanings they have for the people who carry them out. During my research on walking I have been struck by the resonances between walking and ethnographic fieldwork in perceiving the world in a mobile manner, and creating a particular kind of sociability based on a shared rhythm of movement (which I have described elsewhere (Lee and Ingold, 2006)). Here I wish to pursue the links between mobility and methodology further in the context of a discussion of technology and technique in ethnography.
Walking techniques and technologies through ethnography
Fieldwork technologies in historical perspective
In my fieldwork with walkers in North East Scotland I have been interested in what happens during movement, in the midst of a journey. The basis of the work has been shared walks in a variety of locations in the city, the edge of towns, farmland, forests and hills, amongst people ranging from walking clubs and serious hill-walkers to farmers in the countryside and dogwalkers and pedestrians in the city. As the fieldwork continued, empirical or more theoretical topics have emerged – walking as commuting, as an engagement with the landscape, as a way of being sociable, for example. Walking as a technique of the body (Mauss 2009/1935) was an important underlying theme to all of these, and it is one that repays consideration equally
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in a methodological sense. It also fits well into discussions around participant observation from the perspective of gathering data through the ethnographer’s bodily experiences. How we can reconcile attention to the embodied processes of ethnography with the technological possibilities of modern fieldwork?
The question here is not so much about the content of ethnography as the way it is done, or in other words, the techniques of ethnographers. In the tradition of Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, in order to understand techniques we would need a science called
‘technology’ (Mauss, 2009/1948). For Mauss especially, the primary interest in this field was the technique, or, as Sigaut (1994) has put it, the ‘skill’ or embodied knowledge through which an activity takes place, rather than the man-made object. Mauss reclaimed the study of techniques for sociology and anthropology as ‘traditional efficient acts’ (Schlanger 2009), in other words technical activity which is learned and collective. Practical activities such as walking, sleeping and tool making and use were to be seen as entirely social and not separable from the collective representations and effervescences described by Durkheim. Indeed, these are ‘acts that are constructed by the collective, that form part of the social make-up of the individual, that are open to approval, recognition and evaluation’ (Schlanger, 2009: 19).
Mauss’s key argument that ‘the body is man’s first and most natural instrument’
(Mauss, 2009/1935: 83) requires that the body be seen as the site of activity and engagement with the world, although the separation of body and man (or person) in that formulation does not sit well with more recent development in theories of phenomenology and embodiment
(e.g. Merleau-Ponty, 1962; Csordas, 1994). For Mauss however, bodily techniques would suppose and generate practical knowledge, not discursive knowledge. They are the means and mediums for the production and reproduction of social life (Schlanger, 2009). In studying technology the role of the body – those who make something, who use it, who are affected by it – is integral. By this reckoning the very distinction between body and tool is blurred and each must be seen in a relationship to the other, in their combination. The tool, like other things, only becomes what it is through the uses it affords.
Without an understanding of skilful technique, technology as artefact can only remain distanced from bodily engagement. Technology, in the modern Anglo-American sense
(Sigaut, 1994), has often tended to refer to an object that is used for a particular purpose, involving separations of body, object and environment (Ingold 2000, ch15). A common trope is of social and evolutionary progress – in which stone tools, GPS and all points in between are seen as the development or fulfilment of a stage of human potential. This evolutionary perspective (promulgated by Pitt Rivers, for example) was a trend that Durkheim and Mauss were arguing against, and yet it has been persistent in popular culture driven by industrialisation and capitalist consumerism.
Academic culture has also surely been caught up in this, and ethnography like other scholarly pursuits has always at least in part been a technological enterprise. The history of ethnography is intertwined with technologies of travel, sustenance, colonialism and recording, as Edward Said has described (Said, 1979). Ethnographers have been enthusiastic to adopt the latest technology in order to contribute to the progress of research methods, and although a history of this topic is beyond the scope of this paper, some themes can be identified.
Ethnographic methods textbooks tend to be quickly out of date when it comes to technologies of recording and analysis. The earliest of them in Britain, the Royal Anthropological
Institute’s
Notes and Queries on Anthropology series, focused more on lists of topics and questions to be asked (e.g. Royal Anthropological Institute, 1951). Roy Ellen’s
Ethnographic
Research was a more practical field handbook, and the advice around equipment and technology includes ways of storing and securing fieldnotes and cameras (Ellen, 1984). In a reflexive mode, Roger Sanjek’s book Fieldnotes has some fascinating thoughts and confessions on note-taking technologies in the ethnographic enterprise. What we record is indeed surely influenced by the technology we use to record it: ‘Sitting and thinking at a typewriter or computer keyboard brings forth the “enlarging” and “interpreting” that turns
“abbreviated jottings” and personal “shorthand” into fieldnotes’ (Sanjek, 1990: 114). A typewriter or computer demand a certain posture and organisation of furniture that may easily result in the physical removal of oneself from the context of activity or social interaction one
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is writing about (though perhaps tablet computers will change that). Could that be reflected in the tone one takes in writing fieldnotes? Almost as a reaction though, one anonymous ethnographer in Sanjek’s volume claims in a neat turn of phrase that ‘I am a fieldnote’ – ‘my’ bodily experiences and memories, in other words, constitute their own record of fieldwork events to be drawn on in writing anthropology (Jackson, 1990).
Recent textbooks (e.g. Davies, 2007) include discussions of pens and paper, tape recording and the internet – the latter, Davies argues, may pose problems not so inherently different from conventional fieldwork. For internet ethnographers, ‘the best way to ensure the validity of their on-line observational data is to adopt similar expectations regarding longterm contact with the regulars on any site they are studying’ (Davies, 2007: 155). On the other hand, there is no doubt that the internet has provided new opportunities for ethnographers not just to access information and real-world field sites, but to make and maintain contacts with informants both near and far (Frohlick, 2006). Visual technologies, meanwhile, have expanded exponentially, and while the development of cheaper and smaller still and video cameras have made methodologies in visual ethnography widely accessible, the skills involved in using them well are equally academic and technical (Pink, 2007).
While discussions of visual technologies have taken place elsewhere (see for example
Grimshaw, 2001; Pink, 2007), a short personal case study of sound technology will begin to illustrate the relationship between the development of technology and methodological practice that I am interested in. Over the last ten years, the tools I have used to record sound have changed. I started research as a postgraduate with a hand-held Sony cassette recorder, then ‘went digital’ to a Sony mini-disc recorder in 2004 and in 2008 bought an Olympus digital voice recorder. With each of these I have experimented methodologically with the technology and yet a sense of improvement has not been straightforward. The cassette recorder was very reliable and robust but only recorded well in formal interview situations.
Outdoors the sounds lost definition. A Sony mini-disc player became available to me via the finances of an externally-funded research project. It made much clearer recordings outdoors, helped by a better and wind-proofed lapel microphone. This gave me the idea of editing together ‘soundscapes’ from urban fieldwork that I once presented at a conference. But it recorded in a file format (.wav) that was very inconvenient for transcribing, and turned out not be reliable enough as a fault gradually developed with the record function that the shop could not fix. The digital voice recorder is extremely convenient and records in .wma files of practically unlimited length that can be uploaded with a direct USB connection. Being ‘solid state’ it is fairly sturdy, and this has encouraged me to try recording and listening to sounds in all sorts of places, and on the move – on hillsides, amongst dogs, in my car and on my bicycle are some that I remember. I do though miss the sound quality of the minidisc and the reliability and ease of use of the cassette recorder. Furthermore, the digital recorder is the equivalent of a digital camera with a large memory card in which the user takes endless photos and later has to scroll through them, hoping for one or two photos that contain the required subjects in reasonable quality. Now I wonder about investing in one of the larger solid state recorders I occasionally see in the possession of colleagues, but for the moment I am not tempted. Needless to say, many other researchers would be able to recount similar technology-biographies.
High-tech and low-tech in the ethnography of walking
Focusing on recreational walking in the hills and mountains of north east Scotland, it was apparent that such temptations of technology in ethnography mirror those experienced by the walkers themselves. High-tech clothing, GPS (Global Positioning System) devices, cameras, mobile phones, as well as the sound recording equipment described above, were available for me as much as they were for the walkers. Some of these items were identified in the
‘consumables’ section of the research proposal I worked with, where they had a dual function in allowing me to carry out the fieldwork comfortably and as methodological choices.
Walkers are a consumer group targeted for constantly-evolving outdoor clothing and equipment ranges, much as researchers are in their relations with gear. The full intricacies of
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the social aspects of walking gear are beyond the scope of this article, but I want to pursue one theme that actually runs counter to the general discourse of walking equipment.
In the event, I found that talking about ‘gear’ can also be a way to be sociable with someone and find common ground for a while by sharing stories and opinions. It became clear however that there is a definite ‘low-tech’ aesthetic amongst some hill walkers. For those people, burdening oneself with rucksacks and pockets full of gear and constantly updating ones’ walking clothing goes against the ethos of walking as a way of connecting with, and indeed creating, less materialistic aspects of life. Its roots could be traced in the
Romantic literary construction of walking (Wallace, 1993), but such attitudes became apparent also through ordinary conversation and practice on the hills. GPS technology will serve as a specific instance here. Many hill walkers – beyond those who would assent to a description of generally having a low-tech approach – have a quite negative attitude to GPS devices. They argue that GPS should not be relied on partly because their functionality could be suspect (due to batteries, weather conditions or sheer lack of accuracy), but also because they do not relate to the skilled practice of reading maps, understanding the land forms and following paths that many walkers have carefully cultivated. One walker told me about events on a recent hill walk where, as she put it, ‘I saw someone use GPS well then’: the group leader had been map-reading on the way up the hill but the weather became cloudy and only then did he check the group’s position with the GPS – and received a kind of confirmation that they were where he expected them to be. For my informant there were many not so instances of ‘good’ GPS use: ‘It’s useful but you shouldn’t depend on it,’ she said. Navigating one’s way entirely by GPS would not be seen as good practice within the hill-walking community, and such views often take on a moral as well as function tone.
A different way of using GPS is apparent in the following fieldnote that is fully congruent with the ‘serious humour’ of Munro-baggers, those engaged in collecting
Scotland’s mountains of at least 3000 feet in height. I present it in the way I wrote it: computer text written on a laptop, the day after the walk, based partly on hand-written jottings made the same evening.
When we got to the top there was some slightly ironic, slightly serious talk about which bit was actually the highest bit. George was first up and sat down behind the cairn, but later went to have a look at the top a bit further back. We reckoned that he looked a bit higher over there and so we all moved. Alistair had a GPS and said that according to the
GPS this bit was higher. Eilidh said that she didn’t want it to be said that she led the walk but didn’t allow people to be on the top. (fieldnote, July 2005).
Here the GPS was not used to lead the way but did have a role in the symbolic achievement of reaching the very top of the hill. Its power is tapped just at the moment when the routefinding and climbing have been completed by human efforts of moving and map-reading. At that stage it is safe – and acceptable – to turn to a different kind of instrument.
Boots are another good example of the low-tech aesthetic. Many walkers would agree that they get better – more comfortable, more useful – after they have been worn in and are no longer new. In the industrial discourse of technology as progress, ‘wear’ is a problem requiring monitoring. It signals a loss of substance from a finished object and that will result in it functioning less effectively. For walking boots and other shoes, however, wearing-in signals a process of accommodation by which the boot shapes itself to the foot and becomes more flexible. The foot and the rest of the body equally adjust to the shape, weight, balance and friction of the boot. At the same time the walker learns how to wear their boots in the best way – how to tie the laces most effectively, what kind of socks to wear, what kind of journey and weather conditions the boots will be most appropriate for. And a pair of worn boots have a different aesthetic to brand-new ones. Amongst friends, a walker may attract jokes for having boots that look too new and unused – much better to have a well-worn but still strong pair that have seen plenty of action. The walker will probably carry on the joke by tramping through some mud on purpose. Boots in this sense of wear become a record of their own use, physically responsive to the activity that they enable, and integral to the person walking.
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Most other walking equipment does not have this sense of reciprocity and embodiment and thus tends not to generate the same kind of ‘personal’ relationships amongst walkers.
Coats work best when they are new, at least once hoods, fastenings and pockets have been mastered, and so fall into the same category as cameras and indeed my sound recording equipment in which any alteration will almost certainly be a deterioration: wearing-out rather than wearing-in. Waxed jackets could be an exception here, although they not commonly used by the walking community in north east Scotland. Scottish Tweed jackets traditionally used dyes from the very landscapes in which they were woven and so encapsulate well an embodied relationship with land, although these days they are seen like the waxed jacket as a fixture of the country set. In terms of cameras, while some walkers will be taking photos at every opportunity, others will not even bother bringing a camera – they will even sometimes make a point of not taking a camera, saying they are more concerned with experiencing the moment itself.
People in less spectacular settings – walking along a city street on the way to work, for example – do not of course use much in the way of other technological recording devices either. Their concerns are more about footwear and other clothing, perhaps carrying baggage, staying together in a group, enjoying the walk, or just getting to where they are going. Often people will talk about what kinds of shoes they’ve chosen for a particular walk, or what they think about the state of the path or the pavement they are walking along. Depending on the kind of walk they are doing, they will even stop and take photos, or, on a hill walk, take a
GPS reading. But in these cases what is interesting ethnographically is not the result (the photo, or the GPS reading, or the shoes in an objective sense), but the technique , or in other words, the way the person interacts with their surrounding objects and landscapes according to their shared and learned habits and gestures. The ‘low-tech’ walkers, although I hesitate to objectify them in such a way, are careful not to let the technology get in the way of the walk.
How these walkers use and wear things is relevant to the methodological themes pursued here, and I intend this to be the justification of invoking technology both as a form of ethnographic engagement and a theme within ethnographic investigation. I have tried recording walks I have made in various ways, including photography, sound recording, and different kinds of interviews (though I have rarely filmed things). They all have their strengths and have played into my research in different ways as my case study of sound recording showed. But none of the recordings, individually nor collectively, compare particularly well in terms of ethnographic usefulness to the social and bodily experience of simply doing the diverse walks with my informants, where subjectivities are formed, and the world is understood relationally rather than in a decontextualised form. Lengthy transcripts of recorded interviews are useful for mining for quotes, to allow the informant to use their exact words again in one’s analysis, although it seems not without a hint of regret that Roger Sanjek writes in his discussion of fieldnotes that ‘Technology marches on, and taped texts are here to stay’ (Sanjek, 1990: 115). But I find that the engagement in movement itself, and my reflections on it in fieldnotes and analysis, is still the most significant methodological technique in my fieldwork. In some ways my boots become a more evocative record of my walks than most of the pictures or sound recordings I have made; they admittedly lose in terms of specificity, but they have instead a cumulative quality that the individual ‘data’ entirely lack. And some stories remain: the laces on my boots replaced the pair that broke at the Loch Muick car park the day we went up Lochnagar in the rain, which I remember when I tie them.
I think this state of affairs is in keeping with how most walkers understand their gear, and the activities they carry out with it, most of the time. What is ultimately most significant for them are the relations with landscape and people made present through bodily movement and contact with the ground. While hill walkers in North East Scotland might not appear to be typical walkers, they are typical in that they respond through the materials and things they take with them to the environments they move through. They are careful to chose between gear that is useful and that which intervenes in and disrupts the bodily sense of landscape.
And similarly for ethnographers, turning too readily to high technology has the danger that we actually distance ourselves from the experience of movement, in the very act of trying to get
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closer to it.
Further cases in the exploration of technology and movement
Some examples from the literature will help in exploring these issues, and I will continue the discussion of GPS technology as a case study because it opens onto particular issues in conceptualising movement. The examples are not chosen to be the focus of criticism as such, but will illustrate something of the diversity of recent research that could be seen as being within the ‘mobilities’ tent and has also explicitly used equipment from the realm of the
‘high-tech’. Lisa Parks’ ‘Plotting the personal’ (2001) is a relatively early example of GPSbased research from a humanistic social science perspective. It is an exploration of technique
(or in other words, technology in the Maussian sense) as much as the equipment itself. Using plots of her own walks around familiar and unfamiliar environments in California and Alice
Springs, she claims that GPS could be used in a way more akin to travel photography than its initial military context: ‘it may activate memories of subjective perspective, of a particularly situated point of view [...] a trajective not subjective or objective body.’ She uses birds-eye satellite photo images, of a type now commonly known through Google Earth, as an underlay for point-by-point notations of her walks. GPS provides an anchoring for other data, and the point Parks makes is that a geographical siting can also play into a broader cultural siting. The
GPS is, it seems, a way of saying ‘I was really here’.
More recently, Ricketts Hein and colleagues have been using GPS and associated equipment as part of their ‘Rescue Geography’ project based on fieldwork in a soon-to-be
‘regenerated’ suburb of Birmingham (Ricketts Hein et al., 2008). Linking sound recordings of walking interviews with GPS locations and GIS mapping of multisensory streetscapes (lines of sight, traffic etc), the research has demonstrated the close relationship between
‘environmental perception, biographies and social realms’ (ibid. 1279). They show for example that stories relating to place are told in the actual vicinity of those places much more than in traditional indoor interviews. It should be noted that neither this research nor Parks’ is described as intentionally ethnographic in methodology or sensibility, and of course it would be unfair to use entirely different criteria to evaluate it than those employed by the researchers themselves. It is also the case that the research engages GPS technology with human subjects in a much richer way than when it is simply used as a tracking device for remotely following walkers or other moving people (e.g. Shoval and Isaacson, 2006), as I discuss further later on.
However it is still an open question as to whether GPS plots are able to capture some of the most significant and intrinsic aspects of movement, even when supplemented with other kinds of data.
The basic issue in this case is whether points on a map marking progression can ever encapsulate a trajectory or a route. In a phenomenological mode, the problem is similar to that which Henri Bergson turned his attention to in Time and Free Will , drawing on the Eleatic paradox of how an object can be conceived of as traversing space if, at any given instant in time, it is presumably still. Amongst Bergson’s responses was that ‘We have to do here not with an object but with a progress
’ (Bergson, 2002: 64) – the object cannot be disassociated from its movement. Ultimately the notion of parcelling up separate instants of time is not philosophically tenable. The GPS-derived plot on a map does have this sense of divisible time about it. In the selection and spatialisation of regular moments it is perhaps the antithesis of
Bergson’s later notion of ‘duration’. Bergson shifted from thinking that movement can only be recreated by a ‘mental synthesis’ which created the sensation of movement for the observer from a series of moments, and later insisted that time be understood as a flow
(Pearson and Mullarkey, 2002). By this reckoning, ‘real time has no instants, which are born of the mathematical point, that is to say, of space’ (Bergson, 2002: 208). It should therefore be possible to find other ways of thinking and writing mobilities than as a succession of instants. For example, amongst the most significant ‘real’ forms of temporality for walkers I have worked with are rhythms, which describe the walkers’ motion in interaction with the surrounding world (Vergunst, 2010; Middleton, 2009). Rhythms are surely all but unrepresentable through GPS and allied high technology, because they are felt much more
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than they can be seen or heard.
Widlok meanwhile takes an avowed critical approach to the tendency of GPS to fix arbitrary points in a landscape potentially full of meaning and differentiation (Widlok 2008).
He takes on the role of a ‘Confluencer’ – a member of an internet-based group dedicated to recording localities at the thousands of confluences of full-degree lines of latitude and longitude around the world. Unsurprisingly, amongst San bushmen in Namibia he finds such points to be nearly meaningless compared to their own lifeworlds of mobile resources and movement. The only relevance of the grid lines and points is an unwelcome one, in that colonial authorities sometimes used such lines to divide up the land into political territories that still serve to curtail the San’s movement.
But like many other kinds of other technology, GPS has also been incorporated within indigenous societies in a more syncretic fashion. Aporta and Higgs (2005) report that amongst
Inuit people in Nunavut, Northern Canada, GPS use has become common but is a source of concern that other wayfinding survival skills are being lost – a discourse which Scottish hillwalkers are familiar with. Other indigenous groups have appropriated GPS technology to their own political ends, sometimes in collaboration with anthropologists, in order to produce territorial maps which support their native title claims and rights to self-determination
(Chapin et al., 2005). The use of GPS in indigenous rights contexts is an indication of the power and authority that the technology brings and yet also illustrates the degree to which critical perspectives need to be maintained in methodological approaches.
A broader issue in epistemology here is the kind of authority that researchers claim for their various techniques. Despite Parks’ attempt to align GPS with ‘the personal’, I suggest that practices of ‘high technology’ – where equipment is used because it is modern – can tempt researchers into claiming a scientific, universal authority on the basis of that technology rather than in the scope and content of their work. Visual ethnography I suspect has not been altogether free of the same tendency, despite the very full critique and re-evaluation of visual technologies that are now understood very much as ‘techniques’ (see Pink, 2007; Grasseni,
2004). The gaze of the camera usually provides highly detailed and repeatedly viewable images – in a sequence of stills or clips of movement – which barely relate to the kind of seeing that people engage in their ordinary lives, where there are no easy distinctions between moments of vision or boundaries to the view. Yet, as Pink shows, film can approach the mobility of ordinary movement and provide a way of creating ethnographic data collaboratively.
These examples show that there is of course no simple story of cultural progress or decline in relation to technology, and technology has often been resisted as much as embraced. As described earlier, a distinctive anthropological argument has been that social practices and technologies need to be understood in their own right, in their own context, prior to their allocation to any grand narrative of development. Before returning to the issues in methodology, I would like to explore the implications of this for my ethnography of walkers by way of a comparison. Through the 18 th and early 19 th century in parts of Britain, textile workers famously took to machine-breaking in an attempt to resist the industrialisation of their work practices. But there is no neat story of resistance among those who became known as Luddites. Economic historian Maxine Berg writes: ‘Labour was not universally opposed to changing production processes, nor were entrepreneurs all enthusiastic improvers.
... The response of highly-skilled male workers with traditional craft skills was different from that of skilled workers with mechanical and engineering skills, and different again from that of a newly-emergent factory labour force’, who were often women (Berg, 1994: 181).
Resistance was strongest in small local communities, especially in the north and midlands of
England rather than in urban social structures (ibid.: 254). There were concerns over jobs, prices, the quality of goods and the break-up of the artisanal communities, although other areas were more open to new technologies as new labour markets were tapped, for example.
The issue was not that the instruments themselves were simply new and different, but exception was taken to the kind of relations the technology would produce in industry- and geography-specific contexts. Social, economic and cultural differences thus explain the varying uptake and resistance to industrial technology in the 18 th and 19 th centuries and that is
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no doubt the case in other fields too.
Are, then, the low-tech walkers I describe here of any kin with the Luddites in ethic if not in method? While an accusation of Luddism is now generally an insult, a more positive connection might be sought that has an implication for methodological practice too. The walkers are like the Luddites concerned about the kinds of relations engendered by the instruments they use. Relations both environmental and social are significant: their instruments should allow them to enter into a closer and more direct relationship with the places they move through, and, through the process of wear, should embody and make apparent the history of that relationship in much the same way that an artisan’s tools might. A low-tech walking ethic is certainly in one sense a reaction against an industrialised, consumerist economy and its associated systems of mobility. Worn-in gear has also, for these walkers at least, much more specific, personal and socially-engaging stories than does the narrative of technological improvement.
Discussion: from ‘high technology’ to the bodily skills of fieldwork
Methodological debate could usefully take into account what might be described as these ethical dimensions of technology. One angle already encountered is that mobilities research does necessarily need to be strictly tied to a particular reading of the modern-Western social context in which technology proceeds and triumphs relatively unhindered. Here Ricketts
Hein’s and colleagues work is valuable in orienting us to the mobile history and heritage of an urban fabric, once high-tech and now about to be lost in the latest round of a particular
‘modern’ development. ‘Technological’ methods can be about tracking the continuities of social life: how forms of movement are impressed into the landscape, learnt by children from their elders, or creatively improvised from a repertoire of memories and possibilities. Misha
Myers’ research (this volume) is salutary in challenging dichotomies of near and far, traditional and modern, familiar and unfamiliar in terms of relations with place. Dave Horton, meanwhile, uses participatory video amongst cyclists (this volume) to explore not just the experience of cycling (including, indeed aspects of rhythm I described earlier) but how technology can be used to build relationships between researcher and informant, and this is apparent also in Myers’ work. The building of relationships is an extremely important process in any ethnographic or qualitative endeavour. On the other hand, technologies that isolate the researcher from the rhythms and intersecting sensory and material perceptions of movement are likely to result in a loss of sensitivity in fieldwork situations, and present a greater challenge in forming research relationships.
Myers’ and Horton’s methodologies involve sharing techniques of movement by way of various instruments and technologies. Their fieldwork skills are not located in the technology alone, or the mere operation of the technology, but in the way they are able to use the technology to relate to their informants. The purpose of the technology is not simply to objectively view whatever the international migrant or cycle commuter is viewing, because their own participation in the same or similar movements to their informants was important.
The mobile fieldwork skills that result in analytical insight are present in the combination of person and instrument, and are embodied, not technologised.
Other cases from the literature support this perspective on bodily participation in fieldwork. Recent accounts of observation and the senses subvert notions of prior and distanced visual authority, instead exploring the more close-at-hand and mobile skills and perceptions. Helmreich (2007) presents an ethnography of immersion through sound in deepsea scientific expeditions, whereby joining oceanographers on their deep-sea journeys allows him to hear in the same way that they do, leading to reflections on the senses and the production of knowledge in sub-marine worlds. Grasseni writes of the visual skills of northern Italian cattle farmers in attending to their animals through breeding and at sales, in which ‘vision is not always characterised as a gaze , but as a way of looking at the world’
(Grasseni, 2004: 41). The different participants – inspector, farmer, ethnographer – needed to develop ‘a technique (simultaneously discursive, relational, perceptual and kinaesthetic) that would allow us to achieve convergent views,’ which recalls my reading of Myers’ and
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Horton’s progress in developing relations through their technologies. The ethnographer can learn the mobile ways of sensing practiced by others, avoiding the singular position of a static observer distanced from the research object.
An important aspect of all these methodologies is that the techniques of data gathering are centred in the bodily and social skills of the fieldworkers themselves. Whether in observing, participating, or learning to see, the emphasis is on the location and mobility of the fieldworker. Data is produced directly through the presence of the fieldworker, sometimes along with pens and paper, cameras or other tools, but it is always from the experience of the fieldworker with their informants. Are, then, the ethnographer’s movements and journeys also most successful when they resonate with those of the informants, as I have suggested ways of observing can be when shared with informants? In an epistemological reading the answer would be ‘not necessarily’ – there is no strict sense in which sharing a way of moving leads to ethnographic insight – but if the research goal is to generate an understanding of the perspectives and experiences of people in real-world settings, being on the move in a similar manner to one’s informants can be important. If the goal is explicitly to explore their mobilities then the case is made stronger still. Learning to sense in the manner of one’s informants is likely to involve learning to move with them.
Yet it is also true that ethnographers are faced with more and more technological possibilities in carrying out their research and perhaps caution is needed more than ever when such innovations come thick and fast. While a strength of ethnography is to bring the audience or users of the research closer to the lived experience of the one’s informants, there is potential for technology to be as much an unwelcome mediation or distancing device between experience and representation as it is an invitation to share in a certain technique or bodily experience. Sometimes ethnographers (including myself) seem to use recording equipment to allow them to hear even more, or see in ever more detail. The purpose should not be to produce a technological record of the events, to be able to say ever more precisely where one was or what one saw, but the generation of new relations both analytical and social.
It is also possible to question the implications of all the ‘high technology’ for the fieldwork skills of in situ observation, note-taking and grounded analysis. In teaching anthropological methodologies I encourage undergraduate students to work on simply watching and listening very carefully, together with using all the other senses, and finding ways to notate their experiences. Using textbooks such as Amanda Coffey’s The
Ethnographic Self (Coffey, 1999), we consider the importance of positionality, mobility and identity in fieldwork. While recognising that fieldwork has always been a technological enterprise, what is being learned about the place through simply being there with other people, moving about and experiencing it in the way they do? If, as one writes up, the answer is relatively little, are we in danger of losing these bodily skills – the ‘I am a fieldnote’ skills – that are so important for understanding and empathy, and for analytical insight into relations and context?
Following Mauss, a focus on ‘technique’ has the potential to bring technology in the sense of instrument and person together. The mobilities described here involve bodily skills that need to be learnt by the ethnographer in order to allow the practice itself to be understood, rather than its technological representations. Understanding the techniques of ethnography also means not having to make arbitrary distinctions between the social world of relations and material world of objects during the process of research. The distinction between ‘material’ and ‘culture’ would be overcome. Technology by this reckoning would be much closer to Martin Heidegger’s description of tools – that which enables use and is close at hand, rather than that which is distanced and objectified. Or, following the interests of my
‘low-tech’ walker informants, technology would be that which enables social relations and engagement with the landscape to take place, rather than that which hinders them.
A useful ethnography?
In the introduction to this volume D’Andrea et al. raise the question of how mobility
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methodologies can access the ‘structural’ or ‘macro’ factors that influence society and are beyond the immediacy of the movement itself. Is there a tendency of research in a phenomenological direction to lose sight of the possibilities for generalisation? On one level
Urry has addressed this in distinguishing ‘motility’ as the capability for movement from mobility as the actual practice itself, noting that the provision of systems of mobility does not necessarily result in the freedom to actually become mobile (Urry, 2007: 38). My first concern in this article has indeed been with actual movement rather than a system of mobility, based in the understanding that walking can be as much a resistance to a system of mobility as it is constitutive of it. And yet it would be mistaken to equate a close-grained ethnography with merely the study of the immediate and close-at-hand (or foot). Exploring the way that walkers interact with different kinds of technology allows the ‘macro’ generalisation to be made in a particular way: each journey creates a certain kind of sociality and a continuous recreation of social form
Although by no means a Luddite social movement, the walkers are concerned with creating and maintaining certain kinds of relations with the environment and people, especially other walkers and people they meet outside. Their interest in processes of wear draws attention to qualities of the material world which modern technologies are not so good at recording, such as rhythmical motion and change (Lefebvre, 2004). Their interest in personal narratives and a sense of community as walkers similarly draws attention to the ongoing creation of embodied face-to-face (or at least side-by-side) sociality through walking.
This should be of no little import in contexts where contemporary policy concerns include the connections between walking, health and environmental sustainability. In Scotland, these agendas have played into outdoor access reforms that not only involve entitlements to nonmotorised forms of movement but also create new senses of belonging in the landscape
(Vergunst, forthcoming).
Finally, a focus on research techniques such as that in this volume, can in itself potentially help to make an ethnography of movement more useful or meaningful to others.
Perhaps more could be done to divest ethnographic method of the mystique (or, in George
Stocking’s words, the ‘magic’) with which it can be associated. One reason that ethnographic research is sometimes hard to communicate to users is that in contrast to for example interview responses or surveys, ethnographic research rarely produces a clear and complete set of results. By contrast, results are often diverse and suggestive of certain outcomes rather than attempting to communicate a simple message. By understanding what has gone into the production of ethnographic knowledge, policy makers and other research users might be more inclined to pay heed to it – whether it involves close-up narratives from the field or a more structural reading. We could also argue that ‘policy’ is not confined to executive centres that simply effect changes in the world outside. In the field of mobilities, it actually unfolds as people move, according to how they meet, walk, talk, and make decisions about movement.
The continuing relevance of bodily skills in ethnography, even in these globalised and
‘systematised’ times, reflects the significance such skills still have in everyday life too.
To end I would like to briefly recount the recent experiences of myself and colleagues in spending an afternoon with civil servants of the Scottish Government in Edinburgh. We had taken part in a programme of academic seminars and research on the theme of ‘Designing
Environments for Life’, which explored the discrepancy, as we saw it, between everyday understandings of the environment and those produced through techno-scientific and policy discourses. The seminar was held with a series of presentations and discussion, but afterwards we took them for a walk to allow a rather different dynamic to emerge. We encouraged the civil servants to pay attention to their senses and explore a river environment near where they worked slowly and carefully. The aim was both to share our insights in a more direct way and give them a feel for ethnographic methodology. We provided pens and a single sheet of A4 paper which they folded into a small notebook. Although a couple preferred to take photographs, one saying his camera was his notebook, we found that the civil servants readily engaged in mobile note-taking, conversation and attentiveness towards the surroundings. We looked at an empty bag of bread left tied to the fence beside the river, its contents having been fed to the birds, and thought about human-animal relations at the river. Beside an excavation
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where new pipes were being laid we talked about urban drainage systems and the effects of hiding away services infrastructure. Through talking, note-taking and walking, we generated a direct engagement with the issues we were concerned with in Designing Environments for
Life which was perhaps no less useful than the ‘findings’ we presented earlier in the day. To engage in ethnographic research, then, is not to use a methodology in a programmatic manner but to follow, for a while, the same paths that our informants are on, bearing in mind that our destinations differ. Recounting those paths in such a way that others might come to know them is worth doing.
Note
1. I would like to thank all the walkers who helped with this research. I also thank the editors of this special issue, the participants of the Limerick ‘Mobility and Nomadicity:
Methodological Challenges and Innovations’ seminar, and the anonymous referees for their insightful comments on previous versions of the paper. Funding for part of the field research was provided by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (RES-000-23-0312).
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