128 Redrawing Anthropology

Windle, W.F. 1971. Physiology of the Fetus. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas. Chapter 9
Wittgenstein, L. 1980. Culture and Value, edited by G.H. von Wright, translated
by Peter Winch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Beyond A to B
Zeki, S. 1992. The visual image in mind and brain. Scientific American 267(3),
69-76. Griet Scheldeman

A and B: not merely points in space, but two letters of the alphabet, the stuff
words are made of. In an ideal world, this chapter would not give you words to
read. It would rather take you out of your chair, on a walk. I shall take you on a
From Redrawing Anthropology: Materials, walk further on, but with words. Such are the limitations of this format. Using
Movements, Lines, Tim Ingold (ed.), Surrey, words to make you move, and perhaps understand, is what this chapter is about.
Ashgate, 2011
How to get from A to B? Transport surveys readily envisage people hopping on
a pictogram bus, car, or bike, which would take them from one dot (say home)
to the next (say work). The term 'transport' comes from Latin trans-portare: to
carry across. Not much bodily movement is involved here, unless you are one of
those doing the carrying. Indeed for a field of inquiry concerned with motion, the
discipline of transport studies embraces a surprisingly static view. No doubt for
the study of car or other vehicular travel - for which the discipline was originally
developed- the notion of transport is appropriate. But as more body-active modes
like walking and cycling are introduced to the sustainable transport agenda, it may
need some adjustment. Phenomenological philosopher Edward Casey (1996: 24)
distinguishes between transportation - in which 'I am passively carried by an
animal or machine whose purposes are independent of my own'- and transition,
where 'I move in order to pursue my own purposes'. As an anthropologist on a
multidisciplinary project that investigates how people move around cities, I find
myself in a world of transport, with transport and urban planning researchers
as colleagues. Transport may not sound the most thrilling of topics. Its familiar
building blocks - people, cars, bikes, buses, roads, traffic lights, and timetables
- do not allow for much diversion. Yet look closer and you discover a throbbing
mix of people, practices, routes, encounters and conversations - in a word, life.
This is a world, in Casey's terms, not of transportation but transition, in which
people continually move in pursuit of their purposes. Alas, blink once and that
vision is clouded over by questionnaires, counts and surveys, trusted tools of the
transport trade. It finds safety in numbers and straight lines: distance, duration,
connecting routes. I wish to diverge from the straightforward lines connecting
the proverbial yet nonsensical A and B. Can I introduce movement, in practice
and in imagination? Let's walk with others, not so much to trace their lines but to
experience how they make their ways.
130 Redrawing Anthropology
I walking. Though alerted to the materials involved in walking, aware of issues
'Once a Korper (body as physical object) has become a Leib (body as lived)',
writes Edward Casey (1996: 21), 'more than merely punctiform positioning in
empty space ... is at stake'. A body: we all are one, indeed we are by grace of
There's nothing earth shattering about that. Yet we tend to take it for granted, just
like the fact that we all are human. If anthropology is about understanding what it
is to be human, in its myriad variations yet always mediated through our bodies,
then we are fortunate to have the perfect instrument with which to study this. The
body is the most versatile research tool I have come across. This chapter celebrates
our visceral body as a means to understand the lives of others. By 'visceral' I mean
our breathing, acting, moving, feeling, seeing, hearing and thinking body. 1 It is
through experiencing and feeling with the other, that we can hope to understand.
During the past year I have realised two things that I had previously been
taking for granted. Both centre on the body as a way of knowing. The first relates
to method in anthropology. Although I had always been fully appreciative of the
anthropological method of participatory fieldwork, it was not until I found myself
in a multidisciplinary research team that its unique merit struck me. Until then it
had been the mystery element of the discipline, something you could not really be
taught but had to learn by doing. You could discuss how (and mainly how not) to
do it, but you never spoke about why. It was evident that you needed to live with
and share time with others, in order to understand what their lives were about. As I
am writing, I realise that what I will say in this chapter is not new, yet I feel it needs
to be said. For what is self-evident in the small world of academic anthropology
is almost unheard of elsewhere, even in the wider domain of social research. It is
here that I received my wake-up call. During my first months as an anthropologist
in a multidisciplinary research team I had ample occasion to explain the specifics
of qualitative research and ethnography. I was surprised by the challenge this
presented. Moreover, to explain in theory is one thing, to conduct research is quite
another. As we advanced through the project and gathered data, each doing what
we were used to, the differences in our respective practices became tangible. This
threw me, as I explain below, and forced me to reconsider the specific merits
of fieldwork and ethnography. Lost and then found again, I stuck my trusted
but slightly damaged toy back together. It may be that my bricolage is slightly
unorthodox, but as a result I feel like a new-born anthropologist, evangelical about
the discipline and its method.
The second realisation relates to everyday movement. Walking was the main
topic of the research, and I thought I knew what it involved. I considered different
ways of walking, different styles, different speeds, different aids like the supporting
arm of a fellow walker, sticks, canes, and guide dogs, different accessories
such as prams, push trikes, dogs, different footwear, and several ways of non-
1 The Oxford English Dictionary defines visceral as 'affecting the viscera or bowels
regarded as the seat of emotion; pertaining to, or touching deeply, inward feelings'.
Beyond A taB 131
like route choice, infrastructure, traffic, routine, and attentive to lesser abilities
like impaired vision and reduced mobility, I still took 'walking' for granted. Only
by accompanying someone whose style of walking forced me to change my own
habitual way, did I become aware of what I had still overlooked. All the little
adjustments that came so naturally to me - so naturally I had never even noticed
them - were not available to my walking partner. I had therefore to refrain from
doing what I never knew I did in the first place. This physical experience, intensely
frustrating, triggered a methodological epiphany. I was viscerally reminded of the
fundamental importance of being actively present and taking part with one's body.
This is not to dismiss words, nor merely to make a case for embodiment- which
is by now a well established concept in mobility studies, albeit often reduced to
mere technique of motion analysis like jumping on a bicycle with a camera, or
filming people as they walk. I am concerned rather with what it means to work
from our body in all its capacities, oftalking, thinking, feeling, doing, seeing, and
imagining: trying not to favour one over the other, but seeing where an aware and
active presence might lead us.
In this chapter, then, I make a case for lived experience- our own, and through
that, as close as we can get to that of others. Words can only tell us so much. A
focus on lived experience, as method and subject, can give us a glimpse of what it
might mean to be, and to walk, in someone else's shoes.
I do this by sharing an episode of fieldwork, a day spent with 83-year-old
William. The father of my friend Jane, William lives in a service flat down the
road, and I have met him briefly at my friend's house when he came to see his
grandchildren, sit in the garden or play with the dog. On those few occasions we
exchanged short remarks, from which I mainly gathered that he is very quiet,
perhaps shy. I have also been told by his daughter that he likes to do his own
thing, loves to walk, and enjoys public transport. Often, when the family travels
somewhere by car, he will take the train and meet them at the destination. This
stems from the thirty years William spent in Hong Kong, where the train would
whisk him away from the city, to the hills teeming with exotic birdlife. This is
how it carne about that during a lull in fieldwork and on a pleasant spring day, I
jumped at the chance to accompany him on a train journey and walk through the
countryside. Walking with people was what I did, yet often this was a disappointing
ten minutes' dash to work or school, not offering much time to observe or really
get into things. A day with William would be a luxury.
The day became an experiment in being open to whatever unfolded in
movement, in interaction, as well as in thought and feeling. So that is how I will
relate it here, as a detailed narrative. I refrain from juggling with theory, integrated
analysis and anecdotal quotes. I take a step back. This is about the process, how
observations and thoughts come about. And it is about the fact that anthropology
allows for this, letting things occur, with often not much happening, giving space
to the boring lulls and routines that make up the bulk of our experience. I want to
I
132 Redrawing Anthropology
lift the cloth of surveys and academic analysis, and go back to basics. I need to feel
some ground under my feet again.
But first I explain why I feel this approach is so necessary. HalfWay through
the 'Understanding Walking and Cycling' research project,2 I suffered from what I
would call a slight crisis in my identity as a researcher.
The project team combined transport scientists, built environment analysts,
a geographer, a sociologist and myself, an anthropologist. While the former
conducted extensive questionnaires, surveys and spatial analyses, the latter took
care of the qualitative chunk, consisting of interviews, accompanied walking and
cycling journeys and ethnography. This multidisciplinary setup offered extensive
scope to contemplate the merits of specific methods and disciplines, and how they
combined or clashed.
We had been gathering hundreds of recorded and transcribed semi-stmctured
interviews and accounts of accompanied journeys. As the project advanced these
were being conducted by several team members and shared across the team. The
interviews were straightforward to do, requiring no specialist skills, and provided
rich data, accessible to all in their typed-out form. At team meetings the 'data'
were out there, in front of us on the table, for all to discuss: 'What does she say?
How does he go by bike? What's the major issue that people bring up in relation to
walking in that city?' This vexed me in two ways. First, encounters, conversations
and people became 'data': objective facts and bits of knowledge, to be added up,
cut up in quotes and combined as we saw fit. More worryingly though, it was only
people's words we were working with. This worry peaked when a colleague asked:
'what if they were lying?' Words were the source of our knowledge of actions
and movement. We used what people told us to understand what they did. This
felt like a serious reduction. Secondly, and in contrast, this made me question the
merits of the ethnographic fieldwork that I had been tasked with conducting. I had
spent months in other cities, begging for people's time, yet what extra 'data' did
it produce? So far only scribbles in notebooks, no clear conclusions or insights
and nothing that I could easily share with the rest of the team. While I felt that
ethnographic observation and participation were crucial and yielded insights we
could not get otherwise, at the same time I struggled to see what these insights
2 Understanding Walking and Cycling is a project that investigates people's
perceptions, practices and experiences of everyday urban walking and cycling. The aim is to
understand the ambivalences and complexities that people confront on their daily journeys,
in order to provide policy makers with more effective ways to promote sustainable travel.
Research was conducted in four English cities and used multiple methods: a questionnaire
survey of 4,000 households, spatial analysis of the case study neighborhoods, in-depth
interviews, accompanied journeys and ethnographic fieldwork with households in each city.
The three year project (2008-2011) was funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences
Research Council (EPSRC) and was a collaboration benveen the Lancaster Environment
Centre at Lancaster University, the Institute for Transport Research at the University of
Leeds and the School of the Built Environment at Oxford Brookes University.
Beyond A toB 133
were. My provisional answer was that fieldwork gave us context, the public space
in which people moved. In short, it gave colour and scaffolding to the words.
Writing this now, it seems astonishing that at that moment, having walked with
tens of people, of all ages, in different cities, on different trips, such as hurried
school runs, leisurely walks into town and striding commutes into work, I had
not experienced how the act of moving with people yielded specific knowledge
that is unattainable through talk. In fact at that moment I was disappointed.
After a year of fieldwork my initial hunger for phenomenological exploration
had all but died a silent death. I had walked with a variety of people, yet this
had not given me any particular awareness. Here is why: instead of walking with
people, I had been talking with them as we walked. The physical act of walking
had blended into the background as my companions talked about how they
moved around (route choice, speed, variation, clothes, equipment, enjoyments,
frustrations) and about the terrains they moved through (streets, pavements,
crossings, kerbs, traffic). Hence my provisional answer was that fieldwork and
moving with people gave us yet more words. Of course the act of walking, the
movement, could be relegated to the background, as there was nothing specific
about it. Everyone moved more or less as I did; I was not challenged, my body
receded as it was functioning normally; there was nothing to learn, nothing to
unlearn. Proceeding as normal made walking disappointingly pedestrian. It
was only when I came to walk with people whose walking capacity differed
significantly from my own that I woke up. Only then did I start to realise that
by moving differently, we do not just experience our environment differently;
rather, we shape a different environment and a different life.
The day spent with William was an exercise in humility and appreciation as I
experienced the wide array of options at my disposal, in contrast to William's quite
limited box of tricks. In what follows, when I mention my flexibility and ability
to adapt I am not being smug; rather, I point out the moments when I became
painfully aware of how fortunate I am. It was a reminder not to take anything for
granted. Walking with William, I mainly became aware of the specifics of my own
lived experience, and I can only speculate at his. This walk is not where it ends,
we can talk about this day and exchange impressions, but the experience raises
specific ideas which might not have surfaced by way of mere mental and verbal
engagement.
II
'Are you sure you can walk a mile, Dad0 ' Jane asks William, who has just told
her of his plan for the next day, to take the train to Sunnydale and then walk
through the bird reserve to his meeting at the Friends' Meeting House, about a
mile from the railway station. 'Why don't you take the car? Or I could give you
a lift, but I have the school run in the afternoon. Could you take a taxi from the
station?' Quietly-spoken William mutters that he wants to walk. Jane persists: 'I
134 Redrawing Anthropology
ask because last time when we were all at Centre Parks you said you couldn't walk
that far, and that was a lot less than a mile'. Sensing Jane's concern and William's
determination, I offer to go with William so that we can walk together. He accepts.
The following day, as I run across the platform to halt the revving two-carriage
diesel train, not for the first time that day and certainly not the last, I am painfully
- blissfully, gratefully, shamefully - aware of my mobility, or rather, what feels
like my 'ability'. I can, and am I grateful that I can. I always think I just do, but
once this doing happens in conjunction with another person who has difficulty in
doing things you were not even aware that you did, the mere doing becomes being
able to. It stops being 'I walk', 'I run', 'I stroll', and becomes 'I can walk', 'I can
run', 'I can speed up', 'I can be flexible and adapt', or in short, 'I am able'. When
you are able-bodied, some provisions for less able bodies may appear superfluous,
yet move with a less able person and everyv.rhere you notice the shortcomings of
public infrastructure. You become painfully, bodily aware that any simple act, like
walking into town, taking the train, boarding the bus - in short, any trip that does
not involve the car- turns into an obstacle course. Every outing is an adventure,
the outcome is never known. Exciting it may be, but perhaps not always desirable.
We risked missing the train for a combination of reasons, perhaps best summed
up as being slower than what public space is designed for. I recall a myriad of
instances when we were unable to speed things up, unable to choose from several
options and opt for a quicker, shorter, faster one. Not being able to run means to
run out of time and to run out of options. The only way to compensate for this is
through more time. If we cannot manipulate public space, we can but manipulate
time. Half an hour earlier I had walked into the car park of the retirement flats
where William was already waiting for me. I am a bit late. At that time I didn't
know William's speed. This seems a strange thing to say about someone, as if
we are meeting to go for a run together or to set off on a bike ride and I am wary
of being able to keep up. I realise that I only mention the speed of a person, as
opposed to that of a device or a technology, when a sports activity is involved and
the issue is one of how fast someone is. But what if speed is absent; do we call it
non-speed?
But I have rushed ahead - something I did continually throughout the day.
Initially, I was thinking how William would not make it in time for the start of his
meeting. Then, as our walk progressed, one step at a time, I began to think that he
would not make it to the middle or even the end of the meeting, until it became
clear that if we remained on foot, we would not make it at alL As I rushed in my
head - calculating distance, time and ability to walk - this sum of uncertainties
oddly added up to the one firm certainty that we would not make it. William did
not seem rushed; he paused and started a conversation with anyone we met. Was
he exhausted and did he need the rest to catch his breath 0 Or was he instead not
too fussed about getting to the meeting on time? Did he just enjoy the day as an
outing? Or was his concept oftime and ofbeing on time (for the train, the meeting)
different from mine?
Beyond A to B 135
But again I am running ahead of myself; we are still at the flat's parking lot. It
is 11.15; will we make it to the station in time to catcb the 11.32 train? The obvious
event to play with, the mechanism to buy time, is the ticket. William wants to buy
it on the train. He tells me how, on the previous day, he had tried to buy one in
advance from the ticket booth at the station but they said he couldn't, then he tried
the internet but he did not manage that either, so he'll buy it on the train today.
Wben I say I think that's more expensive, he decides that we will ask at the ticket
booth first.
We set off. First, we need to cross the road as there is no pavement on the side
of the road where we exit the car park and cars come perilously close to the edge.
As the two-lane road descends from the green belt towards the medieval town
centre the line of stone walls, majestic lime trees, and Victorian houses transforms
into the fenced front yards of terraces, with pavements on both sides. We wait to
allow cars to pass, as we need a long stretch of 'clear road' before we can venture
out to cross, since, as I will notice soon enough, William walks slowly. Yes, he told
me yesterday when we arranged a time to meet that he walks slowly and yes, until
now I have only met William three times before and, as I realise then, all occasions
were static - or at least, William was static. He does a lot of standing, pausing,
watching and thinking, which is all the more striking as his is a tall, upright, silent
presence. He does not move, he stands, holding a shopping bag, watching his
buzzing granddaughter throwing the ball for the dog to fetch. Sometimes he sits,
but he prefers to be on his feet. William is on slow time; this has a mesmerising
effect on those around him, or at least it has on me. What's with all the rushing
around, the moving and talking to give ourselves something to do, striking a pose?
William stands, and as he is taller than anyone else, looks down on the world. The
dog runs around, floppy ears flapping and wagging its tail in search of the ball,
brings it back, and William kicks it away again. He is a stoic presence. Two year-
old Masy babbles, shouts, shrieks, launches, runs around, stumbles, gets up again,
is off on her tricycle, her pedal car, anything that moves. William is like the sun,
the world revolves around him, making him seem even more stationary.
So, although William had told me he walks slowly, I did not realise what that
meant and how slow slowly could be, until I walked with him, which is now, as we
cross the street to reach the pavement and set off.
The first stretch is downhill, but that has no impact as our way of walking is
ruled by factors other than inclination. It has its own pace, all but oblivious to
infrastructure. I realise how my pace on foot and by bicycle is always in synchrony
with - that is, adaptable and responsive to - my situation and surroundings, a
relentless amalgamation of other people, elevation, the weather, surface structure,
being late, feeling fit, being tired, being worked up and so on. Not so with William,
for the way he walks is at the limit of what is achievable for him: we cannot stretch
it, fire it up or alternate the rhythm. The only scope we have for variation is to stop
altogether, wbich we do in order to allow people coming towards us to pass, or
those behind to overtake. Walking abreast, we fill the narrow pavement and risk
causing a jam. Out of habit I take the side of the pavement bordering the road, so
r 136 Redrawing Anthropology
as not to force my companion any nearer to the traffic than usual, but this means
that William, with his head so high, is often harassed by overhanging branches-
I it is May and the trees are in full foliage. So this 'mechanism' comes with only
two speeds, walking and not-walking. It's like having a doll that can only do two
things, and with envy and regret you eye up the other models around you that can
also kneel and skip, go sideways and run. How do we walk? One foot in front- just
in front - of the other. We move literally one foot at a time. William adds to this
his bland national-health-service model walking stick, metal with white rubber
stopper below and orthopaedic handle on top, which he plants down at the same
time as he lifts his left foot. Is it a third foot, or a supporting arm? Later, when I
offer him an arm in support as he seems to be teetering, he politely declines. 'No
thank you', he says. 'You see, that's why I have this stick.'
Do our rhythms collide, or do they become synchronised? I am not sure, but
know that I myself am working simultaneously at quite different speeds. By going
slow, a lot slower than my usual pace, I am also racing. Continually aware of the
time, at any stage I gauge the specific options available to win time, not having
control over my pace and thus not knowing 'whether we will make it'. I wonder
whether this is how William feels all the time, not knowing whether he will make
it- 'it' being the train, the trip to the station, his ultimate destination or even just
the other side of the street. I am not only racing in my head, but also inside my
body. Going slow, I feel like a coiled spring which, with every step, literally with
one foot in front of the other, releases a little only to be tightly compressed again.
This rhythm readies the coil to leap at the first possible chance - like the free
range chickens in the garden which need to flex their wings in a crazed flight each
morning upon release from their fox-proofed coop, triumphantly celebrating and
reminding themselves of their maximum capacity to move. The coil needs total
release before it can go back to its normal stretch.
We arrive at the station where a conductor confirms that a ticket is more
expensive when bought on the train. William is slightly annoyed and starts to
explain to the conductor how yesterday he tried to buy the ticket in advance. I am
thinking, 'it's 11.25, no time to hang around and chat, we need to get all the way
across to the ticket office and back again, this includes stairs or lift, and I'm not
sure what William is capable of'. What is usually a quick dash for me which -
even taking into account the uncertain time of a possible queue at the ticket office
and the speed of the ticket officer - I know I can do in six minutes at worst and
four at best, now seems like having to climb Everest, an expedition of uncertain
distance, time and outcome. But to my Til just quickly go and buy our tickets,
if you hand me your pensioner's rail card', William responds with a firm 'No'.
He'll come with me. William goes confidently to the lift. We push the call button:
taking the lift is another mini-expedition; the red B (bridge level) light is on, and it
takes an age for the P (platform) square to light up. 'Doors opening', says the lift.
William courteously lets me walk in first- 'doors closing'. I push the B button:
'Bridge level', says the lift again. 'Doors opening'. We walk across the bridge
to the ticket office - no queue. I commence to take out my purse, only to notice
Beyond A toE 137
that I did not bring it. I had packed my rucksack with an Ordnance Survey map,
bananas, oatcakes, binoculars (for the bird reserve), even a compass (not knowing
William's orienteering skills and feeling like the responsible adult, needing to
make sure my charge arrives safely) and a mobile phone, in case I needed to phone
a taxi, daughter Jane, our destination perhaps, or, heaven forbid, an ambulance. I
am ready for any eventuality, yet I forgot my money. While I am still rummaging
through my bag, William calmly has his wallet ready to hand and pays. I secretly
hope he has enough money on him to pay for a taxi in case we need one - he
carries a sling bag which is unreassuringly flat; there can't be any lunch in there,
certainly no bottle or flask, perhaps a cereal bar and a map, but not much else. The
adventure is building up. We make our way back to the platform. It is 11.29, and
the lift alone takes two minutes. As William sets off across the bridge and I object
'isn't it that way?' he replies, 'No no: this way; that way is the lift to the platform
for London, the other lift is this way'. He sounds so convincing that I go along
with him and, as we proceed, I spot the lift we need on the other side; our way only
leads to stairs. As William enthusiastically explains to me how they have a great
system here, and how he knows how to travel to London where passenger care
comes to the platform with a caddy to pick up him and his wife who cannot walk
anymore, which is great, otherwise they couldn't do it you know, travel to London
on their own- we end up at the stairs. 'Oh! You were right. I am very stubborn
you see'- we tum around and retrace our steps, 'my wife calls me a control freak'.
We take the correct entrance this time, 'doors opening - doors closing - doors
opening'. Two hundred meters further along the platform the train is revving. I run
ahead: 'Could you wait for the gentleman with the stick? We got delayed by the
lift'- no problem. As William boards the train the station attendant imparts to the
conductor, 'that's what it's all about'.
Usually, an 'accompanied walk' would end here, each of us going our
own ways, William on the train, me to work. I would summarise the trip as an
observation of how trying it can be to catch a train when you are not very fast. End
of story. Yet today, I hang around. Getting into the pace of things takes time and
application. Whereas on our rush to the station I worried about traffic, missing the
train, William's safety, and crossing the road, in the tranquil bird reserve, where
all we do is walk on the mile-long causeway in an almost straight line, the focus is
wholly on the movement. Here I finally get into William's rhythm. Yet again I feel
like a tightly coiled spring- so tight in fact that it is hard to move at all, to put one
foot in front of another, again and again, for two hours. The slow pace is difficult
and tiring. The almost-but-not-quite standstill over a prolonged stretch of time
makes me dizzy and I sometimes lose my balance - is this partly why William
uses a walking stick? I picture myself as an apprentice in the slow art of defYing
gravity and speed. After the initial effort to find the rhythm, and then to settle into
it, over time this steady repetition has a meditative effect. Even the birdwatchers
who, until now, had always seemed to me to be the epitome of stationariness, seem
to be rushing about. Indeed the whole world seems to whiz around us, as birds
call, warble, twitter and shriek in the reeds. We walk on the causeway, a wide
138 Redrawing Anthropology
track of dirt, sand, and grit; here it is easy to walk abreast, deep in conversation,
while people pass us by. We proceed ever so slowly, and talk. William talks about
his past, his job in the social housing sector in Hong Kong, his English boarding
school youth, his stint in the navy, his childhood in Rhodesia where his father was
a geological surveyor. 'Yes you see, my mother abandoned me when I was six
months old, she joined my father on a survey to Mount Kilimanjaro and left me
with the servants'. Once in a while we are interrupted by a practicality: a passer-
by greeting us, the surface of the track, a near trip, a bird call, and William starts a
new thread. 'I abhor war, that's why I joined the navy you see; you don't need to
see your opponent'. At times, William has to find his step carefully, at other times
he just halts to catch his breath or to regain stability. Does he need a rest, would he
like to sit down? No, he's fine. We continue.
People are puzzled by us, two adults, ambling at an almost standstill pace,
yet we do not seem alarmed or annoyed by it, wanting to move faster. We are in
a bubble, out of pace, out of place, out of time. Are we incongruous? We are, in
relation to the main activity of this place; yet I feel more grounded and more in
this place than I presume the others do who walk fast, stand still, or peer through
binoculars at invisible but very audible birds in the reed beds. We walk so slowly,
we shuffle, as if we never lifted our feet from the ground. I feel in touch with the
entire ground. Were we walking on sand, we would have drawn an uninterrupted
line. William's stories are grounded; the causeway is the surface into which
they are stitched. We pick up a thread, lift it slightly, and weave it through the
ground again. Are we incongruous? We are to the others, puzzled at our slow
speed, wondering perhaps why we walk when we walk so slowly instead of using
a mobility scooter, for example, a few of which we meet on our way.
I look at the map. We have advanced the width of two fingers in one hour. I
casually tell William that we still have a long way to go, and show him on the
map. He does not seem worried. 'Are you in a rush?' I ask 'No'. 'But you want
to get there before the meeting ends?' 'Yes'. We come to a sheep gate marking the
end of the walkway and the entrance to undulating farmland. William looks very
tired, stands still, and wavers. I reach out and hold his elbow. We sit down on a
stone wall, it is overcast now and the wind picks up. We have been on the road
for two hours and covered a quarter of the route. It is 2 o'clock in the afternoon;
William's meeting started at 12.30 and ends at 4.30. As I voice these things I show
William again on the map where we are. What does he want to do? Does he want
to get a taxi? William sits in silence on the wall, a tall man, out of breath, weak.
He is shaking; again, because I don't know him, I am not sure whether this is just
a sign of his age or because he is cold and exhausted. I don't know how worried
I should be about him. He accepts an oatcake and banana. I put on my fleece and
waterproof as it is getting cold now. William is alarmingly quiet. I start to chat,
'so what do we want to do? How do you feel? It is still a long way to go and it is
getting late'. William ponders: 'Probably, we should get a taxi'. He is so quiet, as if
defeated; 'this is the first time I can't do what I set out to do ... I think I have bitten
off more than I can chew ... this is failure'. I strongly disagree, assuring him that it
Beyond A toB 139
is not failure and that we walked a lot, for two hours. I realise that I am witness to
William's corning to terms, or rather being confronted, with his limits, and to how
he did not know, or did not want to know, where they were. A while later William
has mustered up new courage; 'I shall call a taxi'. He takes out his mobile phone
and fumbles with the buttons; there is bad reception as we are in the middle of
nowhere. 'Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello, we are at Borrowdale- Hello? We are at
Borrowdale farm. Can you come and pick us up?' The line drops. William dials
again: 'Hello? ... Yes yes, Borrow dale ... ', and the line drops again. He turns to
me: 'I think they are corning'.
I am not sure. Is it because his calling a taxi does not conform to the normal
rules of calling a taxi? I fear the taxi company might have taken his call as a joke,
as William sounded so innocent, childlike in calling, as if the taxi was on tap,
waiting for his call and they would be on their way. I suggest: 'Perhaps there was
bad reception, I'll try with my phone to make sure they know where we are'. As I
call, the phone is answered by an incredulous and amused voice. 'Ah, yes, I wasn't
sure. Do you want a taxi? You're at Borrowdale farm? OK, I should be there in 10
minutes'. For the second time that day I am glad I am here, as again William could
have been stranded. Here he could have been left for a long time, trusting the taxi
would arrive, getting cold, without food or drink, in the middle of nowhere. I am
struck by the contrast; how easy it is for me. I feel I can manage, am in charge,
can trust myself- my legs, feet, heart stamina, nous, planning - all these by no
means extraordinary, nor even infallible, as illustrated by my forgetting my money
and my consequent inability to buy us out of any situation, whether of hunger,
thirst, or being stranded. In contrast to William, I am made to feel aware, switched
on, part of the world, practical, sorted. And I get angry that it is precisely those
who need it the most- those who are frail, less mobile, or slow- who seem to be
the least attuned to the pragmatic and fast moving world of trains, tickets, taxis,
traffic, and pedestrian cross lights. Twenty minutes later the taxi arrives, a one-
man venture: 'you're lucky I am working today'. As soon as we get into the warm
car, we are back in normal world time, conversation with the cordial driver is fast
and practical, and things are under control, there are certainties again in life: we
will make it, we will be alive; we will be dry. We arrive at our destination in ten
short minutes.
This story has moved along ever so slowly, yet covering a mere one thousand
metres in three thousand words far exceeds the ratio of words spoken to our
distance travelled that day. The slow pace mimics the walk; understanding was
built as things unfolded.
When, a week later, I see William in town, getting out of his car at Marks and
Spencers, I am slightly apprehensive. Marks and Spencers is his daily 'morning
walk into town' destination, where he buys the newspaper and milk, and sets off
back home. Once a week he goes by car to drive his wife to the shop, yet today
he is by himself. As we chat, I mention how I enjoyed our outing last week and
that I would love to accompany him for another walk. With inclined head and in
hushed voice - which at that moment I mistake for his usual shyness - William
140 Redrawing Anthropology Beyond A toE 141

replies: 'Oh, I don't think I'll do another walk'. I explain that I did not mean a this taken away, by age, illness or disability, it would doubtless feel like a major
whole day, just his daily trip to the shop. 'No no, I take the car now. I think my curtailment, not just on how I move, but on what I can, and on who I am.
walking days are over'_ Then it dawns on me, and I refrain from pressing the raw And how do we grasp this human actuality? Not by asking a few questions,
nerve any further. Had our expedition been the tipping point? Did he feel forced but by being open to experience. Our body is the perfect and only tool with which
finally to accept what he had been putting off? Others -like his daughter- might to do this. Knowledge happens in the field, not just afterwards, in an armchair or
have long doubted his capacity to walk, yet he wanted to hold onto it for as long seated at a desk. Here I have stressed those 'Aha' moments, the penny dropping
as he could, as this was his way into the world, setting off on 'one of his walks', as you are doing, as you are with other people long enough to share and feel.
doing his own thing. Anthropology is not an exercise in mere data gathering, nor in recording, mapping
or plotting behaviour. It is about understanding life. This chapter celebrates
anthropology as a discipline that allows for freedom, time, experience and
III imagination in its methods, all of which are necessary and invaluable to get to
what it seeks to comprehend. If there is a call to redraw anthropology, it is perhaps
In his phenomenology of perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty sought to understand timely to remind us of its richness and strengths.
motility as basic intentionality. Consciousness, he wrote, 'is in the first place not a
matter of"! think that" but of"! can"' (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 137). In this chapter I
have focused on the vicissitudes of one walk, as I wanted to make a case for bodily Acknowledgements
experience in a multidisciplinary study of walking that otherwise was dealing
only with words and statements, thus risking to neglect movement altogether. In I am grateful to William for his conviviality and for a fascinating day spent
doing so, I rediscovered the uniqueness of anthropology as a social science and its together. I thank Petra Tjitske Kalshoven and Dave Horton for their reading of a
approach to understanding life. draft of this chapter and their astute comments.
Like some of the thousand respondents to our walking questionnaire, William
had told me that he walks slowly. Yet this did not really tell me anything; it did
not tell me what it means to walk slowly. And it certainly did not tell me about the References
cascade of implications this can bring with it, on any ordinary day or trip, for how
we live our lives. I wanted to get beyond A to B; to bring the movement back in. Casey, E.S. 1996. How to get from space to place in a fairly short stretch of time:
Beyond merely talking or thinking with William, I needed to move with him, if phenomenological prolegomena, in Senses of Place, edited by S. Feld and
I was to get even the sliver of an understanding of what it means to him to walk K.H. Basso. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 13-52.
slowly. In the process I also became aware of my own movement, by recognising Merleau-Ponty, M. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception, translated by C. Smith.
how it differs from his. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
So what did I learn by following the movement? I learned that it is not
merely about the techniques and technicalities of moving. It is rather about what
locomotion does to you, and how it is intrinsic to who we are- to our intentionality,
or to our 'I can', as Merleau-Ponty would say.3 Intentionality is our way of being
geared towards the world; curtail that and we would be cut off from life, from
who we are. We would continually bump up against a glass wall, separated not
only from action but also from interaction with our environment, with others, with
surfaces, with the medium, with ourselves. Moving with people, I realised that
'my' movement centres not so much on the walking but on the bits in between,
the fact that I can adapt, jump, recover after skipping, sway, move out ofthe way,
and speed up. That's me: in control, yet playful, and with different options. Were

3 Of course this fits with Merleau-Ponty's basic stance, establishing our body as 'our
general medium for having a world' (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 146).