Rhizomatic trails
April, 2016 Somewhere between Dubai and Seattle, Emirates Airlines
I had a lot of time to think while walking. Those thoughts were less orderly than taking notes or writing. They were a reaction to the place around me, so much time spent looking at the dirt, the trail, the rocks in front of me. I have poor proprioception. If I don’t look I could fall over–but fortunately my braces keep my ankles in place, so even if I start to fall they stabilize me and I don’t fall each time.
Walking ethnography as a grounded (literally) method includes many moments outside of the field research site visit in Khumbu. This included walks during which movement and the thoughts of the preliminary research design was cognitively configured, the theory examined, and the writing worked out while my body moved through walks in my neighborhood, on trails near my home, in the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra Nevada, canyonlands of Utah, in dripping wet jungles of Southeast Asia, overlooking the rift valley in East Africa, leech filled ambulations in southern India, and the dusty trails of the Himalaya. During field research, the embodied movement through land was the single most influential method of this research. Post-field daily walks through my neighborhood and the trails near my home on long extinct volcanoes, now smoothed over as flat-topped mesas of basalt and dry grasses, provided the naturecultural space to work through the embodied performativity of place and to become entangled in the diffractive analysis of this research.
Walking ethnography involves the process of entering the field, “being in it”, and leaving it. Yi’En (2013) explained that this involves an inclusion of both field sites and those things that are usually considered to be in the background, the distractions that can sometimes contribute to both the “poetics and politics” of field research. Hidden stories such as these can illuminate the intricacies and contexts of place and experience. Yi’En said,
Thus, my field notes and the process of taking notes involved moving through land, sitting in place, and being present in a place. This process (which includes photography as in Yi’En’s case) is a rhythmical bringing of bodies into conversation with the environments humans move through. It is important to note the methods and intentions of walking ethnography does not require the ableism necessary to walk or hike. While that is what my body did in these places, the intent is how one’s body embodies and reacts and responds in a relationship with place. In my contextual experience, as I explain in chapter one, my body’s chronic pain issues and injury were both a limitation and key towards understanding and recognizing embodiment. If one is to engage in this method, all that is necessary is that immersion in place and to be attuned to the cues of the contact zones and rhythms of topography.
Walking ethnography allowed me to develop the embodied topographical narrative style of the presentation of data. The topography of land affects the way a body moves through it. In Khumbu, this was even more apparent with the drastic changes of ecology through changes in altitude. This reaction of body/nature to the elevation and the undulations of the Himalaya supported the development of the narrative, understanding of the intra-actions of place, and importantly the process of this research.