READ: Inspirations - Ways of Walking

There are some writers and theorists whose work you return to again and again, because they are the stepping stones over which we pass to reach our own fields of research. Tim Ingold is one of those people, not just for me, but for a lot of anthropologists. I once joked with Graham Harvey that in my mind Ingold handwrites every page with an antique fountain pen, sitting in a well-worn but beautifully made log cabin, looking out over the wilderness. If that’s not true, and he writes sat in some concrete office in between departmental meetings, on a university laptop, we don’t want to know about it.

But with Ways of Walking, Ingold didn’t write alone. He co-edits, with Jo Lee Vergunst, an volume of chapters by diverse academic voices on a seemingly mundane activity that is very dear to my heart – walking. I think these days walking is my practice above every other. My mother claims I never crawled, but just got up one day and strode determinedly across the room. I walked 5 miles on my fifth birthday, and have endless miserable memories of being forced to walk in any and all weathers, for transport and leisure. More sweetly, one set of my grandparents spent all their courting days out walking, and some of my fondest early memories involve walking hand in hand with them. Coming from similar stock, Phil also understands the need, the responsibility and the joy of walking the land, and we once walked 115 miles together to cross the Lindisfarne sands. I’d like to do more of that, when life isn’t so busy and health still allows. Lately of course, most of my walking is with a dog lead in hand, and George is shaping up to be just as lovely a canine walking companion as Storm ever was.

Also, as I am currently and nervously waiting for the draft chapters to arrive on my third edited volume, I too know the inspirational joy and the administrative pain of making a project like Ways of Walking happen. The subject really has to matter to you.

Giving an insight into why they chose this title, in their introduction, Ingold and Vergunst state that movement is a way of thinking and a way of knowing. Indeed,

“in their timings, rhythms and inflections, the feet respond as much as does the voice to the present and activity of others. Social relations, [they] maintain, are not enacted in situ but are paced out along the ground” p1

Our task as human beings is “not to occupy the world but to inhabit it” and so “Footprints are traces of memory.” p7

Setting the scene for the chapters to come, they talk about the different ways of walking of hunters and farmers, how paths and roads can open up or close the land to walking, how the road can be a killing field, and how colonisation rides, while indwelling walks. They reference a long history of philosophical reflections on walking, from Parisian flaneurs to the collectors of Munro peaks, and the inevitable changes in our walking as our bodies change and age.