Paper short abstract:

Drawing upon my training as a wildlife tracker I explore the 'relational' turn in Anthropology through tracking, attempting to deepen our understanding of both tracking itself as an 'education of attention' and hodology, narrative, and (more-than-human) semiotics with respect to it.

Paper long abstract:

Though the trail itself, as well as many 'tracking' peoples, have been a focus in anthropology for some time, the actual practice has gone little theorized beyond its efficacy as metaphor and concept. No doubt many anthropologists have become competent trackers through their fieldwork, however this has not translated into a theorization of the processes involved in doing so. Drawing on my experience of training as a wildlife tracker at the Wilderness Awareness School (and through the CyberTracker certification system created by Louis Leibenberg), I attempt to ground our analysis, thus deepening our understanding of already existent trends, and its efficacy as an analytic concept. Specifically, I move beyond hodology as trails between, focusing on the trail's constituent track and sign which provides insight into more-than-human relations, the education of attention, taskscapes, rhythm and movement, temporality, and so forth, not to mention the actual specific (drawing on Derrida) 'animot' itself. Furthermore the actual act of trailing an animal Other brings one directly into connection and encounter with topography, the weather-world, flora, and ones' own training and memory. Thusly it provides a generative locus in bridging the 'social' and 'natural' sciences. Finally, drawing upon, and moving beyond trails and walking as linked to narrative through their shared linearity and hodological aspects, I connect this to the work being done in more-than-human semiotics, both in terms of interspecies communication, and the development of our semiotic abilities (and thus narrative ability) evolutionarily, theorized to be resultant from tracking itself.