Upstream and downstream - Being at home in the open
Limit as Education through running and kayaking along rivers with salmon
Paolo Maccagno
(University of Aberdeen)
Deborah Pinniger
(University of Aberdeen)
Contribution description:
Moving upstream and downstream rivers can be a way of countering mainstream ways of education and research by setting up a context of learning where the individual faces the limit, becomes vulnerable and can open up to difference and other ways of being in the world.
Paper long abstract:
We start from a story to bring to the table:
“An accomplished kayaker after having been the first to paddle through the four great rivers of the Himalayas faces a different challenge. He has been diagnosed with a brain tumor. After some medical treatment he feels that “the only way out was downstream” and therefore to paddle the Indus River as a way of healing. He said that releasing control and surrendering to the flow of life, gave him so much freedom and that he felt at home.”
Runner and Feldenkrais practitioner Paolo Maccagno and kayaker Deborah Pinniger move up and down rivers. Maccagno’s ongoing experimental project “Running with Salmon” explores salmon’s upstream movement for learning to die, while Pinniger’s lifelong engagement of kayaking down rivers across the world, pays homage to the educational potential of rivers. Over several months their respective aims and skilled practices have informed a conversation on limit and education which will be the subject of their contribution.
In relation to the above story, they have been asking themselves, “what does it mean to go home?” They have been exploring this question through running and kayaking and by looking at salmon’s way of life. Maccagno and Pinniger’s work has been focused on leading groups of people (often vulnerable) in marginal (prison) and remote (wild rivers) places through practices at the limit, where body and movement are the core of the experience and a source of knowledge. These practices inspire a sense of self beyond the boundary of subjectivity and identity revealing instead one’s own presence and aliveness at the cusp of life. They consider these liminal contexts in relation to their high educational potential, affording the individual to become exposed and vulnerable, yet at the same time offering the possibility to move forward through a new sense of life.
By recognising what they do in relation to Ingold’s notion of anthropology as a practice of education, they investigate the inspirational notion of educere-leading out (Ingold 2018), through their practice of running upstream and kayaking downstream along rivers. Movement is at the centre of their inquiry and is conceived not as displacement in space but in its incipiency as an “issuing along with things in the very processes of their generation” (Ingold 2011: 12), constituting the existential ground wherein humans can be resituated in the world along with all its non-human inhabitants.
They would like to suggest that moving upstream and downstream rivers can be a way of countering mainstream ways of education and research by setting up a context of learning where the individual faces the limit, becomes vulnerable and can open up to difference and other ways of being in the world. In so doing they would like to show the potential of experimental methods of research and participate to the current debate around anthropology and/as education (guided by the works of Ingold, Masschelein, Manning and Biesta) by opening a path into the anthropology of the limit as an educational practice.
Accepted Contribution:
Contribution description:
Paper long abstract:
We start from a story to bring to the table:
“An accomplished kayaker after having been the first to paddle through the four great rivers of the Himalayas faces a different challenge. He has been diagnosed with a brain tumor. After some medical treatment he feels that “the only way out was downstream” and therefore to paddle the Indus River as a way of healing. He said that releasing control and surrendering to the flow of life, gave him so much freedom and that he felt at home.”
Runner and Feldenkrais practitioner Paolo Maccagno and kayaker Deborah Pinniger move up and down rivers. Maccagno’s ongoing experimental project “Running with Salmon” explores salmon’s upstream movement for learning to die, while Pinniger’s lifelong engagement of kayaking down rivers across the world, pays homage to the educational potential of rivers. Over several months their respective aims and skilled practices have informed a conversation on limit and education which will be the subject of their contribution.
In relation to the above story, they have been asking themselves, “what does it mean to go home?” They have been exploring this question through running and kayaking and by looking at salmon’s way of life. Maccagno and Pinniger’s work has been focused on leading groups of people (often vulnerable) in marginal (prison) and remote (wild rivers) places through practices at the limit, where body and movement are the core of the experience and a source of knowledge. These practices inspire a sense of self beyond the boundary of subjectivity and identity revealing instead one’s own presence and aliveness at the cusp of life. They consider these liminal contexts in relation to their high educational potential, affording the individual to become exposed and vulnerable, yet at the same time offering the possibility to move forward through a new sense of life.
By recognising what they do in relation to Ingold’s notion of anthropology as a practice of education, they investigate the inspirational notion of educere-leading out (Ingold 2018), through their practice of running upstream and kayaking downstream along rivers. Movement is at the centre of their inquiry and is conceived not as displacement in space but in its incipiency as an “issuing along with things in the very processes of their generation” (Ingold 2011: 12), constituting the existential ground wherein humans can be resituated in the world along with all its non-human inhabitants.
They would like to suggest that moving upstream and downstream rivers can be a way of countering mainstream ways of education and research by setting up a context of learning where the individual faces the limit, becomes vulnerable and can open up to difference and other ways of being in the world. In so doing they would like to show the potential of experimental methods of research and participate to the current debate around anthropology and/as education (guided by the works of Ingold, Masschelein, Manning and Biesta) by opening a path into the anthropology of the limit as an educational practice.
Anthropology as education
Session 1