Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the value, limitations, and implications of an “analogic” research practice emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic in attempting to get embodied insights about the experience of walking a Himalayan trekking route, while faced with the impossibility to leave a village in the Alps.

Paper long abstract:

Every year, thousands of trekkers, mainly from Western countries, walk the Annapurna Circuit in the Nepali Himalayas. One of the villages along the route is Kagbeni, the historical capital of Lower Mustang. During my fieldwork in 2019 and 2020, initially focused on the local community’s engagement with the landscape, I became increasingly interested in how trekkers experience the same landscape. This shift in focus grew more urgent after the COVID-19 pandemic forced me to return to Europe, interrupting my research.

Once in Europe, while conducting digital ethnography and interviews with former trekkers, I realized walking the Circuit myself would have been invaluable. However, travel to Nepal being impossible anytime soon, I had to seek alternative ways to develop a more embodied understanding of trekkers’ experiences than that offered by interviews. Living in a village in the Italian Alps, and inspired by “go-alongs” (Kusenbach 2003), I invited some trekkers who had walked the Circuit to hike with me in the area. Through the ensuing conversations, where the trekkers compared their experiences in Nepal with walking in the Alps, I gained deeper insights into their time in the Himalayas.

In this paper, I will discuss the implications of this “analogic” research mode. Is the ethnographic data produced by these encounters truly valuable in understanding an experience removed both in time and space? How does the researcher’s positionality play out in such a research practice? Does this way of gathering ethnographic material remain valuable now that travelling is again allowed?