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Paper short abstract

Using ethnographic fieldnotes and thematic interviews from a five-day hike along the Karhunkierros trail in Finland, this paper explores how narratives in the research material reflect embodied, affective, and material dimensions of a hiker's relationship to nature.

Paper long abstract

This paper focuses on how a hiker’s relationship to nature is narrated in ethnographic fieldnotes and two thematic interviews produced during a five-day hike along the Karhunkierros trail in Oulanka National Park, Finland. The research material was formed as a part of my doctoral research, which examines the cultural practices and meanings of hiking and their influence on the construction and transformation of human–nature relations. The theoretical framework draws on the concepts of human-nature relationship, materiality, and affect, and is informed by feminist new materialism as well as by the notions of the “more-than-human world” and natureculture. The paper uses the concept of narrative as a methodological tool for exploring the layered meanings of the hiking experience and of the hiker's relationship to nature.

In the material hiking is presented as a potentially gear-intensive practice, where bodily and sensory experience is mediated by equipment. Along trails, campfire sites, and wilderness huts materialize shared practices and layered histories, while guestbook entries and carved inscriptions reflect narratives of presence. Weather, seasonality, and changing sensory atmospheres — scents, sounds, tastes, colors, temperature, and light — further shape the embodied perception of nature.

Through these dimensions, hiking emerges as an affective practice in which human, material, and more-than-human agencies intertwine, generating narratives that both reflect and transform cultural meanings of nature. In this sense, hiking not only produces embodied and material stories of human–nature entanglements, but also participates in the broader, socially constructed narratives through which we continuously reinterpret what “nature” means.