Paper short abstract:

This paper uses ethnographic research to explore encounters while walking and engagements with place on a long-distance walking trail, the Jordan Trail. I argue that examining a walking trail reorientates geographical accounts of Jordan to the everyday and intimate scale.

Paper long abstract:

The Jordan Trail is a 650km walking trail running the length of Jordan. This paper draws on 12-months of ethnographic research walking and volunteering on the Trail to argue that walking ethnographies enable alternative accounts of the Middle East to emerge. These alternative accounts are encounters between those walking on the Trail - both international tourists and Jordanians - and Bedouin and rural communities. These encounters enable storied accounts of place that are intimately experienced and made meaningful as the ground is used and walked along. Relationships with objects, animals, and the land on the Trail illustrate the means through which different walking bodies come against and value the land and negotiate their journeys through the use of objects, engagements with animals, and relationships with other bodies. For instance how animals such as donkeys help Bedouins with wayfinding and carrying heavy loads.

Walking is further explored in this paper as a practice with different meanings in different places. For instance, little research on walking has explored long-distance walking trails nor histories and contemporary practices of walking outside of Europe and North America. In Jordan, a history of walking is one connected with storied accounts of place: Bedouin nomadic movements, religious pilgrimages, colonial travel diaries, and Ottoman, Roman, and Nabatean trade routes (Mason, 2019). Walking on the Jordan Trail enables these storied accounts of place to emerge but also the noticing of how different groups dwell in place and engage and connect to place.