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Accepted Paper:
Beyond walking as tourist activity and human locomotion in the anthropological research of a transforming landscape
Petr Gibas
(Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences)
Karolína Pauknerová
(Charles University)
Walking, if practised intentionally, can help researchers to focus attention to complex relationships forming the landscape including the more-than-human facets. The paper discusses the challenges posed by walking as a research tool by means of detailing our approach to walking.
Paper long abstract:
In the paper, we present our fieldwork pursued in the post-mining and post-military landscape in the north of the Czech Republic. The landscape in question, in the Podralsko micro-region, has undergone multiple transformations. The area served as a military training area (pre-1918, 1942-45, 1947/1968-1991), was heavily affected by the expulsion of Germans after WWII (1947) and by uranium mining (1965-1995) and the subsequent land rehabilitation. The area has been also frequented by tourists, at least from the 1920s onwards.
In our fieldwork, we employed walking in the area as a research tool and as a way to engage with the landscape. The challenge was to deal with the problem of crossing the genre of the tourist walking and also crossing the banality of walking as a human locomotion. By intentionally distracting us via pre-set forms of recording, planned stops and ways of talking about what surrounded us, we strived to focus our attention differently in order to see more complex relationships within the field including its more-than-human facets, e.g. in the form of traces of mining or military activities in the forest or sounds of the plants and animals, or types of the surfaces we walked on.