Paper short abstract:

Places and paths are habitually and consensually made by humans and non-human animals, and governed by invisible and unnamed norms, rules, habits and interactions. This paper juxtaposes consensual and non-consensual place-making through 19th century visitors’ narratives and archival sources.

Paper long abstract:

How did the visitors to Norway find their way to places and navigate the paths that ran through pastures, forests and mountains, along rivers and streams, over running brooks and frozen lakes? Places and paths were established long before the visitors’ arrival, and were governed by invisible and unnamed norms, rules habits and interactions. Visitors often transgressed norms, and even violated the habits and common interactions of the locals who indeed accommodated the same visitors. Places and paths are habitual parts of a landscape, and are acts of social and consensual making (Macfarlane 2012:17). Hooves and feet habitually created places and paths that visitors to Norwegian landscapes walked on. Movement in a particular place allows the body to integrate its emplaced “past into its present experience: its local history is literally a history of locales” (Casey 1987:194). Who made the paths you can walk in the dark? If we explore the history of the pack horses, cows, sheep, goats and the people who tended these, we can reach a deeper understanding of the places, the paths, the landscape. In addition to ethnological archive sources and various historical accounts, these consensual hoof- and footsteps of people and animals can be found in-between the lines and as afterthoughts in travel accounts written for other readers, belonging to other social classes, and in terms of the non-human animals – to other species, while also introducing other locomotive practices and technologies.