This article draws on Lefebvre's notion of rhythm to contribute to the theorization of embodied space and urban experience. Through gestures (learned and patterned movements), the body gathers together material and social relations in the street and produces rhythms that the ethnographer can listen to and take part in. In the article, the temporality of walking, combining past, present and future, is used to incorporate the history of a particular street in Aberdeen, Scotland, into an analysis of the walking practices of those who use it. Temporal "presence" is suggested as a mode of ethnography appropriate to shared walking, and by which both the familiar and the hidden or mysterious aspects of urban walking can be described. By engaging both with ordinary walking and more distinctive practices, the article shows how the ways that people walk in the street become part of local politics and social relations.
Ethnographers have always had to be concerned with the movements of their informants, and this article identifies the continuing importance of bodily technique and skill in fieldwork from a mobilities perspective. It develops an approach to technology and technique from Marcel Mauss to consider the relationship between ethnography as a technological enterprise and as a set of bodily skills. Evidence is presented on technology as 'gear' amongst hill-walkers in north east Scotland, many of whom adhere to a 'low-tech' aesthetic. Drawing inspiration from them, the suggestion is made that ethnographers should be cautious of adopting 'high-tech' tools for their research. Examples of GPS (Global Positioning System) useamongst the hill-walkers and in cases from the literature illustrate these themes. Finally, the article argues that making the techniques of ethnographic research more broadly known might have the advantage of making the results more useable and accessible.
Th is paper presents refl ections on the theme of sociality from a mass-participation art event in the town of Huntly in north-east Scotland in 2009. Drawing on Alfred Schütz's notion of the 'consociate' and related concepts, our eff orts are directed towards understanding the nature of sociality that the event created for the people involved in it. We consider slowness as an actual experience through pacing and cadence, and also the tensions between experience and the requirement that art should have measureable impact.Keywords: sociality, art, slowness, Schütz, cycling, Scotland Th is paper presents refl ections on the theme of sociality from a mass-participation art event in the town of Huntly in north-east Scotland in 2009. Drawing on Alfred Schütz's notion of the 'consociate' , our eff orts are directed towards understanding the nature of sociality that the event created for the people involved in it. Two aspects should be noted: fi rstly, it was specifi cally a piece of art, and thus the involvement of art and aesthetics in sociality is of concern to us; secondly, it was art created on the move and through movement, and this encourages us to locate sociality in actual activity rather than in a pre-existing context or structure.A biographical note is needed to explain our collaboration in this paper. Anna Vermehren is a curator at Deveron Arts, the organization in Huntly which produced the artwork under discussion here. Vergunst is an anthropologist at the University of Aberdeen and carried out ethnographic fi eldwork focused on the event. Our working together comprises a contention that anthropology should not merely study art as if in a subject-object relation. Instead we fi nd that there are questions of common artistic and anthropological concern that are most satisfyingly addressed by sharing authorship, though not entirely combining our voices. Schütz's perspective on the signifi cance of co-presence in social relationships seems pertinent to our joint attempt to move beyond the usual modes of art criticism, and indeed anthropology, in which the critic/ researcher constructs a relationship of distance towards the objects of concern.We now turn to how the notion of sociality has shaped our work. As the introduction to this collection points out, scholars have tended to use the term to denote a concern
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