Walk This Way: Fitbit and Other Kinds of Walking in Palestine

Abstract

This essay examines how meanings and practices of walking, particularly quantified walking, change according to place. Drawing together my own experience with a wearable computing device called a Fitbit at home and in my field site, East Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank of Palestine, I compare quantified walking and its focus on the self with other forms of walking that highlight place. I examine the relationship between self‐monitoring and other‐monitoring, especially in relation to walking in Palestine, and I explore how genres of mobility like nature walking or playing Pokémon GO might unfold differently in an occupied territory where the right to move is highly contested. I also explore Palestinian genres of walking, including the wander (sarha). In Palestine, walking becomes an important means not for pursuing personal health, but for cultivating a wider health of the land and knowledge of the nurturing relationship between land and the people who walk across it. Such practices of walking with or walking together can, I conclude, function as forms of kinwork.

Transcending enclosures by bus: Public transit protests, frame mobility, and the many facets of colonial occupation

“…Scholars have recently begun to analyze the significance of these running collectives; McGahern (2019) argues that they simultaneously demand and exercise the right to move and the right to recreation as part of a broader claim on the right to fully access their cities, while Stacher (2018) and Paq (2018) note that the runs are opportunities to educate foreign fellow runners (and remote foreign audiences) about the barriers to movement Palestinians experience. Walking is also an arena for resilience and resistance to im/mobilization, crystalized potently as an indigenous form of territorial and temporal reclamation, as per Shehadeh’s (2008) canonical formulation of sarha , the unfettered, roaming form of walking Palestine’s natural landscape (see also Meneley’s [2019] discussion of different forms of walking in Palestine, many both restricted and resilient). Relatedly, Jennifer Kelly (2016) focuses on Palestinian political tours to argue that Palestinian “tour guides use the expansive mobility of tourists to underscore the restricted mobility of Palestinians [and] … frame this contingency and racialized precarity of movement as a constitutive part of the regime of military occupation” (2016: 735).…”

Tracking selves or tracking relationships? Means of measuring time amongst Ethiopian runners

“…In spite of the fact that the athletes I knew spoke at length about particular race locations where ‘the time comes’ and others where it is not possible to run quickly, and of different kinds of races, those who dealt with athlete contracts did so according to a process of commensuration (Espeland & Stevens 1998), where the time an athlete had run was the only important consideration. This logic is similar to that created by the algorithms that process the data from DSTDs into numbers of steps or kilometres, intended, as Meneley puts it, to be ‘capturable, knowable, commensurable, quantified’ (2019: 132), and necessitating a flattening of the experience of training into data. When Jeroen mentions the ‘potential’, he refers to the preference of brands and managers for working with younger athletes, those who have the assumed ability to accelerate over time.…”

The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn: Sociocultural Anthropology in 2019

“…Yet, this fabrication does not proceed uncontested. The state surfaces as a contested arena in diffuse sites, such as through the production of “indigenous” wine terroir as an instrument of settler colonialism in Israel/Palestine (Monterescu and Handel 2019), weekly street parties as celebratory departures from the state socialist temporality of la lucha in Santiago de Cuba (Garth 2019), the speculative politics of land restitution in post‐conflict Colombia (Morris 2019), the ritual negotiation of transnational maritime crossings with “other‐than‐human entities” by Haitian migrants (Kahn 2019), satirical billboards that compel ostensibly dysfunctional Bosnian politicians toward greater public accountability (Kurtović 2019), collective memories of state violence in Kurdistan as a subversion of the state's narrative monopoly on legitimate violence (Günay 2019), the “spectral fiction” of a Somali maritime sovereignty abrogated by US and German counter‐piracy ventures in Somali territorial waters (Dua 2019, 98), and the uneven distribution of augmented‐reality Pokémon GO in‐game items and events that virtually project a “unified Jerusalem without a Palestinian presence” (Meneley 2019, 139; emphasis in original). Perspectives of this sort remind us that the coherence of the state cannot be taken for granted, as its territorial hegemony is either secured or disrupted by ritual, vernacular, or performance.…”