Ethnography in Motion, or Walking With WG Sebald
| DOI | 10.1177/09646639211027338 |
| Author | Panu Minkkinen |
| Date | 01 June 2022 |
| Published date | 01 June 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Ethnography in Motion, or
Walking With WG Sebald
Panu Minkkinen
University of Helsinki, Finland
Abstract
In fieldwork, the collection of qualitative empirical data is almost exclusively carried out
on foot. When we study a ‘field’, it also suggests a terrain or an environment that we are
meant to investigate. Yet the actual process of investigating something ‘on foot’, of
walking, is seldom reflected on in any detail. The aim of this essay is to consider what this
notion of investigating a field ‘on foot’ might mean for socio-legal scholarship. It focuses
on the ways in which author WG Sebald’s walks in the Suffolk landscape, as portrayed in
his novel The Rings of Saturn (1995), provide sensory stimuli for his meditations on
themes such as the passing of time and identity. Sebald’s notion of walking is traced
Claude L´
evi-Strauss’ idea of bricolage as a form of ‘patchwork’ knowledge formation, but
the hybridity of Sebald’s resulting ‘fieldnotes’ suggest a closer affiliation with Walter
Benjamin’s notion of constellation.
Keywords
Ethnography, literature, walking, Walter Benjamin, WG Sebald
Walking
When we conduct fieldwork, we collect qualitative data almost always on foot. We study
a ‘field’ or, as James Clifford defines it, a ‘historically specific set of distances, bound-
aries, and modes of travel’ (Clifford, 1990: 64; also Van Maanen, 2011) which suggests
the existence of a terrain or an environment that we are meant to look into in more detail.
Yet the actual process of investigating ‘on foot’, of walking, is seldom reflected on in any
detail. Whatever fieldnotes we may come up with tend to focus more on those with
whom the walk may have been conducted or the destination that we set out to reach. The
Corresponding author:
Panu Minkkinen, Faculty of Law, PO Box 4, FI-00014 University of Helsinki, Finland.
Email: panu.minkkinen@helsinki.fi
Social & Legal Studies
ªThe Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/09646639211027338
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2022, Vol. 31(3) 347–364
rhythmic experience of walking itself or how the fleeting sensory stimuli may affect our
understanding of what is being investigated are hardly touched upon. The aim of this
essay is to consider what this notion of investigating a field ‘on foot’ might mean for
socio-legal scholarship mainly through a reading of WG Sebald’s novel The Rings of
Saturn, first published in German in 1995 (Sebald, 1998).
Historically speaking, the beginnings of walking as a method can be traced to two
points of origin that both relate to the study of urban environments: Walter Benjamin’s
streetwalking fla
ˆneur as the keen observer of modern city culture (Benjamin, 2003b; also
Tester, 1994), and Guy Debord’s ‘psychogeographic’ radicalisation of urban exploration
as the d´
erive (Debord, 2006a, 2006b; also Sadler, 1998). Indeed, walking would seem to
be exceptionally suited for the observation and study of culturally dense spaces like cities
and urban centres (e.g. Brown and Shortell, 2016; Shortell and Brown, 2016). Walking
namely emulates the everyday practice with which we acquaint ourselves with new or
unfamiliar surroundings (Pinder, 2001). The cultural density of the modern city that was
already noted by the classics of urban sociology like Georg Simmel (Simmel, 1950; also
DeFazio, 2011; Diaconu et al., 2011; historically Cowan and Steward, 2007) results in a
certain sensory overload that requires unpacking making meditative walking particularly
well suited to the task (Degen and Rose, 2012; Low, 2015; Middleton, 2010; Pink, 2009).
In addition to conventional fieldnotes, walking also enables observations that are made
in a variety of other ways such as, for example, collecting random objects discovered
along the way (da Cunha, 2020), taking photographs (Tartia, 2018) or flash interviews
(Goldstein, 2016: 131–138).
More recently, the idea of walking as a method has been developed further in par-
ticular by geographers (e.g. Barnes, 2019) and ethnographers (e.g. Ingold and Vergunst,
2008), and usually with an emphasis on sensory walks that can be conducted in a variety
of spatial environments (e.g. Middleton, 2020; Richardson, 2015). In the ethnographic
tradition, fieldnotes were usually considered as a way with which the ethnographer could
document a reality that was expected to exist externally in relation to her. But today we
would probably consider such a sharp distinction between the external and the internal –
or between the impersonal ‘objective’ and the personal ‘subjective’ – as unfounded and
would instead work through the observations made from an in-between position that is
more in line with what a reflexive ethnography (Aunger, 2004) can offer. As artefacts,
fieldnotes namely also enable self-expressive and personal accounts of the ethnogra-
pher’s own sensory experiences of the environments in which she is embedded. Photo-
graphs illustrate the point well. In Peter Metelerkamp’s words, photographs are ‘both
useful as denotative records, and responsive to what [photographer] Bill Brandt
famously called “atmosphere” – that is to say the subjectively experienced qualities of
our being in space’ (Metelerkamp, 2013: 522). The same duality applies to all data
collected from the field.
The liminal space between the external and the internal has, of course, always been
part and parcel of the epistemologies that socio-legal scholarship is rooted in. The non-
positivistic ‘interpretive’ human sciences (Geertz, 1973; Martin, 1999) are premised on
the assumption that the socio-legal scholar is inevitably embedded in a lifeworld that she
shares with the social actors that she studies. By sharing a lifeworld and its meanings, she
can achieve an accurate enough understanding of how that lifeworld unfolds by simply
348 Social & Legal Studies 31(3)
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