Moving through landscape and feeling knowledge

At Stillwater Historians, Rob Gee recounts a recent wander through Nova Scotia and concludes:

Think of how useful it could be to grad students, academics at any level really, doing research and seeking to spend some time getting a feel for the places they’re writing about. I think of my nineteenth century natural historians who wandered about, staying in people’s homes, and collecting, drawing, and describing species and phenomena that they witnessed. History can no more be done in the archives alone than science can in the lab. Both require their own, admittedly unique, forms of fieldwork as well. The setting is a critical component of any story, and getting a feel for the characteristics of a physical landscape as well as the ways in which places have preserved their past through place names, commemorations and public history carries us much closer to a place where we can engage in informed and interesting story-telling.

While walking and its various historical moments have recently been enjoying a wave of attention (which crested with Solnit’s Wanderlust), Rob’s right that academics haven’t yet picked up the habit of traveling through a place as a way of knowing it. Or maybe the right way of saying it is that academics haven’t picked the habit back up from the antedisciplinary scholars of the nineteenth century. Of course, fieldwork generally and place-sensitivity specifically are watchwords of many contemporary fields of scholarship. Yet fieldwork most often involves a highly-methodologized search for a certain something within the vast expanse of “the field”, and place-sensitivity tends to end up as little more than a prefatory nod towards the spatial situatedness of a research question.

I suspect that for many geographers and environmental historians—and undoubtedly for those in a wide net of other disciplines, too—there is something about the serendipitous ramble that conjures up an instinctual feeling about what it is to know something. The act of passing through a landscape, unencumbered by a precast set of questions and with senses and sinews flashing, recalls a primitive way of knowing which is not always easily crammed into the language of the academy. The primitivity of the ramble, however, should not be mistaken for simplicity or lack of rigor. By contrast, it’s the oversaturated complexity of this kind of knowing which makes it so difficult to incorporate into the research formats with which we are most familiar.

Within the wander, there’s a lot going on: a feeling of knowledge, an exercise of physical capacity, and an unstructured desire, as well as a strange kind of narcissistic heroism. I suspect that in many ways it is the richness of this experience which fuels the secret engine driving the many activities which are called “research”. This is a chord which has been struck by many of the finest scholars whose attentions hew to the land. Witness, for example, Hayden Lorimer:

Travel in real-time begins with the inclination to step-outside, and to variously encounter the places, practices and politics of the past. For many geographical researchers, landscape is the arena where pasts seem to pass through the present, and where forms of fieldwork are entwined with archival inquiry. For these researchers, staggered or shuttling movements are sometimes necessary between sites, conveniently recog- nizable and demarcated as ‘archive’ and ‘field’. […] Hip-high, shoulder-deep, or skein slim, past landscapes are about coming to the spot. Details of location can be cross-referenced. Things can be scooped up, delved into, even dug up. A less settled phenomenon than the historian’s palimpsest (of clean-cut layers resting level upon level) and enlivened by presence, landscapes promise depth and disruption.¹

or John Stilgoe:

Education ought to work outdoors, in the rain and the sleet, in the knife-like heat of a summertime Nebraska wheat field, along a half-abandoned railroad track on a dark autumn afternoon, on the North Atlantic in winter.

or, in one of my favorite under-appreciated journal articles, Smith and Smith on “hodography”:

Hodography is a word for back roads traveling. In leisurely pursuit a hodographer has time to look around and enjoy some real contact with the landscape. He has the opportunity to see and appreciate the passing places, and to keep them as unique spatial memories, rather than simply as a succession of points in an itinerary. En route the hodographer has time to turn his head and to let it be turned by whatever happens. Normally he shuns the pikes and rejects the speed ethic, choosing instead to roll along at his own pace. As he goes, he may be thinking, daydreaming or even singing out loud about what he sees around him.²