Talk the Walk: Walking as a Field Method in Natural History, Urban Studies, and Conservation Science

Abstract

Perhaps one of the most defining ‘techniques of the body’ for human beings is bi-pedal walking. This study brings together studies in socio-cultural anthropology to reflect on the nature of walking as a field method in different social-environmental contexts. The study offers an account of walking in relation to natural history, urban studies and contemporary conservation science. How has walking served as a field method in different knowledge-making contexts, and how does it afford an experiential way of being and belonging (or not) in urban and rural settings? By reflecting on such themes, this paper sheds light on the many ways that people walk, and the places, physical and metaphorical, that it takes them and allows them to discover, reveal, and understand.

1. Introduction

Perhaps one of the most defining ‘techniques of the body’ (cf. Mauss, 1935/1973) as far as human beings go is bi-pedal walking, at least at a species level. How people walk, where people walk, which people walk, with whom people walk, and why people walk can reveal a range of social-environmental dynamics. Nevertheless, before newer forms of mobility (airplanes, cars, bicycles, ships, etc.) became commonplace in the human world, and notwithstanding human reliance on domesticated animals such as horses, camels or donkeys, walking was the primary mode of movement for human beings—over short and long distances. However, walking, which is certainly an evolutionary miracle, is not just a way to move through the world—it is also a way to apprehend it. Walking is, in other words, a way of knowing, and it enables certain ways of knowing. Against a historical moment when there are many more instruments of knowledge available to humanity to apprehend and understand the world (such as GIS and radio-sensing, big data models and artificial intelligence), this study revisits walking as a still very relevant way of experiencing, engaging, and making sense of the world through a review of studies in a number of different fields. In this way, the article reflects on walking as a method in different social-environmental contexts.

We offer a review of inter-connected literatures wherein researchers, scientists, and knowledge-makers self-consciously frame walking as a device with which to create knowledge about and understand the world. We engage with literatures in relation to three broad fields of study: natural history, urban studies, and conservation science. Rather than offering a study of walking per se, this article shows how walking has served as a field method in different knowledge-making contexts, and how it has been written about. By reflecting on such themes, the article sheds light on some different ways that people walk, and the places, physical and metaphorical, that it takes them and allows them to discover.

2. The Natural History Walk

‘The walk’ was once an established scientific method, especially in the field of natural history. It was valorized, even celebrated, in part by those scholars who championed fieldwork, in opposition to those who favored ‘armchair’ theorizing. The structure of the greatest work of natural history in the seventeenth century, The Ambonese Herbal by Georges Eberhard Rumphius, was conceived as a walk across the island of Ambon in the East Indies (Rumphius, 2011, 5:3):

In order to describe the wild Plants we will maintain somewhat the same order one would find if one went straight across the Land of Amboina, from one shore to the other. For example, when we first set foot outside the house, we will be met by grass first, growing around the dwellings of people, in gardens, along roads, and along the edges of tilled land. If we keep walking, we will meet the fields and hills with their plants, and while gradually climbing to the top of the mountains, as well as in the valleys below, we will discover what the Ambonese wilderness has hidden there; then quickly descending… we will come out on the beach on the other side, near the mouth of a large River, and consider such plants that grow in swamps and wet places, even in Water itself, be it the River or the outermost Seashore, wherefore they grow even in Sea-water…

‘The walk’ was similarly prominent in the work of one of the greatest natural historians of the succeeding century, Carl Linnaeus.1 His journal of an expedition to Sápmi in northern Sweden, Lachesis Lapponica, or a Tour in Lapland, reads as a step-by-step narrative of what he successively observes while in the field.2 For example, at one point, in six successive paragraphs he observes (Linnaeus, 1811, pp. 85–88):

One of the Laplanders had caught a quantity of the fish called Sikloja (Salmo Albula) of a large size. He stuck about twenty of them on one spit, the back of each being placed towards the belly of the next, and they were thus roasted before the fire. These fish had previously been dried, though not at all salted.

The glue used by the Laplanders for joining the two portions of different woods of which their bows are made is prepared from the Common Perch (Perca fluviatilis) in the following manner. Some of the largest of this fish being flayed, the skins are first dried, and afterwards soaked in a small quantity of cold water, so that the scales can be rubbed off.

When these people undertake a short journey only, they carry no bag for provisions, the latter being stored between their outer and inner jackets, which are always bound with a girdle, being wide, and formed of numerous folds, both above and below it.

The Purple Willow-herb, or Epilobium (augustifolium?), made the fields at this time very beautiful. The Golden-rod (Solidago Virgaurea) was likewise here in blossom, though not yet upon the alps, where it flowers later.

I have never yet seen any animal swim as light as the reindeer. During the dog days the herds of reindeer, belonging to the inhabitants of the woody parts of Lapland, are very badly off for want of snow, with which these animals refresh themselves in hot weather upon the alps.

The rivulet near Kiomitis Trask has a very white appearance, as if milk had been mixed with it.

This pedestrian field method also characterized the work of Linnaeus’ contemporary, the English country parson Gilbert White, who gathered data while walking (or horse-back riding) about his district: “For many months I carried a list in my pocket of the birds that were to be remarked, and, as I rode or walked about my business, I noted each day the continuance or omission of each bird’s song; so that I am as sure of the certainty of my facts as a man can be of any transaction whatsoever” (White, 1789/1937, p. 130). Into the nineteenth century, this methodology was still reflected in the way that prominent naturalists like Alfred Russel Wallace (Wallace, 1869) and Henry David Thoreau gathered their data (Egerton, 2012, p. 156).3

Notwithstanding this eminent lineage, these field accounts appear odd to modern eyes (Dove, 2024). Due to the rise of scientism in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the embodied positionality of the scholar-as-walker and the admixture of what modern readers would consider to be completely disparate topics—as illustrated by the passage from Linnaeus—were beginning to be seen as un-scientific. This is reflected in the steps that some naturalists in response took to accord the ‘the walk’ more apparent rigor and objectivity. One of the best illustrations of this comes from Erik Mueggler’s close textual analysis of the works of the English botanist and explorer Frank Kingdon-Ward, who carried out a number of expeditions to Tibet and southwest China in the early twentieth century (Mueggler, 2005):

At the end of each day, Kingdon-Ward wrote the walk in memory, submitting it to the slow, even discipline of his steel-nib pen. Walking as perceptual experience and writing as multiple, layered acts of memory in relation to a dense but distant intersection of social relations each lent the other its form. In his diary writing, Kingdon-Ward sought to assert rigorous control over this process. He sought to reconstitute the walk as merely perceptual, and as subject to definite rules for perception. He sought to hammer it out into two elements: the world as a single, extended, continuous, and visible surface, representing nothing and concealing nothing; the observer as a solitary seeing body, unencumbered by sociality, admitting to no debts and no claims—a structure that echoed that of a steel nib scratching its way across a sheet of notebook paper.

This is one of the most in-depth analyses of the otherwise implicit epistemological conventions of ‘the walk’.

The internal discipline that he imparted to ‘the walk’ served Kingdon-Ward well, but as the twentieth century progressed, the tides of scientific fashion were shifting, and the tradition of nature walks—however disciplined—came to be seen as a fatal weakness of the entire field of natural history. Tewksbury et al. (2014) write, “One of the fundamental roadblocks to a vibrant and contemporary natural history movement is the broad perception that natural history consists only of walks in the woods…”4 Only in certain social sciences—rural sociology, human ecology, human geography, and especially anthropology—did ‘the walk’ persist in the twentieth century as an important field method. One of the reasons for this is logistical: anthropologists and those in allied disciplines historically studied ethnic minorities and other peoples practicing traditional livelihoods at the margins of the authority of central states, which until recently meant in upland, road-less territories. The inhabitants of such places got about by walking; and anthropologists had to do the same to get there and work there. For these scholars, there is a second, more subtle and more important dimension to ‘the walk,’ one that is fundamental to knowledge-making.

The anthropologist Andrew S. Mathews writes about ‘the walk’ as one of the methods central to his study of landscape morphology in central Italy (Mathews, 2022, p. 6):

Walking across a mountain range can teach you a lot about the ways that people have made a living in any landscape. Walking, looking, and wondering, I tried to move slowly enough to notice the shapes of trees and landforms. I took time to talk to people who lived and worked in this landscape and who could teach me to make sense of what I was seeing. The landscape I chose, the Monte Pisano between the cities of Lucca and Pisa in Central Italy, is both special and ordinary. It is special because by walking and by looking, by talking to farmers and by visiting archives, I have learned to see this landscape as the site of dramatic encounters between fast-moving fires, catastrophic plant disease epidemics, and changing human societies.

A second example, which shows the anthropologist and his interlocutor in a walk together, points to its ancient, epistemic dimension. In the Introduction to the Yale University dissertation of the anthropologist Harold C. Conklin’s, The Relation of Hanunóo Culture to the Plant World, which revolutionized our understanding of the biodiversity of the tropical rain forest and local people’s knowledge of this, he writes, “While most of this inquiry was carried on by systematically interviewing informants in Parīna, much was learned in other settlements, in cultivated fields, in forests, and while traveling from one area to another,” which he illustrates with a passage from his field notes (Conklin, 1955, pp. 15–17):

At 0600 and in a light rain, Laŋba’ and I left Parīna for Binli and the Mararim area. This meant hiking south through second-growth jungle, primary forest, and kūgun (cogon, Imperata spp.) fields for about three hours. At Arasā’as, Laŋba’ told me to cut off several 10 × 50 cm strips of bark from a ‘anapla kilāla tree (Albizzia procera (Roxb.) Benth.) for protection against the leeches. By periodically rubbing the cambium side of the strips of saponaceous (and poisonous, Quisumbing, 1947, p. 148) bark over our ankles and legs—already wet from the rain soaked vegetation—we produced a most effective leech-repellant lather of pink suds. At one spot along the trail near Aypud, Laŋba’ stopped suddenly, jabbed his walking stick sharply into the side of the trail and pulled up a small weed, tawag kūgun buladlad (Buchnera urticifolia R. Br.) which he told me he will use as a lure (pana’ūli) for a spring-spear boar trap. A few minutes later, and we were going at a good pace, he stopped in a similar manner to dig up a small terrestrial orchid (hardly noticeable beneath the other foliage) known as līyamlīyam (Epipogum roseum (D. Don.) Lindl.). This herb is useful in the magical control of insect pests which destroy cultivated plants… We arrived at the Mararim by mid-afternoon having spent much of our time on the trail discussing changes in the surrounding vegetation in the last few decades.

Whereas Conklin the anthropologist was on a ‘walk’ that morning, his interlocutor Laŋba’ was simply on a walk—without the single quotes. Whereas there was an obvious pedagogical dimension to the walk for Laŋba’ via-à-vis Conklin, as he identified plants for him, there was a similar dimension for Laŋba’ himself. He was taking advantage of the walk to gather rare plants for his own use and to inform himself as well as Conklin of important changes in the landscape. This points to a dimension of walking that long predates the anthropological or natural history walk. As human beings have walked across their landscapes from time immemorial, they have seen, smelled, and heard, and felt them. Walking is the embodied dimension of the most ancient knowledge-making process known to humanity, which anthropologists and natural historians have imitated, to their profit, but did not create.5

In the next section we turn to explore walking as a field method in cityscapes.

3. Urban(e) Walking

In urban contexts, the nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire paints a picture in ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ about a man who is in search for beauty and meaning in the city. Monsieur G. is presented to the reader as a flaneur: an individual who walks around the city, anonymous in its crowds, yet attentive to its many details. This is a person of relative privilege who can see the city and delight in it, while being relatively unseen in it. Such a person “marvels at the eternal beauty and the amazing harmony of life in the capital cities, a harmony so providentially maintained amid the turmoil of human freedom. He gazes upon the landscapes of the great city-landscapes of stone, caressed by the mist or buffeted by the sun” (Baudelaire, 1863/1964, p. 11). Such a person has leisure and taste, and as such they are able to partake of the modern offerings of the city. If ‘nature’ is present in such a vision, it is present to accentuate the high-modernist art of the urban landscape itself. Walking in the city in this way is a privilege.

Around the same time on the other side of the Atlantic, another writer, Henry David Thoreau, writing in English, valorized walking not in the city, but in nature—not to appreciate human creativity and art, but to experience wildness and freedom. If walking is liberating for the urban flaneur in Baudelaire’s essay, for Thoreau, walking is liberating for the person who ventures outside the urban. Thoreau writes that “hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps” (Thoreau, 1862/1914, p. 51) For Thoreau and for Baudelaire then, both quintessential commentators on an emerging urban modernity, walking has the potential of liberation and release, and nature is outside the city.

Moreover, for both Thoreau and Baudelaire, walking is an individual activity. On the other hand, and more recently, the anthropologists Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst write that “walking is a profoundly social activity” (Ingold & Vergunst, 2008, p. 1). This is certainly true. The manner in which we walk, where we walk, at what times of the day or year, what routes we follow, with what frequency, whether we walk alone as a couple or as a group, and so on are all informed by the social context in which such walking happens or not. Without offering a detailed account of such types of walking, this section dwells on how from the late nineteenth century, the ‘modern’ city has walked full circle, from privileging cars and mass transit systems to privileging walking. Walking in the city in the 21st century is both a way to ‘slow down’ and to be attentive to not just art but also ‘nature’ in the city.

In The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), written nearly a century onwards from Thoreau and Baudelaire, Michel de Certeau has an important chapter on walking in the city, counterpointing a “celestial” (de Certeau, 1980/1984, p. 92) view of New York City from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center—which was, prior to the 2001 terrorist attacks, still standing at the time—with more of an ant’s eye view, as it were, of the “practitioner” who lives on the ground “below the thresholds at which visibility begins” (de Certeau, 1980/1984, p. 93). Visibility here refers to a discourse of legibility by the large forces of power, whether of state, capital, urban planning and so on. In contrast to the “totalizing” discursive and material attempts of urbanistic projects and planned urbanization, we learn that such “practitioners” in the city are “are walkers, Wandersmänner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it. These practitioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen; their knowledge of them is as blind as that of lovers in each other’s arms” (de Certeau, 1980/1984, p. 93). Accordingly, de Certeau celebrates walkers as they wend their way through the city, charting paths that are not necessarily in congruence with any map, as they reveal and experience ‘stories’ that are particular and emplaced. As de Certeau goes on to write [in translation], “[b]eneath the discourses that ideologize the city, the ruses and combinations of powers that have no readable identity proliferate; without points where one can take hold of them, without rational transparency, they are impossible to administer” (de Certeau, 1980/1984, p. 95). In other words, walking is celebrated as resistance to the totalizing effects of power. Indeed, some contemporary architecture groups such as the “Stalker Collective” based in Italy have, in response to such critiques, advocated for walking and “transurbance” to pay attention to forgotten urban spaces and the deleterious effects of exclusionary power that can then be remapped onto designs for a better city (cf. Wiley, 2010; Careri, 2002/2017).

From Baudelaire to de Certeau, we see the act of walking as a kind of individuated exaltation: it is a way of being and belonging in urban spaces that can otherwise often overpower, exclude, or limit individual experience. In a related way, Tim Edensor’s essay, published in Tim Ingold’s and Jo Lee Vergunst’s edited collection on ethnographic walking, takes up walking through industrial ruins in England and brings to light the different materiality and affordances of industrial ruins (in contrast to well-paved urban surfaces), which result in different experiences of walking as such environments “coerce the walking body into unfamiliar states” (Edensor, 2008, p. 123). He writes, moreover, that “[w]hile such sites are frequently vilified as despondent realms, spaces of waste and blights on the landscape, they support a range of human activities and a plethora of nonhuman life forms, as well as offering aesthetic, somatic and historical experiences at variance to the often over-coded, themed spaces of urban renewal” (Edensor, 2008, p. 123). Because of the different experiences such spaces afford, Edensor argues, it is from them that a “counter-aesthetics and alternative memories might emerge” (Edensor, 2008, p. 123).

Elaborating on the different types of walking that result from such spaces, Edensor writes that in “contrast to the deliberate channelling of movement in the regulated city, the physical structure of ruins invites and constrains walking in a distinctive fashion. Under conditions of continuous decay, material structures and routeways are not distributed according to an ordering scheme but emerge according to happenstance” (Edensor, 2008, p. 127). Moreover, this experience is particularly evident in industrial ruins because “the historical organization of any industrial site required the very opposite, namely the hierarchical, sequential arrangement of space in accordance with the demands of production lines—an intense regulation that scrutinized the movement of bodies, subjecting them to strict regulation and confining their movements across space and time” (Edensor, 2008, p. 127). As a result, this, what he calls “constantly evolving anti-structure of the ruin”, stands in clear contrast to “the supervised linearity which determines much movement through the city, and opens up a host of spaces that may never normally be traversed and occupied” (Edensor, 2008, p. 128). Edensor argues that although industrial ruins have their own particular characteristics, as “walking through a ruin…leads us to question broader conceptions and depictions of walking. It can, for instance, provide us with a critical awareness with which to interrogate the over-smooth, regulated fabric of much urban and suburban space—and perhaps manicured forms of nature as well. I also propose that the richly embodied, sensual experience of walking through ruins can suggest ways in which we might enrich urban pedestrian environments and experiences…” (Edensor, 2008, pp. 138–139).

However, such walking through ruins (and more broadly through heritage and history) can also happen in groups. Moreover, often in the context of historical cities, groups undertake curated walks to reveal particular aspects of the city that may be in alliance with or in opposition to state-centric narratives. Writing of Milwaukee in the United States, for example, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett writes that the “frenzy of memory in downtown Milwaukee requires the instruments of historic walks, plaques, historical societies, museums, tours, and exhibitions because Old Milwaukee is a phantom… It animates a flourishing heritage industry, thanks to which the phantom is anchored to a patch of sidewalk by means of a plaque that marks where an African American church once stood. Or, it attaches itself to one of the old buildings still standing in a downtown that is otherwise vacated and devitalized, most of its architectural past razed” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1995, p. 376). Curated walks, interlaced with some tourism practices in the city which are “predicated on dislocation: on moving people and, for that matter, sites from one place to another” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1995, p. 377), can reveal these stories.

Moreover, writing on the back of their experience in the Quayside in Exeter, UK, one member of the artists-architects collective “Wrights & Sites” explicates how they use walking both as a knowledge-making method and as a performance practice to curate such walks in the spirit of “critical tourisms” (Smith, 2016, p. 16). Walking through the Historic Quayside, the artists would challenge “official representations of the waterside environment and its history” to “mis-guide” participants away from standard tour narratives (Smith, 2016, p. 4). By engaging in particular activities, conversation and dialogue, the walk would instead reveal to participants “multiple and diverse layers so that any point of view became a queasy one” (Smith, 2016, p. 4). Citing Wearing et al. (2010), Smith argues that crafting a “chorastic” space of active engagement within a heritage site was so effective such that having “self-consciously reconstituted themselves as makers of heritage meaning” (Smith, 2016, p. 12), participants also were able to bear witness to “their own production of place and history” (Smith, 2016, p. 13). In other words, alert and attentive walking, even when curated, can become a powerful tool of discovery and knowledge-making. Indeed, writing of historical Kathmandu in Nepal, Anne Rademacher speaks of a “heritage walk” which is intended not just for tourists but for “tourism professionals who would then take what they learned and conduct such walks on their own” (Rademacher, 2011, p. 168).

More recently, a number of scholars have written about paying attention to who walks in the city, when and how. For example, Amita Baviskar writes that “[m]orning walks—the quintessential quotidian practice of urban Indians with sedentary lifestyles… all wearing the sports shoes that declare their commitment to their fitness regime. They stride briskly along the paths, swinging their arms, breathing deeply to fill their lungs with the clean morning air” (Baviskar, 2020, p. 186). For Baviskar, such kinds of walking are marked by class. These walks for health and fitness are often carried out in the context of green spaces in the city. In this context, it is prudent to point out how much social science and historical literature in the last few decades from Will Cronon (1991) onwards have gone on to show the mutual dependency between cities and rural spaces. Initially focusing on showing how urbanization enfolded ostensibly rural spaces, this literature has advanced to consider ecologies in the city (Rademacher & Sivaramakrishnan, 2013, 2017). These ecologies of and in the city seek to show how nature is and natural spaces are imbricated in urban spaces. The city of de Certeau and Baudelaire did not just flatten out power but also made invisible these diverse forms of life in the city. Paying attention to other life forms and their mobilities also enriches the study of the city (cf. Barua, 2023). Walking in this respect can also open natural spaces in the city. Nature walks, in contrast to Thoreau’s, have also begun to happen within urban contexts. Baviskar, for example, writes that groups of people taking morning walks in the city in “[g]roups do yoga and laughter therapy. Others carry packets of grain which they scatter at designated spots to feed flocks of parakeets and pigeons” (Baviskar, 2020, p. 186). Such groups walk along and in urban forests, and neighborhood gardens, and along water bodies.

Thus, from being written about as an impersonal and individuated way of being in a busy city, we can see how walking (and perspectives on walking) has changed over time to become a mode to knowing and engaging more fruitfully with city spaces, with their histories and peoples, and with the diverse life and natural forms that live in and are affected by them.

In the next section we turn to explore walking as a field method in conservation.

4. Walking in Conservation

Walking in conservation science, a relatively young scientific discipline that emerged in the 1970s in response to accelerating biodiversity loss, serves not only as a vehicle for rigorous data collection but also as a deeply embodied way of knowing that creates and sustains intimate relationships between the walkers and the landscape they walk through. This draws on natural history traditions but has some distinct elements of its own, as this section of our paper shows.

George Schaller (born 1933), one of the most influential conservationists of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, has been described by his colleagues as a “formidable walker,” renowned for undertaking arduous walks during fieldwork in remote landscapes. In The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen—who joined Schaller in the fall of 1973 on a two-month-long trek through the high Himalayas in search of the elusive cats—writes, after ten hours of walking on the second day of their journey (Matthiessen, 1978, p. 25):

While taking rice supper in a local hut, GS investigates wetness in his sneaker and finds it full of his own blood. It relieves me that GS is mortal, prey to the afflictions of the common pilgrim. I am an inspired walker, but he is formidable; were it not for the slow pace of the porters, he would run me into the ground. GS’s strong legs are so crucial to his work in the high mountains of the world that he will not ski or play rough sports for fear he might do them damage.

Matthiessen goes on to note that he later teased Schaller about the bloodied shoe, drawing on a remark from the curator of mammals at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, who had warned that previous companions on Schaller’s Asian field trip had been forced to turn back when their boots filled with blood.

For Schaller, walking was not simply a mode of transportation but a methodological choice that shaped what could be known about wildlife. Moving on foot allowed prolonged exposure to terrain, weather, and animal presence, while minimizing disturbance to animals accustomed to associating vehicles with danger. As Schaller himself writes of his fieldwork in the “harsh landscape of forbidding grandeur and infinite horizons” of the Chang Tang in the Tibet Autonomous Region in China (Schaller, 2007, p. 250):

Distances in the Chang Tang are so vast and the terrain so remote that it is best to use four-wheel drive vehicles. Most areas are accessible, especially in winter, when the soil is dry and streams are frozen. But I preferred to walk: one can only make intimate contact with an area on foot, roofless, exposed to the raw bite of wind. Besides, the animals of the Chang Tang are not innocent of cars. Wild yaks may travel for miles and chiru seek the horizon with dazzling speed when they perceive a vehicle, obviously aware that death can follow.

Through long-term, labor-intensive field walking across the Tibetan Plateau over nearly four decades, which continues into his mid-eighties, Schaller documented the obscure lives of four large carnivores (snow leopard, wolf, lynx, and Tibetan brown bear) and six wild ungulates (wild yak, kiang, blue sheep, Tibetan argali, gazelle, and chiru). These demanding walks, combined with systematic practices of looking, listening, tracking, counting, and categorizing along the paths, made it possible to assess the population status and distribution, food habits, and movement patterns of animals. The same walking-based method underpinned Schaller’s field studies across diverse ecosystems, from Bengal tigers in Kanha National Park in India, to lions and cheetahs in the Serengeti–Ngorongoro ecosystem of East Africa, mountain gorillas in the Virunga Mountains of Central Africa, jaguars in the Brazilian Pantanal, and giant pandas in the temperate montane forests of Sichuan, China.

Schaller’s walking-based research method is reminiscent of the natural historians discussed in the previous section. Although he has been described by many titles—field biologist, wildlife conservationist, nature writer, “the last great literary naturalist–explorer of our time,” and at times a “feral biologist” who “suffers from culture shock not when settling into a project but on returning home”—Schaller views himself as “a nineteenth-century wanderer with a scientific bent on an intangible and elusive search.” For him, conservation provides ample justification for journeys into the remote wilderness. As he writes, “I began to study animals out of curiosity. But anyone who observes the exponential destruction of wilderness must become an advocate for conservation.” Accordingly, he seeks to use “pen and camera [as] potent weapons against oblivion, helping species to survive—or serving as memorials” (Schaller, 2007, p. 23). Over a career spanning more than six decades, Schaller has participated in numerous research and conservation projects, for most of which he produced at least two books. One is typically a scientifically oriented monograph, written in a relatively objective and rigorous style for a specialist audience. The other is addressed to a broader public and often takes the form of a naturalist’s travel narrative, documenting observations, reflections, and encounters while walking in the field, including the wildlife and people he met and the experiences accumulated along the way.

A lot of scientists who now lead wildlife research and conservation initiatives in China, India, Pakistan, Mongolia, Iran, and Brazil acquired their first intensive field training by walking and working alongside Schaller. Perhaps for many of them, walking in the field is not just about data collection but also a source of wonder, surprise, and inspiration. The physically demanding yet rewarding experience of walking through harsh terrain is what initially drew them into conservation, and what sustains their commitment to the cause. Like Schaller, who emphasizes not only intellectual engagement but also aesthetic encounters with animals—“treasuring animals for themselves, enriching us by a sense of kinship” (Schaller, 2007, p. 22)—unexpected encounters with a snow leopard in rugged mountains or eye contact with a mountain gorilla on a forest trail often leave lasting emotional impressions on conservation scientists.

This walking-based field method, exemplified in the work of Schaller and many other pioneering conservation scientists, has over the past several decades become increasingly refined, standardized, and systematized. Today, one widely used approach in conservation fieldwork is the line transect survey, in which researchers systematically walk along predefined lines, recording observations of species or environmental features at set intervals (Silveira et al., 2003). For example, in tropical forests, scientists walk transects to record sightings or signs of elephants or primates in order to estimate population density. In grassland systems, ornithologists conduct point counts along transects, stopping at regular intervals to record all birds seen or heard within a fixed radius. Similarly, plant ecologists assess species composition and vegetation structure by recording plants that intersect a measuring tape or occur at predetermined points along a transect line. Together, these walking-based techniques generate place-based, fine-scale knowledge that is foundational to understanding biodiversity patterns and ecosystem dynamics.

While for early conservationists such as George Schaller “fieldwork is not a career but the core of my existence,” the field-based mode of research is today increasingly disappearing, leading to what is called “the extinction of experiences” within the ecological community (Soga & Gaston, 2025). As a result of multiple factors shaping opportunities, motivation, and capacity for fieldwork, many conservation scientists now work primarily from offices, analyzing satellite imagery and modeling ecological systems at a distance. Even when fieldwork does occur, it is often confined to brief, site-to-site visits, the deployment of data-collecting devices such as camera traps, or the validation of remotely sensed data. In many cases, walking is outsourced to local research assistants, and conservation scientists increasingly assume the role of coordinators of walking rather than walkers themselves. When knowledge of nature is produced with minimal bodily presence in the field, it can foster a false sense of omniscience: the belief that ecosystems can be fully apprehended through digital data alone.

Many of the local assistants whose walking conservation scientists now coordinate come from Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities. For people living in biodiverse landscapes, walking has long been a deeply embodied and embedded way of knowing. Whether following wildlife tracks while hunting in forests, herding livestock across rangelands, or foraging for wild foods and medicinal plants, these practices exemplify knowing in movement, in the sense described by environmental anthropologist Tim Ingold (Ingold, 2010).

It is through walking along familiar yet continually changing terrain that people develop multiple forms of knowledge (Chappell, 2012; Moser, 2002), such as experiential knowledge (knowing by acquaintance through direct, lived experience), procedural knowledge (knowing how to do something), and propositional knowledge (knowing that something is true). Unlike modern scientific knowledge, whose production typically relies on controlled experimentation, measurement, hypothesis testing, and analytical abstraction, Indigenous and local knowledge is not “produced” in a discrete or extractive sense. Rather, it grows along the paths people take through a dynamic environment of ground and air (Ingold, 2010). As Ingold writes (Ingold, 2010, p. 134),

What distinguishes the expert from the novice, then, is not that the mind of the former is more richly furnished with content—as though with every increment of learning yet more representations were packed inside the head—but a greater sensitivity to cues in the environment and a greater capacity to respond to these cues with judgement and precision. The difference, if you will, is not one of how much you know but of how well you know.

By walking along the paths of their lands, Indigenous and local people feel the ground under their feet, adjust their steps to slopes, textures, and obstacles, attend to signs, traces, and subtle changes in the environment, and respond to wind, rain, cold, heat, and light. In this way, Indigenous and local knowledge emerges from the ongoing relations among the moving body, the perceiving mind, and the landscape through which people walk.

If walking undertaken for livelihood can be understood as a necessary and often involuntary practice, then enduring arduous walking for spiritual purposes represents a deliberate and voluntary choice—and, with it, a distinct way of spiritual knowing. In this way of knowing, the body becomes not a container for knowledge but a medium for knowing, and, more crucially, a medium through which ethical values are internalized, enacted, and put to the test.

A striking example is the circumambulation of sacred mountains in the Himalaya and the Tibetan Plateau. Each year, thousands of pilgrims undertake physically demanding journeys to Kang Rinpoche—known in English as Mount Kailash—a peak located at the intersection of China, Nepal, and India and revered as the most sacred site by followers of Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, and Bon. At elevations ranging from approximately 4560 to 5630 m above sea level, pilgrims walk around the mountain either clockwise or counterclockwise, depending on their religious tradition, completing the 52 km circumambulation route known as the kora, typically over the course of two to three days (Snelling, 2006). This practice has lasted for centuries, dating back to at least the thirteenth century, if not earlier (McKay, 2015).

One of the earliest detailed descriptions of the Kailash kora by a European observer comes from the Swedish geographer Sven Hedin. “Our wanderings round Kang-rinpoche, the ‘holy ice mountain’ or the ‘ice jewel,’ is one of my most memorable recollections of Tibet,” Hedin wrote in his two-volume monograph Trans-Himalaya, Discoveries and Adventures in Tibet (Hedin, 1909, p. 197). In September 1907, while searching for the sources of Asia’s major rivers, Hedin joined a pilgrimage circuit around the mountain, riding a small gray Ladakhi horse while his four Tibetan companions walked on foot. As he noted with characteristic self-awareness, “for no one may ride round the holy mountain unless he is a heathen, like myself” (Hedin, 1909, p. 196).

Hedin offered vivid descriptions of the physical geography encountered along the kora, but he was equally attentive to the social landscape of pilgrimage. He carefully recorded the diverse people he encountered on the circumambulation route (Hedin, 1909, p. 204):

I saw the silent procession, the faithful bands, among which all ages and both sexes are represented, youths and maidens, strong men with wife and child, grey old men who would before their death follow in the footsteps of countless pilgrims to win a happier existence, ragged fellows who lived like parasites on the charity of the other pilgrims, scoundrels who had to do penance for a crime, robbers who had plundered peaceful travellers, chiefs, officials, herdsmen, and nomads, a varied train of shady humanity on the thorny road, which after interminable ages ends in the deep peace of Nirvana.

Pilgrims arriving from across the Himalaya and the Tibetan Plateau not only measured the sacred landscape with their feet, but in some cases with their entire bodies. Some performed full-body prostrations, laying themselves flat on the ground at each body-length interval along the route, which is a practice that typically requires several weeks to complete. Hedin recounted meeting an elderly pilgrim who had performed this meritorious act known as gyangchag-tsallgen several years ago, who told him that a single such pilgrimage was considered equivalent to thirteen ordinary circumambulations on foot.

Unlike modern mountaineering, which emphasizes vertical ascent, speed, and summit conquest, the kora pilgrimage embodies a horizontal, repetitive, and reverential engagement with the mountain. Walking here is not a means of overcoming terrain but a practice of ethical alignment. Through repetition, bodily endurance, and sustained proximity to the ground, pilgrims understand walking as a way to accumulate merit, purify negative karma, and deepen spiritual connections with both the divine and the more-than-human world (Piasecki, 2019).

Hedin himself wryly acknowledged the limits of his own participation: “My pilgrimage was of no value at all, because I was riding, the old man said; I must go on foot if I wished to derive any benefit from it” (Hedin, 1909, p. 205). Yet the meanings that pilgrims attributed to bodily exertion and suffering as pathways to spiritual insight and liberation in the afterlife remained only partially intelligible within Hedin’s own interpretive framework. In his view, “the life beyond the grave is hidden from all peoples, but religious conceptions have clothed it in different forms among different peoples” (Hedin, 1909, p. 206). At the same time, he conceded that modern Western observers, who in their presumed superior wisdom might smile at what they regarded as fanaticism or self-mortification, ought to reflect on their own faith in comparison: “Whatever may be our own convictions, we must admire those who, however erroneous their views may be in our opinion, yet possess faith enough to remove mountains” (Hedin, 1909, p. 206).

Today, conservation scientists have come to recognize the value of these Indigenous and local worldviews, values, and knowledges (Gadgil et al., 1993; Reyes-García & Benyei, 2019). Collaborative efforts now aim to bring Indigenous and scientific ways of knowing into dialogue. In a multicountry study spanning Madagascar, Nicaragua, the Philippines, and Tanzania, local volunteers and scientists independently conducted foot-based wildlife patrols. The data collected by community observers on birds, mammals, and resource use closely mirrored that of professional scientists (Danielsen et al., 2014). This and other findings underscore the significance of landscape familiarity, as expressed through walking, in making a meaningful contribution to conservation science.

However, it should be noted that when the walking of indigenous and local people becomes enrolled in conservation research, it is often reconfigured in subtle yet consequential ways. Practices that were once oriented toward sustaining everyday relationships with land and more-than-human beings are reframed around predefined research objectives, standardized routes, and project timelines. Walking that was previously self-directed and responsive to local cosmology and lifeway rhythms becomes increasingly coordinated and supervised through externally designed research protocols. In this sense, indigenous and local research assistants are, to a degree, disciplined to behave like what Ingold calls a “Kantian traveller,” one who “reasons over a map in his mind,” rather than like a wayfarer who “draws a tale from impressions in the ground” (Ingold, 2010, p. 135). Their attention is recalibrated toward data or indicators deemed scientifically relevant rather than meaningful in a web of local and translocal relations. While such walking continues to rely on embodied skill and emminded knowledge, its meanings, as well as its relationships to walkers and the landscapes they traverse, is reworked within asymmetrical arrangements of labor, capital, and epistemic authority.

5. Conclusions

In the 21st century, when a multitude of new research tools have become available for researchers based on fast-paced computing technology (and note the feet-based metaphor there too), there is still much to be gained from taking recourse to the older, distinguished, and still very relevant embodied technology of walking. Walking continues to be a quintessential human activity, and one that reveals social-natural worlds in particular ways. Who walks (and who does not walk), and who chooses to walk, or not, in what location, at what times, and in what manner are all revealing of social relations. Yet, this study did not offer a study of such relations or how they may have changed over time in different contexts. Instead, drawing from wide-ranging literatures, it has offered a survey on walking as a field method and as a knowledge-making and, by extension, world-making process in three different but related areas of study: natural history, urban studies and conservation science. Like much anthropological literature, these are not top-down perspectives; rather, they present perspectives from below—views from the street, or views from the feet, shall we say. While walking as a self-conscious knowledge-making method has older antecedents (going back at least two millennia to the Aristotelian Peripatetics), this paper has reviewed writings and offered perspectives on walking as a field method in more contemporary times. In each of the areas surveyed in this paper (viz., natural history, urban studies, and conservation science), walking enables a grounded inquiry that brings nuanced understanding to such fields of knowledge.