Walking the line: lines, embodiment and movement on the Jordan Trail

Abstract

<jats:p> This article explores the relationship between movement and cultural politics through a long-distance walking trail – the Jordan Trail. The Jordan Trail is a 650-km trail running the length of Jordan from its northern border with the occupied Golan Heights to the Red Sea. While cultural geography has increasingly engaged with walking, the actual line that is walked along has been neglected. Lines can be violent and destructive. This is exemplified by the drawing of the borders of the Jordanian state, under the British Mandate period following the breakdown of the Ottoman Empire. Lines can impose power on a place, therefore, when defined by a state. In Jordan, these state-drawn lines have created divisions where none have previously existed and have severed movement, particularly Bedouin movement. The Jordan Trail, however, has the possibility to rethink and recapture movement, particularly movement erased by the state. This is where I suggest cultural geographical approaches to lines are important in paying attention to the more experiential and ongoing nature of place. The lines of the Jordan Trail can be created by the movement of a body over the ground, they can be invisible to the human eye and instead told through stories, or they can be the recording of Global Positioning Services (GPS) coordinates. This article is based on 12 months of ethnographic research walking on the Jordan Trail and volunteering for the Jordan Trail Association and as such argues for more embedded explorations of movement and cultural politics in Jordan. I argue that a relationship between movement and cultural politics at the embodied and everyday scale can be explored by attending to the line of a walking trail. The Jordan Trail can highlight the violence of state creation and particularly the imposition of state drawn lines in Jordan and the movements they have cut off and the Trail can also capture embodied accounts of movement and place in which Bedouin and everyday accounts matter. </jats:p>

Revisiting walking as mobile place-making practice: a discursive perspective

“…Trails are the most common settings for recreational and touristic walking activities, reflected in the literature commonly exploring walking in the context of particular trails (Berg, 2015;Mason, 2020). They may serve many purposes in tourism: They may offer tourists the opportunity to experience otherwise difficult to access natural environments, such as the Appalachian Trail.…”

“…Similarly, Senda-Cook (2012) outlined how walkers contested the West Rim Trail by frequently going off-trail. On the Inca Trail, Maxwell (2012) observed how symbolic meanings and institutional orders attached by tourism authorities, media and tour companies were being actively contested by tourists who choose not to follow the official trail, while Mason (2020) traced the formation of lines along the Jordan Trail based on different walkers' movements. Thus, tourists experience place through 'the thinking, emotional and active body', through which place is 'subjectively constructed and consumed' (Raki c & Chambers, 2012, p. 1629, and trails are potentially transformed over time (Vannini & Vannini, 2018).…”

“…Ween and Abram (2012) showed, for example, how meanings of hiking as a performance of nature and restorative practice were enacted through accepted walking practices by Norwegian trekkers and produced the Norwegian outdoors. Trails are also often subject to different walking practices at the same time, as outlined by Mason (2020) who traced the production of different lines on the Jordan Trail, referring to indigenous and Western knowledge systems, the former practicing the trail as inherently contestable, while the latter afforded the trail much more guiding power over chosen trajectories. Thus, understanding walking as a discursive practice leads to an understanding of touristic and recreational walking as reflecting particular forms of knowing suffused with habitual and learned regulations of style, which inform tourists' engagements with the trails they walk, and in turn, how trails are produced by these practices.…”

“…Place-making practices in tourism have been a frequent topic of inquiry (Iaquinto, 2020;Lew, 2017;Mason, 2020). While the perspective of tourists has been less frequently taken, tourists' practices are acknowledged to be important factors in the cocreation of place in tourism (Iaquinto, 2020;Lew, 2017).…”

“…Mikkelsen & Cohen, 2015), and walking (e.g. Mason, 2020) for their potential to give us insights into the experiential nature of place.…”