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

Abstract

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.