Ethnography in Motion, or Walking With WG Sebald

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 Lévi-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.