Spatial Anthropology: Excursions in Liminal Space 1786606380, 9781786606389

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Spatial Anthropology

PLACE, MEMORY, AFFECT Series editors: Neil Campbell, Professor of American Studies at the University of Derby and Christine Berberich, School of Social, Historical and Literary Studies at the University of Portsmouth. The Place, Memory, Affect series seeks to extend and deepen debates around the intersections of place, memory, and affect in innovative and challenging ways. The series will forge an agenda for new approaches to the edgy relations of people and place within the transnational global cultures of the twenty-first century and beyond. Walking Inside Out, edited by Tina Richardson The Last Isle: Contemporary Taiwan Film, Culture, and Trauma, by Sheng-mei Ma Divided Subjects, Invisible Borders: Re-Unified Germany After 1989, by Ben Gook The Mother’s Day Protest and Other Fictocritical Essays, by Stephen Muecke Affective Critical Regionality, by Neil Campbell Visual Arts Practice and Affect, edited by Ann Schilo Haunted Landscapes, edited by Ruth Heholt and Niamh Downing In the Ruins of the Cold War Bunker, edited by Luke Bennett The Question of Space: Interrogating the Spatial Turn Between Disciplines, edited by Marijn Nieuwenhuis and David Crouch Spatial Anthropology: Excursions in Liminal Space, by Les Roberts Nature, Place and Affect: The Poetic Affinities of Edward Thomas and Robert Frost 1912–1917, by Anna Stenning (forthcoming)

Spatial Anthropology Excursions in Liminal Space Les Roberts

London • New York

Published by Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB www.rowmaninternational.com Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and Plymouth (UK) www.rowman.com Copyright © 2018 Les Roberts All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN:   HB 978-1-7866-0637-2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN: 978-1-78660-637-2 (cloth. : alk. paper) ISBN: 978-1-78660-638-9 (electronic) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

For Ella and Marc, born in London, raised in the North West

Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Preface: In Search of the North-West Passage

xi

PART I:  SPACINGS 1 1  SPATIAL ANTHROPOLOGY: AN INTRODUCTION 3 Spatial = Anthropology 4 Anthropological Space 11 Anthropology and Space 21 2  OF SPACES IN-BETWEEN 31 Liminality 33 Spaces In-Between 39 Deep Mapping 47 Spatial Bricolage 52 PART II:  SOUNDINGS 61 3  CASTAWAY 63 Marooned 65 Time Out 68 Rhythm Mapping 71 Road to Nowhere 76 Making Tracks 80 Exit 87 4  STALKER 91 First Steps 96 Landscapes in the Frame 100 vii

viii

Contents

Stalking | Wayfinding | Cinemapping Stalking the Ether Reflections on Method

104 109 113

PART III:  GHOSTINGS 117 5  HETEROTOPOLIS 119 Cinetopia: Of Other Spaces 124 The Archive City 128 GIS and New Cinema History 133 Wirral Cinetopia 138 Liverpool Cinetopia 148 6  SONGLINES 157 Music | Maps | Memory 162 Home 170 Dislocation 175 On the Road 180 Story | Coda 185 7  NECROGEOGRAPHY 187 The Digital Aleph 189 Seeing Beyond 191 The Psychogeography of Drowning 195 The Cestrian Book of the Dead 200 Aleph Redux 204 Glossary 205 PART IV:  EARTHINGS 207 8  RECLAMATION 209 Wetlands Visitation 212 Sealand Empire 218 Lines in the Sand 225 Reclamations 232 9  UTOPOS 237 False Starts and Detours 240 The Necrogeography of Oil 244 Reclaiming the Sacred 251 Flirting with Absolute Space 254 Afterword: Killing Space | Giving Life to Space

259

Bibliography 265 Index 291

List of Illustrations

3.1

 rdnance Survey (OS) map of island showing O expedition route, camping area and crossing points.

72

3.2

 oundscape map, 2:00 a.m.–3:00 a.m., 23 August 2013 S (53°18'10.1"N 2°58'00.9"W).

75

3.3

 oundscape map, 8:30 a.m. – 9:30 a.m., 23 August 2013 S (53°18'10.1"N 2°58'00.9"W).

75

3.4

I llustrated map showing proposed southbound M53 extension.

77

3.5

 ap showing GPS tracks of island field visit, M 22–23 August 2013.

84

3.6–3.8 M  aps showing GPS tracks of island field visit, 22–23 August 2013.

85–86

4.1

 CTV image of James Bulger abduction from C Bootle Shopping Centre, 12 February 1993.

4.2

Still from The Bulger Case: A Spatial Story. 98

4.3

Map of abduction route.

105

4.4

 ap showing error in cinemapping tracking of the M abduction route.

111

4.5

Still from The Bulger Case: A Spatial Story. 113

5.1

 creenshot of Google Earth map of Merseyside cinema S locations, showing the location of the Tower Theatre in New Brighton on the Wirral. ix

97

141

x

List of Illustrations

5.2

 ocation of the Electric Palace Cinema, New Chester L Road, Rock Ferry (closed in 1956).

143

5.3

 taff outside the Electric Palace Cinema, Rock Ferry, S circa 1914.

144

5.4

 ocation of the Ritz cinema, Claughton Road, L Birkenhead (closed in 1972).

147

5.5

 rojected Picture Trust regional coordinator Mike P Taylor with photograph of the Ritz cinema from 1952.

147

5.6

Still from The Long Day Closes. 152

5.7

 creenshot of Google Earth map showing the location S of the Hippodrome in Tuebrook, Liverpool and other cinemas along West Derby Road.

154

6.1

 etail of music memory map created by the author D in 2012 as part of the POPID research activities.

171

6.2

 usic memory map created by Ian, a business support M manager working in the music industry.

179

7.1

 creen shot of Google Earth map showing the location S of the Dee Estuary. The example shown from The Cestrian Book of the Dead marks the site of drowning of an unknown girl who was crossing the ford to Hawarden in 1730.

188

7.2

 IS map showing the approximate route of the G Shotwick to Flint ford.

203

8.1

J ohn Mackay 1732 map of Dee Estuary and Hyle [Hoyle] Lake.

227

8.2

 etail of reproduction of John Mackay map 1732 D showing River Dee and Saltney Marsh prior to canalisation. 228

8.3

 etail of reproduction of Thomas Boydell map 1770–1771 D showing River Dee and Saltney Marsh after canalisation.

229

8.4

 etail of John Mackay 1732 map of Dee Estuary and Hyle D Lake showing route of Shotwick to Flint ford (highlighted).

230

9.1

 tanlow Refinery viewed from across the River Mersey S near Liverpool John Lennon Airport.

243

9.2

‘ There be monsters’: OS map of Stanlow Point showing the site of the Abbey ruins.

247

Preface In Search of the North-West Passage

The journeys and meanderings mapped out in these pages have sprung from a number of different wellsprings. As I prepare to embark on another excursion, it occurs to me that one of these starting points has been a desire to get lost. A journey out of knowledge, to paraphrase the poet John Clare, might be one way of looking at it. Another is to embark on a quest for landscapes that refuse to fit neatly into a frame, that bleed and flow with intentionality born of an urge to unmake the boundaries that hold things in place. Projection – whether in the cartographic or psychoanalytic senses of the word – always casts something of a relief map of the Self. To acknowledge the same is to step into a space that shimmers and buckles underfoot, terrain that fashions a tentative, provisional and less coordinated sense of being-in-the-world. A map is only ever as good as the mappings it sets in train. This book is a compendium of certain such mappings; the ‘map’, for its part, is a device to be squinted at when absolutely necessary but otherwise best left crumpled in the back pocket, the better to assist in the task of getting lost. Skirting and progressively drifting into a field that some have begun to label ‘spatial humanities’ – but which, for reasons that I will expound further below, I am preferring to designate spatial anthropology – my modus operandi (as a spatial humanist, spatial anthropologist, whatever) has been to confound an idea and practice of space that renders transparent its inherent inscrutability, or presumes to. If anything, opacity (of reason, knowledge, vision, instrumentality) may be taken as a quality that conveys certain merit insofar as it goes against the grain of what Henri Lefebvre dubbed ‘the illusion of transparency’ (1991: 27), the epistemological fallacy that defines space as something that ‘contains’ or that serves merely as a platform upon which social life, under the irradiating glare of rational perception, is transacted and rehearsed. To stumble, with disoriented but purposeful vision, into a nonsensical world where ‘I’ xi

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am no more solid than the earth upon which I tread is to go some way towards buttressing a performative and embodied ontology of everyday spatiality. The idea of spatial anthropology that is explored in this book is, therefore, one that goes hand in hand with an experiential liminality that places selfhood, intersubjectivity and affectivity at the core of how we approach and think about the cultural production and consumption of space. Moreover, in the spirit of dialectical enquiry, the intention of getting lost – of attaining a state of productive spatial disorientation – needs also to be recognised for what it really is: the intention to orientate anew. To secure, once more, a navigable passage after time spent ‘all at sea’ is to reclaim or regain a semblance of structure from what anthropologist Victor Turner (1969) refers to as ‘anti-structure’: a liminal, flux-ridden state of betwixt-and-betweenness. To look upon everyday landscapes in terms of liminality and transitional phenomena is not to imbue them with fixed affordances or properties but rather to make explicit the phenomenological intensity of the spatially immersive world that informs who and what we are as embodied subjects, both adrift and tethered in equal measure. Getting lost in order to find oneself once more may have an air of cliché about it, but in the context of what has become, in the academy at least, an increasingly audit-driven and instrumental culture of intellectual enquiry it is no less instructive. In her book Little Madnesses, Annette Kuhn quotes the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott as saying, ‘[i]f I knew what I was doing it wouldn’t be research’ (2013a: 2). A front-loaded research strategy that knows where it is going before it gets there, or which valorises ‘impacts’ over fine-grained detail that builds and grows until such time as any given impact reveals itself as ‘impactful’, is one that is hard to reconcile with an approach which embraces an ambulant spirit of uncertainty, confusion, speculation, curiosity, serendipity, happenstance or simply disorientation. With these preliminary thoughts in mind, what I wish to explore by way of some brief introductory remarks is the mechanics of orientation and disorientation as refracted through the ruminative prism of the ‘north-west passage’. For current purposes, this concept serves as a metaphor that allows a number of key positionings that speak to the wider aims and scope of this book to be set out. These coalesce loosely around three categorical headings that are worked through below: geography, psychogeography, and (inter)disciplinarity. Taking the first of these, the idea of a north-west passage is geographically significant in that the empirical work from which individual chapters are drawn is, with only minor deviation, specific to the North West region of the United Kingdom. Research conducted in the negative spaces of the M53 Mid-Wirral Motorway or the north Liverpool streetscapes of Bootle and Walton sit alongside studies that take in the full canvas of the Merseyside metropolitan area as well as the sprawling estuarine spaces of the rivers



In Search of the North-West Passage xiii

Mersey and Dee (the latter occupying the border region between England and North Wales). The idea that the everyday geography of the North West might provide the basis for some sort of ‘passage’ alludes to the capacity of its landscapes to give up something of themselves that transcends the mundane or prosaic characterisations routinely conferred on them. Figuratively, this may constitute a process of ‘going beyond’ in the sense of securing a transformative passage to qualitatively new spaces of affectivity and dwelling. The ‘questing’ element here is not tied to any intrinsic locative properties of the spaces in question (although it certainly can be); it is more a recognition of the autoethnographic and psychogeographic dispositions that bring about the alignment of circumstances whereby space and time are skewed such as to throw up a very particular (although by no means transparent) sense of place. The transitional ‘passages’ that journeys around the North West are designed to open up are, then, invocations of place: soundings and ghostings that cannot be neatly disentangled from the performative practices that have conjured them into presence. The journeys and excursions that are being sifted and picked over in this book have come about as a result of a myriad of reasons, some practical, some recreational, some intellectually purposeful, some entirely coincidental, some emotionally purgative, others despairing, joyful, inspirational, unexceptional, quizzical, rational, irrational, procedural – in short, a whole host of excuses that collectively dispel any suggestion of an overly instrumental purpose underpinning these various meanderings. However, that said, there are two important ‘hubs’ that need mentioning: Home, which is situated in the county of Flintshire, just across the national border in North East Wales; and Work, which, since 2006, has been based in what is now the School of the Arts at the University of Liverpool. The focus of much of my research activities at Liverpool has been locally and regionally specific chiefly on account of two back-to-back projects I worked on in the late 2000s: City in Film: Liverpool’s Urban Landscape and the Moving Image (2006–2008) and Mapping the City in Film: A Geo-historical Analysis (2008–2010). Having arrived fresh-faced to Merseyside (from London and the South East) when embarking on the first of these projects, my induction into the geography and landscape of the region was in no small way expedited by the research I was closely engaged with at the time. A subsequent project, Popular Music Heritage, Cultural Memory and Cultural Identity (2010–2013), while not peculiar to Liverpool, was nevertheless in part concerned with questions of place, landscape and memory that involved fieldwork and site-specific activity that took me across Merseyside, the North West region, and beyond. My north-west passage has, in the first instance therefore, been firmly rooted (and routed) in the North West region of the UK.

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My second application of the north-west passage metaphor, already partly intimated in the first, concerns itself with more psychogeographical matters. The rich melee of ideas that cluster around this term will be elaborated far more expansively and probingly throughout the subsequent chapters. But for now it is sufficient to shuffle our way obliquely towards what is often a necessarily subjective, haphazard and abrasive approach to the anthropology of space and place. What better way to do this than via the opium-addled reflections of the Romantic writer, Thomas De Quincey? [S]ometimes, in my attempts to steer homewards, upon nautical principles, by fixing my eye on the pole-star, and seeking ambitiously for a north-west passage, instead of circumnavigating all the capes and head-lands I had doubled in my outward voyage, I came suddenly upon such knotty problems of alleys, alleys without soundings, such enigmatical entries, and such sphynx’s riddles of streets without obvious outlets or thoroughfares, as must baffle the audacity of porters, and confound the intellects of hackney coachmen. I could almost have believed, at times, that I must be the first discoverer of some of these terrae incognitae, and doubted whether they had yet been laid down in the modern charts of London. (1994: 152)

The literary effect of De Quincey’s use of ‘north-west passage’ – a wellknown nautical reference linked to the fabled search for a navigable sea route connecting the North Atlantic and Pacific oceans – is to re-envision the opium addict’s labyrinthine progress through the knotted streets of London in the form of a sea voyage; the urban landscape akin to a psychogeographic ocean, ‘pushing and pulling the sensitive soul along its eddies and currents’ (Sadler 1998: 88; see also Ingold 2017). Looked upon in this way, the phrase ‘alleys without soundings’ appears particularly suggestive, as if to convey the notion that these otherwise unremarkable urban topographies lay uncharted, their passage potentially hazardous. For the anxious wayfarer, the experiential uncertainty that comes with the territory – these terrae incognitae in the heart of a bustling metropolis – transforms not only the way the spaces are imagined but also how they are practised. Crucially, De Quincey does not so much discover these terrae incognitae as invoke them. For this reason, were we to dismiss his drug-induced ravings as merely the product of solipsistic reverie we would be overlooking the socially and culturally infusive impact of the writer’s vision. In other words, the ways and extent to which it feeds productively and persuasively into a broader urban cultural imaginary (for example: Debord n.d.). De Quincey’s north-west passage is as much ours as it was his if we want and allow it to be. Accordingly, for the writer Iain Sinclair, the north-west passage works as both ‘a metaphor and a practical



In Search of the North-West Passage xv

solution’ (2011: 203), and it is this spirit of applied psychogeography – a methodological response to an urban spatial hermeneutics that dispenses with notions of transparency and rationalism – that has shaped and infused the discussion herein. In my third and final reworking of the north-west passage metaphor, I preface these discussions in terms of their peripatetic movement through variant disciplinary dispositions. The idea, now well-entrenched, of a ‘spatial turn’ wending its way across the humanities and social sciences has brought with it the testing task of imagining some kind of (inter)disciplinary contact zone within which ‘space’ and ‘spatiality’ are afforded common intellectual currency. Putting aside the question of whether such a task is even possible (or, indeed, desirable), when we attempt to stake out a field as nebulous as ‘spatial humanities’, we are quickly confronted with a pressing epistemological conundrum. What does it mean to ‘know’, to generate reservoirs of knowledge as to how space and place are variously thought about, experienced, represented, inhabited, contested, imagined, constructed, practised, performed, produced, consumed, projected or simply felt – the fundamental affective underpinnings that render space and place as intrinsically human phenomena and thus connotative of an expressly anthropological disposition? And, by corollary, does spatial anthropology then step up as the cognate ‘science’ best equipped to make sense of such a disposition? The very ascription of the label ‘science’ here immediately poses the question ‘whither the spatial humanities?’, as if the so-called ‘two cultures’ of C. P. Snow (1998) had any credible purchase when it comes to thinking about spatiality from an anthropological and more holistically oriented vantage point. But, this notwithstanding, the disciplinary baggage brought to the table clearly has bearing on any given iteration of space and place in studies that adopt a broadly sociocultural approach. Not quite a case of ‘film scholars are from Mars, GIScientists are from Venus’ as Julia Hallam and I sketched out in our overview of emerging scholarship on spatiality and film (Roberts and Hallam 2014: 10). But, as we went on to argue, it is important ‘to highlight [those] areas where conceptual language can sometimes hit the buffers of interpretative meaning’, and to be critically observant of the inter- and multidisciplinary contact zones that define a spatial humanities field of practice where ‘there are [often] multiple and overlapping meanings being traded’ (10). Part of what the project of spatial anthropology (not humanities) is proposing to address, therefore, are the challenges posed by the nomadic and fugitive nature of a mode of critical spatial practice that does not sit squarely within any one disciplinary or discursive encampment, but is manifested in and through the restlessness of the wayfarer: the production of knowledge on the go (Ingold 2000: 229).

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To these ends, our third north-west passage stems from the philosopher Michel Serres’s usage of the metaphor in his description of the indeterminate spaces ‘in between’ the humanities and sciences: Have you noticed the popularity among scientists of the word interface – which supposes that the junction between two sciences or two concepts is perfectly under control, or seamless, and poses no problems? On the contrary, I believe that these spaces between are more complicated than one thinks. This is why I have compared them to the Northwest Passage . . . with shores, islands, and fractal ice floes. Between the hard sciences and the so-called human sciences the passage resembles a jagged shore, sprinkled with ice, and variable. (1995: 70, emphasis in original)

For Serres, as Kathryn Yusoff remarks, the aim of navigating these passages (or at least recognising that such terrain is there to be navigated at all) is ‘to reinsert the subjective domain into scientific discourse and to challenge the abandonment of the humanities’ (2011: 300, emphasis added). In the neoliberal academy where the humanities are all-too-often straitjacketed and under assault from many fronts, these sentiments certainly seem resonant. In its own small way, spatial anthropology, viewed from this perspective at least, works as a means by which the soundings of these in-between spaces may be taken, not with the intent of territorialising – or disciplining – them but rather to permit them space to breathe more freely, to sing, to conduct, to listen, to intuit – to expand and contract in their responsiveness to those passing through.

Part I

SPACINGS

Spacings. Space as spacing, as present participle. Space as a reservoir of energies; a force field that senses, and responds to, the presence of those who dwell within it; those who live it. Spacing as the doing of space: its performance, its production, its evisceration. Drawing on ideas expounded by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, the geographer David Crouch (2010: 12) suggests that spacing ‘occurs in the gaps of energies amongst and between things; in their commingling’. Spacing is what happens, what feeds into and from, spaces in-between. Spacings occur throughout this book, not merely in this opening section (comprising two chapters: ‘Spatial Anthropology: An Introduction’ and ‘Of Spaces In-Between’). So why a particular focus on spacing at this point in the proceedings? To force a recognition of space as spacing is the first task in hand. The second being to prise open and explore more intently those spaces in-between as they present themselves for critical scrutiny. Although both objectives are attended to in the section as a whole, the former gathers pace around the proposition that space is the performative product of practices that, as spacings, express a fundamentally anthropological disposition. Accordingly, in chapter 1, spatial anthropology is examined by way of a theoretical excursion into an interdisciplinary field of engagement in which ideas of space and spatiality are variously seen to commingle with those of anthropology. It is important to stress, however, that spatial anthropology is not the same thing as the ‘anthropology of space’, if by this we mean an approach to space that employs it as an adjunct to a wider field of anthropological disciplinary knowledge. Not aligned to or hemmed in by any sense of disciplinary ‘disciplining’, spatial anthropology is presented as a reflexive, open-ended and radically contingent understanding of space as lived, performed and practised from strategic vantage points. Spatiality as anthropology; ideas of anthropological space; or the relationships that have shaped anthropological approaches 1

2

Part I

towards space and place; these and other threads of discussion advanced in chapter 1 spill over into chapter 2, where the conceptual baggage attached to ideas of liminal space and of spaces in-between is unpacked. This, in turn, feeds into questions of method where spatial anthropology begins to be interrogated not as a fixed set of methodological practices but as an ‘undisciplined’, bricolage-style assemblage of interventions and practical orientations that are critically responsive to spaces as they are found, experienced and affectively embodied. This ragtag of spacings and gleanings is designed to unsettle and disrupt processes of spatial abstraction, allowing, at the same time, for the possibility of a ‘momentary resettling of things, feelings and thoughts’ (Crouch 2010: 16) and a reconfiguration of the affective polarities that make spaces both unique and qualitatively charged. Spacing is the creative moulding of spaces that are at once known (epistemologically rendered through forms of critical spatial practice) and felt as a vital and ontologically expressive manifestation of lives as they are lived and performed spatially.

Chapter 1

Spatial Anthropology An Introduction

Space, vast space, is the friend of being. – Gaston Bachelard, 1969

‘Spatial anthropology’, according to the architectural historian Jinnai Hidenobu, is an ‘odd-sounding phrase’ (1995: xi). Writing in the early 1990s, and pitching his ideas to a readership comprised, in the main, of architects and urbanists, Hidenobu’s caution with regard to his coinage of the phrase is perhaps understandable. After all, were it part of the standard lexicon of his urban-architectural cohort, a method that consisted of ‘placing oneself within the urban space of contemporary Tokyo, replete with the meanings and memories that are the accumulation of human activities’ would be taken as read. Indeed, Hidenobu’s desire to ‘grasp Tokyo from a new perspective’(xi, emphasis added) alludes both to a recognition of the apparent novelty of the approach he was bringing to the study of the city and to the very tactile and ‘hands-on’ nature of what was, crucially, an embodied mode of urban spatial enquiry. For Hidenobu, the placing of the researcher, bodily and materially, within the urban landscape was a sufficient enough factor to lend an important anthropological dimension to the proceedings. And in this, of course, he was right. But at the same time, the fact that he felt this needed saying at all does raise the question as to why an ‘anthropological’ perspective to the study of the historic urban environment did – or does – seem novel in the first place. If we were to pursue such a question, it is not the dearth of anthropologically oriented insights or methods that we would find ourselves running up against but the lack of a sufficiently capacious field of practice whereby such insights or methods are permitted to roam unencumbered by disciplinary boundaries. Taking this at face value, does that, one might ask, make 3

4

Chapter 1

spatial anthropology, by comparison, a ‘free-range’ rather than ‘battery’ mode of interdisciplinary scholarship? A corrective response to a perceived sense of enclosure? However suggestive a ‘cage-like’ production of urban spatial knowledge might seem in the context of the progressively marketised and bureaucratic higher education system, it is perhaps more accurate to speak of a relative porosity of thinking and practice that is not always in sync with the structures and disciplinary frameworks through which these thoughts and practices are having to be channelled. It is this mismatch between dispositional practice and disciplinary branding that makes a phrase such as ‘spatial anthropology’ potentially sound odd in some quarters. It is not that scholars are not already engaged in something to which the label ‘spatial anthropology’ might productively (if not of necessity) be attached. But rather that they are. SPATIAL = ANTHROPOLOGY For introductory purposes, we could, then, after the fashion of Hidenobu, offer a rudimentary definition of spatial anthropology as the placing of oneself, critically and reflexively, within the space of contemporary landscapes (urban or otherwise), replete with the meanings and memories that are the accumulation of human activities. Importantly, such a definition, however broad-brushed by way of initial exposition, does not presuppose a discursive affiliation to (or dialogic relationship with) anthropology or the anthropologist in a strict disciplinary sense. Spatial anthropology, in other words, is not merely analogous to something we might alternatively choose to label ‘the anthropology of space’. Insofar as the brief of the latter ranges across broadly epistemological terrain, the former speaks to orientations that are more explicitly performative in their intent and scope. As with Hidenobu’s desire to grasp the city in which he was at the same time placing himself, it is the doingness that is key here; the spatial intentionality of a practice that propels self and body into what Merleau-Ponty (1968: 248) evocatively describes as ‘the flesh of the world’. The doingness of space. This, I concede, requires considerably more unpacking before we can begin to get a firmer sense of what it is that binds together the ideas and interventions that are explored throughout these chapters. Likewise: the intentionality of space. If pressing the self and body into the everyday flesh of the world is what we are concerning ourselves with, then what is it that distinguishes this – as a method, practice, or critical orientation – from what is routinely rehearsed as part of social lives that are lived and practised spatially? This is a question that in part cuts across



Spatial Anthropology 5

some of the formative methodological modalities at play in Spatial Anthropology, not least those that fall under the banner of ‘autoethnography’. In many ways the ‘spaces’ explored herein are distinctly unremarkable: humdrum, prosaic, impressionistically fleeting, vapourous, perhaps even spectral. There is nothing that marks them out for special attention other than that to which they owe their form. And what it is that confers on them form is not something that is easily represented, delineated or ‘mapped’. But then that is the point. A tacit recognition that what we understand as ‘spatial’, by definition, cannot (or should not) be easily disentangled from what we understand as ‘anthropological’. The mundanity of everyday spaces – their ‘ordinary’ affectivity (Stewart 2007) – is what makes them so compelling, but no less elusive for that. How else to get to grips with our spatial worlds than to plunge headlong into them? After all, the flesh of the world is only as ‘fleshy’ as the bodies immersed in it. As a phrase, therefore, ‘spatial anthropology’, whether odd-sounding or not, performs better if not seen as rigidly shackled to a formalised disciplinary framework or as an activity that comes with an attendant suite of methodological practices (which are then prescriptively observed by a spatial anthropologist). What it less rigidly points to is a dispositional orientation towards an idea and practice of space that recognises, by default, its pliable, shape-shifting and pluridimensional form. Spatiality as a condition and affect. Spatiality as a humanism, to misquote Sartre. Spatiality as a posthumanism, even, when considered in response to a digital phenomenology and ‘new materialist’ ontology (Coole and Frost 2010) where the self is increasingly seen as ‘plugged in’ to mediascapes and technoscapes that are themselves inhabited (and inhabitable) ‘worlds’. Spatiality as a material and immaterial facet of our everyday being-in-the-world. Outside of my own appropriation of the phrase in recent years (as an approximation of a descriptor that seems to have gradually stuck), to date the only concerted attempt to work it into something that more or less coheres is that sketched out in Hidenobu’s book on Tokyo. This was the first time I chanced upon the phrase (as an anthropology undergraduate in the mid-to-late 1990s) and while Hidenobu does not do much in the way of wider theoretical or methodological exposition, what his book does do is set up some useful jumping-off points that allow us to initiate a process by which we can think through more carefully the relationship between questions of space and spatiality and those that stem from a more anthropological disposition. A core part of Hidenobu’s project is a search for what could best be described as the city-within-the-city. Strip away the architectural and geographical detail that gives the book its substance (Tokyo) and what we are left with is a performative response to a city perceived to be holding back in

6

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some way, an urban landscape that has lost some of its affective and symbolic layers of meaning beneath the carapace of modernity. The intentionality of urban spatial practice that we glean from the book is a desire to see beyond the surface form of the modern city and to gain some insight into the anthropological structures that have marked key points (spaces) and moments (temporalities) in the city’s becoming. The city-in-the-city which so engages Hidenobu is Edo-Tokyo, Edo being the former name of modern-day Tokyo before the Meiji Restoration and the collapse of the Tokugawa government in 1868. A key objective was therefore to try to re-glimpse contemporary Tokyo through the cartographic gauze of nineteenth-century Edo: Suppose we pick up a city map from the Edo period and set out on a walk in today’s Tokyo. Late Tokugawa drawings depicting each of the city’s districts provide a perfect view of the structure of Edo. On a modern map, crammed with all manner of information, this structure completely escapes our attention. But on the older one, the framework of the city of Tokyo emerges vividly from underneath the jumbled surface created by the buildings and elevated highways of the modern city. It is an uncanny experience to walk along streets with the fresh perspective that such maps provide. (Hidenobu 1995: 8)

From an urban cultural studies or urban anthropological perspective, what is particularly striking about Tokyo: A Spatial Anthropology is its almost hermetic insulation from a wider academic discourse on spatiality and urbanism. While this is unquestionably a serious weakness in terms of the book’s capacity to meaningfully engage a further-flung audience grappling with themes and concerns it touches on, at the same time, stripped down and unburdened by cumbersome theoretical baggage, it is able to offer an instructive lens through which to observe a praxis at play. It is not so much what Hidenobu is ‘mapping’ that is of note (although for those with a specific interest in Tokyo’s urban landscape it has much to offer). What is revealing about the book is what it tells us about Hidenobu’s intuitional approach to his object of study and a habitus of place and space (Hillier and Rooksby 2005) that is brought critically into play. In short, what the book gives us a sense of – however pared down this might be conceptually – is spatial anthropology as a practical orientation towards the lived and representational spaces of cities. For a start, Hidenobu makes much of the idea of ‘reading’ the city. Nothing too remarkable about this of course when considered alongside an already well-established literature on urban semiotics and the city-as-text (cf Barthes 1997; Lynch 1960, Certeau 1984, for example). But interesting nonetheless in what it reveals of the way the author goes about the task of making the landscapes of Tokyo legible – a functional prerequisite of the urban semiotician. ‘Reading the city’, Hidenobu remarks, entails ‘walking the streets and



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experiencing firsthand the topography and the historical development of land-use patterns’ (1995: 10). Teasing out and identifying ‘an established grammar’ (10) is a process of seeking consonance between the cartographic spaces of Edo and the topography experienced ‘firsthand’ in the simple act of walking. This spatially intertextual mode of urban grammatology consists of not so much a translation (ie movement from one ‘text’ to the legibility of another) as a performance. The Edo maps are both woven into the streetscapes of modern Tokyo in the ambulant passage of the pedestrian and, at the same time, culled from the opaque and otherwise illegible fabric of the chaotic and densely compacted urban environment through which he moves. Edo is rehearsed, performed, willed into view. In the process, Tokyo is envisioned anew. No less suggestive in this respect are Hidenobu’s references to the ‘personality’ of the city (10). He wants to get to know it in ways that transcend mere orientation and cognitive legibility. Something of the city’s character is what he is at pains to unmask. That said, could it be that the city is being made to don rather than remove a mask? A persona ascribed to cityscapes that are deemed a little alienating and semiotically unyielding? A city perceived as characterless, thus in want of an ‘authentically’ expressive face? Is this not a projection of Hidenobu’s idealised Tokyo? An exercise in salvage vernacularism by an architect seeking to exorcise the disenchantments of a misguided modernism (or, worse, postmodernism)? We do get a sense of this from time to time. Laments over the ‘defeat of the human elements of the city’ by the ‘incessant pursuit of functionality’ (131), or handwringing over a cityscape that ‘has been reduced to one of dreary, decontextualized uniformity’ (214) provide a clear indication of the restorative function that underwrites Hidenobu’s premodern urban nostalgia (Boym 2001). What particularly shines through though is the warm luminosity of spaces that reflect the human vitality and ‘structure[s] of meaning’ (Hidenobu 1995: 16) that endow them with anthropological value. This is well illustrated in a chapter that re-traces the landscapes of low-city Edo and the concentrations of city life that clustered around the rivers and waterways, rewarding it with the status of a ‘city of water’ (an historic characterisation that has long-since been buried by a century or more of urban development). Alongside Edo maps, Hidenobu draws on the visual evidence found in paintings and wood engravings (such as landscapes and waterfront vistas by, amongst others, the ukiyo-e painters Hiroshige and Hokusai). The picture that is painted of the low city is of a clamorous hive of human activity: waterway traffic, merchant trade, fish markets, temples and shrines, street theatre, puppet plays, Kabuki, teahouses and restaurants, pleasure quarters, brothels and other ‘ludic’ spaces (91). The chapter’s titular reference to the ‘cosmology’ of

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a city of water lends the discussion a deeply symbolic, sacral and mythopoeic inflection; again, a burrowing beyond the surface materiality of the urban landscape to give form to the anthropological layers of meaning that make the city what it is (or was) as a lived space. Similarly, the idea of a sensory texture to the landscapes of the low city catches Hidenobu’s anthropological eye. In his description of a lively waterside theatre district called Kobiki-chö, the subject of an 1834 ukiyo-e painting, the architectural historian imagines what the experience of visiting this location – this ‘performative space’, as he describes it – may have felt like for the theatre-goers and pleasure-seekers: We see crowds crossing the bridge on their way to the theatre. This movement across space – of being drawn through the water by boat or across the bridge on foot – to the entertainment district with its forest of banners and booming drum, must have added to the anticipation of the eager playgoers. Here, nearly all the human senses – sight, sound, touch, and taste – came into play. (98)

In his afterword to the book, Hidenobu, reiterating the message as to why a cultural, historical and anthropological approach to urban-architectural practice is of importance, adds that, ‘Happily, interest among foreigners in Tokyo’s urban space is also on the rise’ (220). This final, almost throwaway remark highlights a no less significant focus of study for those embarked on a spatial anthropology of urban landscapes: that of their touristic consumption. Emphasis placed on ludic and performance spaces, the sensory and emotional geographies of cities, sites that mark the sacred and profane – these all feed into perspectives that circle around forms of symbolic consumption and the affective pull of landscapes for tourists, psychogeographers, and other urban wayfarers (Roberts and Andrews 2013). Had he been writing in the 2010s rather than 1990s the chances are that Hidenobu, despite his architectural proclivities, would have found himself having to engage more actively with issues of heritage tourism, city branding, culture-led urban regeneration initiatives and a whole host of other concerns that have since coalesced with vigour around the historic urban environment and attempts to harness the economic utility of Culture (Zukin 1995; Miles 2007; Yudice 2003; Stevenson 2013). Revisiting Tokyo: A Spatial Anthropology after a period of some time, I’ve been struck by the extent to which the approach adopted by Hidenobu shares many similarities with research colleagues and I have conducted in and around Liverpool over the last decade or so. Although the empirical make-up of the respective case study settings are very different, the projects overlap in a number of significant ways. Some of these points of connection – forged chiefly around a co-investment in the practice of spatial anthropology – will be fleshed out in greater detail as we make our way through the following



Spatial Anthropology 9

chapters. But by far the closest areas of overlap that warrant some brief attention here relate to work that focused on the relationship between Liverpool’s urban landscape and the city’s representation in film. This research formed the basis of the publication Film, Mobility and Urban Space (Roberts 2012a; see also Hallam and Roberts 2011, 2014; Hallam 2010, 2012; Roberts 2015a). Using historical maps and geographical information systems (GIS) software, spatial information and location data drawn from over seventeen hundred archive films of Liverpool dating back to the 1890s were collated together to create a detailed cinematic map of the city and wider Merseyside region. As with Hidenobu’s brand of spatial anthropology, the Liverpool City in Film research sought to furnish not merely a representational geography of a city compiled from visual media (in his case, historic maps and landscape paintings; in mine, historic maps and archive film). What it also set out to do was bring these representational spaces into dialogue with the anthropological spaces of the city; to try and ‘read’ the contemporary city through the scattered constellation of footage salvaged from a past captured by a diverse range of social actors, in very different production contexts (from documentary, newsreel, municipal and promotional film to amateur and home movies, travelogues, actualities, and more besides), and across a wide historical canvas covering the best part of a century (but with special emphasis on the postwar period). This meant engaging as much with the landscapes as they are materially and experientially encountered in the present as with those glimpsed on film or through the cartographic lens of historical Ordnance Survey maps. It also meant trying to tap the ethnographic webs of meaning that tangle themselves around specific films; talking to amateur filmmakers and others linked to selected productions; gleaning insights into the motivations that lay behind attempts to capture what were often disappearing landscapes; understanding the ambience, character or rhythm of particular urban spaces (and drawing comparison with the experiential fabric of the same spaces today); getting a clearer sense of the sociocultural practices of space that mapped on to specific areas of the city as glimpsed through a fragmentary assemblage of archival media (commercial, leisure and sporting, religious, educational, industrial, maritime, festivals and parades, political and contested, and so on). The interdisciplinary make-up of the City in Film projects, depending on the dispositional persuasion of those who intermittently wandered into its field of play, would often throw up questions as to the precise object of study being investigated. For those whose academic background had principally been developed around film it was the representational specificities of the medium that not surprisingly prevailed. For those coming at things from an urban-architectural perspective it was ‘the city’ that tended to take centre stage. Colleagues interested in the history and culture of amateur filmmaking

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would fix their sights mainly on the practices of those whose activities had helped build the ‘archive city’ (Roberts 2015a) in the first place. Similarly, scholars and practitioners engaged more with the archival underpinnings to the research would have their antennae tuned to issues of acquisition, preservation, audience engagement, film heritage, regional and national moving image archives, and so forth. In addition, the straddling of the period of research activity with Liverpool’s tenure as European City of Culture in 2008 (a factor not entirely unconnected to the circumstances surrounding the initial development of City in Film), provided a further intersectional locus of interest. These tended to be frequented by those looking to consider the role played by place-specific visual media in cultural policy issues tied to city branding, post-industrial economic development, tourism and consumption, cultural heritage, or any number of other concerns bustling for attention in the neoliberal marketplace of ideas – ideas that circle, shark-like, around the three C’s of Cities, Culture and Creativity. For a project to productively service a wide-ranging constituency is certainly a boon, but at the same time the centripetal force exerted by disciplinary nodes of practice – for example, ‘architecture’, ‘film studies’, ‘urban sociology/anthropology’, ‘intangible heritage’, ‘cultural geography’, ‘urban cultural studies’, and so on – can cast into relief the epistemological fault lines that are often at play (Roberts and Hallam 2014). If left unchecked these can have the effect of balkanising what can otherwise be a dialogical and interdependent mode of encounter. But equally they help draw attention to the dialectical configuration of the research ‘object’ if by this we mean the ‘city in film’. An approach that takes spatial anthropology as its starting point embraces the open and contested spatialities that come with a field of practice that does not privilege any one subject domain over another. The city is as important as the film; production (of space, texts, films, representations, imaginaries) as important as consumption; representation as indivisible from the ‘non-representational’ (experiential, affective, sensorial, embodied) as the diachronic (narrative, historical, lineal) is from the synchronic (archaeology, mythology, memory); the materiality of urban-architectural form no less a factor for consideration than the immaterial spaces of the moving image; ‘maps’ no less important than ‘mappings’. Bringing a critically reflexive sensibility to the research process as much as to the empirical matter to hand (Liverpool, urban landscape, cinematic geography, archival practices, filmmaking practices) extends the remit of what spatial anthropology is or could be such as to interrogate spatiality from a broader platform. Spatiality lies at the nexus of a collective and participatory set of interventions that, in an ideal scenario, offset the reduction (or retreat) to discreet disciplinary locales. Spatiality as anthropology. Anthropology as spatiality. What we might pick apart



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in terms of the filmic/representational or the urban/architectural (to continue with the example to hand) are constituent elements of a critical spatial praxis: a strategically performative intervention in the social and cultural production of space. Our spatial (dis)positionality, in other words, counts. It is not so much the ‘city in film’ as an object of critical enquiry but rather our critical orientation towards – and reflexive participation in – the ‘city in film’ as itself a form of spatial practice. If we revisit briefly our earlier reworking of Hidenobu’s provisional outline of spatial anthropology – the placing of oneself, critically and reflexively, within the space of contemporary landscapes (urban or otherwise), replete with the meanings and memories that are the accumulation of human activities – what we then take from this, albeit in terms not adumbrated by Hidenobu himself, is a process of immersion in a spatial domain that is lived, temporal, open-ended, multilayered and operative across and within different representational and non-representational registers. If the idea of immersion here carries with it a sense of liquidity, corporeality, perhaps even drowning, then this fits well with the attendant dimensionality of depth. ‘Deep mapping’ – a term I explore more fully in the next chapter – has close affinities with what we might think of as spatial anthropology inasmuch as it presupposes the embodied presence of the researcher ‘within’ the space under investigation. While on the one hand this might seem maddeningly vague (or obvious) as a prescription or statement of methodological intent, on the other what it purposely points to is the not inconsequential fact of the underlying performativity and reflexive acuity of the researcher, practitioner or spatial anthropologist. ANTHROPOLOGICAL SPACE I have already drawn attention to the way that Tokyo: A Spatial Anthropology rarely ventures beyond the theoretical precincts (such as they are) that Hidenobu rather conservatively stakes out. At no point does the book show signs of wanting to engage more expansively with a critical spatial discourse or urban cultural studies literature that it sits a little timidly alongside. While, once again, this is a shortcoming of the work, it is not one that need concern us here. That I cite this example at all is on account of the ‘dressed-down’ nature of what is in essence an exposition of spatial anthropology in action. In its matter-of-fact and somewhat pedestrian (no pun intended) method of going about its business, Tokyo: A Spatial Anthropology provides a useful outline of a spatiocultural disposition that places emphasis on the lived, anthropological fabric of urban space (a quality all too often neglected by architects and

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urbanists of a more rational or Cartesian bent). However, in this respect the example has taken us as far as it can go. Where we now need to head (on its behalf) is towards a more fine-grained understanding of what makes space ‘anthropological’, and to consider how important insights along the road have provided some solid foundations on which spatial anthropology, on the terms elaborated in this book, have started to gain traction and support. A curious omission in Hidenobu’s bibliography is Kevin Lynch’s 1960 publication, The Image of the City, a work with which the Tokyo study has much in common. Both set out their stall around an analytical ‘reading’ and a ‘cognitive mapping’ of their respective case study cities. In Lynch’s case, it is three US cities that are the focus of attention: Boston, Jersey City, and Los Angeles. Lynch taught urban planning at MIT and, like Hidenobu, stood out from his peers by steering a course away from what Barthes refers to as ‘functional studies of the city’ (1997: 171) and by paying greater heed not only to ‘readings of the city’ (171) but also, more crucially, ‘to those who live in a place – to the actual human experience of a city’ (Lynch, in Wood 2010: 190; see also Barthes’s [1982: 36] observation of Tokyo as a city that ‘can be known only by an activity of an ethnographic kind . . . by walking, by sight, by habit, by experience’). No amount of poring over maps, sketching design plans, or careful and precise modelling can substitute for that most elemental of human spatial practices: walking. Walking-as-reading. Walking-as-writing. Walking-as-mapping. Walking-as-wayfinding. Walking-as-walking. Walking: the ambulatory font from which a stream of theoretical exposition has flowed but which sooner or later, in practice, comes back to the basics of motility – the power of active movement. Walking. One foot. Then another. And in this both Lynch and Hidenobu invested much that would prove central to their methodological practice as urbanists and semioticians. As critical cartographer Denis Wood notes (2010: 189–90), as well as an abiding commitment to the spatially humanistic properties of urban environments, there were several key motives that informed Lynch’s work: an interest in the relationship between psychology and environment; focus on questions of aesthetics (in the face of a prevailing trend in urban planning that dismissed them as a ‘matter of taste’); and reflection on issues of evaluation or ‘quality’ (that most elusive of concepts that Robert Pirsig memorably went in search for in his 1974 novel, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance). ‘What is the quality of this or that city?’ ‘How might we go about gauging the aesthetic value attached to urban environments or cityscapes?’ How indeed? That Lynch was even asking such questions highlights the extent to which, at the time, others were not. Or rather they were, but not necessarily from within established urban planning circles. Around the same time, speculation as to the ‘specific effects of the geographic milieu . . . on the affective comport-



Spatial Anthropology 13

ment of individuals . . . [and the degree of] their influence on human feelings’ was being posed by Guy Debord, founding member and one of the main intellectual driving forces of the Situationist International (Debord 2010: 59). These now much-cited words (from Debord’s 1955 essay ‘Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography’) provide the foundations to Situationistflavoured psychogeography. As Wood points out, there were some obvious points of overlap between Situationist/Marxist psychogeography and the Lynchian model of urban cognitive mapping: ‘both elaborated methods that ensured reproducible results and a remarkable degree of objectivity. And both . . . accepted, in fact celebrated, the necessity of using human beings to measure salient dimensions of the environment’ (2010: 195; see also Cairns 2006: 192). Whether or not they both count as ‘psychogeography’ on terms that variously come attached to that label is, however, another matter. Not wishing to get sidetracked with lengthy perambulations on post-Situationist trends in psychogeography (see instead Tina Richardson’s 2015 collection, Walking Inside Out for an excellent overview of contemporary psychogeography practice, albeit in a British context) for the purposes of the current discussion I am opting, as far as is possible, to bracket the ‘P’ word and home in instead on the anthropological commonalities shared by what Wood refers to as the ‘two psychogeographies’ (2010). If we take Debord’s proclamation at face value (that is, without the ancillary baggage that would ordinarily accompany these debates) what we are confronted with is nothing especially radical or earth shattering in terms of its espousal of a basic geographical humanism: The adjective psychogeographic, preserving a rather amusing vagueness, can thus be applied to the data ascertained through this type of investigation [ie psychogeography], to the effects of their influence on human feelings, and even more generally to any situation or any conduct that seems to arise from the same spirit of discovery. (Debord 2010: 59, second emphasis added)

Whatever this ‘same spirit of discovery’ might happen to be, it is evidently not peculiar to that championed of a handful of Marxist intellectuals in postwar Paris (and, as already touched on in the preface to this book, Debord’s debt to Thomas de Quincey pinpoints at least some of psychogeography’s literary and aesthetic antecedents). The same spirit was at work in the humanistic urbanism of, for example, Lynch and the psychologist David Stea (and, later, Hidenobu). A perhaps more revealing and intriguing snippet from ‘Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography’ is Debord’s attribution of the word ‘psychogeography’ to an ‘illiterate Kabyle’ (the Kabyle are an ethnic group native to northern Algeria which in the 1950s was still under French colonial rule). According to Andrew Hussey, the Kabyle in question

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‘regularly sold dope to Debord and his comrades in the rue Xavier-Privas’ (2006: 80). Quite why the Kabyle’s apparent illiteracy is thought to have any bearing on matters is not made clear but what could be read into this is a none-too-subtle elision between the perceived exoticism of ‘the other’, a tacit non-Western (pre-modern) ‘irrationality’, and the sensory derangement and heightened affectivity that comes with intoxication. If this is the spirit that Debord is seeking to tap into, then it has clear affinities with that blazed by his forebears in the Surrealist Movement, not least notable ‘city writers’ such as Andre Breton (Nadja, 1928) or Louis Aragon (Le paysan de Paris [Paris peasant], 1926). For the Surrealists, responding to the industrial-scale barbarism of the First World War, the ‘ethnographic’ appeal of non-Western cultures fed into the cultivation of an aesthetics and poetics that traded on the ‘bizarre’, ‘irrational’, ‘dream-like’ and ‘magical’: qualities deployed to subvert the oppressive rationalism of the prevailing bourgeois social order. As James Clifford remarks in his essay ‘On Ethnographic Surrealism’ (1988: 120): ‘The “primitive” societies of the planet were increasingly available as aesthetic, cosmological, and scientific resources. These possibilities drew on something more than older Orientalism; they required modern ethnography’. We see this, for example, in painter Andre Masson’s attempts to harness the ‘hallucinatory forces’ of the exotic imagination, as Albert Einstein, writing about the surrealist’s work, put it. For Clifford, Einstein’s remarks ‘[suggest] a context in which exotic or archaic possibilities are never far from the surface of consciousness, are ever ready to offer confirmation of any and all breaks opened in the Western order of things’ (130). This idea of conjuring an alternative poetics or, indeed, logic of space by channelling the hallucinatory powers of the (substance-enhanced) imagination is itself intoxicating. Again, this is nothing especially new. De Quincey’s brand of English flânerie, for example, is difficult, if not impossible, to extricate from the opium-haze filter through which we glimpse the world he sets out on the page. But what it does bring us closer to is a sense of the transformative power of the imagination as having a significant and discernible effect on the way we not only think about and imagine everyday urban spaces but also how we experience them. Put aside, for a moment, the capacity to subvert and contest, or the eruption of unconscious and irrational forces from below ‘the surface of consciousness’ (or the surface layers of the city). Bracket off considerations of hallucination and intoxication, or of the ‘eddies and currents’ of a city re-imagined as a ‘psychogeographic sea’ (Sadler 1998: 88), and it is the attributes of an anthropological space that are pulled discreetly into view. This is nothing more than the simple recognition of the city as a space that breathes and pulses in rhythmic accord (and arrhythmic discord) with the human lifeblood that gives it purpose and vitality. A space,



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moreover, upon which desires, emotions and meanings are constantly being projected. The flavour and texture of these singularly human attributes become a residual affect that clings, in turn, and with varying degrees of viscosity, to those who inhabit and move through the urban landscape. As a constitutive element to anthropological space, imagination works in consort with the shifting contours of everyday landscapes to mould something new or moribund (depending on the imaginative agency at play in any given context). The power of the imagination, and the discriminatory cognition that feeds it, becomes spatially expressive in and through forms of everyday practice. From this perspective, spatial practice and cultural practice are but two sides of the same coin. Flipping said coin becomes a routine part of how cities and other landscapes remain living, organic and relational spaces of dwelling. What, then, of Kevin Lynch’s contribution to urban spatial anthropology? Not that he ever described it as such himself, of course. Lynch’s research data were drawn from field observations and interviews with inhabitants, commuters and consumers in Boston, Jersey City and Los Angeles. Key to the groundbreaking nature of the work developed in The Image of the City is Lynch’s formulation of a ‘legible’ sign system by which to orientate and ‘read’ cityscapes and urban spaces. His notational system of ‘edges’, ‘nodes’, ‘landmarks’, ‘districts’ and ‘paths’ provides a useful framework with which to analyse the different ways people construct mental images (or ‘cognitive maps’) of urban environments and learn to navigate their way around cities. Lynch refers to this process as ‘way-finding’ (1960: 4): In the process of way-finding, the strategic link is the environmental image, the generalized mental picture of the exterior physical world that is held by an individual. This image is the product both of immediate sensation and of the memory of past experience, and it is used to interpret information and to guide action. The need to recognize and pattern our surroundings is so crucial, and has such long roots in the past, that this image has wide practical and emotional importance to the individual.

For Lynch, the ‘environmental image’ is key, as is the functional imperative of ‘legibility’. Images of the city that cannot easily be read are not able to translate effectively into useful environmental knowledge. If that building over there is stitched into a composite image that makes environmental sense to me – based on, for example, my memory of the building’s relationship to the ‘edge’ of a river that I know snakes its way through a certain part of the city, or which provides an approximate sense of a district or neighbourhood location which I know I need to head for or avoid – then I am equipped with a sufficiently legible set of codes with which to interpret my surroundings. If there is nothing – no landmarks, pathways, or nodes

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(eg central railway station or well-known café or bar) – that I am able to reliably read, then I am, by definition, lost. The environment remains a stranger to me. There is, as yet, not enough of me or it to forge a meaningful connection. The higher a city’s ‘imageability’ ratio – that is, the provision of sufficiently legible environmental imagery in proximate relation to my geographic location – the higher the chances of my embodying something of the city’s character, meaning and semantic form. That we should regard The Image of the City as a work of spatial anthropology is supported less on account of what Lynch details in the main body of the text itself than in one of its three appendices. The appendix chapter ‘Some References to Orientation’ makes explicit some of the book’s anthropological underpinnings that are elsewhere merely inferred by Lynch rather than confronted head-on. What is curious, though, given that it is urban landscapes and the built environment that Lynch is concerned with, is that the anthropological references he draws on relate to environments that are anything but urban. Geographically, his discussion in this chapter ranges from the Santa Cruz Islands in the Pacific Ocean to the MacDonnell Ranges of central Australia, the Trobriand Islands off the east coast of Papua New Guinea, the Sahara Desert, and the plains of North China to landscapes along the Oregon Trail. At least the cities of Lhasa (Tibet) and Meshed (Iran), which also get a mention, can claim indisputable urban credentials. It is to ‘nature’ rather than ‘culture’ that Lynch looks to formulate his theoretical insights into cognitive mapping and orientation in modern (Euro-American) urban environments. In this, he invokes a Rousseauesque vision of humankind exhibiting its natural and deep-seated ‘way-finding’ faculties. In the city, to follow such reasoning, humans are looking to utilise the same cognitive abilities that have enabled them to make legible (and hence navigable) ‘environmental images’ down the ages. The task of the urban planner and architect is to create designs that are best able to accommodate this basic anthropological predisposition. In other words, the ideal objective of urban design should be to enable the innate spatiality of humans to thrive and express itself in ways that are seen as ‘natural’, as in cognitively hard-wired to the human body and brain. Stephen Cairns, commenting on the ‘Arcadian and primitivist’ undergirding to Lynch’s argument, notes how the notion of ‘tradition’ it trades on helps crystallize a theoretical foundation in which ‘human orientation, navigation, and settlement take place through the alignment of raw matter and cognitive power’ (2006: 195). There is, though, a somewhat precipitous leap required to get from an ethnographic example specific to a remote and distinctly nonurban setting – such as Malinowski’s description of tall groves rising above jungle brush to indicate villages or sites sacred to the Trobrianders (Lynch 1960: 126) – to the complexities of modern and postmodern cityscapes and



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the ‘imageability’ of a sprawling urban metropolis. The idea of an urban environmental image on the terms that Lynch’s analysis chiefly rests is increasingly difficult to sustain. The argument, as Cairns remarks (2006: 196), that an urban image ‘might elegantly encapsulate a city’s manifold dimensions and sustain a referential detachment’ has been savagely undermined by the sheer reality of what cities are, look and feel like in the twenty-first century: Imageability functions not only in the management of the town, but also as a central plank in its real-estate marketing strategy, thereby positing Lynch’s art of urban design not so much as the seed of a ‘new political art’ or a ‘new radical cultural politics’ as another consumerist tool of late capitalist urban development. The image is a brand. The cityscape is a brandscape suggesting that the lessons of imageability have been learnt only too well. (Cairns 2006: 201)

For all this, Lynch’s vision is undeniably appealing insofar as it is driven by a humanistic response to the otherwise dehumanising trajectory that was a feature of much postwar urban planning practice. It is not at all difficult to find empathy with an approach that sought to showcase the merits of spatial anthropology, where the importance of lived space is not seen as marginal or secondary to the abstract workings of design space. In this respect, despite its analytically rather naïve and narrow purview, The Image of the City shares something of the same urgency and sentiment found in Henri Lefebvre’s work on urban space (1991, 2003, 2014). The Marxist humanism that defines Lefebvre’s work, and the dialectical understanding he brings to questions of spatiality and the ‘urban condition’, draws out the social, cultural and political tensions at play in everyday urban living, contradictions which cast into relief the expressive or denuded vitality of lives that are lived spatially and socially. Lived space, for all its compelling and palpable immediacy, has been – and continues to be – routinely ironed out by hegemonic representations of space and place; flattened in a surface plane and sublimated towards abstract expressions of beauty, aesthetics and urban-architectural ‘form’. Lynch himself was not saying as much, of course, but the anthropological inflections to his work on cognitive mapping certainly do not work against such a diagnostic rendering of the critical spatial modalities of contemporary cities. Arguments developed by Michel de Certeau in his influential book The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) point to a similar diagnosis. Geometric space and anthropological space; the city from above and the city at street level; the ‘concept city’ and the ‘metaphorical’ city; panoptic space (the city captured by a ‘Solar eye’) and mythic or poetic space (the city as a locus of ‘spatial stories’). The tension between these qualitatively different spatial registers is experientially made flesh in everyday practices that require us to prise apart the singularity of our own urban itineraries from a conception

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of the city in which we are in its grasp and subject to its totalising gaze. What does my being in Liverpool mean? What is the story, the narrative that stitches together my own sense of place with that which is semiotically meaningful in terms of the city as a whole? To answer that question is to write or speak my way into a textuality of space and place that I then invite others to follow. The ‘intertwined paths’ (Certeau 1984: 107) that delineate my passage and movement through representational spaces that are mine but not mine weave together a compendium of spatial stories that, in their haphazard fashion, tell a tale of the city. In this respect I am perhaps doing none other here than offering a description of this book (or at least those parts that deal with Liverpool, but the point applies equally well to any other of the urban landscapes it ‘writes up’). In another respect, the textualities of the city that I am seeking to unravel are bound up not with the geography of words on a page but with that of my ambulant passage through the city itself. In this sense, the act of walking, not writing, constitutes ‘a space of enunciation’ (108). In the process, it becomes writing. To walk is to write, but only inasmuch as these inscriptions leave a sufficient enough trace to make readings possible. I ‘read’ my local urban environment every day. But others can only read the same (that is, my spatial story) by walking with me, whether in person, on foot, or in some form of textual account that I have taken the time to produce. If pedestrian movement through an urban landscape can be thought of as a ‘long poem of walking’ (101), then its poetic form only gains recognition – or legibility – through the traffic of everyday spatial intercourse. This is what makes the city experienced at ‘street level’ an anthropological space. As a product of spatial practices, the city is routinely enacted and enunciated through the inherent sociality of urban living. The messy flux of encounter; the everyday habitus of place by which city spaces are invested with meaning; the dense ‘forests of gestures’ (102) through and into which each spatial practitioner beats a resolute path – the anthropological spaces of the city are ineluctably non-representational: ‘Their movement cannot be captured in a picture, nor can the meaning of their movements be circumscribed in a text’ (102). Spatial practices are just that: practices. To try and impose and fix a semantic ordering of space – to discipline urban space – is to inhabit a city that can only ever be lived in abstraction: a vision held in frame by remaining on the viewing platform of the World Trade Centre (to use Certeau’s example) and looking down on Manhattan in the same way you might scrutinize a map or – Google Earth-style – vicariously adopt the disembodied vantage point of a satellite camera positioned twenty-two thousand miles away from what would become Ground Zero. ‘Is the immense texturology spread out before one’s eyes anything more than a representation, an optical artifact?’ Certeau asks (92).



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This is a question that bears close comparison with those put forward by Lefebvre in his critique of the spatial logic of advanced capitalism in The Production of Space. Lefebvre’s contention that social space has been, as he put it, ‘usurped’ by ‘a part of that space . . . namely, the part which is concerned with writing and imagery, underpinned by the written text (journalism, literature), and broadcast by the media’ (1991: 52) speaks tellingly to Certeau’s idea of the ‘concept city’ as a panoptic and geometric space that bears down upon the anthropological spaces of the city. For Lefebvre, making urban space conterminous with geometric space ‘amounts to abstraction wielding awesome reductionistic force vis-à-vis “lived” experience’ (52). The part played by media – that is, visual and textual representations that capsulate the city, or reduce it to what Debord (2004) famously termed ‘spectacle’ – therefore poses significant epistemological dilemmas in terms of what we can ‘know’ of anthropological spaces but also how we can know. This is one of the key challenges of a project of spatial anthropology. Questions of (spatial) method are inextricably tied to questions of (spatial) knowledge: what we can know of any given space or landscape is piecemeal at best. My capacity to read and/or write what Lynch calls an ‘image of the city’ is meaningful only to the extent that such an image does not lose sight of the embodied and embedded (or, indeed, disembodied and disembedded) disposition of those who ‘wear’ it. Space presupposes bodies. Or lived space does, at any rate. Spatial anthropology, by this reckoning, is itself piecemeal if only concerned with what it is able point to or imag(in)e. What is of no less importance is the process by which the finger gets to point at what it is pointing at or the image gets to stoke something of a spatial imagination that is meaningful and resonant beyond the mechanics of its ‘capture’. In Certeau’s terms, the spatial practices and spatial stories by which we go about the ‘telling’ of space – the construction of a space of enunciation, in other words – are no less a part of what makes that space meaningful and resonant. In Lefebvre’s terms, this is nothing other than the dialectics of space in action. And in terms of method, as will become apparent in subsequent chapters, this requires a certain degree of compliance with ethnographic and autoethnographic approaches to the performative study of space, place and landscape. When considering Certeau’s writings on space in ‘Walking in the City’ it is important to keep in mind that the distinction between ‘geometrical space’ and ‘anthropological space’ is based on analysis developed by MerleauPonty in part two of his masterwork Phenomenology of Perception. Rejecting the intellectualist and empiricist conceptions of space as, respectively, a geometrical construction that exists from the perspective of a disembodied subject and a physical setting or container within which ‘stuff happens’, Merleau-Ponty says that space is a product of the experiential world in which

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the embodied subject is thrown. Space is existential; existence is spatial. Anthropological spaces (or ‘human spaces’ as they appear in the 1962 Colin Smith translation of Phenomenology of Perception) represent the conferment of human intentionality on a given, or pre-existing ‘natural’ space. ‘I never live entirely within these anthropological spaces’, Merleau-Ponty writes, I am always rooted to a natural and non-human space. As I cross Place de la Concorde and believe myself to be entirely caught up within Paris, I can focus my eyes upon a stone in the wall of the Tuileries garden – the Concorde disappears and all that remains is this stone without any history; again, I can lose my gaze within this coarse and yellowish surface, and then there is no longer even a stone, and all that remains is a play of light upon an indefinite matter. My total perception is not built out of these analytical perceptions, but it can always dissolve into them. (2014: 306–7)

Any given perception of space does not, by default, rest on the spatial ordering of a world deemed to be ‘objective’ and transparent. Dream space, mythical space, schizophrenic space (301), or, as in the example quoted, a visually contemplative engagement with the world in all its contingent givenness (a stone that catches one’s eye; the play of light on ‘indefinite matter’) feeds into the experiential fabric of a ‘space’ within which it is possible to ‘dissolve’ or where ‘existence rushes into’ (300). The stone (in the wall of the Tuileries garden) is a stone; it need have no wider symbolic or historical meaning beyond that thrust upon it; its significance – at that moment, in that place – is given flesh in the most transient and accidental of worldly encounters. Neither the stone nor the light flickering upon the stone are the necessary product of human agentive actions, but that doesn’t mean that they have no part to play in the anthropological constitution of the space that is entered into or experienced by the walker enjoying a stroll across Place de la Concorde. ‘Clear space, that impartial space where all objects have the same importance and the same right to exist, is not merely surrounded, but also wholly penetrated by another spatiality’ (300). The notion here of ‘clear space’ brings to mind Lefebvre’s diagnosis of what he calls the ‘illusion of transparency’: the epistemological assumption that holds space to be open, luminous and intelligible, a symptom brought about by the privileging of the visual and optic over other senses (1991: 27). Proponents of the rationalist view of space that Lefebvre critiques would doubtless fend off suggestion of ‘another spatiality’ that Merleau-Ponty is referring to. To do otherwise would allow a muddying of the constitutive clarity of the space being held up for transparent scrutiny. Venturing into a domain we might provisionally label ‘anthropological space’ is thus to welcome, to usher in this other spatiality and take that as a starting point. What makes up this other spatiality – its tex-



Spatial Anthropology 21

ture and modulation; its affective and symbolic layers of meaning, its cultural and psychosocial constitution, its material and immaterial qualities – can be as elusive and evanescent as the rays of light cast momentarily on the wall of a Parisian public garden. But this doesn’t make it any less significant or any less ‘spatial’. Spatial anthropology is the process by which we go about the task of ‘mapping’ anthropological space. Spatial anthropology is to reflexively step into the warm and sensible flesh of the world. ANTHROPOLOGY AND SPACE In the third and final part of this introduction to spatial anthropology we consider the relationship between sociocultural anthropology as a discipline and approaches to landscape, space and place as objects of anthropological study. Before doing so, it is worth noting some of the attendant complications that we are immediately confronted with in this regard. Foremost amongst these are the complexities attached to a rhetoric of space and place that has worked its way into the epistemological substratum of the discipline since its inception. A Malinowskian and Boasian shift towards ideas of a ‘field’ of anthropological practice already brings with it a spatial understanding of culture as something that has a necessarily bounded sense of place and location. Field here implies some kind of social and cultural arena: a space of dwelling which the anthropologist enters and seeks to make sense of. In the same way that the concept of ‘place’ has undergone a refit so as to keep in step with a new relational geographical ontology (Massey 1991; Cresswell 2004), so too the concept of ‘field’ in anthropology has taken on a more ‘elastic’ or multifaceted dimension, not least when questions of ‘mobility’ and ‘travel’ are factored into the equation (Augé 1995; Appadurai 1996; Hannerz 1996; Clifford 1997). But the presuppositions that come with the idea of a ‘field’ of practice do raise the question as to the degree of homology between the culture or social group being studied and the spatialised frame that provides an empirical context and structural rationale for the investigation. The ‘why’ is held together by the ‘what’ and the ‘where’; the underlying ‘where’ is thus by no means inconsequential to the positing of both the object of study (the ‘what’) and the case for study (the ‘why’). Seen in terms of an epistemological sine qua non, the idea of ‘distance’ – whether distance in time (eg modern/premodern; developed/undeveloped) or in space (‘here’ as opposed to ‘there’; ‘west’ vs. ‘the rest’, etc) – has furnished the raw material from which anthropology has defined its object (cf Fabien 1983). Although, as Gupta and Ferguson point out (1992: 6), ‘there has been surprisingly little self-consciousness about the issue of space in anthropological theory’, in one form or another,

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spatiality has never not been an important ingredient in the anthropological mix of theoretical and practical matter in hand (Miggelbrink et al 2013: 4). To propose an anthropology of space and place, or an anthropology of landscape, is not to make a pitch for something that is not already at the core of what anthropologists are routinely engaged with anyway, it just means that the spatial and geographical context that frames, by default, any anthropological study is moved to the analytical foreground (Hirsh and O’Hanlon 1995; Feld and Basso 1996; Bender and Winer 2001; Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga 2003a; Stewart and Strathern 2003; Miggelbrink et al 2013; Low 2017). Another way of thinking about this is to reverse engineer the disciplinary relationship between field (space, location, setting, landscape, place, territory) and practice. Let us consider, for a moment, how geographers have set out the framework for what some within the discipline refer to as ‘non-representational geography’ (others, mindful of the many ‘hindrances’ that come with this label, prefer ‘more-than representational’ – see Lorimer 2005: 84). Acknowledging, for example, the ‘increasingly diverse character’ of non-representational theory, and that ‘it has a lot of forebears’, Nigel Thrift (2007: 5) outlines some of its key tenets: the importance of ‘radical empiricist’ epistemologies; the ‘on-flow’ and flux of everyday life; the ‘spillage of things’ (the material and technological apparatus of everyday social being); corporeality, affect and the senses; performance and play; and an attentiveness to practices, ‘understood as material bodies of work or styles that have gained enough stability over time, through, for example, the establishment of corporeal routines’ (5–13, emphasis in original). For Thrift, nonrepresentational theory is about ‘the geography of what happens . . . what is present in experience’ (2, emphasis in original). This is a particularly intriguing turn of phrase: the geography of what happens. Although Thrift himself concedes that this sounds a little ‘tentative’ and is delivered in the spirit of ‘experimental’ endeavour (2) it nevertheless poses some interesting questions when considered alongside discussions of anthropology and space. As embodied phenomena, whatever is ‘present in experience’ is, by definition, already present in space. What happens – the temporality of events – happens spatially. Putting aside whether or not it is judged to be relevant, there will always be a spatial frame of reference – a spatiality of some description – that bolts on to considerations of whatever it is that ‘happens’. Given that all anthropological phenomena is, therefore, at least partly if not intrinsically geographical, is the ‘geography of what happens’ any different from the ‘anthropology of where it happens’? Anthropology as an intrinsically spatial practice? And if so, where does any of this get us? I am not sure it does get us anywhere necessarily other than to problematise the prepositional relationship between ‘anthropology’ and ‘space’ (and, by



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extension, between ‘field’ and ‘practice’). Taking the ‘of’ out of the equation (anthropology of space) steers us towards an arguably more productive focus on ‘anthropological space’ rather than a schema in which ‘space’, in the first instance, is actualised as a branch of (anthropological) knowledge. In a roundabout way, what this does is ramp up the ontological attributes of space over those that speak more fully to epistemological concerns. To reiterate the contention made earlier in this chapter: spatiality as anthropology; anthropology as spatiality. Lefebvre asks the question: ‘Is not social space always, and simultaneously, both a field of action (offering its extension to the deployment of projects and practical intentions) and a basis of action (a set of places whence energies derive and whither energies are directed)?’ (1991: 191, emphasis in original). The former (field of action) invokes the social actor, engaged practically and intentionally in whatever his or her energies are being invested in. As a ‘basis of action’, the space is also ‘at once actual (given) and potential ([a] locus of possibilities)’ (191) in that the action of the actor comes about on the basis of the qualitative fabric of the space in which the action takes place. In other words, the actor’s energies are in part drawn from her social and cultural environment in the ready-to-handedness of a spatial reservoir of affective resources. Equally the energies she expends within that environment become transformed into other potential forms of energy: qualities that attach themselves to and help shape the spatial habitus. Although much has been made of a so-called ‘practice turn’ in cultural geography over the last decade or so, by which is meant an embrace of ideas that enable geographers to ‘better understand the habitual practices, intuitive acts and social protocols that draw together humans, objects and technologies’ (Lorimer 2005: 86), for social anthropologists and ethnographers the importance of ‘practice’ has, of course, a much longer pedigree. Observing that ‘culture’ is often analogously described as a ‘map’, Bourdieu suggests that such a conception engenders two countervailing ‘spatial’ orientations. On the one hand, the ‘culture’ in question is framed as ‘an abstract space, devoid of landmarks or any privileged centre – like genealogies, in which the ego is as unreal as the starting-point in a Cartesian space’. On the other, Bourdieu points to ‘the practical space of journeys actually made, or rather journeys actually being made’ (1977: 2, emphasis added). The two are brought potentially in to some form of alignment although each is necessarily open to the persuasions and dialectical influence of the other. The ‘map’ of culture is predicated on a knowing subject who ‘inflicts on practice a much more fundamental and pernicious alteration which . . . is bound to pass unnoticed’ (2). What this is a reference to is the withdrawal (of the researcher) from the action – the field of practice – in order to observe it from a distance and from

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above. Practical activity is thereby constituted ‘as an object of observation and analysis, a representation’ (2, emphasis in original). For Bourdieu, then, as Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga note, ‘Space can have no meaning apart from practice; the system of generative and structuring dispositions, or habitus, constitutes and is constituted by actors’ movement through space’ (2003b: 10). What we could also add here, by way of addendum, is that what might be deemed as ‘non-representational’ can have no pragmatic meaning apart from the practice whereby whatever it is that is ‘non-representational’ is made ‘representational’ (something of a functional prerequisite for the jobbing academic). ‘It will not do’, as Thomas Csordas remarks, ‘to identify what we are getting at with a negative term, as something non-representational’ (1994a: 10). Csordas is specifically referring here to embodiment and experience, but this prescription serves equally well in relation to the experience and performance of everyday space. The practice of space therefore opens up a wider anthropological canvas that takes in, among other things, questions of method and the reflexive positionality of the spatial anthropologist in relation to his or her ‘object’ of study. These and other questions will be explored more thoroughly in the next chapter. But for present purposes there are two key and interrelated focal points that need attention by way of prelude. The first is in response to the suggestion that a ‘reassertion of “depth”’ (Coleman and Collins 2006: 3) might be taken as a modus operandi of the spatial work that the anthropologically minded researcher is seeking to put into practice. The second is that spatial knowledge – the prize, or instrumental tool with which to ‘make an impact’ (to borrow the parlance of the corporatised university) in the wider social world – is synonymously linked to strategies of territorialisation, and that, correspondingly, the project of ‘mapping’ culture is fraught with the ambiguities and contradictions that come with the idea of the ‘map’ as a rationalisation of space (Roberts 2012b). For Coleman and Collins (2006: 3), a reassertion of depth in anthropological practice is suggestive of a corresponding reassertion of ‘authenticity’ premised on an abundant supply of social spaces that in some way or another lack qualitative meaning or symbolic structures of place and identity. ‘Non-places’ is the term routinely reserved for such spaces; their emergence attributed to the haemorrhaging of structures of ‘anthropological place’ that is a symptom of a condition that pervades the landscapes and increasingly sterile environments of ‘supermodernity’ (Augé 1995). We delve more deeply into non-places in chapter 3 (‘Castaway’) which examines the ‘negative spaces’ of a motorway traffic island on the M53 Mid-Wirral Motorway. In the project from which that chapter draws – the working title of which was ‘Concrete Island’ after J. G. Ballard’s 1974 novel of the same name – a



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key motivation was to take a landscape whose non-place-ometer reading was ‘off the scale’. From there, my task was to see what the idea of ‘depth’ could possibly throw up in such a radically placeless place as a motorway island that was being surveyed in its capacity not as a functionalist space but as an affective space. The functional existence of the ‘concrete island’ (ie as a negative space – like that between two words in a line of text – that separates two motorway carriageways at the site of an aborted junction) obviously played its part in my analysis. But at the same time the challenge I set myself was to try and forge an embodied, material and affective connection with a space otherwise ‘off the grid’ of everyday lived spatial experience. In other words, in direct response to the island’s status as a non-place that was about as far from the concept of ‘anthropological place’ as it was possible to get, my aim was to confer on it (or salvage from it – I’m not entirely sure which it is) some vestiges of place. Marc Augé’s work on non-places has been highly influential, much debated, and extraordinarily well-rehearsed to the extent that not much in the way of exposition is necessary here. What is worth briefly drawing attention to, however, is that, while many critics of Augé’s theory have been quick to fix upon what are taken to be the socially inert, de-actualising and nodal properties of non-places (Adey 2006); linking the concept with broader discussions around ideas of ‘deterritorialisation’ (Tomlinson 1999: 108–13), spaces of flows, nomadism and such like, it is important to keep in mind that for Augé the non-place is ostensibly defined in opposition to ‘anthropological place’: an organic sociality, localised and bounded in time and space, and sharing common symbols, narratives and coherent structures of identity. While Augé certainly opens himself to the charge of romanticising this uniquely Durkheimian conception of anthropological place (Osborne 2001: 188), the tensions and bipolarities of place/non-place draw attention to the relational qualities which these spaces harbour (Augé 1995: 79); a fact, as Merriman observes (2004: 149), that critics tend to overlook. This is important for our present purposes as, however convinced one might be of the merits of Augé’s thesis (and it has tended to be geographers who have expressed most scepticism) what Non-Places has done exceptionally well has been to throw greater spotlight on what it is that makes spaces ‘anthropological’ and, by corollary, what it is that doesn’t. Coleman and Collins remark that it may be a ‘sign of the times’ that a textbook on keywords in social and cultural anthropology included an entry for ‘non-places’ but lacks one on the concept of ‘place’ (2006: 2) (Clifford Geertz [1996: 260] makes a similar point in his afterword to Feld and Basso’s Senses of Place). Considering this from a dialectical standpoint it is possible to argue that the negation of a concept – in this case that of ‘place’ – provides an ideal starting place to then work back

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from in terms of what the negation of that negation (place) might conceivably point to. Or, indeed, what it should point to: How might a consideration of nonplaces inform and revivify an ethics of place and space? (Hill and Martin 2017). What do we collectively judge to have significant enough ‘anthropological’ value that would compel us to resist moves that might threaten to undermine it? What is the ‘quality’ of our everyday spaces of transit and dwelling? And are we even asking these questions to the degree that we need to be asking them? And who is this ‘we’ I am invoking? What is the constitution of different groups, communities, stakeholders, cultures, ‘spatial practitioners’ of various colours and shapes, and so on, and what political questions does the interplay of this rich melee of social actors bring into focus? A project of spatial anthropology picks up these and related questions and puts them to work. In the very loosest of senses we can take this to be a ‘reassertion of authenticity’ inasmuch as it is driven by a desire to probe and draw to the surface (to plunder that ‘depth’ metaphor once again) qualities that we are seeking to divine or to excise/exorcise in order to free up more desirous affects of space. At the risk of gross generalisation, what I tentatively venture to throw into the ring is the suggestion that what unites all forays into anthropological space – from Debordian psychogeography to Lynchian cognitive mapping or Hidenobu’s palimpsestic ‘city-within-the-city’, to Certeau’s spatial practices, to urban exploration and place-hacking (Garrett 2013), or to adventures in so-called ‘deep mapping’ (Roberts 2016a) – is a desire to salvage, excavate or unravel a ‘space’ into which it is then possible to step with more agentive purpose. To declare and affirm this space not that (or that space not this). To these ends, what we think of as place/non-places (the affirmation and negation cannot be neatly prised apart) has an important heterotopic dimension: it always invokes ‘another space’ that exists in relation to that laid out before/around/within us (cf Foucault 1986; see also chapter 5, ‘Heterotopolis’). The significance of ‘depth’ to spatial anthropology practices will be developed further in chapter 2 (‘Of Spaces In-Between’). But at this point – and to bring this introductory chapter to a close – we turn to the second of my key focal points: spatial knowledge as a rationalisation of space (and the related implications this has for a project of spatial anthropology). To return to Augé’s Non-Places for a moment, in the introduction to their book, The Anthropology of Space and Place, editors Low and LawrenceZúñiga parcel a short reference to the concept of non-places in a section called ‘Translocal Spaces’ (2003b: 29). This is not an inaccurate typology necessarily (although many spaces that have been theorized as non-places – eg shopping centres, multi-storey car parks, business and retail parks, multinational cinema, hotel and leisure chains, or liminal spaces such as decom-



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missioned industrial sites, brownfield sites and edgelands – are not what we routinely think of as ‘translocal’). But what it does do is highlight the way the theoretical language and rhetoric of space is itself ‘spatialised’ and subject to a classificatory logic not dissimilar to that wielded by many city planners and urban technocrats. This example is cited not so much as a criticism but as a means by which to distinguish an anthropology of space that is wedded to an epistemological remit (space as a classificatory mechanism with which to think about the sociality of space) from a spatial anthropology that takes its cue from ontological reflections on space as an existential ground of everyday being. To the extent that what is arguably the key shortcoming of Non-Places – its neglect of a sensory and affective anthropology of place and space – is itself indicative of the need to taxonomise spatial phenomena (the ‘what’ of non-places as opposed to the ‘when’ of autoethnographic thick description) we need only add that this is by no means atypical in anthropological approaches to space and sociocultural phenomena. Appadurai’s (1996) designation of ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, ideoscapes, and financescapes arguably follows similar patterns of spatial ordering. As the subtitle of Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga’s book suggests, this is about ‘locating culture’ – finding an appropriate theoretical landscape within which to ‘fit’ or ‘locate’ culture(s) amidst the disorientations and uncertainties of a globalised postmodern world (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). Coleman and Collins’s Locating the Field (2006) is similarly instructive in this respect. It is the ‘field’ – the space – that needs locating, not the relationship individual actors might have with particular experiences, textures or dispositions of space. What is noticeably absent – or relegated to the margins at least – is a focus on practices of space and the fleshiness of the world into which, from which, and of which human and posthuman bodies are thrown. This is a point echoed by Christine Helliwell in her ethnographic study focused on the traditional longhouses of the Dayak people in Borneo. Reproaching ethnographers whose inclination has been to merely ‘map’ the social spaces of Dayak society and to break social life down into structures or discrete ‘pieces’, Helliwell points out how so little of what makes longhouses distinctive as lived spaces: ‘their sounds, smells, the endless sense of movement . . . has ever found its way into the public ethnographic record of the region’ (1996: 145). Approaching the longhouse ‘not as an abstract “structure” to be mapped, but rather as a place to be lived and used’ (145, emphasis in original) reinforces the view that space cannot adequately be ‘known’ apart from the spacings that go into making that space what it is in practice. Space understood as a performative field rather than a container of social action. If what is meant by a ‘spatial turn’ in social and cultural theory is a spatialisation of the discourse of social and cultural phenomena, this is not neces-

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sarily the same thing as a ‘turn’ to space in the terms I am outlining here. If a shift towards the ethnography of space and place constitutes the ‘spatializing [of] culture’ (Low 2017), then we could profitably ask whether the reverse might be any less warranted: the culturalisation of space. Space as a symbolically expressive and embodied engagement with the everyday world(s) we inhabit and pass through. Space as a constitutive component of everyday being. Space as lived. Life as spaced. The logic that governs the spatialisation and location of culture engenders a social landscape that is viewed through a fragmentary and prismatic lens. ‘Space’ is broken down into separate units: translocal space, liminal space, embodied space, cartographic space, lived space, anthropological space, geometric space, transnational space, hyperspace, cyberspace, digital space, analogue space, media space, spaces of flow, spaces of place, affective space, spaces of travel, spaces of mobility, deterritorialised space, striated space, smooth space, tactical space, architectonic space, textual space, diegetic space, outer space, inner space, and any number of countless other ‘spaces’ that we might conceivably encounter (if not always ‘inhabit’). The language of ‘space’, in other words, has become more fine-grained and textured. And this is of course no bad thing. But while space and spatiality have undoubtedly secured a stronger discursive foothold in the humanities and social sciences, this does not necessarily translate to a spatiality of practice in which space is reflexively turned back on itself and the object of study folded into the flux of an embodied spatial method. As something to be merely poked at or glimpsed from a distance, the perception of the ‘space’ under investigation is as something that, in all likelihood, remains ‘over there’. Recognition of the invocatory power of its presence as an object of knowledge is to go some way towards acknowledging that, through the very act of its enunciation, the spatiality in question is already being inhabited or ‘worn’. The space pulls us – as spatial humanists – into its orbit by default. In this sense, what sets apart, however subtly, an anthropology of space from a space of anthropology is the phenomenological primacy of the doingness of space. Space as a ‘taskscape’ (Ingold 2000: 197) – it is there to be worked at. We cannot comfortably or productively sit outside of whatever it is we are trying to inhabit. To do so reduces spatiality to little more than a grid when it is better thought of as a mesh. It captures us as much as we (try to) capture it. This is echoed in Tilley and Cameron-Daum’s (2017: 5) discussion of anthropology and landscape. ‘We are not somehow outside it, or contained by it’, they argue, rather, that landscape is part of ourselves, a thing in which we move and think. . . . It is not a blank slate for conceptual or imaginative thought but a material form with textures and surfaces, wet and dry places, scents and sounds, diurnal and seasonal



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rhythms, places and paths and cultural forms and built architecture that, through differential experience, is constitutive of different identities.

Space, then, is not something we can ‘stand back’ from (Bender 2001: 3) any more than landscape is. It is something we can stand ‘in relation to’ – whether representationally in the form of a map, landscape painting, architect’s model, or digital 3D simulation, for example – but the purity of abstraction is sustained only by a corresponding denial of the embodied and situated intentionality of the observer. Whatever the nature of the relationship between the body-subject and the space ‘being framed’, it is not one that can be characterised as mute or static. It is, rather, dialectical – it requires us to creatively ‘enter into correspondence’ (Ingold 2012: 14) with the representational spaces of a world we variously inhabit, throw ourselves into, contest and reject, or simply embody. These encounters and correspondences are ‘predicated on our being in and learning how to go on in the world’ (Bender 2001: 3, emphasis in original). Spatial knowledge, for the anthropologist as for those she shares her space with (and with whom she is similarly correspondent), is accrued by living and inhabiting the environments within which that knowledge has most currency – most practical application. This has some parallels with Kevin Lynch’s discussion of way-finding and cognitive mapping, mentioned earlier (see also Golledge 1991). But it is more fully in accord with anthropologist Tim Ingold’s conceptualisation of way-finding, which is less narrowly focused around processes of spatial cognition. For Ingold, inhabitants of spaces and landscapes ‘know as they go, as they journey through the world along paths of travel. Far from being ancillary to the point-to-point collection of data to be passed for subsequent processing into knowledge, movement is itself the inhabitant’s way of knowing’ (2011: 154, emphasis in original). By yoking spatial knowledge to embodied spatial movement Ingold highlights the constitutive tensions that govern the processual correspondence between spatial knowledge as the production of mappings and spatial knowledge as the production of maps. ‘All wayfinding is mapping, though not all mapping is wayfinding’, Ingold remarks (2000: 232; Roberts 2012b: 17). The distinction rests on the extent to which any given mapping incites the map-reader to stand back from the world or step forth into it. Knowledge, viewed as the product of way-finding or ‘thinking-in-movement’ (Ingold 2013: 262), is the making of knowledge: ‘a process entailing co-ordinated interaction between interlocutors and practitioners with their total environment’ (Marchand 2010, in Dalidowicz 2015: 95). Space, by this reckoning, is correspondingly understood as spatial praxis. The ‘product’, if by this we mean a concrete representational output that coincides with some

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form of ‘arrival’, can only ever be provisional and contingent. The ‘making of’ part, in other words, grounds space ontologically. What it is cannot be disentangled from what it does and what we (as social actors and ‘inhabitants’) make of it and from it. One of the key axioms underpinning what Michael Jackson and Albert Piette refer to as ‘existential anthropology’ is that life is irreducible to the terms with which we seek to grasp it (2015: 9). What this means in practice is a methodological suspension of bulky conceptual baggage so as to not grasp space as much as live it. As Jackson and Piette stress, ontology cannot be extrapolated directly from representations, ‘it must be inferred from what is happening and unfolding concretely in specific situations’ (24). The nature of Being in anthropological practice – the interrogation of ‘fundamental ontology’ as a focus on ‘what is there before the human is constructed in terms of a particular worldview, be this a local cosmology, theory of mind, or scientific model’ (25) – is a field of enquiry that is necessarily coextensive with the ontological dynamics of space. What is ‘there’ before space and place are constructed from a particular point of view, local cosmology, theoretical template or scientific model is what is given in the experiential presence of spatial being. Spatial anthropology is an attempt to give a name to the processes whereby the fundamental spatiality of being is woven into and from everyday practices, dispositions and experiential knowledge. To proceed on these terms – irrespective of disciplinary persuasion – is to understand and practice space as an existential ground of everyday being.

Chapter 2

Of Spaces In-Between

The flower is the mind, the seed is the performance. – Zeami Motokiyo, c 1410

In chapter 1 we surveyed some of the expansive and densely thicketed theoretical terrain in which ideas of anthropological space and spatial anthropology have started to take root. As we have seen, the disciplinary seeding that has contributed to their development can by no means be limited to anthropology or to the activities of anthropologists. Cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary seeding is a better way of putting this horticultural metaphor to work. Space is as much a property of the methods and ‘frames’ by which we apprehend it as it is of the practices, habitations and dispositions which we might expect to find there (wherever or whatever ‘there’ might happen to be). The spacings (Crouch 2010: 45) we cultivate and enact have bearing on the spaces we variously inhabit and/or produce. Anthropological spaces are produced in the same way that (social) spaces help ‘produce’ the actors that make up those spaces. This does sound a little tautologous, granted. But then, so it should. We come at space through the practices that ascribe a given space or place with the form by which we recognise it as such. Equally, we can think of spatial practices in terms of the spatial structures that define and refine these same practices and which are thus part of the anthropological fabric of a given space or place. Space and anthropology. Anthropology and space. In one sense, this seems driven by the same dialectical logic that feeds understandings of the interplay between structure and agency: spatiality reconstituted as an analogue of sociality, space as a manifestation of habitus (Hillier and Rooksby 2005). Lefebvre, from the perspective of a Marxist 31

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dialectician, certainly reinforces this when he argues that ‘the social relations of production have a social existence to the extent that they have a spatial existence; they project themselves into space, becoming inscribed there, and in the process producing that space itself’ (1991: 129). But there is more at play here that risks being sidelined if the impression is given that spatial anthropology amounts to merely socio-spatial anthropology. The social production and consumption of space is, of course, key to how we need to think about how space and place are made manifest in our everyday lifeworlds (the ways in which they are experienced, lived, conceived and practised). It is more a question of framing the social ontologies of space in such a way as to make room for concerns which are coextensive with cognate fields of engagement. In the first instance, this perhaps requires nothing more than a little fine-tuning – a stress on the psychosocial dynamics of spatial anthropology, for example, thereby allowing for greater recognition of the important psychic and emotional cadences that make space, place and landscape what they are on a more visceral, affective and experiential level. But also, of course, it is all that makes our spatial worlds what they are on account of factors that are expressly non-human and non-anthropogenic. Despite the focus on cities and built environments in chapter 1, ‘Spatial Anthropology’ is no less engaged with landscapes that fall ‘between the cracks’ of human habitation and development and are correspondingly perceived as ‘natural’, such as estuaries, marshland, rivers, scrubland and sky. Sky being open, expansive, ‘empty’ space which, on the one hand, is not really empty at all – the busy ‘airspace’ (Pascoe 2001) of the Mersey Estuary explored in chapter 9 (‘Utopos’), along with its abundant birdlife and waterfowl (not to mention grey industrial clouds) are testament to this–and is at the same time a negative space into which the imagination itself can take flight. In the same way that the space and spaciousness (Tuan 1977) of the sky is not necessarily empty, neither is nature necessarily ‘natural’. Again, the estuarine landscapes of the Mersey (chapter 9) and the Dee (chapters 7 and 8, ‘Necrogeography’ and ‘Reclamation’, respectively) provide a good illustration of this when we take into account the sheer scale of human intervention and engineering that has so dramatically transformed these spaces. There is nothing intrinsically natural about nature (MacCormark 1980; Soper 1995). Yet there is nothing intrinsically human or ‘anthropological’ about it either. In this chapter we dig deeper into the idea of ‘spaces in-between’, spaces both geographic (such as estuaries or marshlands) and psychosocial. Such a task requires us to work through several areas of discussion, which all in their own way speak to the concept of ‘liminality’. Accordingly, what follows is, firstly, an outline sketch of the theoretical origins of liminality and liminal phenomena in anthropological studies of ritual and performance. This leads in



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to a more specific focus on the liminality of space or spaces of liminality. The remainder of the chapter will address issues bound up with methodological approaches to spatial anthropology which are themselves afforded the status of ‘in-between’. These ‘methods’ – if that is indeed what they are – are examined under the respective headings of ‘deep mapping’ and ‘spatial bricolage’. Both, it is argued, are crucial to an understanding of spatial anthropology as a practice that sits – precariously at times – on the cusp of dissolution. LIMINALITY Liminality, or rather liminal spaces and landscapes, have dovetailed in and out of my work in a number of different ways over a number of years. From my doctoral research on cinematic geographies of travel and migration (Roberts 2002, 2005) through, more recently, to work developed with Hazel Andrews on liminality, landscape and travel (Andrews and Roberts 2012a, 2015), liminal phenomena, either directly or obliquely, have remained an important underpinning to critical interventions in areas straddling concerns with space, culture, memory and landscape. Much of this work has its hooks in the North West of the UK: Merseyside, the Wirral and the Dee Estuary in particular (hence the geographical focus of this book). But also other places ‘on the margin’ (Shields 1991) such as the coastal town of Margate in Kent (Roberts 2002; Andrews and Roberts 2012b). If my interest in liminality was initially stoked by spaces, places and non-places of travel (border zones, airports, motorways/highways, seaports, railway stations, roads and tracks, as well as different modes of transport), Andrews’s developed from ethnographic reflection on tourism spaces such as beach resorts (and beaches themselves), hotels, bars and restaurants, family entertainment venues, or sight-seeing attractions. The fieldwork settings where much of her research took place were the ‘British’ Mediterranean resorts of Magaluf and Palmanova on the Spanish island of Mallorca. The concept of liminality fed into her work, in the first instance, through engagement with some of the pivotal studies in tourism anthropology that likened the holiday experience to a ‘rite of passage’ or sacred journey akin to a pilgrimage (Graburn 1989; MacCannell 1976). The holiday, in this analysis, marks a hiatus in the social and familial calendar – a period where the workaday rhythms and routines are put temporarily on hold and the holidaymaker embraces the flux and freedom of a space betwixt-and-between the leaving from and eventual return to the home world. This liminal experience is thus both temporal (in that it lasts the duration of the holiday) and spatial (in that it entails a process of travel to an ‘other’ space or place). Moreover, the license

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afforded to behaviour that might be less characteristic of the quotidian world back home – for example, eating or drinking to excess, indulgence in casual (or at least more ardent) sexual activity, lazing the day away on the beach, body and beauty treatments (pampering, massage, relaxing in the sauna or spa), lavish shopping and consumption in general, adventure activities, family games and bonding in and by the pool, greater interest in and enjoyment of arts and culture (eg museums, galleries and heritage attractions), and whatever else the holidaymaker would wish to extract from his or her holiday ritual – offers the tourist opportunities to fully embrace the (often morally inversive) pleasures of the ‘carnivalesque’, another characteristic commonly attributed to tourism as a liminal experience (Shields 1991). Focused chiefly around considerations of space, the body, and food and drink, what Andrews’s ethnographic analysis reveals in the case of Mallorca is a ludic space given over to, among other things, a heightened sense of nationalistic fervour – ‘effervescent Britishness’ (Andrews 2011: 223) – that finds its performative expression in a symbolic landscape dominated by signs of British identity, history and mythology. The liminality that suffuses the spatiotemporal lifeworld of Magaluf and Palmanova is, Andrews argues, experienced as a ‘disruption’ of the everyday habitus – a moment of being (Andrews 2009) whereby the tourist is temporarily pulled out of his or her normative social existence and is free to embrace embodied and symbolic dispositions that give performative voice to latent ideas of being and selfhood. By way of rejoinder to arguments that stress difference and exoticism as characteristic features of the typical ‘host-guest’ encounter, Andrews’s case study provides valuable insights into the sameness and familiarity that underwrites what it is many tourists are hoping to ‘find’ or re-affirm in the performative playground of specific tourism landscapes. In Magaluf in particular, the sense of a hermetic and tightly clustered social landscape is indicative of a touristic field of action that functions to contain and compress. The intensity of a hedonistic culture of embodied excess, so palpably felt in the bars, clubs, streetscapes and beaches of the resort, is matched by the intensity of symbolic affects that speak powerfully to ideas of identity, nationhood and place associated with the ‘home’ world. As a liminal landscape and liminal ‘moment’, the holiday experience is played out as if in a crucible, the heat and concentrated energies of which forge a strong sense of selfhood and identity that the tourists potentially take back home along with their luggage and any souvenirs (or STDs) they may have picked up while away. Approached from the conceptual vantage point of liminality, what examples such as this usefully draw attention to are spaces and landscapes that are not merely ‘liminal’ in the sense of a generic ‘in-between-ness’ (as if the ‘space’ of Magaluf is liminal in the same way that it is, say, ‘urban’ or ‘com-



Of Spaces In-Between 35

mercial’). There is nothing given about the liminality of the resort any more than there is about its perceived ‘Britishness’. These are qualities that can only be divined through careful and attentive processes of observation, listening, feeling and immersion – like the tentative lowering of the body into the cold water of the swimming pool, but in the wider social spaces within which tourists play and splash. The significance of so-called ‘liminal’ phenomena in the resort is only worth registering insofar as it provides a lens through which to better see what, in all its messy humanness, is going on there: what it is that makes up the social production and consumption of space in the resort; what bodies are doing; how time is being experienced; the way the space is embodied and made meaningful through practice; how sexual or violent behaviour (Andrews 2014) is made manifest; the way the space and time of the holiday is experienced in relational terms (ie what it inversely might illuminate with respect to the home world); how Self is constituted in relation to an Other; the utilitarian value of liminal phenomena from the point of view of the tourist industry and commercial service providers in the resort. Liminality, in other words, is only as important as the social and spatial practices it brings into play (and thus, from the point of view of the tourism ethnographer, brings into frame). What examples such as Andrews’s tourism ethnography usefully point to, therefore, is the important ritual and psychosocial dimension to liminality and liminal phenomenon. Accordingly, the work can be assessed as part of a tradition that has explored tourism through recourse to ideas of the sacred journey, authenticity, pilgrimage, rites of passage, and so on. But at the same time it recognises the importance of a tradition – hitherto more peripheral to anthropological studies of travel and tourism – that explores questions of embodiment, experiential and existential groundings of tourism as ‘a moment of being’ (Andrews 2009) and ‘becoming’ (Andrews 2017), and which thus draws inspiration from broadly phenomenological approaches to social and cultural anthropology (see Csordas 1994b; Jackson 1996a; Ram and Houston 2015). Liminality, in short, is a concept that cannot adequately be grappled with without at the same time taking stock of its origins in anthropological discussions of ritual and performance, as well as broader discussions around the anthropology of experience. For those not familiar with these debates, the remainder of this section will address this literature more directly so as to better pave the way for the discussion on liminality and space that follows. The concept of ‘liminality’, much like the phenomena to which it is generally held to ascribe, is itself passing through something of a transitional phase. From its origins in the work of the French ethnologist and folklorist Arnold van Gennep, through to the pioneering theoretical anthropology of Victor Turner in the 1960s and 1970s, what is understood by the term

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‘liminality’ today encompasses a wide array of meanings and theoretical associations that go far beyond those more traditionally linked with anthropological discussions on ritual, performance, pilgrimage and cross-societal ‘rites of passage’. As already intimated, one of the foremost points of critical intersection that has propelled renewed interest in liminality and liminal phenomena is the relationship between liminality, space and place (Andrews and Roberts 2012a; Gómez Reus and Gifford 2013; Downey et al 2016). While undoubtedly such trends can in part be attributed to the impact of a so-called ‘spatial turn’ (see chapter 1), it can also be taken as evidence of a concerted push to re-engage with the concept of liminality in ways that acknowledge, but which at the same time are by no means bound by the foundational work of figures such as van Gennep and Turner. As Thomassen notes (2009), the concept has ‘travelled’ since it was first introduced in van Gennep’s influential book Rites de passage (1960 [1909] – see also Thomassen 2014). Derived from the Latin word for ‘threshold’ (limen) – an etymological reminder of the important spatial underpinnings to the concept – ‘liminal’ is attributed by van Gennep to the symbolic processes and ritual conventions that structure and define key moments of social transition or ‘rites of passage’. Exploring the relationship between liminal experiences and lasting effects of those experiences, van Gennep argued that structure and order is derived from liminality – from the crucial middle or ‘in-between’ states that facilitate ritual passage from one social stage to another. Rites of passage, in this analysis, are structured and patterned in ways that are replicable across all cultures and societies. This universal, tripartite ritual structure consists of, firstly, the separation or preliminal phase, in which the initiate or participant in the ritual is physically detached from his or her normal social environment and everyday routines (for example: a groom or bride-to-be whose attendance at the obligatory stag or hen party marks the final fling of someone whose status is still ‘single’). This is followed by the liminal or transitional phase in which the initiate is physically and symbolically marginalised (for example, a tourist, pilgrim or honeymooner whose workaday world is held in abeyance for the duration of their holiday or pilgrimage). During the liminal period, the initiates often share a strong social bond and sense of camaraderie as ‘fellow travellers’ in the ritual in which they are all taking part (Turner would go on to develop this idea in his concept of communitas – see below). Lastly, the incorporation or postliminal phase marks the point where the initiate is reincorporated back into society having undergone (or so it is hoped) a process of ritual transformation and entered a new stage in life or attained a new social status (for example: the former groom or bride returns home to routine social life as a husband or wife; the tourist-pilgrim returns from his holiday



Of Spaces In-Between 37

refreshed and revivified having embodied in some way the liminal or ‘sacred’ experience of the holiday). However useful, insightful, clunky, simplistic or ‘structural’ this analysis may seem today, the important point to draw from Rites de passage is that liminality does not presuppose certainty or offer an explanatory causality with regard to outcome, but rather describes a world of contingency ‘where . . . “reality” itself, can be carried in different directions’ (Thomassen 2009: 5). The uncertainty, flux and ‘uncharted’ space-time of the liminal phase allows for the possibility of change and transformation. This may be for good or ill (ideally the ritual is designed with the former in mind), but irrespective of this what it offers is a space where fixed bearings no longer apply as reliable bases of orientation. In this respect, the idea of a ‘map’ of liminal space makes little sense. If a territory can be easily mapped, then it is not strictly speaking ‘liminal’, or at least its liminal potential is significantly reduced (the drunken stag-do reveller may wake up to find himself naked and chained to a lamppost with all his body hair shaven off but if there is an expectation of the same, then to what extent is the constitutive chaos of the ritual meaningful as a liminal experience?). If van Gennep’s formative contributions are little more than a footnote in most discussions of the anthropology of liminality today, this is because his ideas have since been taken up and reworked far more cogently by the British anthropologist Victor Turner, whose early writings on ritual and the role of symbols in social processes was based on fieldwork conducted among the Ndembu tribe of Zambia (1967). For Turner, liminality – or the liminal phase – constitutes an experiential moment that is marked by uncertainty and lack of inevitability between what is known and has gone before and future outcomes. The creative potential of ritual – the ways in which the performance attached to liminal spaces and moments might be harnessed for productive social ends – would go on to play a particularly important part in Turner’s later work. What Turner took from van Gennep in this respect was the idea that, during the liminal phase of a ritual, initiates are in a ‘betwixt and between’ status, a threshold from which a new identity or social status can potentially emerge. The liminal phase – or liminal space insofar as the duration has extension and material corporeality – thus harbours potentiality and becoming: it is incubatory in that it promises birth or renewal. It is also often playful: ‘Liminality may involve a complex sequence of episodes in sacred space-time, and may also include subversive and ludic (or playful) events. . . . [I]n liminality people “play” with the elements of the familiar and defamiliarize them’ (Turner 1982: 27). With this emphasis on playful action, liminality becomes significant in understanding individual and group responses to the

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‘betwixt and between’ rather than emphasising only its linear role as part of a sequence of events. Crucially, for Turner, the liminal phase presents the opportunity of being re-shaped or ‘fashioned anew’ (1969: 81). A notable, though frequently glossed-over innovation in Turner’s theoretical updating of van Gennep’s earlier ideas is the distinction he makes between liminal and ‘liminoid’. Turner (1982) argues that in modern consumerist societies in which work and play are more clearly defined than in so-called traditional societies the possibilities for liminal experiences to arise are reduced. Because of this, what would otherwise constitute liminal ritual practices are supplanted by liminoid moments, such as those found in artistic performances and forms of leisure and lifestyle consumption. The ritual and liminal characteristics ascribed to ‘traditional’ societies are transmuted into liminoid experiences through play, creativity, drama and their associated art forms, such as theatre and literature. Although it could be argued that the liminal-liminoid split trades on too crude a distinction between ideas of ‘traditional’ and ‘non-traditional’, Turner’s concept of the liminoid does nonetheless allow for a more qualified or conditional sense of the liminal insofar as it defines a transitional moment that is optional and which does not involve a change of status or offer a resolution (Thomassen 2009: 15). The playfulness and experiential qualities of liminoid phenomena can be transformative but they are not transitional in the same way that a rite of passage represents a liminal state of ‘betwixt and between’. In From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (1982) Turner notes that ‘oid’ derives from the Greek word eidos, meaning a form or shape. Liminoid thus takes the form of or resembles but is not the same as the liminal. It represents ‘an independent domain of creative activity’ (1982: 33). For example, the distinction between pilgrimage and tourism in terms of, respectively, liminal and liminoid practices is one that has been touched upon in anthropological studies of travel and tourism (Gottlieb 1982; Lett 1983; Shields 1991). As we have already seen, tourism has been theorised (by Graburn and others) as a form of pilgrimage whereby both tourist and pilgrim share the status of initiates embarked on a liminal rite of passage. Pilgrimage, a focus of some of Turner’s later work on liminality and ritual which he developed with his wife Edith (Turner and Turner 1978), entails an equalling out of participants: status hierarchies are temporarily suspended and the pilgrims share a common experience of communitas. Similar arguments have been made with respect to rave, dance and techno cultures and subcultures (see, for example, Gerard 2004; St. John 2008 – see also chapter 6, ‘Songlines’), prompting debate as to whether these represent liminal or liminoid experiences. Lastly, an important but often overlooked characteristic of the liminal phase is its association with danger (Andrews and Roberts 2012b, 2015;



Of Spaces In-Between 39

Thomassen 2012). The attendant risk attached to the entering of a liminal phase or liminal space is of losing a stable sense of self and identity, or of not being reincorporated into the social world in ways that had been anticipated or desired. For those seeking drug-induced and consciousnessaltering experiences of communitas, for example, the psychological and physical impacts may have permanent or long-term consequences that take the experience outside of the temporary and otherwise contained environment of the liminal phase. Death itself is also strongly associated with liminality (see Das 1977). But danger also has other connotations when thinking about liminal spaces as inherently unstable and uncertain. Andrei Tarkovky’s classic 1979 film Stalker has, alongside its cult status, acquired almost meta-mythological significance in this respect in its depiction of the Zone. Fenced off and forbidden entry by an authoritarian state, the Zone is a quintessential liminal space. Rational spatial knowledge and linear patterns of movement and orientation do not apply in this landscape. Nothing is as it seems; it demands respect and reverence. It is a sacred space, certainly for the stalker himself, the guide and seasoned pilgrim who risks life and limb leading fellow initiates through its phantasmagorical maze of abandoned buildings and industrial ruins. The elusive and ineffable qualities that permeate the Zone and which draw pilgrims to risk undertaking the ‘rite of passage’ to its miraculous heart are precisely what unsettles and threatens the rationally minded autocrats who deem the space to be taboo and ‘off limits’. The Oxford English Dictionary definition of ‘trespass’ is: a transgression; a breach of law or duty; an offence, sin, wrong; a fault. In the grander scheme of things to suggest that the stalker and his followers are ‘trespassing’ seems to underplay the significance of their actions. But it is certainly a transgression and a breach of law, and the forbidden status ascribed to the Zone is, along with whatever affective wellsprings it may be possible to tap there, the very quality that guarantees the radical liminality of the space. I will return to considerations of ‘danger’ and ‘trespass’ later in this chapter when exploring questions of method (and related issues of transgression and ‘ethical’ boundaries and constraints). But for now I wish to broaden out the discussion on liminality so as to probe more deeply the relationship between liminality, space and place. SPACES IN-BETWEEN In his account of a walk along an ancient and notoriously hazardous tidal path situated off the Essex coast, the writer Robert Macfarlane (2012: 78) observes:

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We lack – we need – a term for those places where one experiences a ‘transition’ from a known landscape . . . [to] somewhere we feel and think significantly differently. I have for some time been imagining such transitions as ‘border crossings’. These borders do not correspond to national boundaries, and papers and documents are unrequired at them. Their traverse is generally unbiddable, and no reliable map exists of their routes and outlines.

Although he does not use the term, in this quotation Macfarlane succinctly outlines some of the defining characteristics of what may be regarded as a liminal space and associated liminal experience. Liminality is of inferential significance here insofar as it is ‘located’ in terms of both its geography and its constitutive temporality. To experience the transition Macfarlane describes entails a process of traversing space, whether real (the physical landscape as a site of wayfinding or pilgrimage) and/or imagined (the social, symbolic and textual spaces of transition that invest the landscape with meaning). It is also an experience that has duration: it unfolds over a period of time. But crucially, like the landscape itself, the ‘routes and outlines’ that otherwise order and rationalise time are – experientially at least – difficult to ‘map’ or reliably navigate, as noted earlier. The pilgrim/wayfarer enters ‘another place’, which, like artist Anthony Gormley’s installation of the same name located on Crosby beach near Liverpool (Andrews 2012; Roberts 2012c), is governed by the contingent workings of the natural elements. By the same token, the quintessential liminality of the spatiotemporal moment is marked by the threat of danger. In the case of the tidal mudflats that Macfarlane describes this, of course, has very obvious connotations. But the extent to which borders and boundaries are elusive and ‘unbiddable’ may also invoke fears rooted in an incipient sense of existential or ontological displacement. In the same way the initiate entering the liminal phase of a social ritual may experience the undoing of a fixed or habituated sense of selfhood, the navigator of liminal landscapes potentially ‘crosses over’ to states of being or consciousness that draw their precarious affectivity from the uncertain and ‘unmappable’ geographies that are temporally inhabited. That these transitional spaces might represent ‘border crossings’ both highlights the structural and experiential liminality of borderzones and hints at ways in which liminal landscapes do not necessarily correlate with conventional territorial understandings of borders such as those that relate to national boundaries. Borderzones, like all liminal phenomena, are ambivalent in that they are at once spaces of mobility and immobility, transition and stasis (Roberts 2002), hope and violence (Harvey 2000), place and non-place (Augé 1995), memory and oblivion (Augé 2004) – spaces where the ‘play’ of horizons and frontiers (Marin 1984; Roberts 2005) reflects the differential power relations that govern the increasingly complex patterns of transnational



Of Spaces In-Between 41

mobility. As spaces of ‘radical openness’ (hooks 1990), borderzones can engender what Gloria Anzaldúa has described as a ‘mestiza consciousness’, a consciousness of the borderlands that is the ‘product of the transfer of the cultural and spiritual values of one group to another’ (1987: 78). Equally they may take the form of ‘smooth spaces’ of flow, the domain of the deterritorialised ‘nomad’, the figurative (and frequently romanticised) embodiment of postmodern homelessness who, at home everywhere and nowhere, exists in a constant state of flux and becoming. For the nomad, the border (geographical or metaphorical) represents a striated space of power that is there to be crossed or ‘smoothed out’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1986a; Braidotti 1994). The idea that these and other liminal zones are anti-essentialist spaces where identities are contingent, malleable and fluid, is one that also underpins Bhabha’s concept of ‘third space’, conceived of as a cultural space where hybrid identities are negotiated and forged, often in resistance to hegemonic power structures (see also Soja 1996). For Bhabha, ‘[t]he non-synchronous temporality of global and national cultures opens up a cultural space – a third space – where the negotiation of incommensurable differences creates a tension peculiar to borderline existences’ (1994: 218). Although concepts such as ‘third space’, ‘nomad’, and la mestiza are predicated on a radically de-essentialised space of liminal encounter, arguably they are only able to sustain their deterritorialising logic through a concomitant essentialisation of space. As Smith and Katz have commented, ‘an absolutist spatial ontology . . . provides the missing foundation for everything else in flux’ (1993: 79). By reducing the complexities and dynamics of social space (Lefebvre 1991) to a largely rhetorical space of flow, hybridity and becoming, the extent to which identities are caught within – and often at the mercy of – material and economic geographies of transnational liminality can be overlooked. An instructive case in point is that of the twenty-three Chinese migrant workers who drowned while picking cockles in the vast expanse of sandflats and mudflats at Morecambe Bay in 2004. Located on the north-west coast of England in Lancashire, Morecambe Bay is notorious for its fast-moving tides and treacherous quicksand, as well as its lucrative cockle beds. Despite the dangers posed by this stretch of coastline the Bay has long attracted itinerant workers, many of whom, as with the Chinese cockle pickers, remain at the mercy of exploitative and illegal gangmasters. While the Morecambe Bay incident brought to light the appalling conditions faced by these migrant workers, it also forced an awareness of the extent to which such groups are an invisible but immutable presence, occupying a ghostly liminal zone on the social and geographic margins of the nation; caught in the interstices of transnational space. Situated ‘betwixt and between’ land and sea Morecambe Bay Sands represents an ambiguous, and thus potentially dangerous zone on account of

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its unbiddable and ‘unmappable’ physical terrain. But, as the 2004 incident made clear, such landscapes are also liminal to the extent that they are heterotopias, or spaces of otherness, ‘juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible’ (Foucault 1986: 25; Hetherington 1997). As a space of transnational migrant labour and increasingly globalised social, cultural and economic relations, coastal resorts such as Morecambe Bay expose the underlying tensions and social divisions between representations that play on the ludic, touristic heritage of these resorts and those which address the marginality and exclusion that characterises the other set of mobilities and meanings evoked by these spaces (similar tensions ripple through Thanet on the north Kent coast, where former United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) leader and Brexit advocate Nigel Farage stood for election in 2015). Viewed thus, the precarious and unnavigable natural landscape of Morecambe Bay Sands becomes a metonym for the increasingly de-stabilising landscapes of global capitalism. Compare this example with the hybrid spaces depicted in the film Bhaji on the Beach (1993), in which a group of British-Asian women go on a day trip to Blackpool, also on the Lancashire coast. The sense of shared communitas and identity that the beachscape connotes in the latter stands in stark contrast to the fear, exploitation and uncertainty experienced by those occupying very different spaces of marginality and transnational liminality in twenty-first-century Britain. When thinking about the liminal constitution of everyday spaces and landscapes, it is important to keep in mind the no-less-commanding psychosocial dynamics of these spaces in-between. They are as much interior and psychological as they are social and material. Navigation of both (psychic and social) is, as with Tarkovsky’s ‘stalker’, often made possible with help from experts furnished with detailed knowledge of the liminal ‘zones’ being traversed. For example, when planning his walk across Maplin Sands on the Thames Estuary, Robert Macfarlane initially and very sensibly sought the services of a guide who had the requisite local knowledge necessary to navigate the route safely. Wayfarers crossing the sand-flats of Morecambe Bay are also encouraged to undertake the walk only with the accompaniment of a guide. An official guide, known as the Sand Pilot of Morecambe Bay, regularly leads parties on the six-mile trek across the sands. As Andrews and I noted in our introduction to Liminal Landscapes (Andrews and Roberts 2012b: 8), the role of the guide highlights another common attribute of liminal landscapes in that initiates are required to place their trust in the knowledge of a ‘ritual elder’ or ‘master of ceremonies’ so as to ensure safe navigation and transit. Analogies here can be drawn with the relationship between psychotherapist and patient, the former often held to be providing a form of ‘ritual leadership’ (Moore 1991: 25). In From Ritual to Theatre, Turner casts the experimental theatre



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director Jerzy Grotowski in the role of ritual guide-cum-psychotherapist: ‘Let us create a liminal space-time “pod” or pilgrimage centre, [Grotowski] seems to be saying, where human beings may be disciplined and discipline themselves to strip off the false personae stifling the individual within’ (1982: 120). Importantly, however, the ritual leader is not the master or controller of transformative space. Such space ‘cannot be commanded – it can only be invoked’ (Moore 1991: 27). As such, liminality ‘is always within a context of containment in which the boundaries are not tended by the ego of the individual involved’ (29), but nor, for that matter, are they overly determined by the intervention of the leader or guide. Navigating the psycho-liminal landscapes of the patient, the therapist, like the Morecambe Bay Sand Pilot, is responsible for ensuring the careful stewardship of the boundary beyond which safe and secure transformation cannot be assured. Stressing the importance of the boundary in an article examining the psychoanalyst as ritual elder, Moore argues that: when sensing the need for a liminal space, [individuals] will seek out boundary and containment wherever they can. If knowledgeable ritual elders are not present to invoke liminal space and lead them through it, then they gravitate to the liminoid and try to find containment or generate it on their own. The attraction of geographical boundaries such as seashores to those in transition states is a striking example of this intuitive quest for the boundary. Finding a natural boundary is, of course, relatively simple. Locating an appropriate transformative container, however, is much more difficult. (1991: 28)

The concepts of liminal and liminoid, and particularly the work of Turner, have been influential in the development of Jungian-based psychoanalysis in which the therapeutic contract between therapist and client is conceived of as a ritual process. The edited collection Liminality and Transitional Phenomena (Schwartz-Salant and Stein 1991) brings together work by scholars of psychology and religion alongside that of psychotherapists and counsellors who all approach the theory and practice of Jungian psychotherapy by engaging closely with ideas of liminality. The importance of the ‘container’ or ‘vessel’ as part of the psychotherapeutic ritual process is one that several contributors draw attention to. Hopcke, for example, notes that the concept of liminality is ‘felicitously consonant’ with Carl Jung’s own approach to analysis, which was to provide a space, ‘a temenos, a magic circle, a vessel, in which the transformation inherent in the patient’s condition would be allowed to take place’ (1991: 117). For Hopcke, liminality is the very essence of effective analytic work, the aim of which is transformation and change. The work of the paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott – particularly his discussion of potential or transitional spaces and the creative

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benefits of play – is also worth mentioning here. Although they come at the question of creativity from very different starting points, there are some instructive overlaps between Winnicott’s psychoanalytic notion of ‘potential space’ and Victor Turner’s thoughts on liminality and performance. Both are predicated on a conceptualisation of ‘in-between space’ in which identities (psychic, social, cultural) are played out in a context where there is freedom to experiment and shape-shift; where boundaries are tested and redrawn, and where there is potential for change and transformation. Something – someone – will potentially emerge from this experiential domain; in Winnicott’s case it is the ego-formation of a child cognisant of being ‘me’ and not ‘not-me’ (ie a separate, individual self apart from its mother); in Turner’s it is an adult or adolescent who has undergone a transformative experience that delivers them to a new station in their life – a new and/or refined sense of selfhood. Moreover, what the psychoanalyst and anthropologist also share is an understanding of cultural identity as shaped through performance and play in a social environment conducive to the kind of flexibility and openness that enables culture to be ‘cultivated’ and bedded down in social and psychic terrain. The creativity of play and the creativity of ‘anti-structural’ cultural performance (Turner 1969) are made possible on account of the spaces that help nourish these and other forms of self-expression: ‘The place where cultural experience is located is in the potential space between the individual and the environment’, a space of ‘maximally intense experiences. . . . Cultural experience begins with creative living first manifested in play’ (Winnicott 1971: 100, emphasis in original). Annette Kuhn writes, ‘Spatial, liminal and kinetic imagery abounds in Winnicott’s thinking’ (2013b: 18). The potential of transitional spaces works against the idea of stasis or of securely anchored psychic and emotional states of being. The self that is made manifest in these spaces is ‘mobile’ and in a state of flux; it is moving between moments or experiential nodes on the ‘map’ of being. When ruminating on the questions ‘[what] are we doing when we are listening to a Beethoven symphony or making a pilgrimage to a picture gallery or reading Troilus and Cressida in bed, or playing tennis?’, or ‘What is a child doing when sitting on the floor playing with toys under the aegis of the mother?’, it is telling that Winnicott follows this with the question ‘Where are we when we are doing what in fact we do a great deal of our time, namely, enjoying ourselves?’ (1971: 105–6). Trading the question of what we are doing with where is no mere speculative foray into the geography of enjoyment. The ‘space’ Winnicott is invoking here is existential in its composition. It is a space that cannot be divorced from the emotional and cultural experiences of the individual who is feeling, embodying or inhabiting that space.



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The suggestion that the potential spaces we inhabit harbour the possibility of ‘maximally intense experiences’ that allow for creativity and psychic growth is one that has affinities with states of mind associated with madness. Responding to Winnicott’s observation that ‘We are poor indeed if we are only sane’, Kuhn argues that ‘the passions and enthusiasms that excite our creative imaginations’ and which prompt us to ‘seek a mental and physical place, as adults, to play’ represent Winnicottian ‘little madnesses’ – socially and culturally sanctioned moments of freeform playfulness and creative disorder (2013a: 3). This may express itself in any number of ways: for example, role-playing and ‘acting out’ in online gaming and blog writing (Watts 2014); the use of social media to play out fantasies and performative fictions of selfhood (Hills 2014); or the act of cinema spectatorship – and the ‘ritual’ of cinema-going – conceived of as entering a ‘transitional space’ and partaking of a ‘threshold experience’ (Zittoun 2013). From a Winnicottian perspective, therefore, the abandonment and flow that comes with play or creative and cultural expression are manifested in and through the same spaces in which madness takes hold. The idea of cultural experience as a ‘little madness’ is certainly enticing, suggesting as it does a mild derangement of the senses or a contained psychic meltdown that allows the self to fly full-throttle through a world in which normal rules do not apply. The restoration of ‘sanity’ – stumbling out of the cinema auditorium into the brightness and mundane clamour of an urban retail park, or emerging bleary-eyed from an ecstasy-fuelled allnight rave – potentially carries with it a seed or residue of the experience that went before it; a tincture of madness to colour and flavour the world glimpsed anew. Again, there are striking affinities here between the ‘madness’ of transitional/potential spaces and the liminal experiences of communitas and ‘antistructure’ which Turner alerts us to (see chapter 6, ‘Songlines,’ for further application of these ideas). One final point of connection we can make here proceeds from Kuhn’s usage of the metaphor of ‘bridge’ as a feature of Winnicottian potential space: Potential space has a key role to play in people’s inner and outer worlds. Its sphere of activity lies between these two worlds, between me and not-me; while at the same time it acts as a kind of bridge – a vector of contact and communication between them, just as a bridge spans a river and makes each bank accessible to the other – though each still remains a distinct space in its own right. (Kuhn 2013b: 15, emphasis in original)

I have written elsewhere on the symbolic significance of the bridge and other spaces or ‘vectors’ of communication such as road tunnels, important as they are to the social and cultural geography of the Merseyside region (Roberts

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2010a; Roberts 2012a: 97–127). The psychosocial significance of the bridge, as suggested by Kuhn, brings to mind actor Michael Palin’s character in Alan Bleasdale’s 1991 television drama GBH. The Runcorn bridge, which features in several episodes of the drama, becomes a site of tense personal struggle for Palin’s character, who suffers an acute phobia of road bridge crossings. His eventual triumphant attempt to cross over the bridge, having finally conquered his fears and anxieties, coincides with wider developments in the dramatic arc of the narrative that mark a resolution of sorts. The character’s transition is thus both symbolically and geographically enacted in the potential space of the Runcorn crossing. In the process, the dynamics of the plotline are in part engineered through the functional deployment of the crossing as a chronotope (Bakhtin 1981): space and time are pulled into line (narrative form) through recourse to the potentiality that is compressed in and around the bridge as a topographic form. Similar observations could be made with respect to the ‘door’, as Simmel poetically demonstrates in his 1909 essay ‘Bridge and Door’. For Simmel, the door represents not just a fixed or ‘mute’ boundary like a separating wall that cannot be opened. Rather, ‘the door speaks’: it is a linkage between human spaces and everything outside. It transcends the boundary between inner and outer: The finitude into which we have entered somehow always borders somewhere on the infinitude of physical or metaphysical being. . . . [L]ife flows forth out of the door from the limitation of isolated separate existence into the limitlessness of all possible directions. (Simmel 1994: 7–8)

The door thus symbolically plays host to a dialectic of finitude and infinitude, of conditionality and unconditionality. Embodied metaphors of the door, such as in William Blake’s poem ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’ (If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is: Infinite), or in romantic phrases such as ‘open the doors to my heart’, strongly hint at this invitation/visitation dialectic in their respective invocations of divine knowledge or unconditional love. As Bachelard notes, ‘[T]he door is an entire cosmos of the Half-open’ (1969: 222); a poetics of space and form into which sacred qualities have long been invested. ‘A threshold is a sacred thing’ the third century poet and scholar Porphyrus observed (223), and we need look no further than the custom of the groom carrying the newly-wed bride over the threshold for an example of household practices where ritual observance is paid to the sacred powers of the threshold. Traditionally, of course, this particular example also carries with it the more erotically charged associations brought about by the consummation of the union that is to follow upon the couple’s retreat to the intimate spaces of bedroom (where the



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crossing of another symbolic threshold is destined to take place, that of the virginal hymen). Liminal space, transitional space, potential space – what each of these points to is the open and fluid characteristics of space as an existential ground of being into and from which life, time, death, dissolution, creation, rebirth, procreation, reproduction, resolution and much more besides finds a means – a space – to breathe: ‘In its countless alveoli space contains compressed time. That is what space is for’ (Bachelard 1969: 8, emphasis added). DEEP MAPPING In the remainder of this chapter I turn to the question of how one might go about the task of researching – or ‘mapping’ – liminal spaces. What I am keen to quash from the outset is any suggestion that spatial anthropology is a ‘discipline’ that requires of those who take it up compliance with a rigid methodological orthodoxy. On the contrary, as I have already made clear, it is its very undisciplined and open characteristics that need embracing if we are to avoid the risk of spatialising space. Space, we can assume, is already ‘spatial’ enough. It is the humanising of space that we, as spatial humanists, need turn our attention more vigorously towards. Accordingly, in what follows I pursue this goal firstly through critical reflection on ‘deep mapping’ as an orientation towards space that in some way seeks to ‘capture’ its substanceless substance: its open, fugitive, and ‘non-representational’ qualities. My interest in deep mapping was initially sparked by an awareness of how regularly the term had started to pop up in writings on space and place I was engaging with at the time. I was drawn to the concept not so much by what it had to offer but to sate my curiosity as to what ‘it’ in fact was, especially given that there seemed to be a number of competing claims as to its precise meaning and purpose. In addition, the question of deep mapping seemed to offer a productive way to approach a related problem that I had been tasked with (Roberts 2016a): to throw some critical scrutiny on the idea of spatial humanities as a coherent or semi-coherent assemblage of vaguely ‘humanistic’ orientations towards questions of space and place (Bodenhamer et al 2010, 2015; Gregory and Geddes 2014; Dear et al 2011; Fraser 2015). Keen to try and reflect the heterogeneity and plurality of research that falls within the interdisciplinary domain of so-called spatial humanities, my interest was channelled towards exploring what is an undoubtedly more circumscribed subject area but one which is no less a product of this same rather loose configuration of spatiocultural methods and practices. Deep maps and deep mapping offer particularly rich pickings in this respect in that they highlight

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the ways in which qualitative and humanistic forays into the representation and practice of space and place are multifaceted, open-ended and irreducible to formal and programmatic design. To flesh out the doing of deep mapping necessitates engaging with the same performative dynamics by which its various iterations are made manifest in practice. Accepting the necessarily provisional status of deep mapping, then, the scrutiny and attention afforded to the concept is useful inasmuch as it offers a fresh set of insights by which otherwise different research practices may be tentatively brought into critical alignment. In this sense, deep mapping can be regarded as a statement of intent to the extent to which what it is not can at least be evinced and a certain familial resemblance correspondingly transacted. What it is not – or at least what it should not be – is irreducibly representational if by this we mean a process that is predicated on stemming the flow of spatial and temporal vitality that bleeds into and through the ‘map’ (as a cartographic abstraction). It is on account of this necessarily processual underpinning to deep mapping practices that the very notion of a ‘deep map’ arguably becomes problematic. The travel narrative PrairyErth, its writer William Least Heat-Moon tells us, is a ‘deep map’ (1991). But while the book is certainly the creative outcome of a process we could describe as ‘deep mapping’, the idea that the text itself constitutes a ‘map’ arguably holds less water. Although, as coiner of the term, Heat-Moon’s name is routinely rehearsed in discussions of deep mapping as part of a preliminary conceptual backstory, Heat-Moon himself was not consciously laying the foundation stones for something that others would go on to pick up as ‘deep mapping’. As a dense, deeply layered and richly textured literary survey of Chase County in the US state of Kansas, PrairyErth is a deep map of sorts; an entirely fitting metaphorical description of a literary cartography that aspires to yield what a conventional map or guide cannot even come close to conveying. What it is not is a representational device to which we can ascribe a set of formal and reproducible cartographic features that ‘project’ Chase County or which provide a serviceable locative function (beyond that of a rudimentary stitching of narratives – however deep – to place). But then it does of course boil down to what is meant and understood by the term ‘map’ (Roberts 2012b). When we start to think about the ways PrairyErth may be considered a deep map there are a number of key touchpoints from which we can extrapolate a broader outline of analysis. As a self-styled ‘secretary of underlife’ (1991: 367), Heat-Moon is desirous to dig deeper in his researches: to burrow down from the surface in order to excavate that which is hidden or buried beneath thinly layered deposits of topsoil or asphalt. Deep mapping in this sense is as much a process of archaeology as it is cartography. With this comes an emphasis on verticality (Schiavini 2004–2005): the ‘plumbing of



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a place’s depth’ (Gregory-Guider 2005: 5). Horizontality is for the thin mappers (Harris 2015: 29–31); those who hold back from peeling off the surface layer and who, in the process, thus allow limited space for time. The temporal configurations that anchor places in turf that has been synchronically as well as diachronically ploughed are the stuff from which the deep mapper fashions her or his craft. Our role (as readers, viewers, consumers, users) is to take up the invitation to ‘dive within’, as artist, filmmaker, and transcendental meditator David Lynch might put it (Lynch 2006; Daye 2013). Wydeven writes that Heat-Moon ‘encourages us to fit ourselves in the creases [of maps]’ (1993: 134), a nice turn of phrase which neatly captures the materiality and performativity that goes with the act of wayfinding: of exploring and placing oneself within the multi-scalar locative dimensions that are opened up through the act of deep mapping. The important emphasis placed on performance is most notably explored by the archaeologists Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks, whose book Theatre/Archaeology (2001) distils a re-oriented and quintessentially interdisciplinary view of landscape, one that pays heed to ‘the grain and patina of place . . . the interpenetrations of the historical and the contemporary, the political and the poetic, the factual and the fictional, the discursive and the sensual’ (2001: 64–65). For Pearson and Shanks, deep mapping extends to ‘everything you might ever want to say about a place’ (2001: 65). Of course, everything you might want to say may be voluminous, polyvocal or open-ended. Unlike the surface dimensions that delineate and give shape to the locational properties of place, verticality and depth denote a comparative absence of limitations. The deeper you go, the more layers you accrue. The problem becomes how to hold it all together: how to ‘frame’ it as a map. The performativity and theatricality of place that might accompany a walker in Heat-Moon’s Chase County, or which might give flavour to his or her practice, is not predicated on their being a material cartographic resource as a necessary reference point when out ‘in the field’. The ‘map’ is lodged in the more immaterial spaces of the body and imagination. Its performativity is made flesh in the way the walker inhabits and dwells within the space that both map (book) and walker conjure into being. There is, then, a fundamental creativity at work in the practice of deep mapping, both on the part of the mapper and that of the ‘map reader’. Given this, it is not all that surprising to discover that, alongside the proponents of a literary deep mapping – chiefly, but by no means exclusively originating from the United States (Maher 2014) – the most notable traffic of activity conducted under the banner of deep mapping has been initiated by visual and performance artists. Two of its more eloquent champions are Clifford McLucas (2000) and Iain Biggs. The latter in particular is at pains to stress

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the interdisciplinarity or post-disciplinarity of deep mapping. For Biggs, one of the defining ingredients of an ‘open’ deep mapping is the extent to which it is able to avoid ‘becoming complicit in its “disciplining”’ (2010: 21), or of it being reined in as an otherwise ‘knowledgeable, passionate, polyvocal engagement with the world’ (2010: 8). Cultivating what Biggs refers to as a metaxy of practice – a ‘space in-between’ in which to pitch a precarious and purposefully indeterminate sense of a deep mapping practice – is to tread a fine line between complicity and creative dissolution. The creative efficacy of open deep mapping is co-extensive with that which underpins an artistic praxis that is operative outside of the tramlines of disciplinary or institutional orthodoxy. The complicity comes in the form of challenges that are posed in having to dance around a discursive object – deep mapping – whose constitutive ‘openness’ is itself open to the dangers of ‘disciplining’. The call for an ‘open’ deep mapping only makes sense insofar as its openness is sufficiently diffuse as to do away with the very idea of deep mapping in the first place. The challenge of balancing these contradictory facets means questioning the coherence and validity of deep mapping on the one hand and maintaining a loose, plural and open application of the term on the other. Putting aside the sustainability or efficacy of ‘deep mapping’ as a methodological descriptor (or as a set of modalities and practices that could just as well be framed as interventions in a broader project of spatial anthropology – see Roberts 2016a), there are some common threads that can provisionally be woven together: a concern with narrative and spatial storytelling; a multiscalar and multilayered spatial structure; a capacity for thick description; a multimedial navigability; a spatially intertextual hermeneutics; an orientation towards the experiential and embodied; a strongly performative dimension; an embrace of the spatiotemporally contingent; a compliance with ethnographic and autoethnographic methods and frameworks; an ‘undisciplined’ interdisciplinary modality; a time-based cartographics; an open and processual spatial sensibility; and a reflexive – yet ‘aspirational’ (Oxx et al 2013: 206) – sense of the fundamental unmappability of the world that the ‘deep map’ sets out to map. When we relate this all to developments in geospatial computing and the increasingly migratory domain of geographic information systems (GIS), then the idea of what a deep map might look (or act) like takes on more concrete form. Responding to the challenge to create a ‘model’ of a deep map and to ‘explore how digital tools and interfaces can support ambiguous, subjective, uncertain, imprecise, rich, experiential content alongside the highly structured data at which GIS systems excel’, Ridge et al conjure the notion of a ‘greedy deep map’ (2013: 176, 181). This rather intriguing and suggestive metaphor presents us with an image of a data-rich and data-hungry geospatial



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resource whose value lies in its capacity to outstrip the ability – and agency – of its human counterparts in terms of a spatial praxis sublimated towards more computational ends (the provision of a potentiality of retrievably layered data). To conceive of the deep map as ‘a space in which a near limitless range and quantity of sources can be included, interrogated, manipulated, archived, analysed, and read’ (184) is to imagine what the realization of a deep map is or could be as a big data-driven, totalizing model. The question this raises for those invested in the development of a digital spatial humanities is whether the acquisition of the prized goal of a digitally limitless deep map comes at the cost of jettisoning the more anthropological, embodied and performative spatialities that are bound up with the practice of deep mapping. An arguably more modest – and humanist – aim would be to follow David Bodenhamer’s lead (2015: 23) in recognising that, at its best, GIS-based deep mapping is an ‘ideal storyboard for humanists’, offering a conceptual, technological, and spatial framework adapted to the need to tell spatial stories that are harvested from ‘experiential as well as objective space’ and which are replete with the ‘rich contradictions and complexities’ that ordinarily, as abstract representations of space, maps fall short of conveying. But as a ‘storyboard’ – digital or otherwise – the map is only as expressive and ‘deep’ as the mappings that have fed it and given it its shape and texture. To re-envision deep mapping as spatial anthropology is to take heed of the broadly anthropological underpinnings that root the practice in the performative and processual flux of everyday life. In their ethnographically-informed case study based in rural North Cornwall, Jane Bailey and Iain Biggs describe a deep mapping process that consists of ‘observing, listening, walking, conversing, writing and exchanging . . . of selecting, reflecting, naming, and generating . . . [and] of digitizing, interweaving, offering and inviting’ (2012: 326). While this full set of verbs will not apply to all variations and permutations of deep mapping practice, what they do usefully signpost is the way that very little of what deep mappers are doing is in fact oriented towards the production of maps so much as immersing themselves in the warp and weft of a lived and fundamentally intersubjective spatiality. It is from that performative platform – that space – that the creative coalescence of structures, forms, affects, energies, narratives, connections, memories, imaginaries, mythologies, voices, identities, temporalities, images and textualities starts to provisionally take shape. Whether or not we wish to call what emerges from this process a ‘map’ (or the process itself ‘mapping’) seems to me less important than the fact that it is taking place at all. That it is taking place at all is not on account of a unified or formal set of methods that translate it into practice. From a methodological standpoint, it is rather a tendency towards bricolage – the deep mapper as spatiocultural bricoleur

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– that is, I am suggesting, the common constitutive element that underpins deep mapping as a work of spatial anthropology. SPATIAL BRICOLAGE Whether or not it is productive to consider deep mapping in terms of a ‘method’ of spatiocultural enquiry is, as we have seen, a question that is difficult to reliably pin down without taking stock of the ‘openness’ and eclecticism that comes with the label. This openness is such as to undo deep mapping as a coherent and methodologically consistent set of practices and thus to throw into question the utility of the concept in the first place. Why ‘deep’ and why ‘mapping’? What is the ‘depth’ metaphor doing in any given iteration? What makes any given practice ‘mapping’? These are questions that could doubtless elicit some valid and convincing responses, but I am not sure they would necessarily take us anywhere that would repay our efforts in getting there. Then why expend time and energy on it at all? you might legitimately ask. The rationale for unpacking deep mapping – which bore its initial fruit in the edited collection Deep Mapping (Roberts 2015–2016) – has been to approach it from the vantage point of spatial anthropology: to pay some attention to the different ways that the deep mapping impulse reflects a concerted attempt to inject humanistic and anthropological concerns at the core of cartographic thinking and practice (although, as already suggested, the extent to which we should automatically apply the term ‘mapping’ to any of this is something of a moot point). Biggs’s notion of a metaxy of practice – a ‘space in-between’ in which to squat in a provocatively ‘undisciplined’ manner, shrugging off the settled weight of an institutional or disciplinary habitus – provides a useful way of thinking about how the wayfaring academic, artist, writer, practitioner negotiates his or her passage through landscapes that s/he is variously mapping, surveying, creating, producing, inhabiting, invoking, embodying, sensing, imagining, collecting, tracing, gleaning, building, framing, cultivating or simply spacing. To make sense of these landscapes – to harness or manufacture affective structures of feeling that fellow travellers/ wayfarers may profitably plug in to – requires access to a correspondingly ‘undisciplined’ set of methods and toolkit. One way of approaching this is through recourse to ideas of bricolage and the researcher-as-bricoleur. The concept of bricolage is of course well established in anthropological literature principally through the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss. It has also found a fruitful outlet in theoretical approaches in cultural studies, the visual arts, architecture, fashion, computing and many other areas of design aesthetics and do-it-yourself (DIY)-inflected praxis (cf Hebdige 1979). The



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ideas that lie behind spatial bricolage are multi-stranded but chiefly take their starting point from the basic ‘ready-to-handedness’ and ‘making-do’ of approaches that pull tactically and expediently from the ‘taskscapes’ (Ingold 2000) of everyday life. Certeau describes bricolage as ‘the poetic making do’ (1984: xv) and this lends itself perfectly to a poetics of space and place that fashions a contingent sense of selfhood from the givenness and flux of the world it both is and passes through. Spatial anthropology and spatial bricolage go hand in hand to the extent that space and self are dialectically woven from the world as it is experienced, conceived and practised. The researcher or practitioner of spatial anthropology steps mindfully into this world in order to know it – to make something of it – as experientially manifested in movement and sensorial spacing. For Lévi-Strauss (1966: 21), the bricoleur ‘derives his [sic] poetry from the fact that he does not confine himself to accomplishment and execution: he “speaks” not only with things . . . but also through the medium of things’. Moreover, ‘[he] may not ever complete his purpose but he always puts something of himself into it’ (second emphasis added). If this were applied to the academic researcher, it is hard to think of a formula less compatible with the instrumentalist and impacts-driven logic that decrees what is or isn’t sanctionable (ie deemed ‘legitimate’) researchwise in the neoliberal academy. That the researcher may ‘put something of herself’ into whatever it is she is researching is not merely to draw attention to the subjective influence brought to bear on the object of study, it is also to acknowledge that the researcher is herself part of any outputs of that study. These ‘outputs’ might conceivably be limited just to what the researcher has made of herself (ie experience, knowledge, skills, insights, emotional rewards, sense of well-being and accomplishment, and so on) but not anything tangible in terms of a deliverable product that can be measured, quantified, evaluated and affirmed as part of an official research assessment exercise. If a research ‘performance’ takes place (not necessarily in a forest) and no one is around to ‘measure’ it, does it make an impact? Perhaps, perhaps not, but then it depends on what is meant by ‘impact’ (cf Stein 2018). The bricoleur – as compared to, say, scientist or engineer – is arguably less governed by an overarching awareness of embarking on a ‘project’ and, correspondingly, of performing in compliance with a clearly defined set of ‘aims’ or ‘objectives’. The idea that research might be conducted under conditions of aimlessness and without a clear objective in mind does not necessarily mean that it lacks the rigours of ‘accomplishment and execution’ but that much of what is fashioned in the process is contingent on factors that cannot always be foreseen. In this sense, to borrow from Turner, it entails stepping into a space and time of ‘anti-structure’. In the case of anthropologists and ethnographers carrying out their doctoral fieldwork, then, this is already something of a rite of pas-

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sage akin to the liminal phase of a ritual process (Epstein 1979: xi; Gardner 1999: 49; Carsten 2012: 15). To deny the productivity and refinement of the self as part of what is ‘made’ in the space-time of the research performance is certainly disingenuous, but by the same token, is the expectation that spatial anthropology step up as an ‘objective science’ any less so? The open, out-ofthe-closet subjectivity of the spatial bricoleur at least seems more honest in these respects. Space is being made but only from what is ready-to-hand and by putting to work only those methods that offer themselves up for strategically provisional means. Such means, as Lévi-Strauss suggests, might even extend to the ‘devious’ (1966: 16–17), a quality that opens up thorny questions of field research ethics, a subject I will return to shortly. Lévi-Straussian ideas of the bricoleur and of bricolage are, then, our starting point. But pushing these ideas towards consideration of the dispositional practices of the researcher and spatial anthropology practitioner is by no means a major leap. Norman Denzin and others have already breached this gap more than convincingly. As such, my work in this area has been steered by the many insights and innovations of figures like Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln, who provide a vigorous and much-needed shake-up to how we think about and implement qualitative research methods. In an article considering the future of qualitative research, they write: The material practices of qualitative enquiry turn the researcher into a methodological (and epistemological) bricoleur. This person is an artist, a quilt maker, a skilled craftsperson, a maker of montages and collages. The interpretive bricoleur can interview; observe; study material culture; think within and beyond visual methods; write poetry, fiction, and autoethnography; construct narratives that tell explanatory stories; use qualitative computer software; do text-based inquiries; construct testimonios using focus group interviews; and even engage in applied ethnography and policy formulation. (Denzin and Lincoln 2011: 681–82)

As an academic who has turned his hands to many of these activities and practices as part of, or in tandem with, routine research agendas this makes perfect sense to me. As does the corresponding awareness that siphoning off the constituent parts of a research project into a neatly contained section labelled ‘methodology’ can often work against the openness and eclecticism that are otherwise part and parcel of what that project actually entails in practice. Like the children’s cartoon character Bob the Builder (in France the programme title is Bob le Bricoleur), the researcher-as-bricoleur goes about his or her business equipped with a set of tools rather than a fit-for-purpose methodological strategy. The provision of a methodological toolkit simply means the ready-to-handedness of practical methods that can be quickly deployed



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as circumstances demand. The eclecticism of bricolage methods – the adaptability and portability of said toolkit – can (and does) invite accusations of superficiality and lack of rigour. In such a scenario the researcher-as-bricoleur comes across as a ‘jack-of-all-trades’ (and, by implication, master of none), someone who plays fast-and-loose with established research methods and paradigms. By way of illustration, Joe Kincheloe describes problems he and his students encountered at university committee meetings and job interviews when advancing the merits of bricolage (and by extension interdisciplinary) approaches to their work as academics. ‘Implicit in the critique of interdisciplinarity’, he writes, ‘and thus of bricolage as its manifestation in research is the assumption that interdisciplinarity is by nature superficial’ (2001: 680– 81). A commitment to research eclecticism – of ‘allowing circumstance to shape methods employed’ (Kincheloe et al 2011: 168–69) – can thus be seen from certain quarters as inherently problematic and something that shouldn’t really be encouraged. I have encountered similar resistance in this respect in attempting to reframe spatial humanities methods through the lens of bricolage (Roberts 2017–2018). The suggestion of methodological eclecticism as a means by which to try and account for what ‘spatial humanities’ is in practice (having already questioned the usefulness of the descriptor in taxonomic terms) elicited one particularly defensive rebuttal along the lines of ‘(spatial) humanities researchers do not make it up as they go along’. That the idea of bricolage methods or the researcher-as-bricoleur should automatically be read as ‘no methods’ or ‘watered-down methods’ is instructive in itself. Factor into the equation the word ‘digital’ (digital methods, digital cultures, digital humanities, digital geo-humanities, digital ethnography, digital memory, digital geography, digital diasporas) and already we are poised at the precipitous edge of an uncertain landscape that can no longer be as readily brought to heel using static methodological templates. The complexities attached to the question of what constitutes a ‘field’; the openness and pluridimensional fabric of our everyday spatial worlds; the obvious practical benefits that digital tools and methods bring to the research process; a more emphatic emergence of the researcher – bodily, reflexively, and as autoethnographic performance artiste – within the anthropological field of play; these are all grist for the mill of scholars grappling with the opportunities and challenges that come with the refashioned territory (Back and Puwar 2012). But it would be naïve to discount the possibility that self-ascribing as ‘bricoleur’ might give license to research practices that skirt with superficiality and lack of rigour (much like opportunistically pinning the label of ‘autoethnography’ on to writing that stylistically is more suited to a blog journal or memoir than academic text is not without precedent – see Denzin 2014: 69–70). In this respect, the caution expressed by my humanities colleagues

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is certainly understandable. However, that the mere coupling of ‘bricoleur’ and ‘researcher’ in the same sentence should immediately connote a negative response provides at least some indication that more work is needed to make the case louder and stronger. Such a case can only be touched upon here (see Roberts 2017–2018 for a more thorough exposition of these ideas), but for current purposes, it is necessary to sketch some provisional considerations as to the significance of bricolage to methodological understandings of and approaches to spatial anthropology. One of these key touchpoints, as we have seen, is interdisciplinarity: ‘bricoleurs move beyond the blinders of particular disciplines and peer through a conceptual window to a new world of research and knowledge production’ (Kincheloe et al 2011: 168). There are, in other words, spaces in-between disciplinary and epistemological encampments – ‘the liminal zones where disciplines collide’ (Kincheloe 2001: 689) – into and of which the spatial bricoleur makes space, or rather makes and enunciates spacings. In addition, the researcher-as-bricoleur is reflexively governed by a ‘respect for the complexity of the lived world’ (Kincheloe et al 2011: 168) and a care towards that world (Heidegger 1962) that, in its ‘attempts to stay close to how people experience everyday life’ strives to shed itself of concepts (Denzin 2003: xi). The lived, everyday, and performative, therefore, is the ‘space’ within and from which the world – our world, this world, any given world we are speaking towards – erupts into being. Denzin remarks that ‘Writing creates the worlds we inhabit’ (xii), and while this is true it is an observation that can no less instructively be turned on its head without rupturing its essential meaning: inhabiting creates the worlds we write. The process of habitation does not necessarily presuppose that of the world being written into being. It is there anyway, as are we. A cri de cœur, such as Ingold’s dream-dredged ‘Enough of words, Let’s meet the world’ (2015a: vii), might now and again yank us back down to earth (back to the world), but however much the socalled ‘non-representational’ inflames our performative passions, whether we like it or not, we are stuck with the communicative and representational burden of writing up. We are stuck with words. Here I am writing them and there you are reading them. But then, that is not strictly the case. And this is where the incursion of all things digital begins to leave its mark. If, as discussed earlier, the idea of a digital deep map is the seed of a performative desire to overcome the constraints of representational cartography, then words function as merely one part of a multimedia rhizomatic assemblage. At its most concrete level, this need be nothing more than a desire to avail oneself of all that the digital humanist now has at his or her disposal. Whether this be video, audio soundscapes, GPS tracking data, locative media apps, GIS and digital mapping tools, social media, virtual and augmented reality devices, hyperlinks,



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geo-tagging, digital intangible heritage, archival and database resources, or whatever else might be on hand to feed a ‘greedy’ deep map (Ridge at al 2013: 181), the basic point here is that the ‘writing’ of place in the digital age, where publications are just as likely to be read on a screen as on a printed page, is not just limited to the written word. That doesn’t make it any less ‘representational’, of course. But it does make for a more malleable and open canvas on and from which the story of that place might potentially be told. This will be explored in more expansive and illustrative fashion in the chapters that follow, but for now, apropos a discussion of spatial bricolage, it is sufficient to highlight the ready-to-handedness and making-do of digital ‘stuff’ as part of what gets thrown into the spatial anthropology mix. Crang (2000: 306) draws a useful parallel between Simmel’s disoriented and frazzled urban bricoleur, who learns to make do by stitching together an identity from fragmented sources, and the type of bricolage that defines the wanderer in cyberspace who similarly makes her way through an overabundance of information by making do with whatever is to hand. Because she cannot possibly trawl through everything, the web flâneur assembles a sense of self and world from the digital matter that she interacts with as she moves through and dwells within her everyday mediascapes. Home is where the cursor is; the ‘home page’ a habituated place that she makes her own (Moores 2015: 23). Bricolage, viewed thus, bears close comparison with gleaning inasmuch as what the bricoleur is doing in any given space or scenario is picking up and repurposing matter that is already ‘out there’. Lévi-Strauss hints at this in The Savage Mind when suggesting that ‘the “bricoleur” addresses himself to a collection of oddments left over from human endeavours, that is, only a sub-set of the culture’ (1966: 19). Much of what is done under the banner of spatial anthropology is about picking up traces and fragments of what went before and working these back in to the ongoing production and crafting of spaces as living and breathing worlds that we inhabit. Gleaning as a spatial praxis. Again, digital technology plays an important part in this ongoing process, not just in the provision of representational spaces through which to travel (the virtual spaces of online flânerie) but also as tools that help us in our travels through the fleshy and haptic spaces of material worlds. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in Agnès Varda’s extraordinary documentary, The Gleaners and I (2000). The gleaning we are privy to in the film encompasses an array of material practices – from rummaging for discarded foodstuffs in supermarket dumpsters, to picking up crops left over from the harvest, to salvaging objects of neglected or disfigured beauty (such as a clock with no hands), to the act of filmmaking itself: the gleaning of images – Varda as cinematographic glaneuse. As with the on-screen gleaners combing through the discarded detritus of contemporary France, Varda too is intuitively aware of the shape, texture and provenance of the objects she gleans. Armed with a

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handheld digital camera, she moves through the landscape with the embodied vision – or ‘vision in the flesh’ (Sobchack 2004) – of a traveller for whom the camera is both a tool of engagement and ‘collecting sack’ in which to deposit the items gleaned. The idea of the researcher-as-bricoleur-as-filmmaker-asgleaner is extraordinarily rich in its threshing of practice from the dry husk of representation. To re-envision the capture of digital video as a practice of gleaning is to lend a palpable sense of materiality to the art of image making. Hauling a bulging cache of image-objects back to her studio, the gleaner-bricoleur, like Denzin and Lincoln’s quilt-maker, then arranges and assembles. Both quilt and film tell their story but not to the exclusion of all that flows into and out of their respective frames: the lives and criss-crossing pathways that knot together (Ingold 2007: 100) as the representational objects by which we know them as topoi or texts. The poetics of gleaning are thus co-extensive with an idea of bricolage as the ‘poetic making do’ (Certeau 1984: xv; Morrison 2015: 196): both thrive on opportunity, uncertainty and serendipity. Whatever is found in whatever landscape the gleaner-bricoleur happens to find herself at whatever time she happens to be there is potentially constituent matter of an assemblage-inprogress, the production of which may take a number of different forms (or none at all – the practice of gleaning-bricolage need not cede an ‘output’ for it to still count as gleaning and/or bricolage). ‘But hang on’, one might interject at this point, ‘this is all well and good for the poet or artist who might be assumed to have more license or disposable freedom to embark on such speculative forays than, say, the academic. But what about the researcher-asbricoleur? How does s/he negotiate the bureaucratic quagmire that is there as an impediment and counterweight to all that the practice of bricolage and gleaning otherwise holds in store? How does the academic stalker legitimately embrace the in-between spaces of the Zone?’ The answer to the latter question is that he or she doesn’t necessarily. The ‘legitimacy’ issue, like the official gateway to a space that might qualify as liminal or off-limits, is often skirted around rather than confronted head-on. This is a matter of pragmatics more than anything else. If the case warrants it, and in the full knowledge that access via official channels will in all likelihood prove futile, the spatial bricoleur just simply gets on with things. Risk is shouldered by the individual who, while necessarily cognisant of any and all potential pitfalls, balances this against the benefits that will potentially be prised from the experience. The rationale, however subjectively determined and/or dubious in intent, is nevertheless such as to hold its own (or not, as the case may be) as an exercise in spatial anthropology. What all this points to, of course, are questions of research ethics. This is a topic that I am only able to scratch the surface of here, requiring, as it does, a far more expansive space in which to unpack all that needs unpacking. Some of these questions



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will be addressed as we progress through the proceeding chapters. Considerations of danger and personal safety, legality/illegality, trespass, ethics, consent (permissions for use of visual methods in site-specific environments, for example), and so on relate to topics discussed in certain chapters more than others (see in particular part II, ‘Soundings’). For now, and to bring the current chapter to a close, I wish merely to flag up some key points for consideration from the vantage point of spatial bricolage and attendant questions of spatial method. To question a space by the simple act of stepping into it is, by definition, already a breach of boundaries. We cannot roam wherever we like whenever we like, but where lines are ‘legitimately’ drawn in any given scenario is fuzzy at best. However much truck a university ethics committee might have with the argument that researchers themselves should be at liberty to exercise some degree of ethical circumspection, the fact remains that, within the framework of what is deemed possible (if not necessarily defensible), the responsibility for action lies with the actor. For it to be otherwise would be to deny that there is any such thing as, for example, ‘gonzo ethnography’, defined by Barbara Tedlock (2011: 332; see also Sefcovic 1995; Fedorowicz 2013) as ‘a postmodern documentary style that encourages a blend of observation with participation and rationality with altered states of consciousness’ (the ghost of gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson looms large over this particular research method). It is not necessarily incumbent on the gonzo ethnographer to enter a space where their presence might be frowned upon or actively resisted, but it is, gonzo-style, to provoke action as much as observe it (an altered state of consciousness might help in this regard, but it is not essential). It is also, just as importantly, to engage in a cultural performance of some description. This is not, needless to say, a dance routine or carefully choreographed stage play, but performative in the sense of being ‘constitutive of experience’ (Denzin 2014: 41). As Denzin notes, performance ethnography can be strategically adapted so that the experience the performance is constitutive of is performative in terms of playing host to creatively interventionist or disruptive practices. Viewed thus, the ethnographer moves from a view of performance as ‘imitation, or dramaturgical staging . . . to an emphasis on performance as liminality and construction . . . [and] to a view of performance as struggle, as intervention, as breaking and remaking, as kinesis, as a sociopolitical act’ (2003: 4). The idea of gonzo anthropology – or, by way of a further example, the ‘place-hacking’ exploits of urban explorers who strive to ‘connect in a meaningful way to a world rendered increasingly mundane by commercial interests and an endless state of “heightened” security’ (Garrett 2013: 240) – is unlikely to be one that the average ethics review committee would look favourably upon. While not necessarily involving illegality or danger (although in the case of place hacking, both certainly apply) interven-

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tionist or provocatory research methods such as these do bring with them the radical uncertainties that are their stock-in-trade. As we will see in chapters 3 (‘Castaway’) and 4 (‘Stalker’), calculations with regard to the autoethnographic strategy deployed in each case study were inevitably premised on the need for ‘off-grid’ modes of site-specific intervention. I am not sure whether that constitutes a response to the ethical concerns that apply in each case or merely a bypassing of such concerns altogether. Either way, as forms of spatial bricolage and deep mapping, these examples provide an illustration of in-between spaces whose liminal constitution extends to the uncertainties that mark out the testing terrain of field ethics and of institutional and disciplinary policing of normative frameworks of practice. Neither putting the ‘Performative-I on stage’ nor seeking to get recognition of autoethnography as a ‘disruptive practice’ (Denzin 2014: 11, 23) are easy propositions to sell to the average institutional review board. The IRB [institutional review board] framework assumes that one model of research fits all forms of inquiry, but that is not the case. This model requires that researchers fill out forms concerning subjects’ informed consent, the risks and benefits of the research for subjects, confidentiality, and voluntary participation. The model also presumes a static, monolithic view of the human subject. Performance autoethnography, for example, falls outside this model. . . . Participation is entirely voluntary, hence there is no need for subjects to sign forms indicating that their consent is ‘informed.’ The activities that makes up the research are participatory; that is, they are performative, collaborative, and action and praxis based. (Denzin 2003: 249–50, emphasis added)

In a similar vein, bringing a performative and autoethnographic sensibility to the sociocultural study of space is to assume that our understanding and experience of space is itself action and praxis based. Our task as bricoleurs, gleaners, deep mappers – whatever label we choose to attach – is to convince others of the same. Spatial anthropology does not hover drone-like over a world it seeks to scan and territorialise. Its methodological instincts are to dissolve abstraction into the concrete fleshiness of a world that gives of itself in lived time and with all the jumble, chaos and clamour that maps (or some maps at least) iron out and expunge. If anything, spatial anthropology is more concerned with the creases and folds of the map, the topographic shapes and dispositional practices by which we order and structure our spatial worlds; the habitual songlines we intuit through practice; the ghosting of past journeys that filter through from the dark sump of memory; or the spatial rhythms that breathe with us or which tighten around our chests. To quixotically reduce the whole of part I down to a single sentence: spatial anthropology is the study of lives that are lived spatially – the science and poetics of spacing.

Part II

SOUNDINGS

Soundings. To sound out. To take depth soundings. A mode of enquiry that is circumspect inasmuch as the cautious dipping of a toe is often a necessary prelude to the act of plunging headlong into a field of performative action. While oceanographers equipped with precise measuring tools may have a different take on the concept, the idea of ‘soundings’ that unravels throughout the following two chapters (‘Castaway’ and ‘Stalker’) is one that is predicated on imprecision, happenstance and approximation, qualities that go squarely against the grain of positivistic approaches to landscape, space and place. In this section, soundings speak more of an intuitive engagement, of feeling one’s way into a space of representational flux, ambiguity and becoming. The presence of the researcher in the field of practice is taken to be a constitutive part of that field and, as such, it is recognised that her or his task is not so much to pin down or capture the representational form of any given space, but to respond to its fluid, mutable and mercurial properties in ways that conjure an impressionistic sense of that space (and its manifold spacings). Accordingly, soundings are taken of two strikingly different spaces and environments, but the methodological disposition of the researcher in relation to each of these spaces is the same. As soundings, it is the contingent placing of the embodied self within a field of action that is there to be made sense of that binds the two case studies together as forms of spatial anthropology. ‘Making sense’ here can be read as the cultural production of affect and sensory ethnographic soundings as much as it can the shedding of insight in more generic terms. The spaces of representation that are mapped, invoked and sounded out are particular to the circumstances whereby they become ‘known’, albeit impressionistically, as inhabitant knowledge (Ingold 2007: 89; Moores 2015). Such knowledge can only be mapped in the loosest and most provisional of senses. To impose greater levels of cartographic 61

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discipline is to push time and the reflexive positionality of the cartographer/ spatial anthropologist out of the equation altogether. Embodied time and the rhythmanalytical qualities of non-places are the focus of chapter 3, in which an autoethnographic foray into the negative spaces of a motorway traffic island prompts reflection on the affective dynamics of such spaces. As is shown, the soundings and deep mappings that can be extracted from radically placeless environments such as those particular to motorways (service stations, verges, embankments, traffic islands, slip roads, carriageways) are not limited to those qualities by which non-places are typically defined (inertia, homogeneity, lack of organic sociality, and so on). What they can also tap into is what it is these qualities help furnish by way of a negation of the negation of place; that is, the different forms of affective response to boredom, inertia and sociospatial abstraction, whether these be moments of reverie, flights of the imagination or the creative disaggregation of the self from the mundanity of everyday urban form. The soundings that are transacted in chapter 4 are the result of an altogether different set of spatial methods and practices. The idea of the researcher as ‘stalker’ underpins a wider discussion on the ethics and practical logistics of cinemapping as a means of ‘gonzo-style’ urban spatial enquiry. The chapter’s reflection on method is centred around the case of the murdered Merseyside toddler James Bulger, whose death at the hands of two ten-year-old boys in 1993 hit headlines around the world. Cinemapping-as-stalking, and the problems, challenges, and demonstrable benefits that such a method offers the urban ethnographer or psychogeographer, are critically examined by re-approaching the Bulger case as a local spatial story where processes of performative intervention work to nudge and disturb an imaginary of space that has been moulded into shape by a quarter century of sustained media spectacle.

Chapter 3

Castaway

I am the island. – J. G. Ballard, 1974

Road verges, the edgelands and margins that exist largely as motion blur in the peripheral vision of motorists, occupy an in-between zone of sorts in the same way that a comma breaks up the flow of a sentence. Our interest, as readers, is generally not what is going on between words but what it is that their traversal imparts. We are just as unlikely to dwell on a comma or semicolon as we are a traffic island or motorway embankment. Yet, as spaces that topographically order and thus play a not inconsequential role in our everyday spatial practices, road verges become conspicuous only when we notice that they are not not there. They are negative spaces whose existence, once acknowledged, inversely maps the spaces that they are there to punctuate. In April 2017, the UK environmental conservation charity Plantlife ran a campaign that sought to draw attention to the ecological value of road verges and the need to protect wildflowers and plants that flourish there. For readers of Richard Mabey’s The Unofficial Countryside (2010), first published in 1973, this pointed to nothing that they did not already know (see also Farley and Symmons Roberts 2011). What the campaign specifically aimed to raise awareness of, though, was how these landscapes had become the ‘last refuge’ for some of Britain’s rarest wild plants, such as wood calamint and fen ragwort. Remarking that verges are typically thought of as ‘dull, inconsequential places that flash by in the wing mirror’, a spokesman for Plantlife cautioned against negligent maintenance whereby, through the indiscriminate clearance of what is perceived to be unkempt and overgrown

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vegetation, the value of road verges as nature reserves is habitually underplayed (Briggs 2017; Plantlife 2017). Driving northward up the M53 Mid-Wirral Motorway early in 2017 I noticed that parts of the traffic island I had landed on and explored some three or four years previously had been dramatically transformed. The thick blanket of trees and plant life that had wrapped a densely woven and slightly mysterious kernel of interiority had undergone a rather savage pruning. The island had been stripped bare in places and in the process appeared vulnerable as if, Samson-like, it had lost something of its former virility. Nature’s command of this space had been cut down to size and a resurgent rationalism stamped firmly in place. The trim borders and interiors of the island matched the equally trim discipline it now exuded, like a freshly shorn soldier buckling down to duty after a period of longhaired laxity. It is not known what of its flora was swept away along with the foliage and general motorway flotsam (and whether these are of the rare variety that the Plantlife campaign addressed), but the idea of the island being a refuge was one that struck a chord in terms of how I had sought to confront its undisciplined and aberrant character as a negative space: a ‘space in-between’. Visibility, first and foremost, was the quality that immediately trounced any notion of refuge post-pruning. The ability to secrete or lose oneself within the transitory folds of non-places is made possible by the very placelessness and anonymity by which they are defined. But equally, for it to function as such, the irradiating glare (Augé 1996: 179) of a surveillant modernity that requires an abundance of such spaces exercises control by exposing every inch of these same spaces to scrutiny. The maintenance of a traffic island or road verge that is premised on curbing organic forms of growth is geared towards their smooth functionality as rational spaces of transit rather than as habitats or as ‘places’ with potentially their own fledging ecologies. The same logic applies to non-places as they are more routinely understood – one of the defining features of airport terminals or shopping malls is a processual functionality that is calibrated in such a way as to ensure flow, throughput, and contractual modes of sociality that are kept closely in sync with the designs and intellectual prescriptions of conceived space (Lefebvre 1991). This does not mean that individuals within these spaces are, by default, mindless automatons or may not deviate from what the design spaces tell them they should be doing there. What it does tend to mean is a high level of surveillance and disciplinary control designed to ensure that whatever is going on there is kept more or less compliant with the architectural blueprint. A traffic island situated between two carriageways of a motorway is not a space designed to be camped on any more than it is planned as a nature reserve or refuge for wildflowers. The maintenance to which such a space is periodically exposed minimises the likelihood of either



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eventuality. But to dwell for a moment or two – to recognise the pause in the landscape that gives continuity its expression and mobility – is to work against the grain of a spatial logic of practice that routinely goes unnoticed. The mundanity of non-places is the cloak that offers potential refuge. The trick is to avoid standing out; to blend in, in such a way as to not draw heat from the irradiating glare; to hide in plain sight. This is the starting point for ideas that are explored throughout this chapter. The ‘methods’ deployed herein are manifold: the act of castaway as a basis for autoethnographic deep mapping; a rhythmanalytical meditation on the temporality of non-places; gonzo spatial anthropology; digital bricolage as cartographic assemblage; the reflexive soundings of topoanalytic enquiry; deep phenomenology; a performative response to negative space. All of the above are accurate as statements of intent and it is certainly conceivable that I may have even articulated them as such prior to the act of casting myself away on the island (the fieldwork period on which this chapter is based). But it is also worth acknowledging the deliberately fuzzy rationale I brought to bear on the research practice. The aim, in part, was to feel my way in to a space that I was as much creating as I was mapping. As far as was possible, the performative rationale was to be left open and undetermined. I would equip myself with various tools (GPS tracker, digital camera and tripod, mobile phone, tablet, audio recorder, pen and paper) and practical necessities (food, drink, a camping mattress and blow-up pillow, Swiss army knife, waterproofs). But beyond that, the plan was: (a) to attentively follow the experiential threads of my immersion in the field as they unravelled and became entangled with the space of the island, and (b) to see where (if anywhere) that might take me once I had hauled the fruits of my gleaning back home. MAROONED Running across a northbound stretch of the M53 motorway one August afternoon in 2013, a backpack of basic supplies and equipment thumping against my spine, and J. G. Ballard’s contention that ‘Marooned in an office block or on a traffic island, we can tyrannise ourselves, test our strengths and weaknesses’ (2014: viii) lodged in the back of my mind, my progress was steered towards territory that could lay claim to few, if any, attributes of what might count as ‘place’. Initially conceived of as a kind of autoethnographic experiment, I was not setting out to tyrannise myself, Ballardian style, as much as to try and map a sense of embodied dwelling (my ‘being-there’): to examine how the non-place towards which I was headed might play host to a performative study of the rhythms and cadences of a radically liminal space. Hur-

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tling headlong across the motorway, taking strategic advantage of a brief lull in the traffic flow, my goal was thus to maroon my self in a space defined in opposition to those routinely inhabited or imagined: a negative space against which the more mundane geographies of everyday mobility might be cast and measured. The liminal space in question, like that which forms the setting of Ballard’s story, is a motorway traffic island. A ‘concrete island’, to borrow from the title of the 1974 novel, is a reasonably apt descriptor, but only inasmuch as this too is constitutive of a negative frame of reference: an island surrounded by a sea of concrete (and tarmac) rather than one that is made of concrete. Indeed, it was partly the lushness and density of the island flora that first drew my attention to this topographic anomaly when driving past it on my way to and from Liverpool. The island’s anomalous status (of which more later) was another factor that piqued my initial curiosity, setting in motion the designs of a Crusoe-esque quest spurred as much by the question as to why such a feature existed at all as by that which probed the island’s more experiential or rhythmanalytical (Lefebvre 2004; Edensor 2010) dimensions. What might be gleaned, I had wondered, from time spent self-marooned on this motorway island; a day and night cocooned by nothing but the hiss and roar of high-speed traffic? What might a spatial anthropology of such a radically deterritorialised landscape throw up that could not be ascertained by other modes of enquiry? (What does the ‘being-there’ element bring to the table?) Given the depthless and socio-historically ‘empty’ fabric of this non-place, to what extent might a project of ‘deep mapping’ make sense of a space that, save perhaps the occasional visitation by motorway maintenance workers, has remained cut off from all human contact? Beyond the more broadly conceived goal of exploring the spatial anthropology of non-places – a reflexive enquiry into what could be described as the negation of the negation of place – what, exactly, is the point of marooning the embodied self in depthless space? To begin to flesh out a provisional response to this question, the idea of ‘tuning in’ provides a useful and suggestive point of departure. Finding the right frequency is to connect or find resonance with a space of communication defined in terms of modulation and rhythm rather than infrastructural and material form. Viewed thus, for those marooned in ‘non-places’ rather than in transit through them, adjusting – mindfully – to the temporal geographies of motorway space is akin to tuning the dial on a car radio. Rather than confronting the ‘white noise’ of traffic that defines a dissonant or transitory moment of encounter (such as my precarious transit to and from the island), the bestowal of prolonged durational time – the lacuna (Bachelard 2000: 19) period spent in the midst of flow and movement – provides the motorway dweller with a space by which to ease the embodied self into a



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habituated sense of rhythmic order, as if slowly beginning to make out the shape and contour of a recognisable tune coming through the airwaves. In autoethnographic terms, as a key methodological objective, ‘tuning in’ thus became an integral part of the wayfinding and habituation process by which I familiarized myself with and made sense of the environment I had made my temporary home. By extension, in cartographic terms, ‘reading the rhythm’ of the space is perhaps the most instructive way of thinking about the project as an exercise in mapping (‘deep’ or otherwise) oriented around the central axis of the embodied and situated self. In the absence of topographic detail, embodied immersion in the liminal spatialities of a motorway island is therefore as much an enquiry into the phenomenology of time as it is that of space or ‘non-place’. More accurately, it is necessary to look upon the temporal geographies under investigation in terms of an experiential ‘time out’ conceived of as a disruption of the temporal flow that otherwise structures a sense of everyday habitus and being-inthe-world. As Edensor notes, ‘The usually unreflexive sensual and rhythmic attunement to place and familiar space may be confounded when the body is “out of place”’ (2010: 5). Accordingly, it is what Morris has referred to as the ‘metaphorai of the pause’ (1988: 41) that our rhythmanalytical attention is principally addressed. Concerned less with arrival and departure in terms of the consummatory passage through a space or non-place of transit, the experiential space-time of the island is more redolent of an embodied sense of stasis: a temporal unfolding of spatial restriction where movement is defined in relation to the immobility and longueur of the liminal ‘pause’ (Roberts 2002: 82–83; 2005). Horizons are scaled down to the immediacy of the moment and the ebb and flow of time that is mobilized in vehicular form. From the axis point of the island Crusoe, cast ashore and stranded from a world in perpetual flux, the north- and southbound rhythms of the motorway inhibit any sense of resolution or consummation other than that by which the islandbody is brought into being as a time unto itself. In his study of memory and oblivion, Augé (2004: 55–84) sets out what he refers to as three ‘figures of oblivion’ that structure the temporal dialectics of remembrance and forgetting. The second of these, suspense, refers to the cutting off of the present from the past and future. In ritual terms, this approximates to the separation phase of Arnold van Gennep’s tripartite rite of passage, or Victor Turner’s notion of communitas – an in-between state in which the oblivion of past returns and future beginnings (or of points in time and space already departed as well as those yet to be arrived at) shapes a temporary state of suspended presentness (see chapter 2, ‘Of Spaces InBetween’). The motorway island, like that of the motorway more generally, is a liminal space of oblivion par excellence. Memory is afforded little in

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the way of traction. Anthropological place, in the Durkheimian sense of an organic social space that is ‘relational, historical and concerned with identity’ (Augé 1995: 77), has limited application in the case of environments such as these. The mirror-like ‘surface sheen’ (the functional prerequisite of a space given over to pure mobility) prevents the slow absorption of time and memory; it can only be ‘layered’ or ‘embedded’ insofar as the mode of transport itself becomes the site of topographic depth (Edensor 2010: 6; Sheller 2004; Borden 2013; Thrift 2004). To maroon oneself in a radically placeless place (or negative space) is thus to ritually harness the oblivion of suspense and to bracket time – to take some time out. TIME OUT If motorways are an example of what Dimendberg (2004: 177–78) refers to as ‘centrifugal space’, where the density of the urban centre is radially dispersed throughout what are increasingly abstract, hyper-mobile and virtual spaces and networks, then the ‘walking cure’ (109) prescribed by the flâneur or psychogeographer can be looked upon as a kind of counter force. This need not necessarily be centripetal in its orientation, but does at least serve to anchor affects of place and memory in spaces that are otherwise experienced as abstract or in some way drained of local colour and depth. The tactical interweaving of imaginative and embodied worlds with the concrete materiality of everyday urban form – ‘tramping asphalted earth in alert reverie’, to borrow Iain Sinclair’s suggestive phrase (2003a: 4) – thus allows for the layering and accretion of anthropological place, if by this we mean places invested with humanistic attributes, the ‘impure content’ – ‘lived time, everyday time, . . . bodies with their opacity and solidity, their warmth, their life and their death’ (Lefebvre 1991: 97) – that processes of spatial rationalisation can prove so adept at flushing out. By extension, the motorway flâneur – as illustrated by Sinclair’s (2003b) epic trek around London’s M25 orbital motorway – is someone whose cartographic proclivities are steered towards the deep mapping or ‘deep topography’ (Papadimitriou 2012) of landscapes through, across or above which, ordinarily, the subject is centrifugally slung. Morse notes that ‘[f]reeways are displaced in that they do not lie earthbound and contiguous to their surroundings so much as float above or below the horizon’ (1990: 197). A topographic study premised on the notion of deep mapping is thus one that is bent on reversing or going against the grain of the motorway conceived of as a rational and functional space. If ‘time out’ represents a temporal disruption of the functional space-time linearity of the motorway, then ‘off-road’ is its spatial correlate (Roberts



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2005; Ward 2012). Off-road here can refer to the physical edgelands of motorways (such as, in my case, a motorway island situated between carriageways, or those outlying liminal landscapes that hug the orbital colossus of Sinclair’s M25). It can also point to the flights of imagination and creative reverie that the mundane features of motorways can help foster (Morse 1990; Bracewell 2002; Edensor 2003). A phenomenon that will be all too familiar to motorists who regularly drive on motorways is the experience of slipping into ‘autopilot’ for a period of miles/minutes/hours and of subsequently ‘coming to’ with little recollection or awareness of having been driving, almost as if the motorist had been spirited away to another space entirely. In Morse’s ‘An Ontology of Everyday Distraction’, she examines the ways that ‘non spaces’ such as freeways/motorways or shopping malls can promote a state of mind whereby the individual is ‘disengaged from the paramount orientation to reality’ and experiences a ‘“spacing out” or partial absence of mind’ (1990: 200, 194, emphasis in original). It is instructive to look upon these lapses and moments of ‘spacing out’ not as ellipses (akin to film or television footage that has been ‘edited out’) but rather as negatives through which we encounter the flux of thought and mental flânerie: imaginative worlds that project a different inflection on what we might understand by the concept of non-place/space. This is an idea that finds resonance with Osborne’s view that non-places may potentially be configured ‘less as “empty” or “solitary” versions of traditional places and more as radically new ontological types of place, constituted qua places through their relations to another spatiality’ (Osborne 2001: 189, emphasis in original). It also brings to mind Marin’s discussion of the ‘spatial play’ of utopic practice: utopia (a conflation of the Greek words outopia and eutopia ‘no place’ and ‘good place’) conceived of as the ‘reverse image of this world, its photographic negative’ (1984: 242). The non-places of the motorway, in other words, refer to both the anthropologically inert or ‘empty’ spatialities of the built environment and the ‘other spaces/places’ of the imagination that the mundane roadscape (Edensor 2003) helps conjure into being. Perhaps inevitably, the Ballardian backdrop to a discussion that fixes its attention on the mundanity of a motorway traffic island leads us at some point to consider the phenomenological significance of boredom. Boredom comes with the territory. It is arguably one of the most distinctive affective qualities associated with non-places. Importantly, however, this is not automatically suggestive of an experience of stasis or dead time (a space-time needing to be ‘filled’ in some way) but rather, viewed dialectically, points to the ways that boredom sets the experiential conditions for its alleviation through the activities it engenders (a space-time that is being ‘filled’ in some way – probably via a smartphone or tablet computer). To help illustrate this, the geographer

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Tim Edensor cites the results of a report conducted into rail commuting, noting that only 2 percent of respondents found travelling boring. ‘The automaticity commonly ascribed as boring,’ Edensor notes, ‘allows commuters to dream, read, telephone and plan’ (2012: 198). In Iain Sinclair and Chris Petit’s 2002 experimental documentary London Orbital, boredom becomes a threshold that is there to be crossed; the M25, by extension, becomes a ‘doorway into another reality’. For Sinclair and Petit, the more that one is drawn in to the motorway’s almost hallucinatory force field, the more it appears to exude its own consciousness. The goal of the motorway flâneur – whether artist, photographer, filmmaker, cartographer, anthropologist, psychogeographer, deep topographer – is to try and access this affective space (and in so doing help cultivate it). Deep mapping or deep topography comes to resemble a form of meditation practice: The M25 is negative space – an energy drain. To enter it is to enter dead time; clockwise or anti-clockwise. More than other motorways, the M25 is designed to test the thresholds of boredom. It eliminates any romantic notion of boredom, but for the addicted it has its attractions: it is mainline boredom, it is true boredom, the quest for transcendental boredom . . . (narration by Chris Petit in London Orbital)

Whether transcendence can ever meaningfully be achieved is another matter. What motorway boredom inevitably leads to is perhaps an integral part of the journey itself, even if this is just the eventual exit up a slip road and a welcome retreat to a less transcendent geography of roundabouts, crossroads, and traffic lights (Augé 1995: 57; Augé 2002a). Towards the end of London Orbital we learn that one of the filmmakers’ fellow travellers, the artist John Sargeant, fails in his own endeavour to transcend the limits of motorway boredom. Having retreated to a concrete island interchange to observe the road, his quest ends in inertia and disillusion: ‘After running too long on empty, everything stops – boredom, like rust, becomes entropy’, remarks Petit, by way of rumination. London Orbital is a film whose aesthetic and formal properties are well in keeping with its subject matter. The surveillant gaze of the moving image – the ‘flat literalness’ (to again quote Petit) of a digital journey through negative space – feels as hypnotic as the experience of driving (or being driven) through the abstract spaces of the motorway itself. The film sears its unrelenting and driving rhythm on the mental landscapes of the ‘voyager-voyeur’ (Virilio 2005: 105) in such a way as to slip, momentarily, into the experiential flux of actual motorway driving (and vice versa – the cinematic experience conjuring an embodied memory of motorway driving spaces). It is for this reason that London Orbital has never felt far from my peripheral vision as I



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have set about conducting my own enquiries into negative space. The film is also very much the product of two interlocking but otherwise separate spatial methodologies: Petit’s ruminant journeys around the motorway by car and Sinclair’s more peripatetic adventures on foot. If the abstract rhythms of the former have felt more closely in sync with my own experience of motorway driving (the journey up and down the M53 is part of my regular commute to and from work), the latter – a form of motorway navigation that deviates quite sharply from what might be regarded as routine – taps into rhythms that are closer to those encountered in my time spent on the motorway island. RHYTHM MAPPING There is, perhaps, an inclination to think of motorways as in some way neat, ordered, and ‘smoothly’ configured to efficiently accommodate the unimpeded flow and circulation of traffic (even if this functional imperative routinely falls short of motorists’ expectations). While motorways of course do exhibit these qualities it takes only the briefest of ‘off-road’ diversions to access an altogether different landscape, one that is less ordered, more feral, and seemingly untroubled by the meshwork and desire lines of human activity. Similarly, when thinking about the kind of rhythms we might associate with motorways (from the mobile perspective of driver or passenger) it is those that map on to the experiential geography of the journey itself that are of significance: the rush and flow (Turner 1979; Csikszentmihalyi 1975, 1990) of forward momentum; the frustration induced by traffic jams or of slow crawls along congested carriageways; the violent collision of metal on metal; the parallel tracking of musical rhythm from the car radio or CD player (Edensor 2012: 198; Bull 2001). What is less likely to draw comment is the slow, arduous, and often painful progress of the body as it hacks its way through a dense thicket of trees and undergrowth, a growing blanket of dusk prompting a briskness of pace. Nature, left to itself, makes no concession to the human visitor. This is an entry from my field notes, written shortly after my arrival on the island. Very dense vegetation – difficult to move through island to the north, flatter area. Boredom had little purchase in this environment, at least in these early stages of my residency; there was simply no time to be bored. The practical demands of orientation and of finding a suitable location that might serve as base camp (a clearing flat and comfortable enough to accommodate a body in a sleeping bag) imbued the landscape not with inertia but character and form. This was no negative space; no anomalous feature on the map. In the first instance, it is an island woodland. Screen out the traffic noise and the fact that it was

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surrounded at all sides by motorway and there is little to distinguish it from other wooded areas that are located ‘inland’ off the motorway. The ‘north, flatter area’ towards which I was headed is, in fact, not north at all, but west of my initial location. The directional geometry of the motorway (northbound and southbound) had imprinted itself on my cognitive map of the island in such a way as to streamline space and remove all but the most abstract of geographical forms. The non-place of the map had territorialized a space that in all other respects was anything but uniform or geometrically defined. This spatial confusion would become all the more apparent after I had spent a night on the island. The ‘north, flatter area’ was where I would set up camp and initiate my nocturnal watch over the now moonlit and street lamp-bathed island (figure 3.1). Come morning, when my exploratory adventures would begin proper, the sense of my being directionally challenged soon became clear: Major orientation problems. . . . I thought I was heading northwards [west] on the exploration this morning, but was in fact heading south [east]. Confusion over which side of the motorway I am on. I thought I was on the opposite side from the point where I landed but I am in fact on the same side, facing towards Hooton and south, not northwards. (Field note extract)

Figure 3.1  Ordnance Survey (OS) map of island showing expedition route, camping area and crossing points. Map data: © Crown Copyright and Database Right [2013]. Ordnance Survey (Digimap Licence).



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This field note entry was recorded more than two hours after I had reached what I thought had been the most northerly (westerly) tip of the island. Lack of sleep, coupled with a befuddled sense of space, had served to unstitch the territory from its geo-locational points of anchorage, transforming it into a residual product of my ever so slightly wired imagination. Hubcaps, coke cans, an exhaust cylinder, half-brick, empty bag of garden chippings, large metal frame – possibly part of a sign, Quaver [crisps] packet, length of polystyrene coving, take-away coffee cup with lid, traffic cones (x 2), seat of office chair, rusty metal rope (with noose). (Field note extract)

The carpet detritus that littered the floor of the island – the sole vestiges of a proximate human presence – contributed to the general sense of dislocation I was experiencing. The coming to rest of objects that had been washed up at random moments helped define an island ecology that has developed in isolation from the more manicured and legible landscapes of the motorway and surrounding area. In other words, despite the relentless soundscape of a chaotic and busy world ‘out there’, the topographic texture of the island conspires towards an interiority of place and experiential dwelling. In an environment such as this, the mind is left to follow its own course: consciousness and geography alike become unmoored. The sedentariness, or restricted spatiality of the body, provides fertile ground for the imagination to cut loose and take flight. I cannot recall now exactly at which point the significance of the soundscape began to leave its mark, but the challenges encountered in terms of spatial awareness were more than compensated by the cartographies of sound that became the default sensorial mechanism by which a habitual and ‘grounded’ sense of space and place was provisionally secured. What might be understood as a ‘map’ of the island non-place was thus one that derived its form from the pulses and sonic rhythms established by the unremitting flow of vehicular traffic. In retrospect, these island rhythms probably began to fully seep their way into the sensorium of my body in the early hours of the morning when I had bedded down to what would prove to be an extremely fitful sleep. The following field notes, written at 10:40 p.m. as I attempted to make myself comfortable for the night, provide some indication of the experiential space that had begun to take shape around me: Lying on mattress, blow up pillow. Looking up at the canopy and stars beyond. Full moon to the east [north]. As cars go by light ripples through leaves of the canopy. Sound of cars, like waves – irregular rhythm. Unwavering, few variations (bar the odd motorbike or lorry). They seem to have a life/biorhythm of

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their own, as if they are part of a bigger entity. Feeling of isolation – each one a world unto itself, surrounding my own isolated space. . . . I wonder if the relentless hiss/rush of cars will have an effect on my sleeping/dreaming state (if I manage to sleep. . .). (Field note extract)

At 4:17 a.m., I am awoken by the sound of a tin can, thrown from a car, rolling along the motorway. No doubt, in time, this too would become a constituent part of the island’s alluvial terrain: hybrid flotsam that, like me, finds its place in the entropy of motorway edgelands. In a space – or non-place – such as this, the night waves and rhythms can cast something of a spell. The traffic noise – the soundscape – seems louder and more prominent than during the day (lorries and heavy goods vehicles make a particularly thunderous impression). As a consequence, it becomes all the more enveloping; its peaks and lulls secrete an inexorable pattern that lodges itself in the penumbral zone between consciousness and slumber. Despite its heightened volume, the traffic may even have had something of a soporific effect, although this is less easy to recall with any degree of accuracy. Indeed, as in autoethnographic terms I had become, for three or four hours at least, an ‘unreliable narrator’, it is the sound recordings I had been making since my arrival on the island that provide the sole means of documentation during the few hours of sleep. Insofar as the all-embracing soundscape so clearly defines the embodied spatialities of the island, it is the frequency, intensity and rhythmicity of the traffic noise that provide the raw material from which to best engineer a cartographic ‘capture’ of this experiential space. The time domain images extracted from the sound recordings (figures 3.2 and 3.3), if processed in conjunction with the audio recordings themselves, render possible a form of locational positioning whereby, representationally at least, the island may be revisited or re-inhabited and a rudimentary degree of orientation established (see Roberts 2015b and www.liminoids.com/projects/concreteisland.html for links to audio clips along with additional images and video). As maps, the sound capture images delineate the temporal geographies of the island in ways that give an impression of the rhythmic modulations that both anchor the space in the durational flux of phenomenological time and track the nocturnal and diurnal rhythms of a social ecology built on mobility and flow. This latter, more cyclical space-time transcends the time-stamped singularity of the captured moment (the contingent occurrence of my being-there) to form the entrenched social rhythms that are a constellated product of the myriad spatial stories and everyday mobilities of the motorway wayfarer. Accordingly, as Lefebvre suggests, ‘[t]he cyclical is social organisation manifesting itself. The linear is the daily grind, the routine, therefore the perpetual, made up of chance and encounters’ (2004: 30).



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Figure 3.2  Soundscape map, 2:00 a.m. – 3:00 a.m., 23 August 2013 (53°18'10.1"N 2°58'00.9"W).

Figure 3.3  Soundscape map, 8:30 a.m. – 9:30 a.m., 23 August 2013 (53°18'10.1"N 2°58'00.9"W).

If we compare figures 3.2 and 3.3 (2:00 a.m. to 3:00 a.m. and 8:30 a.m. to 9:30 a.m., respectively), the difference in the intensity of rhythm is stark and vivid, not all that surprising given that one of the maps corresponds with the height of morning rush hour. From one vantage point, then, the rhythms of the road represent a chronometric reading of a purely functional, processual and utilitarian space. From another, however, and one more in keeping with the idea of the island as an embodied and experiential space, these representations map onto an interiorized world of which, as rhythmanalyst, I am both monarch and intrepid explorer. Revisiting the space-time of the island through sound, the images can quite readily be re-imagined as electroencephalographic readings of brain wave activity. Between 2:00 a.m. and 3:00 a.m. it is a landscape shaped as much by gaps and lacunae as the indicative verticality of ‘events’. The mind is wound down and given over to the contemplative or somnolent flux of phenomena that, come morning, has succumbed to the more fevered density of ambient activity. By contrast, between 8:30 a.m. and 9:30 a.m. there is little in the way of horizontal ‘space’ in which the mind can wander. Instead, we are thrown headlong into the fray of a dense conurbation: a surging cluster of individuated time that barrels across the page like a juggernaut. In his ‘previsionary portrait’ of the rhythmanalyst, Lefebvre presents us with a figure who ‘listens – and first to his [sic] body; he learns rhythm from it, in order consequently to appreciate external rhythms. His body serves him as a metronome’ (2004: 19). The metronomic function of the researcher’s situated body is a central methodological component that marks out her or

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his practice from that of, say, the surveyor or topographer. The body feels for rhythm, a process that allows for the spiralling out of embodied time to the spatiotemporal precincts of the wider social world, a conjunction that can be felt in either resonant or dissonant terms (or, as is more likely, both). Lefebvre goes on to remark that the body produces a ‘garland’ of rhythms: ‘the surroundings of bodies, be they in nature or a social setting, are also bundles, bouquets, garlands of rhythms, to which it is necessary to listen in order to grasp the natural or produced ensembles’ (2004: 20, emphasis in original). The time domain images, especially those extracted from sound recordings made during the day, might themselves be likened to garlands inasmuch as they represent a bundle of temporal moments ‘strung together’ in the fashion of what Lefebvre describes as ‘an aesthetic arrangement’ (2004: 20). Garlanded by rhythm on all sides, my time on the island was not entirely my own insofar as my embodied self was in part a composite assemblage of the time of others. But equally, by adorning myself in the garlanded rhythms of the motorway I was able to cultivate and fashion my own spatiotemporal corporeality. Bringing into sharper relief the very otherness of the rhythms that defined the space-time of my island dwelling, the marooning helped make possible a time-unto-myself: an experiential ‘time out’ that provided the space for a creative re-ordering or re-assemblage of the space-time rhythms of an otherwise mundane roadscape. Viewed methodologically, the function of the body in this non-place setting is, therefore, that of a rhythmanalytical apparatus or interface: the body as a site of spatiotemporal praxis. ROAD TO NOWHERE If the discussion has thus far centred more squarely on temporality and rhythm in terms of an embodied mapping of the motorway island, no less important are considerations of its material geographies and why it is that such a topographic anomaly is there at all. However seductive it may be to think of this space as existing ‘outside’ of the quotidian trammels of history (as if a ‘bubble’ of utopic non-space that has somehow fallen between the cracks of Euclidean social reality), a more prosaic reflection would be to cast attention on the historical geography of this stretch of the M53 motorway and the circumstances surrounding the island’s formation. Refer to any map showing the area just to the west of Junction 5 on the M53 and it is not difficult to infer an obvious design intent on the part of the motorway engineers despite the fact that these plans never came into fruition. A provisional history can be gleaned from even the most cursory cartographic scrutiny. On a satellite image, for example, a curious oblong feature seemingly protruding from the island on the south side of the northbound carriageway has obvious affinities with the island topography in ways that cannot fail to pique

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geographical interest (search Google Maps/Earth coordinates: 53.302504, –2.970039). If we turn to a detailed Ordnance Survey (OS) map of the island the relationship between the two features is rendered all the more apparent (figure 3.1). That this island protuberance is the result of an aborted motorway design can be confirmed by reference to maps published when the M53 was still under construction (figure 3.4). The triangular shape that defines

Figure 3.4  Illustrated map showing proposed southbound M53 extension. Courtesy of the Motorway Archive Trust.

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the area that has since come to form the island is made up of what were to have been two slip roads exiting the motorway that would eventually link up with the M531 that bypassed Ellesmere Port to the east. The carriageway of the M53 was to have continued south thus forming what is now the bulk of the island terrain as well as the adjacent patch of land. What were to be the slip roads are now the south- and northbound carriageways of the M53, which continues south-east along the route of the former M531. In other words, to position oneself on the island is quite literally to be on a road to nowhere. A more visible monument to this short-lived plan was a flyover bridge that, until its demolition in the early 2000s, spanned little more than the width of the motorway’s northbound carriageway. Work on construction of the M53 Mid-Wirral Motorway began in 1969 and was carried out in various stages until 1982, when the last section was opened, extending the motorway to the outskirts of the city of Chester. The M531, which had been extended to join up with the M56 North Cheshire East-West Motorway, was completed in 1981 and would became part of the M53 as it exists today, which runs along the spine of the Wirral from the Kingsway (Mersey) Tunnel in the north to the A55 North Wales Expressway near Chester in the south (McCoubrey 2008: 311–13). In their report published in 1966, the Consulting Engineers commissioned by the Ministry of Transport to carry out a location study for the new motorway recommended that the route be extended south to the interchange at Dunkirk with the A5117. This would have linked with a newly extended M56, but also would have provided a faster route for traffic bound for North Wales along the A494 (Maunsell and Partners 1966: 10). As already mentioned, the M53 is a road that I use often as part of my regular journey from North Wales, where I live, to my place of work in Liverpool. Junction 5, which is near to the location of the island, is the point at which I enter and exit the motorway. Had the proposed southbound extension gone ahead this would have been the route I would have routinely taken (cutting a good ten minutes off my commute time in the bargain!). Given this, perhaps my ‘islandness’ (Vannini and Taggart 2012) might be construed as nothing more than a performative work-through of a latent geography that was destined not to be consummated (a utopian imagining sprung from an unrealized sense of auto-mobile satisfaction). However, a more likely rationale would be one that sought to join the dots between an experience of motorway ‘driving space’ (Merriman 2007) and the ‘off-road’ geographies that, over time and repeated iterations, have become firmly imprinted on my cognitive and affective map of the M53 as an everyday landscape. Because the distance travelled along the motorway is relatively short (the M53 is only nineteen miles from beginning to end), it has rarely felt as monotonous



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a driving experience as that encountered on, say, the M6, or other parts of Britain’s motorway network. Edensor’s observation that ‘confrontations with forms of otherness [such as fantasies, disruptions, lines of flight, sensual intrusions] . . . disrupt routinized experience and practice, throwing into sharp relief constructions of normative automobility’ (2003: 155) does not adequately take into account the extent to which such disruptions are themselves part of routine and habitual experience. The question: ‘How might routine commutes by car on the motorway be defamiliarised?’ (155) can thus partly be answered by pointing to the ways that commuters routinely defamiliarise their surroundings through recourse to the flights of imagination, disruptions, sensualities, and so on that are part and parcel of the negotiation of these and other everyday landscapes. To reiterate the argument made earlier: as anthropological spaces, non-places contain within them the potentiality of their own negation; motorways, on account of the very mundanity and featurelessness that Edensor’s argument sets out to counter, are affective spaces given over to the ‘commingling’ (Crouch 2010: 12) of the self with the entropic energies of a landscape in flux (see also Roberts 2014a). One of the (de)familiarised features of the motorway which I found myself becoming ever more entangled with was the verdant mantle of trees that defined the territory that I only later realized to be an island. Approaching along the southbound carriageway, the apparently pointless margin of hatched road markings that flank the northern stretch of the island, along with a red and white ‘road closed’ sign erected to (presumably) prevent cars from stopping or using the road markings area as an additional lane, were what first drew my attention. As subsequent journeys and more attentive rubbernecking would make clear there is more to this landscape than meets the eye. For a start, much of the island terrain remains unlandscaped; it is a pocket of land otherwise untroubled by the upheaval of road construction, as if it had somehow managed to hold off the territorialising march of the bulldozer and excavator and the contractors had resignedly accepted that they would have to work around it instead. As we have already seen, aerial views and maps allow us to clearly make out exactly where the excavatory incision for the road-that-was-not-to-be had been made. But either side of this cleft remains a dense thicket of trees and topographically uneven terrain that thumbs its nose at the uniformity of the surrounding road. This was a landscape that had the appearance of concealing a story that it had never gotten around to telling itself. Beyond the piecing together of a truncated history from official archival records, or the online chatter of discussion forums where amateur historians or transport enthusiasts trade local knowledge and geographic speculation, the narrow curve of unkempt (and untouched) greenery offers itself up as the only viable resource from which to extract a semblance of a geographical

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or archaeological narrative. A hastily thrown glance as I sped by at sixty or seventy miles per hour could only disclose so much. MAKING TRACKS I hacked through dense thicket for a while then saw a ditch leading up/away [providing a route] with less dense obstructions. I hacked a clear path along this, making sure that the path could be easily identified for the return journey. I continued along this as far as I could before hitting an impenetrable wall of bramble and trees. I scrambled up a bank to the left of the ‘path’ and, after some minor hacking, found this led out onto an open ‘meadow’. (Field note extract)

After my night spent under the orange-glow canopy of trees to the east of the island (near to the point where I had landed), and the spatial disorientation that marked, come morning, my initial attempts at exploration, the objective for the second day was to make my way to the western edge (although, in keeping with an internalized directional logic of northbound/southbound, I was still thinking of this in terms of ‘north’). The journey was one that mostly involved trekking through the interior of the island, away from the perimeter edges and the rush and immediacy of the morning traffic (a concern with being spotted by passing motorists, particularly lorry drivers who had a higher vantage point, meant that the journey ‘north’ offered a welcome opportunity to once again don a cloak of invisibility). The difficulties encountered in navigating those parts of the island that have remained largely untouched by human intervention were compensated by the reward of arriving at the open expanse of grassland which I referred to as the ‘meadow’. The meadow represents that area of land that had been carved out by the motorway contractors as part of the aborted plans to extend the route directly south. As my field notes describe, This open area is comprised of tall grasses, thistles, wild flowers, and a number of crumbling brown-earth ant mounds. Beyond the clearing is another dense mass of trees and brambles, which dips down into a ‘valley’ type area. Beyond that the island flattens and thins out and comes to an end. I walked around to the edge of the last group of trees and could just make out the stripy road markings that mark the start of the island, but it was not possible to see these clearly without being seen by motorists. The clearing area, as it is open, is mostly in full view of the southbound traffic. The meadow/clearing must be the highest point of the island. (Field note extract)

By the time I reached the meadow it was midday, the sun had fully broken through the intermittent cloud cover, and a light breeze was toying gently



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with the tall grasses and ragwort. After some time spent photographing and videoing the landscape and flora, I sat for an hour or so soaking up the warmth and the undulant rhythms and succumbing to a feeling of general well-being and corporeal detachment. If I had been climbing a mountain this would have been the summit moment: a snatch of well-earned ‘time out’ before the final descent. This part of the island was also the widest, meaning that I was furthest from the motorway than at any point in my residency. Because of this it was possible to get more of a sense of the landscape as existing on its own terms and not as merely an adjunct to the roadscape or as a negative space defined wholly in relation to the motorway. An entry in my field notes written at 04:17 a.m., when ensconced in the wooded area that I had made my base for the night, recorded the following observation: Appears to be little in the way of insects or wildlife. Nor, from what I recall, was there much diversity in terms of plant life on this part of the island. It was as if the location’s close association with the motorway, just a few feet to the north, had taken its toll on the island ecology and drained it of vim and vitality (something that, up to a point, resonated with my own embodied experience during this period). In the meadow, by contrast, life had all the appearance of being a good deal more abundant. While it would be premature to start imagining some form of utopian settlement eking out an existence on the island’s untapped natural and aesthetic bounty, the affective appeal of the meadow does invite reflections on ideas of ‘islandness’ conceived of as a spatial practice oriented in response to the mainline rhythms and spatiotemporal structures of everyday modernity. In their ‘non-representational’ approach to the question of island dwelling, Vannini and Taggart argue that ‘islandness’ is best approached not in abstract terms (ie ‘what is an island?’) but as an affective experience and practice (‘how do you do your island?’). Viewed thus, islandness ‘changes from a representation inside our heads to a set of tasks unfolding in front of its inhabitants’ (Vannini and Taggart 2012: 235). In other words, the ways in which an island is dwelt upon determines the meanings and shape that make the island what it is: ‘the life of your island is the sum total of the sensations it gives rise to, the cumulative incorporation of those feelings carved into its soils and shores, and the embodiment of its affective spaces on its dwellers’ (236). Although such a formula might conceivably be applied to any type of landscape (it also raises the question of whether a performative/non-representational understanding of islandness is necessarily predicated on there being something that topographically/representationally is an island in order for it to be valid), what it does usefully point to is the way islandness is carved out through the different forms of practice, movement and mobility that temporalise the landscape and confer on it the more anthropologically loaded status of ‘taskscape’.

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For Ingold, the concept of taskscape offers a strategically important tool with which to rethink landscape in terms of its fundamental temporality. ‘[T]he temporality of the taskscape,’ he suggests, while it is intrinsic rather than externally imposed (metronomic), lies not in any particular rhythm, but in the network of interrelationships between the multiple rhythms of which the taskscape is itself constituted . . . the forms of the taskscape, like those of music, come into being through movement. Music exists only when it is being performed; it does not pre-exist, as is sometimes thought, in the score, any more than a cake pre-exists in the recipe for making it. Similarly, the taskscape exists only so long as people are actually engaged in the activities of dwelling. (2000: 197)

If we extend this reasoning to maps (as Ingold himself goes on to do in a subsequent chapter of The Perception of the Environment), and to the process of mapping the embodied landscape/taskscape of the motorway island, then what we might understand as deep mapping acquires greater resonance insofar as it helps tease out the temporal dynamics ascribed to a cartographic method that is critically underpinned by an anthropological sensitivity to landscape as a fundamentally social, embodied and lived set of practices. As a form of spatial anthropology practice, deep mapping is thus strongly consonant with an idea of ‘wayfinding’: knowledge that is ‘cultivated by moving along paths that lead around, towards or away from places’ (229). As a product of wayfinding, spatial and environmental knowledge is ‘ambulatory . . . [in that] we know as we go, not before we go’ (230, emphasis in original). Mapping-as-wayfinding unborders the map as a frame or plane of representation. The cartographer-as-wayfinder, by extension, is a fundamentally embodied subject whose field of practice is similarly unbounded and more productively thought of as a meshwork in which she or he is reflexively entangled. Mapping, in this sense, is as much about the embodied self as it is about the space which the cartographer is oriented towards as a focus of study and in which s/he dwells. Dwelling in the midday sun of my island meadow, the less fevered rhythms of the road now more of a background tapestry of sound than in-your-face maelstrom, the landscape I had at my disposal was one that to a large extent had been willed into being. Even now, as I (re)construct the performative map of my island imaginary, the iteration of its fictive geographies is such that whatever might be gleaned in terms of ‘islandness’ is nothing but the residual and contingent product of my being-there (an islandness, in other words, that can only ever be ‘my’ islandness). Much of what would have passed through my consciousness, like the evanescent flow of traffic around me, has long since faded into oblivion. The traces that remain – whether hastily scribbled field



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notes, digital captures of various description, or memories that have coalesced into renderable form – have provided the basis for a tenuous archaeology from which I have crafted the outline of a narrative journey, the performance of which has given shape and substance to a ‘place’ that is otherwise not a place (or that is a non-place, to affirm the negative). If I remove myself from the equation, there is no island to speak of, merely an inconsequential pocket of land tucked between two motorway carriageways (two slip roads that were destined not to be) which, for much of the four decades or so it has existed, has probably mustered little if any human interest. It is negative space in the same way that the area beneath objects such as chairs or tables, made concrete (literally so) in work by the artist and sculptor Rachel Whiteread, is negative space. It is not that the space is not there but that it is through the intervention of the artist (or in my case the autoethnographer or spatial anthropologist) that what is not not there acquires a rudimentary form. To dwell in such a space is therefore to both conjure and embrace this form. Islandness is culled from abstraction in the same way that an imaginary is culled from the imagination. In Dialectic of Duration, Bachelard remarks, ‘The story of a journey is a function of its geography’ (2000: 89). The geography of the island is that which, in the first instance, makes it an island (the liquid space of the motorway replacing that of water). But the island’s geography is also what makes it an island in the narrative sense (a story and performance, an academic fiction). Islandness is the story of a journey. Moreover, it is in the journey that we trace and retrace what it is that islandness might conceivably delineate at any given juncture. Mapping the islandness of the island is a process of, firstly, making tracks. These are laid down in the act of walking, the gleaning of digital ephemera (images, audio, geospatial tracks – see www.liminoids.com/projects/concrete​ island.html), and the embodied immersion in a space that is ordinarily marked out in terms of its placelessness and abstraction. The follow-through is the re-tracing (re-making) of these tracks and moulding them into a bricolage or assemblage, the function of which is to convey a spatial story that maps onto an embodied sense of place: the being-there-ness of my island dwelling. The task of re-tracing/re-making is constituted in the process of writing-up. In this respect, the relative ‘depth’ of mapping is a measure of just how vivid or impressionistic the performative space of islandness actually is in terms of a cartographic imaginary. As an autoethnographic narrative, the locative properties of the text are such as to situate myself within a representational space that both frames my being-there (the recounting of a journey in the etymological sense of a ‘day’s work or travel’ [from jornee in Old French]) and creates a setting (a mise-en-scène) in which to explore the imbricated rhythms and temporalities by which ‘islandness’ is set adrift and plugged into a wider matrix of space, time and everyday mobility.

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As a purely geo-locative spatial story – a meshwork of lines digitally inscribed on a map – islandness can be textually reconstructed in the form of an itinerary or journey: a traversing of physical space. But this too can be shown to register the pull effect of centrifugal space, the affective force of the motorway’s hyper-mobile and ‘placeless’ environment threatening to destabilize an otherwise Euclidean pattern of lineation. The maps shown in figures 3.5–3.8 each chart – up to a point – the route I followed throughout my time on the island. I digitally recorded the tracks of my journey using two separate devices: a GPS-enabled tablet computer and a Garmin eTrex GPS receiver. Both sets of tracks are represented on each of the maps. In figure 3.5 the whole route is visible, from the starting point at a residential street called Dale Hey where I had parked my car, to the point where I crossed over the motorway (a journey which in itself was by no means straightforward, having been determined as a result of two prior recce, or reconnaissance, visits), and then my meanderings across the island itself. The return journey and crossing followed the same route. However, where the GPS signals dropped out momentarily en route there are several spikes that are visible, the most prominent being the grey (tablet) lance-like feature jutting northwards and its black (eTrex) counterpart pointing south-east. If we zoom in to the next scale (figure 3.6) we start to

Figure 3.5  Map showing GPS tracks of island field visit, 22–23 August 2013. Base map data: © Crown Copyright and Database Right [2013], Ordnance Survey (Digimap Licence).



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get a clearer picture of just how erratic and undisciplined the track lines in fact are. Zoom in again (figure 3.7) and a thick knot of grey lines reveals a quite alarming degree of agitated movement around what is less than a 100-square-meter area to the east of the island. This surely cannot be an accurate representation of my actual spatial mobilities. If it is, then I am at a loss to account for the frenetic rhythms being tramped out or why it was that I thought such a complex and baffling pattern of movement might have been necessary. If we zoom in one final time (figure 3.8), then it is almost as if we are entering a different spatiotemporal dimension entirely. If evidence were needed that, at a micro level, some other, wholly unaccountable form of spatial activity was being tracked, then this is it. The area shown on the map is little more than five square meters. The geometric complexity revealed at this scale maps a web of mobility that resembles nothing that is corporeally human. In fact, the points on or near the island where these disturbances mainly seem to occur correspond with those where movement was minimal, such as the location at the edge of the motorway where I waited to cross over to the island. The dense mass of tangled lines to the east of the island marks the location where I had camped for the night. If these patterns represented the tracking of movements in space, then they were not any that I could convincingly lay claim to.

Figure 3.6–3.8  Maps showing GPS tracks of island field visit, 22–23 August 2013 Base map data: © Crown Copyright and Database Right [2013], Ordnance Survey (Digimap Licence).



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Whatever technical quirks or environmental anomalies these tics and spikes might be attributed to lies beyond the scope of the present discussion. However, given that they tended to occur at locations where I was mostly stationary, it is hard not to equate them with the affective traffic of thoughts, sensations, rhythms, reveries, flows, transmissions, and general mental meanderings that arise when the body comes to rest. Trading the ‘taskscape’ of the purposive trek (track lines with few aberrant deviations) for the unfettered space of the imagination (track lines that display no discernibly rational spatial logic), the body’s entanglement with this meshwork of lines opens it up to a qualitatively different set of mobilities. As with the soundscape maps discussed earlier, rhythms captured as a result of empirical methods of environmental data capture function instead as détourned mappings that project a purely experiential and embodied sense of space. The pregnant liminality of this space allows for the steady accretion of temporal topologies (‘time out’) that deterritorialise and ‘garland’ the embodied self. The centrifugal pull of the motorway exerts a force that suffuses almost every facet of island dwelling, even – or rather especially – in those moments when consciousness takes flight far beyond the space-time of the present. EXIT When it came time to make my departure from the island there was already a palpable shift in rhythmicity, back towards the more routinised temporalities encountered as part of my everyday spatial practice. My crossing back over the carriageway, while executed with the same degree of caution with regard to personal safety, was characterized by a more lackadaisical attitude when it came to being seen. For some reason this now seemed less important, and as I scrambled back up the embankment that led to the farmland I had crossed over the day before I realized I was in full view of the flow of traffic that had resumed along the stretch of the motorway that skirts the southern flank of the island. Perhaps a feeling of closure and accomplishment had started to kick in. Perhaps my fatigue and aching limbs (not to mention lacerated forearms from all the hacking through undergrowth) had begun to numb the excitement and sense of danger, blunting the edge of the island’s former rhythmicity. Perhaps I was just fed up and in desperate need of a shower. Whatever the circumstances, approached in terms of its spatiotemporal rhythms, what makes the island what it is (by which I mean what gives it its ‘islandness’) are precisely those temporal geographies which, upon arrival, disrupt the habitus of self and body, and which, upon exit, are experienced less acutely.

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Rhythms, as Edensor observes, ‘are essentially dynamic, part of the multiplicity of flows that emanate from, pass through and centre upon place, and contribute to its situated dynamics’ (2010: 3). The rhythms that make the nonplace of the island what it is are, of course, particular to its own situated dynamics. They are also particular to my own situatedness as an embodied subject, rhythmanalyst, autoethnographer, deep cartographer or whatever other label we might choose to affix; the point being that the institutional and individual habitus of the body plays a key part in determining, feeling, intuiting, interpreting, mapping, collecting, assembling or listening in to the rhythms that constitute the island’s observable islandness. Gottschalk and Salvaggio argue that non-places exhibit ‘distinctive temporal parameters that replicate, deviate from, or completely subvert those that typically organize everyday life’ (2015: 16). While this is borne out by the analysis presented in this study, the timbre and rhythm that makes these temporal parameters distinctive are by no means uniform. The distinctiveness of non-places is not just on account of their constituent temporalities, but also of their heterogeneity. Although, by definition, non-places lack the social and symbolic embeddedness of anthropological places (and hence why they are typically defined in terms of their lack of heterogeneity and identity), when interrogated with the depth and rhythmanalytical precision required to draw out the temporal affects of these spaces, or, when recognising that ‘the soundscapes of non-places are also important stimulators of movement, interactions, and subjectivities’ (27, emphasis in original), the extent to which there is often a distinctiveness and heterogeneity to speak of becomes that much more apparent. In this respect, to analytically frame this discussion in terms of the rhythm of non-places should not be construed as an attempt to refine a spatial taxonomy to which I am ascribing a transferable set of ‘defining’ characteristics. Such an objective would be almost as reductionist and questionable as that which set about exploring the ‘rhythm of places’. Which places? When? Whose rhythms? How are they measured? To what ends? These are all questions that can just as readily be posed of non-places. Instead of subscribing to an excessively rigid application of the concept (at the expense of fine-grained, ethnographic and performative insights) a more instructive approach is to acknowledge the dialectical configuration that makes spaces such as a motorway island what they are in relation to places that are routinely encountered (and thus more likely to be invested with symbolic meaning and structures of identity). The question that is jostling for attention is not what makes places non-places (a rather well-trodden and near-exhausted line of enquiry) but rather what it is that makes non-places places. To which, of course, the provisional answer is: people.



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In epistemological terms, the task of populating non-places is one that informs the necessary (if still nascent) development of a spatial anthropology; in other words, a closer degree of engagement with those who move through, inhabit and produce such spaces. By extension, methodologically the task becomes one of embracing ethnographic and autoethnographic approaches: populating in the sense of the performative emplacement and direct intervention of the researcher in the field. In my case, this latter extrapolation brings with it a more literal connotation in that I was the population where before there had been none. Autoethnography, and an analytical gaze turned partly inward, becomes the default setting: there simply was no one else on the island – no person Friday – to whom I could turn my attention or share my rhythms. The islandness or liminality I experienced was not, therefore, shaped by a sense of communitas (Turner 1969) or intersubjectivity (Jackson 1998), but rather by the anonymity and abstraction of the hyper-mobile environment in which I was marooned. In such a setting, my self and my body constitute no less of what counts as the ‘field’ as the taskscapes of the island itself: The rhythmanalyst calls on all his [sic] senses. He draws on his breathing, the circulation of his blood, the beatings of his heart and the delivery of his speech as landmarks. . . . He thinks with his body, not in the abstract, but in lived temporality. (Lefebvre 2004: 21).

An enquiry into the rhythms of non-places is, therefore, at the same time an enquiry into the rhythms of the self. Thinking with her body in lived temporality, the rhythmanalyst of non-places maps resonant and dissonant connections with the ambient space-time ‘noise’ around and beyond her immediate field setting. Proceeding from the existential and ‘radically empiricist’ (Jackson 1989; 1996b; 2005) grounding of a field practice attuned to the micro-sensorial and entangled commingling of lived space and embodied time, the rhythmanalytically observant anthropologist variously reads, feels, senses, captures, measures, channels, conducts, détourns, visualizes, represents, gives vent to and ruminates on the rhythms – the lived temporality – in which she dwells. One of the key challenges posed by an anthropology of non-places, however, is finding ways to feed out to (and back from) a wider social and intersubjective field of mobility and practice. In other words, how to go beyond the specifically autoethnographic remit of the research. Again, this hinges on the specificity of the non-place in question. An ethnography centred on, say, an airport (Gefou-Madianou 2009: 62) or the Las Vegas Strip (Gottschalk and Salvaggio 2015), given the steady flow and throughput of people, would of course offer more opportunities in this regard. For a space such as a motorway island – not the kind of setting one would expect to run into prospective informants – the challenge is that much more difficult.

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In this vein, the very last task on my island expedition consisted of fixing a laminated flyer onto a strategically chosen plank of wood. The wood fords a brook that marks a key entry and exit point to and from the island. The flyer features a design logo for the motorway project, which at the time I had been calling ‘Concrete Island’. The flyer also includes the URL of a webpage that provides some basic information about the project along with contact details. This was in fact the last of several (identical) flyers I had erected, all but two of which had been pinned to trees at various locations around the island. As might be guessed, the point of the flyers was to keep open the possibility of contact with anyone who chanced upon these particular locations and who might be willing to be drawn into discussion about their own ‘being-there’ (or, indeed, their own ‘islandness’). The two flyers I had erected at non-island locations (the border brook and a fence near to the point where I had crossed over the motorway) were unlikely to attract the attention of any casual passerby. Given the difficulty in accessing these locations whoever stumbled upon the flyers would have to have had some purpose or design that had led them there. While there is the possibility that such a design may extend to their marooning themselves on the motorway island, by the same token, it is not inconceivable that the discovery of the flyers (and subsequent retrieval of digital information) might plant the idea of an island visit when no such plan had previously been in the cards. Either way, as at the time of writing there remain no correspondents who have gotten in touch, I can only conclude that either no one has since ventured along the same route or no one has felt sufficiently interested to want to find out more. It would seem, then, that the island, and the islandness I accrued over the day and night I spent there, are destined to remain mine and mine alone. Perhaps this is as it should be. After all, not only is it illegal to trespass on motorways it is also, self evidently, extremely dangerous. Needless to say, this is by no means the kind of project that could be run by a university’s research ethics committee for approval. The rationale for this undertaking can hopefully be evinced from the analysis and discussion presented throughout this chapter. As a non-place – an unequivocally negative space – it is not the topography and landscape of the island that is of particular import (its constitutive placelessness and absence of human dwelling is for very good reason). Rather, it is all that the island opens up to as an inverted space of abstraction that is of significance: the negation of the negation of place; the non-place as a launch pad of the imagination; the flow and deterritorialisation of the affective body; a creatively ‘flirtatious’ (Crouch 2010) surfing of the utopic; a deep mapping of depthless space. As a negative space, the island, and the islandness it helps foster, is all of these things: a reverse transparency on which to map the meshwork, rhythms and delirious mobilities of late modernity.

Chapter 4

Stalker

Cinema stalks the world, shadowing it, refracting it, and changing it. – Adrian J. Ivakhiv, 2013

From the labyrinthine London cityscapes of Edgar Allen Poe’s Man of the Crowd to the hallucinatory vistas of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Zone, or to the larghissimo spectacle of Denis Lavant’s shadowing of a Buddhist monk walking with ritual deliberation through Marseilles in Tsai Ming-liang’s short film Journey to the West, the figure of the stalker has secured a wellentrenched foothold in the urban cultural imaginary. In an age of social media and locative smartphone apps the possibilities offered the budding stalker have expanded beyond all proportion as the practice of stalking migrates and extends its reach to the virtual spaces of the digital world. Reworking Descartes for the Facebook and Twitter generation, writer and filmmaker Chris Petit goes as far as to suggest that stalking lies at the heart of modern identity: ‘I am stalked therefore I am. . . . I stalk therefore I am’ (Roth 2008: 10). Parents may feel conflicted when insisting that their teenage son or daughter’s weekend away in the big city is conditional on the installation of a mobile phone tracker (such as ‘Find My iPhone’), but the realisation that modern parenthood might entail a license to stalk (and that, correspondingly, the personhood of the compliant teenager is that of potential stalkee) is unlikely to deter either party from continued participation in the contract. In typical everyday circumstances, for the behaviour of the stalker to be regarded as ‘stalking’ rests on relative degrees of consent; for example, a parent consensually ‘spying’ on a teenager in his capacity as responsible carer is of a wholly different order from a situation whereby that same parent finds himself spying on a teenager who is unaware they are being watched and who 91

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has no familial or consensual relationship with the voyeur/stalker whatsoever. The question of license and legitimacy in these matters is, needless to say, thorny and ethically fraught, as it is rife with the wider complexities bound up with technologies of surveillance and the gaze. In certain circumstances, it invariably leads to something of a face-off as demonstrated in the case of documentary filmmakers trying to probe the inner workings of the Church of Scientology. A memorable scene from Louis Theroux’s BBC-financed My Scientology Movie (2015) has Theroux confronting a cameraman commissioned by the Church to follow and stalk the filmmaker and his production crew. Brandishing his mobile phone as if a retaliatory weapon, we witness Theroux filming the cameraman who is filming him, both at very close range. The power differentials at play between what is essentially the weaponised gaze of two corporate giants locked in cinematographic combat are palpable and make for compelling viewing, but to tease out the ethical positionalities that underwrite such a face-off, whatever one’s view of Scientology (or, for that matter, of the BBC), is as knotty and complex as those that come with the territory of stalking and the stalker (Guardian 2017). Accordingly, it is not a foray into the ethics and practices of stalking per se that I am concerned with in this chapter. Such a move would push the discussion in a direction that veers sharply away from what it is that I do wish to engage with: that is, to strategically adopt the mantle of ‘stalker’ to open up questions around the use of visual methods – ‘cinemapping’ in particular – in urban spatial anthropology and gonzo or bricolage ethnography. Ethical considerations are by no means peripheral to the case study material I explore herein (the mediated geographies linked to the reporting of the killing of the Merseyside toddler James Bulger). Nor is critical reflection on the discourse and practice of stalking more generally entirely absent from the proceedings to hand. For current purposes, the significance of ‘stalker’ and ‘stalking’ lies chiefly in what it is they serve to frame in terms of a digitally mobile or perambulatory gaze and the uses to which such a technology might productively and/or contentiously be put. As has already been suggested, the act of stalking itself, despite its many negative associations, conveys a much broader sense of ethical ambiguity when we take stock of the different cultural meanings and values that are attached to the concept. The detective and investigative journalist are just as likely to be engaged in ‘stalking’ as the pathological stalker who voyeuristically shadows his prey for more nefarious ends. Similarly, at what point on the ethical spectrum does the paparazzi journalist slip into the category of celebrity stalker? Again, such questions, however worthy of our attention, are presented here as points of departure rather than subject matter of primary concern. That said, I am mindful that there is a danger of romanticising the idea of stalk-



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ing as a quest for some sort of transcendence or Truth (a la Tarkovsky), or of playing fast-and-loose with the notion of researcher-as-stalker in ways that undermine reasonable and entirely legitimate boundaries of ethical propriety. Some of the context surrounding the why and the how of the research project on which this chapter is based will shed some insight into these areas of consideration, and with it, hopefully some sense of a critical spatial ethics that can be extracted from this case study. But beyond these pages, as already intimated in chapter 2, any ethical and practical concerns raised by these examples are designed to interlace with the broader debates surrounding open and undisciplined research methods and to help carve out a more prominent space within which to critically examine some of the implications and challenges specifically posed by ideas of spatial bricolage, the researcher-as-gleaner/ glaneuse and the filmmaker-as-stalker (the latter being the jumping-off point for the current discussion). Although I am not yet in a position to try it, I suspect that an internet search that includes the words ‘Bulger case’ and ‘stalker’ might throw up results that include my own blunderings into this subject area, but by far the more prominent hits will direct readers to news items reporting the conviction, in October 2016, of a man (who locals had nicknamed ‘psycho’) who for years had been stalking James Bulger’s mother, Denise (Bunyan 2016). The sensitivities around the death of the young boy in 1993 and the long-standing media interest in the case brings with it an awareness of a responsibility on the part of those entering into or maintaining public discourse, whether journalists, broadcasters or academics, to ensure that the tone and conduct of any such communication is appropriate and tenable. Given this, self-identifying as a ‘stalker’ in describing the fieldwork process adopted in researching the Bulger case might well run the risk of aggravating such sensitivities. In order to offset any such concerns, some preliminary justifications are warranted before moving on to discuss the fieldwork in practice. ‘Stalking presupposes an intense projection that remains unfulfilled. If it is fulfilled that negates the condition which preceded it’. Chris Petit’s (Roth 2008: 10) diagnosis lends an air of obsession and unresolvedness to the act of stalking, almost as if the stalker, by definition, can never close the case – the chase is all, the quarry remains forever out of reach. In serial fiction, the brooding figure of a detective undergoing some kind of existential crisis certainly fits this mould. We could think here of Henning Mankell’s character, Kurt Wallander, or the charismatically intense Rustin Cohle (played by Matthew McConaughey) in the first series of the American crime drama True Detective (see Andrews and Roberts forthcoming). Closure (the solving of the murder, the arrest and conviction of the suspect) is never quite enough because the resolution it offers is not sufficiently in sync with the overarching state of

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existential flux that is the detective’s condition and being-in-the-world. The stalked quarry tramps a transcendental pathway along which the detective is destined to forever roam as a shadow. Closure can only ever be temporary; a pause between the closing credits and those that will set the scene on what unfolds the following week. In his book Stalking, Bran Nicol (2006: 92), by way of Walter Benjamin, draws parallels between the nameless flâneur of Poe’s Man of the Crowd and the modern detective story. The old man who is the fugitive object of the flâneur’s investigatory gaze remains undefined, a taxonomic anomaly that is unable to offer resolution. In this sense, Benjamin’s description of Man of the Crowd as ‘the X-ray picture of a detective story’ (1983: 48) is no less a template for the stalker as an existentialist urban shadow. The slightly purgatorial connotations this conjures up may appear at odds with the idea of the researcher-as-stalker. But the analogy holds up insofar as the common currency running through all of these urban spatial practices is a provisional, processual and performative relationship with the researcher’s ‘quarry’ (his or her object of enquiry). It alludes to the possibility that things are never quite resolved in the sense of a positivistic ‘bang to rights’. The researcher remains entangled, never fully lets go; there is always another shade or interpretative gleaning – another angle – that is potentially there for extraction. In addition to the provisionality of the research practice and the indivisible bond between the performative method and the discursive output, one further rumination on the stalker as embodiment of an urban spatial method proceeds from analysis of the technological mechanics of the mobile gaze: the visual apparatus which the fieldworker brings to his or her practice. This has particular bearing on the case study discussed shortly. If the field may be imagined as the Zone, then – to extend the analogy – isn’t Tarkovsky as filmmaker as much the stalker as the earnest wayfarer whom we follow as he meanders through the film’s diegetic world? Is it the researcher-as-videographer who is stalking his or her quarry or is it the researcher-as-performer? To what extent are the modalities of ‘stalking’ extricable from those that are mobilised in and through the act of film- or video-making itself? Ivakhiv (2013: 304) writes: ‘Just as the Stalker guides his followers slowly and carefully through the unpredictable and unknowable terrain of the Zone, I am suggesting that the filmmaker (or production collective) is a stalker in this sense as well’. The performative dispositions of the diegetic stalker can be seen as an extension of Tarkovsky as directorial stalker-in-chief. As viewers, we too are drawn in to this world as associate stalkers. The ‘stalking’ is made flesh by a gaze that is orchestrated, choreographed and complicit in its resolve to probe ever deeper into the space of the world being tracked. Importantly, the gaze is embodied – the performativity of the stalker is indivisible from the methods by



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which, as filmmaker, the stalker sets the gaze in motion in the first place. That the inherent visuality of the gaze is leavened by a sense of embodied, mobile, perambulatory, or peripatetic practice is a crucial element in the performance space that is opened up and explored as the researcher-as-stalker makes his or her way. I will return to this shortly when setting out the rationale for the visual methods adopted in my site-specific analysis of the James Bulger abduction and murder. One last point for consideration here stems from the idea that the stalker is engaged in tracking. ‘Making tracks’, as we saw in the previous chapter, is an exercise in linearity – lines that retain an unbroken and topographically grounded sense of spatial continuity, lines that tell a spatial story insofar as they are the residual patterns of a movement that we are retroactively plotting or unravelling. At one point in his ethnographic travelogue, Tristes Tropiques, Lévi-Strauss remarks: ‘Without deliberate intention on my part, a kind of mental “tracking shot” has led me from central Brazil to southern Asia; from the most recently discovered lands to those in which civilisation first made its appearance’ (1973: 181, emphasis added). The deployment of a cinematic metaphor here lends this description a strongly visual expressivity, as if the anthropologist, in the act of reflection, is drawing a line on a map that is able to transport us through both space and time in the iteration of its passage (or its lineation). For the metaphor to work, the movement needs to be unbroken, as, indeed, does a sequence or tracking shot in cinema. The video footage discussed below – unedited, a ‘raw’ process of capturing the reality unfolding (in real time) in front of the camera lens, a lineal transcription of the world into image – is ‘observational’ inasmuch as it could be said to combine ‘a desire for the invisibility of the imagination’ with ‘the aseptic touch of the surgeon’s glove’ (McDougall 1998: 129). Such logic has it that what I had set out to film would have been there anyway and so my role in the process is simply that of an invisible and dispassionate observer. This is tenable up to a point but only as far as the critical pigeon-holing of observational cinema can be reduced to its positivistic rendering of a ‘distanced, disembodied, controlling gaze’ (Grimshaw and Ravetz 2009: 541). Which is, of course, not very far at all. There are certainly correlations that can legitimately be made between observational modes of filmmaking and visual technologies of surveillance. By the same token, it isn’t too much of a leap to envision the observational tracking shot as a predatory tool of the stalker – a distanced (yet proximate) and disembodied gaze that is controlling to the extent that it mobilises relations of power. The tracking shot can be thought of in this way but it presupposes a conception of the stalker that is similarly wedded to a panoptic visual regime predicated on the necessary disempowerment or passivity of all it surveys.

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By wishing to neither bolster a reductionist approach as to what may or may not qualify as observational cinema nor limit how we might think about the subjectivity of the researcher/filmmaker-as-stalker or the practice of stalking as a legitimate ethnographic method, I am drawn instead towards what visual methods can offer in terms of their performative and provocatory potential. The idea of tracking in this context – drawing and following a line on a map; stalking the world through the perambulatory gaze of a digital video (DV) camera – comes alive (becomes flesh) in the form of an embodied perception that rolls and responds to the world as it is encountered. The observational remit of the visual methods employed here is not, therefore, driven by a desire to create ‘an accurate transcription of the world . . . [but instead] hinges upon connection, expressed in an almost intangible, empathic moment’ (Grimshaw and Ravetz 2009: 552). Grimshaw and Ravetz’s call for observational cinema to draw inspiration from perspectives in phenomenological anthropology is one that strongly resonates with the approach I have sought to bring to the cinemapping of the field sites relating to the Bulger case. FIRST STEPS A traumatic event such as the high-profile murder of a child leaves traces and echoes that are imprinted, often indelibly, on the material and symbolic landscapes of the places in which they occurred. Over the years, the narratives that attach themselves to these irrepressibly dark lieux de mémoire (Nora 1989) cast shadows across the folds and imbrications of spaces that are increasingly the product of multiple mediations. In the case of the twoyear-old Merseyside toddler James Bulger, abducted and murdered in 1993, the intense media interest sparked by the killing, news of which was met with revulsion around the world, has, in addition to the two decades of scrutinous reporting in the news media itself, given rise to television documentaries, a slew of ‘true crime’ books, accounts of those who investigated the murder, recollections of the boy’s parents, even art exhibits (Knifton 2010). More recently, there have been a growing number of YouTube videos uploaded by those moved to contribute their own narrative reflections on the case. Contained within this mosaic of Bulger narratives are cartographies of memory and trauma which are the intermedial product of specific, and at times contradictory spatial stories. Critical scrutiny of the Bulger case as a constellation of spatial narratives prompts questions as to the place of the local in mediations of violent and traumatic crimes, and the ways in which specific spaces of representation shape the symbolic landscapes of places burdened, if not quite defined, by the dark legacy of these crimes. Key to



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such questions is the extent to which these mediated spaces are embedded in or disembedded from (Roberts 2010b) the material and everyday urban landscapes that flesh out, more acutely, the shape and contours of a given spatial story. A framework of analysis that proceeds along these lines takes its cue from the tensions and contradictions at play between representations that serve to spectacularise and fetishise local topographies of crime and those more reflective of the embodied, sensory and ambulatory mappings that ground these stories in specific spaces and locales. At either end of what is presented here as a continuum rather than binary polarity, is, on the one hand, the grainy CCTV footage of James Bulger being led away by his abductors in the Strand Shopping Centre in Bootle; an image that quickly became an iconic and deeply disturbing signifier of the case and which has anchored the story in one of a handful of very specific locations (figure 4.1). On the other is a forty-two-minute video The Bulger Case: A Spatial Story, shot by the author in June 2010. This followed, in real time, the abduction route from the shopping centre, along the two-and-half-mile route through Bootle and nearby Walton to the location – a railway track – where the victim was killed and his body later found. If one could be said to have

Figure 4.1  CCTV image of James Bulger abduction from Bootle Shopping Centre, 12 February 1993.

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Figure 4.2  Still from The Bulger Case: A Spatial Story. Dir: Les Roberts, 2010.

ceded a space of representation that has ‘located’ the story in an ever more delocalized and virtual realm, the other has sought to make tangible the immaterial accumulations of images that have permeated the ‘ether’ (Lundemo 2010: 315) of Web 2.0 platforms such as YouTube and to re-embed their associated spatial stories in the everyday taskscapes and embodied entanglements of the local urban environment. To explore these stories is also to engage in a critical intervention in the spatial anthropology of media worlds and, by corollary, the spatial practices that configure specific and often contested narratives and place myths that constellate around affective landscapes such as those linked with high-profile crime stories. The Bulger Case: A Spatial Story is firstly discussed in terms of its status as a map of the abduction route: a cartographic representation that enables those navigating it on YouTube (www.liminoids.com/video/the​ bulgercaseaspatialstory.html) to locate themselves in the crime mise-en-scène and to explore a space of representation that provides insights into a very different spatial story from those that can be found, in abundance, elsewhere on the video-sharing site. Methodological reflections on the map-making process – the wayfinding practice that constituted the act of filming/walking/



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stalking the abduction route – are discussed alongside narratives generated by the video in the form of comments added by YouTube viewers. By adopting practices and tropes of stalking-as-wayfinding, and by being critically attentive to the ways in which film- and video-making practices are also fundamentally spatial practices, urban cinemapping can provoke insights into the lived, anthropological spaces of memory and the hidden or muted spatial stories to which they play host. The a-spatial configuration of digital image-spaces that are disembedded and delocated from a clear sense of geographical context is what makes YouTube the ultimate utopic space – a non-place. A place (such as the Strand Shopping Centre) can be an any-space-whatever (Deleuze 1986, 1989) in that it becomes detached from a rational pedestal of geometry and cartography by which spatial anchorage might otherwise be established, however tentatively. Nowhere is this spatial logic more amply demonstrated than in the rhetoric that drives the idea of ‘cloud’ computing. The singer Michael Jackson, who became interested in the Bulger case as it started to attract global media attention, mistakenly believed that the events took place in London rather than Merseyside (Wardrop 2009). This was long before the advent of smartphones and Web 2.0 yet already the ‘spatial story’ had started to work its way loose from its groundings in Bootle and Walton. A jettisoning of the rooted semiotics and affects of place and the rhizomatic riot of lines and connections that have supplanted them means that any geographical hold retained by a placenarrative is ever more tenuous. The digital diffusion that gives form to the formlessness of the ‘cloud’ provides a precariously a-spatial foundation for a cultural discourse that had its inception in landscapes that are every bit as tangible and mappable as the spatial stories that may be found there. The contention that the hyper-mediated ‘mappings’ that have shaped geographical understandings of the Bulger case are anchored in the immaterial environs of the ‘cloud’ or ‘ether’ is one that draws parallels with debates that weigh the cartographic abstractions of maps against the performative and situated practices of wayfinding (Turnbull 2005: 24; Ingold 2000). This tension is also played out in the historically shifting spatialities of the modern and postmodern city and the emergence of what Ed Dimendberg describes as ‘centrifugal’ urban spaces: If centripetal space is characterised by a fascination with urban density and the visible – the skyline, monuments, recognisable public spaces, and inner-city neighbourhoods – its centrifugal variant can be located in a shift toward immateriality, invisibility, and speed. Separation replaces concentration, distance supplants proximity, and the highway and the automobile supersede the street and the pedestrian. Where centripetality facilitates escape or evasion by facilitating invisibility in an urban crowd, centrifugality offers the tactical advantages of

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speed and superior knowledge of territory. Frequently lacking visible landmarks, centrifugal spaces substitute communication networks and the mass media to orient those who traverse them. (2004: 177–78)

As we saw in chapter 1, a countervailing emphasis on the merits of walking as a means to re-frame or replenish the otherwise abstract spaces of the city (and to de-cloud the cloud) is one that underpins a whole host of critical perspectives and practices. From Baudelairean flânerie, to Certeau’s discussion of geometric and anthropological space, or the Lynchian-based cognitive mappings of urban spatial anthropologists such as Jinnai Hidenobu, through to the loose coalition of practices that cluster under the label of ‘psychogeography’ (Richardson 2015); the gravitational (or centripetal) pull of the street as a performative space of embodied practice has furnished a rich cultural history and milieu within which the present discussion is situated. By critically aligning the embodied practice of cinemapping with that of stalking and wayfinding, my intentions in this chapter are threefold: (1) to explore more closely the spatial narratives that have come to define media representations of the Bulger case; (2) to examine the ways that digital tools can enhance strategies of wayfinding and urban memory; and (3) to counterweight the mediated abstractions of centrifugal space with the movement, contingence and messy vitality of anthropological space. Moreover, by seeking to engage with a wider social constituency through digital platforms such as YouTube, its aim is to show how urban cinemapping, as Turnbull notes more generally in relation to wayfinding, is not just limited to the experiences of the individual filmmaker, but that it is also ‘socially shared as gossip’ (2002: 137). LANDSCAPES IN THE FRAME The abduction, torture and killing of the two-year-old boy James Bulger in February 1993, while a tragic and deeply disturbing incident in its own right, was made all the more unsettling by the fact that the perpetrators of the crime were themselves young children. The murder sent shock waves across Britain and around the world. The worldwide interest in the case can in part be gauged by Michael Jackson’s reported desire to meet Bulger’s killers, believing he had the powers to heal them (Wardrop 2009 – for background to the events surrounding the Bulger case see: Valentine 1996; Morrison 1997; Lees 2011: 203–17; Messenger Davies 2013; Rice and Thomas 2013). News footage of the case featured CCTV images of the toddler being led away by his killers, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, both of whom were ten years old at the time. The images were captured in the Strand Shopping Centre in



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Bootle where Bulger and his mother were out shopping for the afternoon. Bootle is located north of Liverpool in the Merseyside borough of Sefton. In view of the importance attached to CCTV imagery in the Bulger case it is instructive to note that Britain now has more CCTV than any country in the world, with more cameras than the rest of Europe put together (Minton 2009: 47). Indeed, such was the impact of the Bulger killing and the role CCTV imagery played in the police investigation that the case proved pivotal in the subsequent development, expansion, and justification of CCTV systems in the UK (Knifton 2010: 83). Given the sheer volume of CCTV material, it is not surprising that much of this footage has found its way into the popular media in the form of real-life crime programmes, or shows such as BBC’s Crimewatch in which the programme makers work with the police to issue appeals to the public to help solve crimes, broadcast CCTV footage of crimes taking place, and stage reconstructions of crimes in their actual locations. Moreover, with the rise of video sharing sites such as YouTube, the fascination with true crime stories has meant that incriminating surveillance footage is endlessly consumed as part of user-generated narratives that feed off cases such as the Bulger killing. In topographic analyses of mediated crime, the role of television in the production and consumption of space can thus throw critical light on the place of the local in everyday imaginaries and the dis/embedded nature of the media geographies by which understandings of a place are shaped and transacted (Roberts 2016b). In its capacity to reinforce and compound the disciplinary logic that sustains a wider surveillance culture, television unquestionably plays a formative part, and in this regard, as a medium, it can be argued that it is television itself that needs putting ‘in the frame’. But that needn’t necessarily preclude televisual representations in which the place of the local is afforded more fine-grained and semiotically textured topographic treatment. Commenting on the limitations, as he sees it, of television in terms of representing landscape and location, the artist and filmmaker Patrick Keiller notes, rather disparagingly, that the celebrated London gangster film The Long Good Friday, released in 1979, was ‘conceived as a TV movie – the locations are used not as spaces, but as signs, in a rather crude semiotic sense. We see A Dock, A Pub, A Church, The River, these all used as objects, not spaces, to denote rather than create the atmospherics of the story’ (2003: 81). Coming from a similar critical angle, Chris Petit has suggested (I suspect somewhat puckishly) that one of his favourite television programmes is BBC’s Crimewatch. Petit bases this on the fact that, unlike the majority of what is likely to be encountered on the small screen, programmes such as Crimewatch are often specifically about place (Brown 1995). As mentioned above, Crimewatch, as with other programmes that now adopt a similar format, features CCTV

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footage of crimes, as well as reconstructions which often trace in detail the actual locations where crimes have taken place. These programmes and other real-life crime genres are now a well-established subject of academic scrutiny in television and media studies (see, for example, Jermyn 2003, 2005). Yet despite the proliferation of such genres what seems notably absent from much of the extant literature is detailed engagement with issues of landscape, place and space. For Petit, like Keiller, the critical imperative is to reflect on the ways in which visual narratives do not merely serve up the usual ‘semiotic’ depictions of places as generic or which are instrumentally yoked to the production of ‘location-as-setting’ (Lefebvre 2006; Roberts 2016b). Petit’s argument about the importance of place in television crime genres therefore raises salient questions about the relationship between image, representation and place in an urban context. The marginalisation of landscape in television – whether through its routine contraction as ‘setting’ or its downgraded importance in relation to landscape in film – needs to be considered alongside the way landscape and location is consumed as part of everyday cultures of viewing and the role television plays in shaping perceptions and practices of space and place. Given the topographic and locative nature of much television procedural drama – the detective being essentially a mobile subject: a figure whose investigative enquiries take her to and from specific location points as she goes about trying to piece together bits of the narrative puzzle – it is a genre that has much to offer for the purposes of spatial analysis. Although the current focus of concern relates specifically to factual and documentary genres, the more general points raised with respect to crime and procedural dramas underscores the main contention herein: (1) the mediation of spaces and places linked to high-profile crime cases – spatial stories of crime – lends itself to analysis of the contradictions between the spectacularised, centrifugal and disembedded spatialities these set in train and those that work against or in relation to these more abstract iterations of place; (2) to chart and cultivate the de-spectacularised, centripetal and embedded affects of place is to put into practice strategies and methods that exemplify what in broader terms I am describing as spatial anthropology (for a detailed discussion of landscape and the procedural crime drama see Roberts 2016b). In the case of Bootle and the Bulger murder, it is worth remarking by way of a brief historical aside that the first crime reconstruction film ever made was filmed only a short distance away from the Strand Shopping Centre. Arrest of Goudie was shot by the early film pioneers Mitchell and Kenyon in December 1901 less than two days after the real-life arrest of Thomas Goudie, a bank employee who had stolen £170,000 from the Bank of Liverpool to pay off gambling debts and who had subsequently disappeared. Thought to have fled to London, Paris or even Brazil he was in fact discovered in a house less



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than half a mile from the local police station in Bootle. Toulmin (2004: 37) points out that the film’s uniqueness and originality lay in the fact that (a) the filmmakers used the actual locations where the event occurred; (b) it was advertised as a factual and authentic account of the arrest; and (c) that it was filmed so soon after the arrest had taken place. This early fascination with the local topographies of topical crime stories would be echoed, nearly a century later, when Bootle was once again fated to be the subject of crime news media attention as the horrific details of the Bulger case became known. In the two decades that followed the murder there have been two key historical moments which reignited national media interest in the Bulger case: the release of the killers on license in 2001, and the return of Venables to prison for breaking the terms of his probation (in July 2010 he was sentenced to two years imprisonment for downloading and distributing indecent images of young children. He was recalled to prison again in 2017). In Eyes of the Detective, a BBC documentary made in 2001, the filmmakers revisit many of the locations linked to the Bulger abduction and murder. Although the events took place in Bootle, the opening images of the documentary are of the Liverpool landmark the Liver building at Pier Head. The film includes many travelling shots of Liverpool, Bootle and Walton taken from inside the car of Albert Kirby, the detective who had led the investigation in 1993. Kirby is filmed revisiting locations along the two-and-a-half-mile route which the killers took following the abduction of Bulger at the Strand. In this respect, it provides a more detailed mapping of the local geography relevant to the case than that found in the majority of media representations, which almost exclusively focus on the shopping centre and the railway line at Walton. Yet framing it within the wider symbolic geography of Liverpool reinforces the perception that for many – especially in the national media and those outside Merseyside – this was a Liverpool story rather than a more local Bootle- and Walton-based narrative. Andrew Lees recalls an article published in the Times newspaper asking ‘where had the city’s community conscience gone’? (2011: 217, emphasis added), a comment which tarred, in a stroke, all Liverpudlians with the same brush of collective culpability. For many in the overwhelmingly London-based news media, similar sentiments, such as claims that the ‘Self-Pity City’ was ‘getting off’ on its own misfortune (204-6), were the stock-in-trade of a press that has never fought shy of demonizing the city and its people, and for whom the Bulger case was seen as being indicative of the city’s disreputable character, reinforcing pervasive stereotypes about Liverpool. The fact that Bootle, where the abduction took place, is in the Merseyside borough of Sefton, and that the Bulgers lived in Kirkby, an overspill town in the Merseyside borough of Knowsley, did not detract from the overall impression that the Bulger killing was fundamentally a Liverpool story: a tale of the city and its people.

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STALKING | WAYFINDING | CINEMAPPING Within a few weeks of Venables’s re-imprisonment in 2010 the Liverpool Echo newspaper published a Google map showing the route that Bulger’s killers took the boy along before murdering him, providing at least one indicator that the renewal of interest in the case had also taken the form of a geographical curiosity as to the exact locations where the crime had taken place. Responses posted to the newspaper’s website struck a decidedly negative tone, one read: ‘Let the poor lad rest in peace, nobody wants a map, pity the scum who took his life have to keep reappearing’ (Liverpool Echo 2010). However, if the number of user-generated media on YouTube is anything to go by, there remains an enduring interest in the Bulger case, no doubt prompted by the widespread media coverage it still attracts. The majority of these YouTube videos take the form of tributes to the dead boy, with typically emotional or sentimental choices of soundtrack accompanying the images. They often feature images (still and moving) of the key locations – the Strand, the nearby canal, the railway track – which have been pulled from the news media and documentaries such as Eyes of the Detective, or James Bulger – a Mother’s Story (ITV 2008). Yet none feature the less well-known locations or provide much in the way of evidence of local forms of visual engagement with the case. As with the professional media representations, these videos reproduce and endlessly re-circulate the CCTV images of the shopping centre. The surrounding geography is largely ignored, with little or no information on the local urban context provided. This elision of place contributes to what is arguably the fetishisation of the Strand as a semiotic marker of an event that has become detached from the spaces and locations in which it unfolded. The apparent resistance to acknowledge the Bulger killing as a local spatial story, as evidenced by the response to the Liverpool Echo map, provokes consideration of the relationship between representation, space and place, and the ways in which film practices might elicit different forms of engagement with local urban geographies. Prompted by the publication of the route map, in June 2010 I decided to film the route in order to explore more closely the sites linked to the Bulger abduction (figure 4.3). Having established as accurately as possible the exact locations I set about the task of walking the route and filming it in one continuous take. Starting off outside a butchers shop in the Strand Shopping Centre where the abduction took place, I walked with a digital camera held at approximately waist level to avoid attracting attention. The other reasons for this method of filming was that it framed both an eye-level perspective of the walk as it might have been experienced by a two or three year old boy, and an embodied and peripatetic gaze: a perspective informed by the physical act of walking. The walk/film took approximately



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Figure 4.3.  Map of abduction route. Base map © OpenStreetMap contributors.

forty minutes to complete and offers at least a partial insight into how this two-and-half-mile journey along and across busy streets and junctions might have been experienced by a toddler in an acute state of distress. It has been well documented that no fewer than thirty-eight people saw the boys at various stages of the route. Branded by the press as the ‘Liverpool 38’ – the ‘ones Who Saw But Didn’t Act’ (Morrison 1997: 68; see also Ferguson 2003) – the fact that not one of these intervened, possibly preventing Bulger’s death, has been the cause of much soul-searching in Merseyside, not least amongst those individuals concerned. That this constellation of narratives is a product of the contingent geography of the route adds another tragic dimension to the spatial story that underpins the case. Near the end of the walk, not far from the railway bridge at Walton Lane, I was questioned by two men in a car who had spotted the camera and were demanding to know what I was doing. The confrontational approach of the men, who lived nearby, conveyed quite clearly their anger at my actions even though I had been filming public rights of way and not private residences or individuals. As I was reluctant to abandon the unbroken edit of the walk, particularly as I was so close to the end of the route, demands for me to stop filming were responded to with the untruthful assertion that the camera was switched off. As other people, local

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residents who appeared to know the men, had now joined the chorus of disapproval, it seemed clear that dialogue was not a favourable option and that the best course of action was to carry on and hope for the best. Yet the use of the word ‘nonce’ as part of the invective directed towards me by one of the men suggested that the context of filming – the connection with the Bulger case – was well understood. ‘Nonce’ is a colloquial term typically reserved for sexual offenders and child abusers. The local sensitivity surrounding the Bulger killing, still very raw, would explain the suspicions felt by some local residents towards a filmmaker perceived to be encroaching on spaces and communities that have had to endure the dark and unwanted legacy of the killing. The historian Andrew Lees relates a not dissimilar experience in his account of walking the abduction route, although his observations often resemble little more than caricature sketches that do little to dispel the stereotypical portrayal of many working-class Liverpudlians and ‘scallies’: Suddenly I faced the wizened hardness of several pre-teen hoodies whose childhood had been stolen from them. They were on BMX bikes outside a call box, defending their territory and doing dirty work for a drug gang. Their fearless malice made me freeze but then one asked me what I was doing . . . he probably had a knife and perhaps a gun (2011: 217).

Lees’s references to ‘leering streets’ and an air of ‘downtrodden resignation’ paint a grimly unflattering (if over-generalising) portrait of ‘a land of permanent lottery losses, bungled bank robberies’, peopled by those ‘who had missed the boat and now lived on a penn’orths of whiskey’ (216). Faced with such savage stigmatisation and barely disguised contempt it is not at all surprising that some members of the local community may react in ways that are abrasive or confrontational. What flagrantly negative portraits such as this serve to reinforce is the sense of an urban landscape that is irredeemably tainted and ‘in the frame’, as if the Bulger legacy had branded the streets and neighbourhoods in such a way as to sear in place a meta-narrative by which all sociality therein is measured. Guilt by association. The ‘pre-teen’ hoodies (James Bulger’s killers, remember, were ten years old in 1993) whose ‘childhood has been stolen’ were bound to have been knife or gun-wielding drug dealers, for what else would these landscapes-in-the-frame have conceivably spawned? Or so such reasoning would have it. But then, for all that, had my contribution done anything other than to exacerbate these pre-existing tensions? Is not the mere act of directing the gaze towards spaces and communities that have had to unwittingly shoulder this legacy enough to re-entrench the symbolic tramlines of that spatial story? There are countless others that could potentially be told but none that appear fully able to extricate themselves from



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the meta-narrative that forever hangs over landmarks and locations which, for those perceived as outsiders at least, seem perpetually fated to convey that set of associations. Moreover, if I should choose to describe my intervention in terms of stalking it should not exactly come as a shock to learn that those on the receiving end might feel as though they are being stalked. However naïve this exercise in stalking-cum-wayfinding-cum-cinemapping may have been, the intention was to explore a space of representation that was deliberately at odds with that which has long dominated visual discourses surrounding the Bulger case. Re-framed as a spatial story, the grounding of its virtual geographies provides a counterpoint to the abstract iterations of place that have over the years secured an ever-greater foothold in centrifugal spaces of media spectacle. The use of the shopping centre CCTV footage, although time and place specific (the date and time is on the images, as is the name of the shop where the CCTV camera was located), conveys more of a deterritorialised sense of place and locale: an any-space-whatever to use Deleuze’s concept: Any-space-whatever is not an abstract universal, in all times, in all places. It is a perfectly singular space, which has merely lost its homogeneity, that is, the principle of its metric relations or the connections of its own parts, so that the linkages can be made in an infinite number of ways. It is a space of virtual conjunction, grasped as the pure locus of the possible. (Deleuze 1986: 109, emphasis added)

The narratives surrounding the CCTV images of the Bulger abduction have played centrally on the actions that were to follow, often imagining ‘what if’ scenarios of other possible (happier) outcomes or temporal connections that could have emerged from the any-space-whatever of the shopping centre. The spectral, haunted spaces of memory (Pile 2005) which the low-resolution images invoke are those whose affective potency lies in the conjunctive irresolvability of time and space. Locked in an endless replay, and spiralling further into a centrifugal vortex of non-space, the images cannot sustain a contradictory logic in which the repression of space conceals the temporal inevitability of events whose afterlife is rehearsed in real space and real time. To the extent that it exhibits ‘topographic continuity’ (Misek 2012: 55) and spatial embeddedness, the moving image ‘capture’ of quotidian urban landscapes such as those I set out to explore represents what is essentially a performative space of cartographic engagement. That is, like any form of locative media, these spaces of representation provide the means by which spectators or readers can transform themselves into wayfarers, performers or spatial practitioners. Commenting on the affinities between film and

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cartography, Tom Conley notes that, ‘by nature [film] bears an implicit relation with cartography. . . . [F]ilms are maps insofar as each medium can be defined as a form of what cartographers call “locational media”’ (2007: 1–2). However, insofar as film, as a spatial practice, is also a form of mapping it is the spatial anthropology of moving image cultures that is of particular import. The fine-grained distinctions that delineate what is meant by ‘cinematic cartography’ or cinemapping in this context are thus to draw attention to the performative and embodied semiotics of cartographic knowledge (Bruno 2002; Caquard and Taylor 2009; Roberts 2012a, 2012d; Misek 2012). Ingold’s distinction between mapping-as-wayfinding and the ‘totalising vision’ and ‘transcendent consciousness’ of cartographic reason (2000: 230) is thus steered towards a greater recognition of an anthropology of mapping practices that is rooted – or routed – in movement and time. This critical emphasis on the performativity of mapping-as-wayfinding accords with Certeau’s temporalised notion of space as ‘practiced place’ (1984: 117): the everyday journeys, narrative trails, and storylines (Ingold 2007: 90–96, 2015b) that shape anthropological understandings of environment and place. Of course, in the mediation of the Bulger case what may also be described as storylines or narrative trails have unravelled themselves through the disembodied and a-spatial spaces of virtual conjunction (any-spaceswhatever) that platforms such as YouTube help nurture and propagate. Yet these are spatial stories that do not presuppose, or necessarily lay claim to, an intrinsic connection to the anthropological spaces of memory that are resonant with the emotional geographies and local sensitivities that the wayfarer might seek to map (or, indeed, unwittingly trespass upon). However, in instances where these spatial stories bear the archaeological imprints of pasts burdened by the weight of dark heritage (White and Frew 2013), the fact that narratives that are generated might allow connections with other spaces, identities and their associated emotions, might, for some, have the benefits of meliorating the burden of memory: of ‘forget[ting] in order to remain present’ (Augé 2004: 89). By way of a quick recap, the video, The Bulger Case: A Spatial Story, is an attempt to reconfigure the spaces of representation that have dominated the mediations and narratives connected with the 1993 murder. Conceived of as a deep mapping practice, its aim is to explore and map cartographies of knowledge that are ambulatory: the product of embedded and embodied spatial engagement – stalking as a provocatory mode of wayfinding. As an exercise in wayfinding, the video, and the cinemapping strategies of which it is a product, has sought to narrate a spatial story, not as a palimpsest or corrective to those it might otherwise claim to overwrite, but as a means by



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which the crosscurrents of space, place and memory might be brought more sharply into view. In so doing, its overarching aim is to make explicit the spatialities that shape the production and consumption of local narratives, and to provoke and explore the contested iterations of place and cultural memory that mediations of the Bulger case have refined in the two decades or more since James Bulger’s murder. Accordingly, in the next section I consider some of comments posted on YouTube by those responding to the video before drawing together some concluding remarks and observations. STALKING THE ETHER As already suggested, discussions on the spatiality of Web 2.0 platforms such as YouTube invariably focus on the connectivity, flow and relational cartographies that propel its narratives and imagery into the ‘ether’ (Lundemo 2010: 315) or ‘non places’ (Iverson 2010) of cyberspace (cf Meek 2012). Elsaesser, for example, imagines himself as a ‘Web 2.0 flaneur’ (2010: 169), posing the question as to what stories and spatial narratives YouTube offers ‘once a user engages with the site’s dynamic architecture . . . and then lets him/herself be taken to different sites, spaces and places . . . by the workings of contiguity, combinatory and chance’ (167). The apparently limitless abundance of spaces the YouTube flâneur may happen to chance upon reinforces the sense of a ‘plenitude’ and totality of virtual and archival spaces ‘out/up there’ within which to roam (Lundemo 2010: 314; Gehl 2009). The weightless and immaterial suggestiveness of the ‘archival cloud’, while antithetical to the embedded corporeality of material spatial practices (the ambulatory mobilities of the wayfarer), is also architecturally indicative of a new spatial logic underpinning modes of cultural consumption. In this respect, Geert Lovink’s observation that ‘we no longer watch films or TV, we watch databases’ (in Snickars 2010: 304) is one that echoes Lev Manovich’s (1999) contention that the database is the new symbolic form of the computer age, supplanting other modes of cultural expression such as the narrative (syntagmatic, linear cause-and-effect sequencing, characteristic of traditional literary or cinematic forms). The anti-narrative logic of Web 2.0, Manovich suggests, initiates new forms and structures of cultural production and consumption, by which token we might deduce that, by dint of its ether-like capacity to induce paradigmatic patterns of virtual flânerie, YouTube is itself antithetical to conventional modes of narrative ‘ambulation’. However, it is clear that this need not necessarily be the case – without, that is, discounting the extent to which YouTube videos are able to sustain,

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over time, extra-textual narratives and dialogues in the form of comments on the video made by users, as well as comments on other users’ comments. In a later article, Manovich picks up on this, noting that ‘web infrastructure and software allow such conversations to become distributed in space and time; people can respond to each other regardless of their location, and the conversation can in theory go on forever’ (2009: 327). When more pointedly applied to the theoretical specificities of deep mapping and narrative cartography, the otherwise incidental reference in this quote to ‘regardless of their location’ underscores the degree to which the ‘locatedness’ of enunciation is by no means incidental when critical enquiry is pegged to questions of how, why, and where particularly spatial stories are located in place. This can be illustrated by examining a selection of comments that YouTube audiences posted in response to The Bulger Case video. One of the first comments addressed a particular aspect of geographical detail: The route is not correct. They went into Park Str., pass the javbone [Jawbone] tavern, and then they went into the Merton Rd.

This is true. After completing the video/walk I realised that I had overlooked a short part of the route and should have turned left off Stanley Road earlier before then joining up with Merton Road via Park Street and Litherland Road. The user’s reference to the Jawbone Tavern in his/her comments suggests familiarity with the local geography, and enables us, with a certain degree of confidence, to situate the user as someone who lives in the area or has at least good local knowledge. It is also worth noting that the user’s YouTube Channel reveals a number of videos linked to the Bulger case, many of them tributes or memorials to the murdered boy. Responding to this comment (two years later), another user posted the word ‘correct’. That user’s YouTube profile picture is of the Liverpool Football Club logo, again suggesting a possible local connection. The first commentator cited above, responding to a user who had described the video as ‘amazing’, replied: Amazing ??? This is definitely the wrong word for it.........

The negative reception of the video that is evident here may be on account of the geographical error that the user’s comments drew attention to; equally it may be that, from a local perspective, such detailed geographical scrutiny of a story many would doubtless wish to forget has been perceived as an unwelcome and intrusive intervention into issues that remain very sensitive to those local communities affected.

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Figure 4.4  Map showing error in cinemapping tracking of the abduction route. Base map © OpenStreetMap contributors.

The majority of the responses to the video commented on the length of the abduction route and how this fact alone would have contributed to the suffering of the toddler. For example: It seems the way is so long . . . poor kid. I’m still amazed that ten year olds, much less a two year old, could walk all this way without collapsing. Simply horrifying.

Given the length of the route, other commentators questioned how or why so few people had intervened, a subject that obviously touches on particular sensitivities for those who lived and worked in the area: Really stupid. they walked for such a long time. a long distance and yet NOBODY noticed something:( poor James