walking, experience, participation, presence, rhythm, flâneur, biography, prehistory, settlement, pilgrimage, ethnography, reality, unreality
Walking on two feet is both the most simple and basic of activities, and is what has made us human. While for long ignored, walking as a practice and a theme is receiving increasingly attention, highlighted by the popularity of the Camino de Santiago. An embodied, multisensory, lived experience, involving participation and presence, walking brings out and alleviates the increasing unreality of the contemporary world. Central themes and methods in the sociology of walking include pre-historical sociology, the shift from walking culture to settlement, pilgrimage as a religious practice, autoethnography, and walking interview as a biographical method. Walking is homologous to thinking and drawing, each being lineal, and is compatible with a return to the thinking of Plato.