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

Introducing a line

I begin with a line. The line of the Jordan Trail is a 650-km (450 mile) walking trail running the length of Jordan. In Arabic, it is called darab al urdon, درب الاردن, translated as the ‘Path of Jordan’. I begin with a line because while walking is increasingly regarded as an important cultural practice, ¹ walking trails themselves have been neglected. Walking trails as a cultural site of production can be important to explore embodied accounts of place in which the materiality of ground and the relationship between movement, lines, and place matters. ² The aim of this article is to illustrate how a long-distance walking trail, the Jordan Trail, can investigate accounts of movement that predate current borders and capture indigenous and embodied accounts of movement that can redraw place. The processes by which walking trails are drawn, and the material and immaterial traces they follow, deserve greater focus. Walking trails capture historical movements as they follow the traces left by previous movements, but they can also be understood through the movement of present-day walkers along them. As such, accounts of movement are captured that speak back to bordering practices in Jordan, which have traditionally curtailed movement and sedentarised the large Bedouin population. Jordan’s borderlines (drawn in 1921 after the breakdown of the Ottoman Empire) created divisions, particularly among Bedouin tribes, by drawing lines where none previously existed. The Jordan Trail I argue is one that can recapture the movements curtailed by these bordering practices and critically consider which movements and which bodies that move have been privileged within state narratives.

The Jordan Trail begins at Jordan’s northern border with the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights and continues in an almost vertical line, parallel and at times only a few miles away from Jordan’s western border with Israel and the West Bank, until its southern border with Saudi Arabia at the Red Sea. As Image 1 illustrates, it is a mapped line imposed on the land, in a similar way to the drawing of a borderline. However, in contrast to the borderline, a walking trail is moved along and is formed as a result of movement. The Jordan Trail at times follows historical trade routes used by Nabatean merchants and their camel caravans, routes the Roman and Ottoman Empires continued to use into the early 20th century. At other times, the Jordan Trail follows the footprints of animals and their Bedouin herders, footprints that intersect with those of modern-day walkers. The historical nature and close relationship with place through routes is reminiscent of what Lorimer terms a ‘sentient topography’. ³ By exploring the relationships between reindeer and their herders, Lorimer observed the creation of an earthbound geography that animates the lived culture of the herd. ⁴ Cultural and political accounts of place intersect here in which constructions of state territory are unpacked by cultural accounts of place. These accounts of place draw attention to both the materiality of ground and the ongoing connections between movement and body. The movements of humans and non-humans, and particularly indigenous and Bedouin movements, become part of territorial imaginaries. The state and its bordering practices are not central to these accounts, lines that transgress borders also matter. Just as Lorimer’s reindeer moves between different nation-states, so do the lines of the Jordan Trail. For example, a Nabatean trade route moved from Iraq, through Jordan and across Palestine and Israel to the Mediterranean sea ports.

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Image 1.

Map of Jordan showing political borders.

The capturing of alternative histories of movement contributes to recent work in mobility studies asking for ‘historical time horizons drawing on global indigenous, non-western, and postcolonial experiences’ ⁵ and within political geography for the need to explore accounts of topography, territory and bordering practices through everyday and embodied experiences that capture the relationality of places. ⁶ The empirical work at the heart of this article presents a politics of movement through an in-depth case study of a trail as a cultural site of production. My prolonged engagement with the Jordan Trail, walking its lines on foot and volunteering for the Jordan Trail Association (JTA), illustrates how embodied accounts of movement can be captured by paying attention to individual bodies who move. In Jordan, cultural practices – such as a walking trail – are often neglected and cultural geography as a discipline has had limited engagement with the Middle East. I suggest work in cultural geography can speak to political geographies of movement and territory. For instance, I draw on cultural geographical and cultural anthropological work on lines, walking, and the relationality between the moving body and the materiality of ground throughout this article. This article argues that the cultural geographies of a walking trail can capture relationships between people and place in which every day, Bedouin and experiential accounts of movement and place matter. I do this by focusing on the line of the Trail. I bring into conversation a political geography focused on lines, politics and power with cultural geographical accounts more embedded in the experiential and ongoing working out on the ground of the Trail.

The article is organised as follows. The next section focuses on the drawing of the borders of the Jordanian state and discusses how lines can delimit, restrict and cut movement in ways that are often violent. I then draw on work in cultural geography to suggest that lines can be understood through movement and embodiment. In moving beyond Cartesian accounts of territory, I argue work in cultural geography can speak to contemporary work on territory and borders in political geography, and that cultural geography has not sufficiently engaged with walking trails nor the Middle East. In the following three sections, I discuss how movement along a line is captured on the Jordan Trail. First, in the drawing of the line of the Jordan Trail, I critically examine what the term drawing might mean and how a walking trail offers an alternative mapping (Image 2). Second, I explore how Bedouin versus Western understandings of movement can create moments to reconsider how geopolitical knowledge about place is created and valued. Third, I pay attention to the relationship between embodiment and movement, how bodies matter and how different bodies matter on the Jordan Trail in ways that create embodied cultural political accounts of Jordan. In sum, I argue that the Jordan Trail illustrates the potential of walking trails as cultural practices to understand the cultural politics of movement, particularly within the context of the Middle East.

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Image 2.

Schematic map of the Jordan Trail.

Lines as violent

The creation of the modern borders of Jordan was a violent, colonial act that created states along lines where none had previously existed. ⁷ Massad ⁸ argues that boundary lines and maps are particularly important in Jordan because ‘before 1921, there was no territory, people, or nationalist movement that was designated, or that designation itself, as Transjordan ⁹ ’. It was a state created by Britain and other colonial powers. After the breakdown of the Ottoman Empire, the areas it encompassed were partitioned by France and Britain, resulting in 1921 in the creation of Transjordan under British protectorate. ¹⁰ In 1946, Jordan gained its independence and was renamed the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan (Jordan) and at this time incorporated the West Bank. The West Bank was subsequently seized by force by Israel in 1967. ¹¹ This resulted in Jordan being a state in which borders have been drawn and redrawn as a result of war and colonialism and having severed populations in ways that are contested and experienced in the present day through ‘diverse, multilayered identities and complex connections to different places’. ¹² A bordering and line drawing was and is particularly violent for the Bedouin population in Jordan whose tribal links extended beyond the boundaries of the current state. ¹³

Jordan’s large and mobile Bedouin population was seen as a problem as it was a population that had tribal links beyond the borders drawn under the British mandate period and whose nomadic herding routes extended beyond these borders. The state map making was destructive as it produced borderlines that cut off other lines of movement and tribal links beyond its borders. The state and its borders, however, could never adequately or completely curtail or tame the movement of the Bedouin and as a result measures to sedentarise the Bedouin were imposed by the Jordanian state. Sedentarisation in Jordan forced the previously mobile Bedouin population to live in fixed locations through enforcement of laws requiring children to attend school and to only provide essential items such as healthcare, water, sanitation and electricity to those living in fixed locations. ¹⁴ Scott ¹⁵ calls these practices of state legibility, attempts by the state to ‘arrange the population in ways that simplified . . . classic state functions’. These attempts to arrange the population for Scott ¹⁶ were in part by sedentarising the population, ‘people who move around’ have always been enemies of the state. As the rise of the privileged body (White, Western, male) of the 21st century has illustrated mobility is never equal but only granted to some and (im)mobility has always been an act of state control. ¹⁷

Borders are moved through freely for some and are violent for others. ¹⁸ The border is one of the most stark reminders of the productive powers of the map.^19,20 Cartographic lines are problematic because they privilege certain conceptualisations of space particularly the lines of borders. Geographical understandings of the world are normalised. ²¹ These lines also fail to notate forms of movement that relate to intersubjective experience. Carter ²² argues they can be compared to the rectangular grid imposed on the earth’s surface by the imperial survey. Lines have a role in the formation of the modern state particularly through cartography and the depiction of the modern state on the map: ‘as a spatial form modelled on the map’s linear boundary and homogeneous space’. ²³ However, Carter ²⁴ argues that what was left out of these predominantly state-drawn maps is the body that writes. Bodily movement has been immobilised, its pre-inscriptions erased and its corporeality dematerialised. In her research into mapped representations of the Middle East, Culcasi ²⁵ argues,

Though analysis of official and cartographic discourses remain important areas of study, a focus on maps tells only a partial story that can miss the complexity of how people imagine their relationship with the territories.

Two points arise in Culcasi’s ²⁶ argument that are important to this article: first, the erasure of lived experienced within cartographic and official (state or colonial) discourses, and second, cartographic practices privilege the border as the most important line. The erasure of lived experiences of cartography is one shared by Krishna’s ²⁷ work in India, through what he terms cartographic anxiety. Cartography, Krishna argues, is more than the technical and specific mapping of the country and also the representational practices that entrench countries such as India with a history, meaning, content and trajectory. Peteet, ²⁸ Neocleous ²⁹ and Shapiro ³⁰ all use the term violent cartography to describe the state’s violent constructions of territory through the act of mapping and drawing of borders. Importantly, in all these cases, the line is significant as an enactor of this violence. Krishna ³¹ writes that daily life is bisected by lines on the map that discipline and abstract those living close to borders. Peteet, ³² Neocleous ³³ and Shapiro ³⁴ further suggest cartographic violence is carried out by lines themselves which divide and lineate. It is not just cartography that is violent but the way in which lines are enforced and controlled by the state. This argument is even more pertinent in Jordan. As Nacify ³⁵ notes, ‘in recent years no region in the world has borne deadlier sustained clashes of physical (and discursive) borders than the Middle East’. These physical and discursive clashes speak to the need, I argue, to go beyond discussions over current borders but lines which might capture other bordering practices. Further for the need to explore cultural and everyday practices within the context of Jordan to explore the impact of state creation in Jordan on relationships between individuals and place. I argue for a co-production of place in which walking bodies can produce new understandings of place and an acknowledgement of lines that can capture embodied experiences of movement. This follows work in cultural geography arguing for understandings of place that can capture multiple narratives, histories, that are co-productive. ³⁶ These pluralising accounts of place ensure that indigenous and forgotten relationships can emerge.

I therefore explore the means by which a walking trail creates a line on the ground that captures embodiment and movement; a line that captures pluralising narratives and intersubjective experiences; a line that is not one thing but always in relationality with those who move along it and a line that can change, can have different meaning depending on those who walk it and can produce opportunities to speak back to other line drawing practices in the Middle East and highlight their violence.

Lines as movement and embodiment

To be a place, every somewhere must lie on one or several paths of movement to and from places elsewhere. Life is lived along paths, not just in places, and paths are lines of sort. It is along paths too, that people grow into a knowledge of the world around them, and describe this world in the stories they tell. ³⁷

Following Ingold, ³⁸ it is the movements, knowledges and lives lived along lines that offer another way of understanding the demarcation of territory. For Ingold, ³⁹ a consideration of lines is a way of knowing and inhabiting the world, a means through which to understand how movement and embodiment are central to constructions of place. Ingold’s work makes connections between the cartographic practices involved in creating the Jordan Trail and the practices of movement that make these lines sensed, experienced and formed. Through alternative conceptualisations of lines, in ways that contrast with what Ingold ⁴⁰ terms a Eurocentric fixation on lines of demarcation, boundary building and separation, he suggests a different worldview is created. It is a worldview in which lines are not simply those of borders, cartography or town planning but lines formed in the natural world, lines that are carried in indigenous stories and made through movements. A walking trail offers possibilities to capture these embodied movements along lines. Walking trails, particularly within tourism studies, are receiving increasing academic interest. Timothy and Boyd, ⁴¹ for instance, argue that lines, routes and/or trails have not until recently been considered ‘elements’ of tourism, and thus argue that trails offer important accounts of how individuals are moving through place. Studies which do take into account walking trails have often been heavily focused on the question of why one walks, their motivations or else quantitative accounts of demographics. ⁴²

Few studies of walking take place in non-European or North American settings. This returns again to the question of what forms of movement are valued. It depends on what we call a study and also what is defined as walking. Few academic studies have attempted to think more critically about what walking is as a practice. ⁴³ Through my exploration of lines and a walking trail, I want to move beyond the question of why one walks, to instead how one walks. This questions walking within different cultures and beyond Eurocentric and North American histories of walking, leisure, and discovery. While important work, particularly in disability studies, ⁴⁴ is exploring what it means to walk, my interest in the question of how we walk is considering how the routes for walking to take place are formed, how movement is captured along them and how these routes are negotiated by the body. The result of this line of enquiry is an acknowledgement of how walking can create different relationships between individual movements and place. A question, I argue, can be considered through cultural practices such as a walking trail and builds on recent work in Jordan exploring cultural practices as political in addition to work exploring the politics of movement in conflict and post-conflict regions at the everyday scale. ⁴⁵ Riding ⁴⁶ argues that walking-with-others while traversing the post-genocidal landscape of Bosnia on foot can challenge more linear and conventional approaches of landscape and conflict. Landscapes for Riding ⁴⁷ are not static entities but performed, multiple and in-becoming and walking can be a means of making landscapes come alive.

I focus on the act of drawing the line of a walking trail and how this drawing captures movement erased by the sedentary perspective of nation-states. ⁴⁸ It is revealing, Ingold ⁴⁹ notes, that the verb to draw is one that commonly refers to actions pertaining to the hand. ⁵⁰ This results in two problems. First, drawing is typically associated with pen and ink and the use of the hand. Lines may appear on maps and charts using a ruler and a compass; lines ‘have no physical counterpart in the world’. ⁵¹ Second, there is a tendency to privilege those things made with the hand over the foot. The foot with its immobile big toes is merely a pedestal to hold the body upright ‘while all the important work of holding, feeling, and gesturing is delegated to the hand’. ⁵² Bipedal movement freed the hands for the use and manufacturing of tools. ⁵³ Walking, however, places the foot directly in contact with the ground. It can both follow lines drawn by other bodies and create lines as it moves, the walking body draws.

There are numerous ways of naming the Jordan Trail: a trail, a path, a way, a set of GPS coordinates or a route. ⁵⁴ By using the word line, I encompass all these linguistic variations and also the possibility to move beyond the line by considering how these different forms relate in turn to different systems of knowledge and embodied movements – different ways in which the body draws. Ingold, ⁵⁵ for instance, concentrates on three types of lines that illustrate how drawing is an embodied act through walking: threads, traces and ghostly lines. Threads, usually woven by human hands, are one of the most ancient of human arts through which buildings, textures and materials are made. They also emerge in natural environments, in the form of roots, rhizomes and fungal mycelia. Traces are any enduring surface left on a solid surface by continual movement, usually one of two kinds: additive or reductive. Lines drawn with chalk or charcoal are the former, while lines scratched, scored or etched onto the surface are the latter. Like threads they adorn the non-human world and are left often by humans. Ghostly lines are those which do not bear any physical mark on the surface but are instead created in our imagination, through stories or on charts.

These distinctions between lines are crucial for Ingold, ⁵⁶ because they change relationships with surfaces. It is the joining of threads that make surfaces and the dissolution and disappearance of traces that dissolve them. An attention to lines can illuminate how surfaces are created and how individuals relate to them. Surface is a term, I suggest, that can encompass the materialities of ground and the social aspects of place. I argue that exploring the movement of bodies along a walking trail, a line, is able to capture embodied relationships between individuals and the materiality of ground as they walk and also the different meaning inscribed on place through lines. For Ingold, ⁵⁷ walking is a process in which surfaces are created as the walking body continually breathes, steps and interacts with the surface materially and ephemerally. For instance, the breathing of air, touching of a plant, placing of a footstep all continually alter the surface of the earth. This offers a contrary understanding to the Cartesian relationship between land, terrain and territory outlined by Elden, ⁵⁸ a relationship in which territory is related to power and the state and is an amalgamation of both the resource of land and the field of power linked to terrain. ⁵⁹ Recent work in political geography and particularly feminist geography has begun to unpack this Cartesian and static view of territory through movement, ⁶⁰ intimacy, embodiment and emotion. ⁶¹ I build on this work, particularly its ability to produce embodied accounts of territory in which individual bodies are valued and storied accounts of territory are created.

Cultural practices like walking and cultural geographical approaches to place ⁶² have received little attention in political geography’s accounts of territory. Work in cultural geography on place, and particular its focus on how the moving body can engage with place, has much to offer political accounts of the Middle East. In this work, embodiment relates to the ability for the individual, embodied subject to create their own meaning of place. Embodiment through walking is a constant relationship between movement, body and ground. Through walking, each body can be differently mobile and alternative accounts of movement in Jordan are created.

Researching the Jordan Trail

Although this article is not directly focused on methods, I want to emphasise the importance of embodied methodologies within political and cultural geography. The fieldwork for this article involved long periods on the Jordan Trail of both mobility and immobility. I estimate I walked its 650-km length twice. This is because the Jordan Trail is not always walked as a whole but in sections, or a series of day trips, of which I joined numerous different walks. This included a 44-day ‘thru-hike’, ⁶³ day trips and section walks in 2016 and 2017. I also spent time ‘not moving’ in homestays and resting on the trail. Further I volunteered for the JTA from Summer 2016 to Summer 2017, working primarily in their office, answering emails, helping produce marketing material and running their social media accounts. These moments of stasis and time spent in the JTA office are as important as the act of walking and time on the trail. Investigating alternative understandings of place must involve negotiations between both official discourse and experiences. I was fortunate enough to be able to spend prolonged periods of time with those involved in the Jordan Trail and those walking so that this research was able to capture a wide range of voices and experiences. I learnt Arabic and can speak it conversationally; furthermore, I made my position, reasons for being there and research clear and open for dialogue and conversation. My positionality as a young, White, female researcher is important to mention especially when in conversation with the class dynamics of walking. Walking on the Jordan Trail is a privileged activity. To have the money and free time to walk, the Jordan Trail is not granted to all Jordanians. ⁶⁴ There are, however, increasing numbers of not-for-profit walking groups aimed at Jordanians who use the Jordan Trail for day trips. Although the Jordan Trail intends to be an international walking trail, it is currently attracting mostly Jordanians. ⁶⁵ I dealt with my anxieties in the field following Smith ⁶⁶ by being transparent about my position and politics, including points of disagreement and my ongoing research. I also made sure to share my research findings along the way in informal settings with those I had involved.

Generating the line: creating the Jordan Trail

The story of the Jordan Trail changes depending on who tells the story, but the generally agreed narrative goes something like this. In the 1980s, a couple from Manchester, Tony Howard and Di Taylor, were given funding by the Jordanian Ministry of Tourism and Queen Noor of Jordan to develop walking and climbing routes across Jordan. A couple of books later, ⁶⁷ and the steady development of Jordan as a walking and climbing destination, led to conversations in the spring of 2014 about a long-distance walking trail in Jordan connecting these different walking trails together. Others in the tourism industry told me the idea of a Jordan Trail was also in response to the growth within tourism practices of trails and lines connecting different tourism sites to create more coherent tourism narratives. ⁶⁸

The 2000s saw a group of Jordanians with support from USAID and tourism agencies in Jordan begin the process of mapping the Jordan Trail in two main ways: first, by speaking with locals; second, through the use of colonial and Ottoman maps of the region. These maps were used by those drawing the line of the Jordan Trail to find old Roman roads that might have since been covered up, roads used during the Ottoman times and also topographically to find aesthetically pleasing natural scenery. They then went to these areas, walked them to check and then spoke to locals. These maps were provided by Queen Noor and are not publicly accessible. Maps of Jordan are only produced by the military and are also not publicly accessible as the current political situation in the Middle East means they could be a security concern I was told. This means that for those wishing to go walking in Jordan, there are no detailed maps available in the way that Ordinance Survey maps in the United Kingdom are.

The drawing of the line of Jordan Trail, however, needed to be clearer and more precise. This line was intended to be walked by large numbers of people; therefore, detailed maps were needed and since at many parts there was nothing clear on the ground to signify the route of the Trail, a line needed to be drawn using online software to then be downloaded onto GPS devices, and waymarks on the ground for it to be followed. As opposed to the drawing of boundary lines, a performative mapping process takes place. One in which a line becomes more than one thing, it is material, digital and imaginative.

Its materiality takes the form of both the maps that are produced, the waymarks on the ground and the traces it follows. These traces might be a Roman road that is followed; polished rock worn down by the footsteps of Bedouins moving their herds to better grazing areas; the footprints of camels, donkeys and goats; passages used by Nabatean traders, evidence of their movement through polished rocks and the irrigation channels they were famous for. Alongside these lines of movement, the traces of churches, mosques, Roman amphitheatres and palaces adorn the Trail and place it within a history of movement beyond its current borders. As Robin’s ⁶⁹ ‘A History of Jordan’ illustrates, Jordan’s history is one of recent Middle Eastern geopolitics and is also one of Islamic, Judaic and Christian significance and one that dates back to Neolithic times and incorporates significant periods of Greco-Roman, Nabatean, Ottoman and Umayyad rule. The Nabatean Kingdom built Petra, one of Jordan’s most famous contemporary classical sites, as its capital. The Nabatean Empire was incorporated into the Roman Empire, which extended to Jordan on its Eastern edges. The well-preserved Roman city of Jerash sits on the Jordan Trail and was an important centre of trade in the region. It was positioned on the incense and spice trade route from the Arabian Peninsula to Syria and the Mediterranean region. Its popularity began to decline partly due to new movements in the region, as trade over sea began to take precedence over land. With the decline of the Roman Empire, the next substantial period was the Umayyad Empire, one of the first Muslim dynasties, of which present-day Amman became a major town in the administrative district of Damascus. The Crusader period followed Ottoman rule when Ottoman forces invaded the Levant in 1516 and gained control, ruling until World War I when Jordan came under British Mandate.

The Jordan Trail captures this history of movement. Each time period described above is not remembered just for its historical sites but for the movements each created. For instance, Petra is entered on the Jordan Trail through the same route Nabatean traders would have taken. This is true also of the Roman roads followed, the South Gate of Jerash marking the entrance traders from the Arabian Peninsula might have taken. The Jordan Trail captures these traces of a history of movement. The forms that traces on the Jordan Trail take are thus important because they are able to link to different forms of movement and bring each into relationality. By exploring more carefully how the line is drawn, how it is followed and what it follows helps to understand the importance a walking trail can provide to capturing these embodied movements that compose place.

While some walking trails such as the Icknield Way in South East England ⁷⁰ follow a distinct mark that captures movement – here an ancient chalk escarpment that was an ancient trading route – many trails do not follow any physical trace. This highlights another type of line captured on the Jordan Trail, what Ingold ⁷¹ calls ghostly lines – lines of the imagination and lines which capture stories, emotions and memories; the act, for instance, of retracing a route one remembers from childhood. Ghostly lines are those which do not bear any physical mark on the surface but are created in our imagination, through stories or on charts. For Ingold, ⁷² ghostly lines are important because they capture non-Western and non-linear histories and understandings of place. Examples are the ‘songlines’ of Indigenous Australians, which are lines that have no physical trace but are instead celebrated through song, stories and dance and mark the routes of ‘creator-beings’. ⁷³ The Jordan Trail similarly captures both these ghostly lines through the tracing of Ottoman, Roman and Nabatean routes whose traces are occasionally material but are most often kept alive in writings, maps and oral histories. Another crucial ‘ghostly line’ is that of journeys detailed in both religious texts and Western travel writing of Jordan. The Jordan Trail I was told in interviews with the JTA is not a pilgrimage trail. ⁷⁴ However, this does not stop many of those who walk it, walking with religious associations. A walker and blogger, with who I walked the Jordan Trail, Andrew Evans, wrote on his blog:

While the Jordan Trail is brand new, crossing Jordan by foot is one of the oldest adventures in the world. Travelers [sic] and traders have wandered up and down the King’s Highway as far back as the Old Testament. Jesus, Elijah, and Mohammad walked these paths and camel caravans carried frankincense along these same ancient spice routes.

As Evans emphasises, ghostly lines can evoke strong connections to place. For Evans, the Jordan Trail evokes in him the journeys described in the Old Testament. Evans grew up as a Mormon reading religious texts and the route of the Jordan Trail has meaning for him and connects him through its tracing of these journeys he read as a child. The Trail has meaning here beyond its material qualities. To return to the beginning of the Jordan Trail, Tony and Di initially travelled to Jordan after watching the 1962 epic ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, which was filmed in Wadi Rum, and thinking to themselves there must be a lot of good climbing there. Their view of Jordan was in part a worldview based on the writings of T. E. Lawrence, Gertrude Bell and Mark Twain. ⁷⁵ These imaginations have produced many of the colonial understandings of Jordan, which still bleed into the present day and cartographic representations of Jordan. ⁷⁶ Walking trails therefore pose opportunities to capture other histories and narratives of place but can equally impose certain representations of place. For instance, the development of walking trails in Israel was a key element of the creation of an Israeli identity by connecting Israeli citizens to their newly formed state by physically walking it. ⁷⁷ While in neighbouring Palestine, walking trails are now a key part of the reclaiming of a Palestinian identity and an assertion of their right to be there by physically walking the land. ⁷⁸

What makes the Jordan Trail important is that the embodied act of walking ensures that such imaginations – colonial or religious – are always contestable. They are contested through the generation of the line and how it was drawn. The drawing of the line of the Jordan Trail did not just involve pen and ink and the manipulation of the hand – in the way that borderlines have been historically drawn – it was one that captured a wide variety of lines and movements. The movements of present-day walkers along the line bring present movement into relationality with past movements. This intersection between past and present is particularly important on the Jordan Trail because of its postcolonial history, intersections between Western and non-Western accounts of movement – particularly walking – and the current geopolitics of Jordan. The Jordan Trail is not one type of a line but a way of capturing and exploring the entangled history and present negotiations with movement in Jordan.

Walking the Jordan Trail: movements I

I was a bit behind the rest of the group keeping to my own slightly slower rhythm. Ahead of me I could see that my group instead of keeping to one line, was splitting in two. A fork heading in a straight line and another fork veering off to the left. I sped up towards the point at which each line began to veer. Unsure who to follow I saw that Sam had continued in the straight line and was stopped ahead with John and Salma. I caught up with them to see Sam with his GPS device in hand and a map in the other:

Me: What’s happening?

Sam: Yusef has gone off the route nearer the mountain, he announced, he says it’s a better way.

Me: Why didn’t you follow him?

Sam: We are keeping to the line. (Field diary: 30 September 2016)

In this note from my field diary, Sam is an American trail expert, with experience of trail development in the Middle East, who has been flown over to help check the route of the Jordan Trail. As I have previously described, the Jordan Trail was mapped in a variety of ways and much of it was physically walked on the ground to draw the route, with GPS coordinates created by recording this movement. However, some of it was only mapped online, choosing the easiest route by following an existing road – partly the result of time pressures. Sam’s job was to walk the whole Trail, ahead of its inaugural ‘thru-hike’ ⁷⁹ and the GPS coordinates being made available to the public. Yusef is a local Bedouin, who had been asked to join this technical ‘thru-hike’ too. Locals from each area the Trail walks through were asked to work with Sam as local experts. The moment above is a coming together of two different knowledge systems, two notions of the ‘expert’. Two different ways of configuring movement: one in which a line is a way of placing power on a place and the other in which a line is movement itself. For Sam, the line is an uncontestable static entity and this places power on the line. For Yusef, the line is always contestable as individual bodies come against it and move it. This contestation is what makes the Jordan Trail important as Sam was forced to rethink the line. A discussion took place as to whether the line should be changed and why, shown in Image 3. This contingent moment of decision, made in the relationship between lines and the body, is a moment when the line is generated in and through movement. While all walking trails can capture this inflexibility what makes this moment of indecision important on the Jordan Trail is that this contestability is one that brings Western knowledge systems into conversation with indigenous and non-western knowledge systems. How movement relates to place is contested and challenged.

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Image 3.

Querying the map on the Jordan Trail.

Ingold ⁸⁰ suggests that how different bodies follow and use lines is crucial to how place is in turn understood. Ingold conceptualises this as the difference between the wayfarer and the traveller. The wayfarer is continually on the move, they are their movement, while the traveller moves solely to destination, which is a terminus and a point of entry into a world from which they have been temporally exiled while in transit. Ingold argues that lines have gradually been shorn of the movement that gave rise to them. Once the trace of a continuous gesture, the line has been fragmented – under the sway of modernity – into a succession of points or dots. This fragmentation has taken place in the related field of travel where wayfaring has been replaced by destination-orientated transport and mapping, where the drawn sketch is replaced by the route plan. In Jordan, this is illustrated by the rise of the coach tour in which guests are shuttled between classical tourist sites with little comprehension of the space in between. ⁸¹ Jordan becomes reduced to a series of concrete roads and tourist sites that fail to capture embodied and Bedouin accounts of movement that are crucial to a fuller understanding of Jordan’s past and present.

In Jordan, as the Trail is moved along, there are frequent conversations with locals about movement, for instance, a conversation with a Bedouin herding his sheep, who laughed at us walking the Jordan Trail ‘for fun’ as he walks this route every year to move his sheep to different herding ground. Therefore, while walking the Jordan Trail itself could be argued to be a leisure activity that not all can access, these discussions are constantly part of the experience of walking it. How we walk and how others walk become crucial parts of being on the Jordan Trail. The Trail at times closely follows the border with Israel and runs very close to Jordan’s southern border with Saudi Arabia. As we walk on the Jordan Trail, discussions between Palestinian Jordanians about the increasing restrictions at the border between Israel and Jordan arise, or else Bedouins describe how they used to move freely between what is now Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The proximity of the Jordan Trail to both Palestinian and Syrian refugee camps is also significant, as the movement of walkers is often in stark contrast to restrictions in these camps. Jordanian citizens are not easily able to visit these camps and refugees cannot easily leave.

How we walk in relation to others is also a way of decentring discussions about mobility as colonial and indigenous histories of movement matter. ⁸² Walking and lines are not one thing on the Jordan Trail, and the narrative of the privileged White male walker is not the only one that matters. For instance, Edensor and Kothari, ⁸³ on their research into Indian tourists travelling to Europe, argue that assumptions about movement exist which centre the European tourist, by which the European traveller moved to place where the inhabitants were immobile. Edensor and Kothari ⁸⁴ argue instead that travel across and between colonial realms was multidirectional and varied in purpose. By focusing on non-European travellers, other forms of knowledge are enabled that destabilise the Eurocentrism of travel narratives. These perceived mobilities versus immobilities are crucial to understanding how a focus on the Jordan Trail can use movement to rethink place. Cresswell ⁸⁵ suggests, ‘place is an event marked by openness and change rather than boundedness and permanence [. . .] places are intersections of flows and movement they are in a constant state of becoming’. For Cresswell, ⁸⁶ different social groups are placed in distinct ways in relation to movement – to the flows and connections. The Jordan Trail brings different social groups together to decentre movement by capturing colonial and non-Western accounts of movement and ensuring the drawing and walking of the line is always in negotiation. The Jordan Trail constantly requires us to evaluate our own movements in relation to others.

Walking the line: movements II

As I have argued throughout this article, the line of the Jordan Trail makes bodies matter. The Jordan Trail is not one thing, it is material and immaterial traces, it is virtual through GPS coordinates, and ghostly through its following of journeys in biblical texts, colonial narratives and Bedouin herding routes. The Jordan Trail makes each of these lines matters and in doing so is able to produce embodied and alternative narratives of movement and place that speak back to sedentary state narratives of Jordan. In this final section, I focus specifically on how the line is followed to argue that a walking trail makes individual journeys matter.

The Jordan Trail can currently only be followed in its entirety by downloading GPS coordinates from its website. These coordinates are freely available and therefore anyone with a GPS device, of which there are free programmes that can be downloaded onto smart phones, can follow them. These GPS coordinates form a line on the screen, which is then followed on the ground. These coordinates consolidate different forms of lines – traces, ghostly – into one coherent line. However, the following of this line is once again complicated by the movement of bodies along it. First, because as the line is transferred from line on device to line on the ground, problems with translating it arise. Second, as each body walks, although following the same line, their individual movements are always slightly different. A walker might deviate from the Trail to visit a site of interest, they might accept an offer from someone they meet to share a cup of tea or decide to walk the Trail in a series of smaller journeys resulting in lines back and forth from the Trail. Each of these individual journeys matters as they weave threads over the surface of the ground. These threads can be captured on GPS devices, or retold by referring back to a map, and as each walker weaves their thread, the cumulation of them creates new surfaces on the ground. In Image 4, the coloured lines represent my movements down the Jordan Trail captured on my GPS device. As I moved along the Jordan Trail, my GPS device captured my own coordinates so that I could see how my own movements at times followed and also deviated slightly from the Trail.

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Image 4.

My GPS tracks gathered on GPS software on my phone.

These threads are woven differently because of the difficulty of following an abstract line on the screen on the ground. For a period in 2017, the JTA decided to remove the GPS coordinates from its website as several walkers got lost following them. As a result, to download the coordinates from the website, walkers must agree not to hold the JTA liable if they get lost. Another decision relating to this is whether to waymark the trail or not. Waymarking (shown in Image 5) is a process in which marks are placed on the ground to show the way. Most European and North American trails have this system and it offers another way in which to follow the line of the Trail but through a physical trace as opposed to a virtual thread. There has, however, been much opposition to the waymarking of the Trail. Waymarking, some argue, means the route cannot be easily changed – a flexibility of the Trail that many believe is important to maintain the fidelity to its fluid relationship with place. Waymarking also requires regular maintenance as the paint fades and they can be dislodged during events such as flash floods. Jordanians working as guides on the Trail worry that waymarking will make their jobs redundant. However, as I have argued, there are numerous skills involved in walking the Trail that go beyond simply following it: knowledge of where to find water, where to find shelter from bad weather or sun and a crucial but more recent piece of Bedouin knowledge – where to find phone signal. One fellow walker joked that instead of relying on GPS, we were using BPS – Bedouin Positioning Systems.

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Image 5.

Waymarking on the Jordan Trail.

On the Jordan Trail, a repossession of the ground through the line takes place as opposed to the imperialism imposed on it by the lines of state-led mapping and cartography. This is because non-Western and indigenous mobilities are captured and relational understandings of place that Sheller argues can speak back to more fixed nation-state perspectives. ⁸⁷ A performative mapping takes place on the Jordan Trail that is multiple as opposed to the single-layered narrative of state cartography, ⁸⁸ an aspect of walking trails that has been infrequently explored especially in the postcolonial context of Jordan. Different bodies repossess the ground in different ways, mapping becomes performed and negotiated by walkers and the materiality of ground is important. This returns to Lorimer’s ⁸⁹ research on reindeers and herders, that through an exploration of their entangled movements, intimate, transnational and sentient understandings of place emerge by exploring the movements of human and non-human bodies over ground. The contours of the earth on our bodies alter our experiences of ground and the line. For instance, I was told the story, by a Jordanian who scouted the trail, about a route plotted online using Google maps. The route was downloaded onto GPS devices and walked, only to find that the surface of the ground was more uneven than they realised and went down a steep slope. The materiality of the ground always matters so that place is never abstract. Bruun ⁹⁰ writes of the scientific expeditions led by the Danish Government in Greenland to search for uranium. The scientists’ use of scientific equipment often came into opposition with the ways in which their inexperienced bodies came against the steep mountain surfacing. The Danish scientists attempted to turn land colonially occupied into measurable and quantifiable land for resource extraction.

On the Jordan Trail, similar practices of state legibility – the sedentarising of the Bedouin population – and state mapping practices that have created borders when none existed before are constantly queried. Place is not simply abstract and represented on maps but formed through individual journeys and within these journeys conversations about movement and differing relationships with place. These individual journeys become important threads in the creation of new surfaces. Surfaces that can be multiple and complex by concentrating on how movement creates more fluid understandings of place. Here, movement is not prescribed by the state but by movement. The movement formed by the walking body is also attentive to non-movement. While the aim of a ‘thru-hike’ or any day or section hikes walking on the Jordan Trail is to move along a line, this movement is filled with prolonged periods of stasis: waiting in the heat of the day for the sun to cool, waiting for water to boil for tea, waiting to catch our breath after walking up a steep hill, waiting for a dressing to be applied to a blister, stopping for lunch, stopping to make sure are going the right way, stopping to talk to a local we meet. These moments of stasis are all negotiations between individual bodies and place. In all of these moments, there are often conversations about how different bodies navigate a line, and bring conversations about movement to the centre, in a place in which movement has often been controlled by the state. ⁹¹ Moments of stasis, Bissell ⁹² argues, have often been understood as unproductive in contrast to the dominant productivist rendering of mobilities. Yet, immobility for Bissell ⁹³ is not always in dualism to mobility but can generate rich times that weave through multiple temporalities. Bodies, Bissell ⁹⁴ argues, are attuned through stillness. The line therefore and the inevitable halts and pauses it creates are crucial because they create these embodied attunements. One cannot simply continually move on the Jordan Trail staring at a screen, abstracted from place, the body has to pause and the ground and weather get in the way of free flowing movement. As a result, the line of the Jordan Trail is constantly altered in heterogeneous and mobile ways that in turn transform understandings of place – understandings that are important to challenge the colonial, flat and homogeneous mapping of Jordan. Understandings in which movement itself is central and alternative narratives and movements can be captured which speak back to the violence of borders and a focus only on lines and movements related to colonial and state power.

Conclusion: the beginning of the line

This article has argued that walking trails are important sites of cultural politics. This article has contributed to work in cultural geography on walking by arguing for a greater focus on the lines of trails and how movement can be understood by both the generation of a trail and those who move along it. Further to this, I have argued that through this cultural site, a politics of movement in the Middle East emerges that is embodied, everyday and able to capture non-Western and indigenous accounts of movement and place. I suggest more work in Jordan needs to explore cultural sites of production and the intersections between indigeneity, culture, and politics. ⁹⁵

In Jordan, lines have often been violent, colonial and divisive – especially their role in the creation of the Jordanian state. On the Jordan Trail, lines can reclaim movement and capture individual embodied movements that have often been excluded from state narratives in Jordan. As the first section argued, the creation of the state of Jordan involved the drawing of borders where none had existed before. I argued that lines were essential to the colonial violence of this border drawing by dividing and imposing order on the world, in ways which are often violent and erase embodied histories and movement. ⁹⁶ Using work in cultural geography on walking and lines, I demonstrated how a walking trail produces lines that are about knowing and inhabiting the world. The Jordan Trail is one way in which a line can redraw place and capture embodied movement.

The Jordan Trail is more than a line but a way in which to understand the relationship between movement and place. These were evidenced in the repeated conversations as to what a Trail is: a series of GPS coordinates, a waymarked path or something maintained in our imagination. A means of drawing took place in which the embodied act of walking and not the manipulation of pen and paper created lines. I suggested that the Jordan Trail was not just another line of imposition on the ground but was a line that captured historical and Bedouin accounts of movement. Movement matters on the Trail and as a result a broader relationship between bodies and movement in the region is created than imperial lines of road building and borders can and often erase. On the Jordan Trail, movement does not begin and end at state borders.

When the Trail is walked, embodied relationships become important. This was demonstrated through moments of incoherence while walking the line: moments when the line becomes contestable, whether it was imposing movement on the landscape through the close following of GPS coordinates or whether it was able to capture movement itself. It is in these contestations that the Jordan Trail creates moments of dialogue between different relationships people have with place and movement. Furthermore, individual bodies and individual movements matter. Each journey on the Jordan Trail weaves its own individual thread and creates new relationalities so that place is always multiple and contested. The line itself no longer matters.

This article is therefore the beginning of the Jordan Trail, in that there is much more that walking trails can offer cultural and political geographies. The Jordan Trail itself has much to offer those interested in narratives from Jordan that focus on everyday experiences and the postcolonial aftermaths of the creation of the modern Jordanian nation-state. I also argue that within research on walking, particularly work within cultural geography, more studies should explore walking trails themselves as means to explore movement and politics – particularly in non-Western contexts. Walking is also a method that can explore how bodies matter to political accounts of place. This builds on recent work in political geography which argues that bodies make territory and are formed through territorial processes. ⁹⁷ I expand on this work by arguing that bodies must also be understood beyond conceptualisations of territory – often restricted by the boundaries of the nation-state – through explorations of ground, movement and lines. In summary, this article opens dialogue to suggest how we can begin to consider relationships between bodies and movement differently by paying attention to a long-distance walking trail. The Jordan Trail is not just a line but an opening up of relationships between movement, bodies and place.