Walking together: perils of participation in anthropology and philosophy of action : a case study in post-apartheid South Africa

This dissertation examines norms of walking together in the racialized public space of post-apartheid South Africa. Critically reflecting upon Western, gendered and racialized traditions of the flâneur, the dissertation mines the space between localized and globalized perspectives on walking together. Ethnographically, it comprises thirteen months of extensive fieldwork with women of the first generation born into post-apartheid South Africa. Set in Makhanda—a small town in the Eastern Cape Province—the dissertation explores how specific styles of group walking both embody and respond to the legacy of racial suppression and division, offering an account of its function as a shared act of resistance against segregated public space.
On a methodological level, "Walking Together" calls into question the empirical foundation of anthropology’s most important research method: participant observation. My research uses the lens of an everyday practice—walking—that encompasses both participation and observation to interrogate the status of testimonial evidence as foundational to ethnography. On a theoretical level, I incorporate recent trends in analytic social philosophy—where walking together has become a paradigmatic example for a small-scale shared action—and introduce a holistic conception of "participant attention" into anthropological methodology. I argue that attention, framed as a social learning capacity to direct the mind, ought to become the guiding principle in participant observation for registering context-specific aspects of a practice.
Starting from the idea of sharing a view ahead, which is implicit in the act of walking together, my research shows how current findings in philosophy and the anthropological debate on embodied participation can benefit one another. In this way, "Walking Together" creates an epistemological intersection between two highly advanced debates on the phenomenon of participation, making them meet on equal footing.