Walking Walking ethnography and interviews in the analysis of aesthetic experiences in the Cerrado¹

Abstract

This study, based on hermeneutic phenomenology, intends to compare and discuss different data collection possibilities employed in a study aimed at deeply understanding the meaning of the aesthetic experience for a group of seventeen people with regard to the Cerrado (Brazilian Savannah). These possibilities arose from the need to answer the research question, with the researchers attempting to dialogue with other theoretical and methodological options. In this sense, this study was based on classic literature such as Merleau-Ponty and Gadamer with a gradual broadening of the theoretical framework, incorporating contemporary authors such as Sarah Pink and Tim Ingold. Thus, this manuscript presents the limitations and potentialities of two types of data collection - walking ethnography and interviews - as methodological possibilities to understand the aesthetic experience of this group in the Cerrado. Based on an interpretative paradigm, this manuscript aims to make considerations on the potentiality of broadening the dialogue with other methodological perspectives in order to increase the investigation’s consistency. It was noted that the interviews and the walking ethnography provided different perspectives and are therefore complementary. It was thus considered that the interviews permitted a better understanding of childhood memories and of the participants’ history of ethical and political involvement, whereas walking ethnography focused on the corporeal and multi-sensorial practices in the Cerrado. The affective responses witnessed during the walking ethnography were considered to be crucial to understand the experience in a phenomenological approach and broadened the analysis possibilities in this study.

Mobile ethnography; Mobile investigations; Interviews; Environmental education; Hermeneutic phenomenology

Resumo

Pautado na fenomenologia-hermenêutica, o estudo se propõe a comparar e discutir diferentes possibilidades para coleta de dados durante uma pesquisa que procurou compreender, em profundidade, o significado da experiência estética para um grupo de dezessete pessoas em relação ao Cerrado. Essas possibilidades surgiram em decorrência da preocupação em responder à questão de pesquisa, em que as pesquisadoras buscaram dialogar com outras opções teórico-metodológicas. Sendo assim, o estudo se embasou em leituras clássicas como Merleau-Ponty e Gadamer e, gradativamente, ampliou-se o escopo teórico, incorporando autores(es) contemporâneos como Sarah Pink e Tim Ingold. Logo, o artigo apresenta as limitações e potencialidades de dois tipos de coleta de dados – walking ethnography e entrevistas – como possibilidades metodológicas para compreender a experiência estética desse grupo no Cerrado. Baseado em um paradigma interpretativo, o objetivo do presente artigo é tecer considerações sobre a potencialidade de se ampliar o diálogo com outras perspectivas metodológicas a fim de proporcionar maior consistência para a investigação. Identificou-se que as entrevistas e o walking ethnography forneceram diferentes perspectivas e foram complementares. Considerou-se, então, que a entrevista possibilitou conhecer as memórias de infância, histórico de envolvimento ético e político dos(as) participantes, enquanto que o foco do walking ethnography residiu nas práticas corporais e multissensoriais no Cerrado. As respostas afetivas testemunhadas durante o walking ethnography foram consideradas elementos fundamentais para a compreensão da experiência em uma abordagem fenomenológica e ampliaram as possibilidades de análise do presente estudo.

Etnografia em movimento; Investigações móveis; Entrevistas; Educação ambiental; Fenomenologia hermenêutica

Introduction⁴

This study presents and discusses the limitations and potentialities of two types of data collection - interviews and walking ethnography / mobile studies / sensory ethnography⁴ - as methodological possibilities to understand the aesthetic experience of a group of people in a Cerrado fragment, in the interior of São Paulo state. This study stems from a PhD research (IARED, 2015), in which we used two techniques for data collection - not to compare between them, but to better understand the research question: what is the nature of the aesthetic experience in the Cerrado for a group of participants with a history of emotional connection to this place? The concern with the coherence between the theoretical framework and the methodology used for data collection resulted in a deeper intellectual study, which will be made explicit in this manuscript in an attempt to justify the choices we made during the investigation. As mentioned above, although it was not the objective of the PhD research, we realized the importance of bringing these methodologies into focus as a contribution to reflect on the theoretical and methodological approaches in environmental education.

This study used hermeneutic phenomenology as theoretical and methodological framework. Hermeneutic phenomenology establishes the sensitive as a pre-reflexive region that goes back to a level of individual experience that precedes language, does not begin and is not exhausted by language, but is sensitive and reflects our involvement with the world (MERLEAU-PONTY, 1971). In other words, if we are in the world, we know that we are in the world and have a perception of it, even if this perception has not been formed into language. For hermeneutic phenomenology, the world is experienced at this pre-reflexive stage. Therefore, to study the phenomenon of the aesthetic experience in the Cerrado is to investigate this level that is prior to language, and accessing and representing the pre-reflexive zone by verbal and textual means may be problematic from the theoretical and methodological point of view (PAYNE, 2013; PINK, 2009; THRIFT, 2008), precisely because the concern with research commensurability has been one of the points debated in the publications of this field (PAYNE, 2009; ROBOTTOM; HART, 1993). The option for new methodological paths in environmental education research has been motivated by some other studies, such as those by Hart (2005, 2013). According to this author, we, as reflexive researchers, must understand the limits of our own knowledge, be more conscious of the multiple layers of reality and be critical with regard to our own investigations, in order to challenge ourselves to think outside the traditional definitions and familiar spaces. For this, input from other fields of knowledge, such as anthropology, philosophy, psychology has been proving itself as a force giving us impulse to recognize our own challenges and to search for methodological innovations (HART, 2013).

In addition, there has been a growing concern with the limits of data representation in the social sciences, leading to the formulation of the non-representational theory (ALVESSON, 2002; THRIFT, 2008). These authors question conservative studies that conceive social issues as static and superficial, resulting in some data collection techniques that take snapshots of the reality and represent them by numbers and words. The recent publication by Jackson and Mazzei (2012) challenges us to think, for example, about the technical insufficiency of the interview, depending on the theory guiding our investigation. According to Thrift (2008), our studies have traditionally accessed and represented the world by numbers and by verbal or textual words. We defend here that this is an important argument when dealing with the aesthetic and affectional dimension of life. According to the phenomenological perspective, this emotional experience occurs in a level that is prior to language. How can we then access and represent it beyond the textual and verbal forms?

Assuming the hermeneutic phenomenological approach, we thus proposed a dialogue with the authors representing different ontologies and epidemiologies in order to deeply understand the meaning of the aesthetic experience in a specific context. This movement resulted from an intellectual motion by the researchers themselves, who began their studies by reading classics such as Merleau-Ponty and Gadamer and afterwards broadened the theoretical framework of the study to include contemporary authors such as Sarah Pink and Tim Ingold. We thus passed by authors such as Merleau-Ponty (1971), with a more subjectivist ontology, Paulo Freire (2010), who made us think of a dual ontology, and Tim Ingold (2011), who speaks of the impartibility between mind, body and culture. This leads to the use of different methodologies, based on hermeneutic interpretation, as was believed by Gadamer (2006), on dialogue, according to Freire (1994), or on the body engaged in the world, as discussed by Ingold (2011). Although these authors come together in the interpretative approach, they have some concepts that deserve further attention: for example, hermeneutics in Gadamer and dialogue in Freire, which may be understood as research methodologies, are amplified in Ingold’s idea that we understand the experience by living it together/with/like everything inhabiting the world. This brings the perspective of a researcher who is also present in the multisensoriality of the experience, connecting them to the daily activity of other people (PINK, 2009). According to this author, sensory perception is not only dialogued, and our social interactions are not based only on verbal communication and visual impressions. In other words, the experience of other people may be better apprehended and understood when we, researchers, are also living the experience instead of simply listening to or reading the “representations of these experiences” (THRIFT, 2008).

Walking ethnography

The interview is a widely used and diffused technique in social research (ALVESSON, 2002; MINAYO, 2004; ROLLEMBERG, 2013). However, some authors (PAYNE, 2013; PINK, 2009; ROLLEMBERG, 2013) perceive the traditional interview as a method with some limitations, not being appropriate for the field of sensitivities. When researching affection and the sensitive, it is necessary to apply methodologies that are more coherent with this dimension of the human experience. In particular, we believe that one of the tasks of environmental education research is in how to represent, beyond human relations, the “materiality of experience” (CONNOLLY, 2010), which brings the affective and the significance of perceptions, sensations and relations with the more-than-human world. This task demands a methodological innovation in environmental education research in the attempt to understand how our body, embodied in the world, feels, perceives and relates in/with/as nature (PAYNE, 2013).

The last decade has seen a growth in the number of studies in the so-called “mobile investigations” (LORIMER, 2011; PINK et al., 2010). In general terms, this conception of movement is seen as ontologically preceding the epistemological representation and has contributed to the development of the different perspectives of mobility. Movement is not a one-directional practice that moves us from point A to point B. To move is to be immersed in the environment, perceiving it (INGOLD, 2011), feeling with the senses and attributing meanings (MERLEAU-PONTY, 1971). As an example, we bring the book A Philosophy of Gardens (COOPER, 2006), in which the author defends that all senses - sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste - are involved in the aesthetic experience of a garden, because “we not only look at a garden from a window or a terrace, but we look at it when moving along it or through it (COOPER, 2006, p. 30). The aesthetic experience of the garden happens in the movement flow: flowers grow and die, trees lose their leaves, plants respond to seasonal changes, whereas the gardeners accompany and are part of this garden movement.

According to Sheets-Johnstone (1999), Johnson (2007), Ingold (2000, 2011), among others, our way of perceiving and acting in the world arises from our sensory and motor capacities. This corporeal and sensory capacity cannot be compartmentalized or disaggregated into formats that treat each sense as isolated and independent. Instead, at the phenomenological level of interpretation and description, we assume the conception of synesthesia proposed by Merleau-Ponty (1971), reiterated by Abran (1996) and also contemplated in the notion of the sensorium (STOLLER, 1989). In effect, these concepts intertwine the sensory modalities into the way people relate to, move in, dwell in and become part of the environment. Merleau-Ponty (1971) and Abram (1996) state that our primordial and pre-conceptual experience is inherently synesthetic, in which the thinks and the elements surrounding us are expressive, not inert. For Ingold (2000, 2011), Kusenbach (2003) and Johnson (2007), meaning emerges from movement, which occurs in a level preceding language. To interpret these deeper pre-rational meanings of our bodily encounters with the world, we must comprehend how these movements constitute our corporeal perception and, therefore, our embodied ethical and political being. This investigation process inevitably affects the way we conceive and build the curriculum, pedagogy and theory of learning. We must look “more deeply into aspects of existence that are found on a level preceding words or phrases” (JOHNSON, 2007, p. 17). Thus being, we must concentrate on the importance of body movement, considering that life is movement and we perceive the world when moving (INGOLD, 2000, 2011).

Johnson (2007) states that we have visceral connections to life since our conception as flesh creatures. Meaning comes from our corporeal perceptions, movements, emotions and feelings. These visceral connections deal with the field of aesthetics - not aesthetics as the study of art, but as the study of all that has strong connections to our incarnated body (HERMANN, 2005; JOHNSON, 2007; MARIN, 2006; SHUSTERMAN, 2008; SULLIVAN, 2001). Aesthetics, here, encompasses the intrinsic connections with the world and the human capacity to attribute meaning to experience. Johnson (2007) believes that phenomenology has been marginalized in some fields of research, but some recent neuroscience studies have been emphasizing the importance of the embodied mind (VARELA; THOMPSON; ROSCH, 1991) for the development of emotions regarding cognitive issues. In fact, many interdisciplinary approaches (GALLAGHER, 2005; JOHNSON, 2007; SHEETS-JOHNSTONE, 2009; SHUSTERMAN, 2008) have discussed somaesthetics (SHUSTERMAN, 2008) as crucial for our cognitive, ethical and political being (JAMES, 2006; PAYNE, 2013; SULLIVAN, 2001). This recent philosophical orientation (phenomenological in its nature) proposes the corporeal turn (PAYNE, WATTCHOW, 2009; SHEETS-JOHNSTONE, 2009) and focuses on the body as the center and origin of our being in the world - in other words, an embodied mind, in which the “non-separation between thinking and doing is evident; as is also the non-separation between feeling and moving” (SHEETS-JOHNSTONE, 2009, p. 61).

Pink (2009) arguments strongly in defense of a method that considers the multisensoriality of the experience to access the manner in which a group of people experiences the environment. This author motivates the researcher’s engagement in this experience, connecting them to the same activity as performed by the people involved in the research. According to her, sensorial experience does not permeate only speech, as our social interactions are not based only on verbal communication and visual impressions. Instead, they are fully incorporated into multi-sensorial events, and therefore the researchers must be open to multiple forms of exploring and reflexing on the new ways/forms of conceptualizing knowledge. Our experience is incorporated and the researcher apprehends the experience of other people through his/her own engaged body. Ingold (2000, 2011) puts movement first when arguing that the places are produced from movement, because we are between the comings and goings of human and non-human beings or, as Cooper (2006), who highlights that we perceive the movement of seasons, the sun, trees, scents and so on. The proposal by Pink (2009) is not an analysis of the sensory and cultural perceptions, but is, instead, the use of one’s own sensory experiences as researcher to apprehend and comprehend the experiences, the ways of knowing and perceiving and giving meaning of other people.

Ingold and Vergunst (2008) proposed walking to better understand the variety of meanings given by us to some theme, as, for Ingold (2011), to perceive is to join oneself to the flows of materials and movements that contribute to our ongoing formation. In addition, walking is not restricted to human beings, as it is also explored by animals (INGOLD; VERGUNST, 2008), and its potential consists in increasing the social relations between human and non-human beings - a key point for the aesthetic dimension of environmental education. Lorimer (2011) uses the generic term new mobile studies to characterize this technique used in multidisciplinary forms of research and of cultural practice. In fact, there has been an increase in walking methodologies in the social and human sciences during the last decade (PINK et al., 2010) as a strategy to explore new comprehensions of the experience lived: shared walk (LEE; INGOLD, 2006); natural go-along (KUSENBACH, 2003); commented walks (WINKLER, 2002); walking interview (EVANS; JONES, 2011); mobile ethnographies (PORTER et al., 2010).

Given the exposed above, our proposal in this manuscript is to discuss two forms of collecting data in an investigation that had as research question: what are the natures of the aesthetic experience in the Cerrado for groups of people who have a history of strong affective engagement with this environment?

Data collection in two different perspectives

To define the public taking part of the study, we looked for people who had a history of engagement with regard to the Cerrado biome, which did not go back to punctual experience in the environment in question but to an affective memory and a deep emotional connection constructed from intrinsic values with the biome. This is the reason for the term in plural, experiences, in the title of the article, as the participants have experienced the Cerrado on different opportunities. We chose to use this vegetation type due to its history of occupation in Brazil and because we are inserted in a territory where the Cerrado is present. Considering this profile of engagement, we invited groups of people whom we already knew to have a history of affective relation with the Cerrado, without reference to a specific region of Brazil. In this way, we invited groups in which the researchers were already inserted or at least had contact with: Environmental Education Study and Research Group / UFSCar (Gepea), Environmental Education and Recreation Project / UFSCar (Pedal), Ecovillage Tibá of São Carlos and the group of monitors of the Center for Scientific and Cultural Communication (CDCC) / USP. Gepea is composed by professors, undergrad and grad students and people interested in reflecting on and discussing environmental education under the perspective of research. Pedal is a group of cyclists who seek to travel and ride in non-urban landscapes, permitting the contact with forests, waterfalls, beaches and trails as a recreation alternative not related to consumption. The Ecovillage Tibá of São Carlos is a group of people interested in living and share their living at a place favoring a more intense contact with nature and searching for a joint group management to achieve this goal. The monitors of CDCC are paid interns and volunteers guiding visits to some sites in São Carlos, with the Cerrado of UFSCar being one of these sites.

By means of semi-structured interviews, we aimed to understanding which emotions and feelings were lived in the Cerrado, based on the following questions: which elements call your attention in this vegetation type? Which feelings and emotions are awoken? Which experiences were and still are pleasant and why? The interviews, totaling seventeen, were conducted from June to December 2012, with an average duration of forty minutes, at the participants’ dwellings or working places. Of the seventeen interviewees, all are connected to activities at the University, having performed or still performing activities at or in partnership with the University of São Paulo (USP) - São Carlos campus and the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar).

As we based this study on a hermeneutic approach, we understand that data interpretation occurs in the dialogue between the researcher and the research participants. We thus followed some steps which we considered coherent with the adopted theoretical and methodological framework. We first returned the transcribed interviews to those involved in the study, permitting them to make changes to the text, removing or even adding situations, opinions and information that they considered to be important. Based on this analytical corpus, we systematized the interviews by approximating repeating text units (words and sentences) into representative expressions. This systematizations was organized as tables, which were returned to the interviewees for them to discuss whether our interpretation of the experience was coherent with what they felt and experienced. Our concern was to make opportunities for reflexion moments transcending the interview, which is characterized by reporting an experience in a short conversation time and often does not reflect all the ideas, memories and opinions of the participants (ROLLEMBERG, 2013). Thus being, the interviewee could once more analyze the systematization and complement or even alter what was conversed. After this stage, we reorganized the systematization and data analysis based on this interpretation, which we consider to be more dialogical and, therefore, more in tune with the adopted theoretical and methodological framework. However, we even so assume here the limits of the representation of the data collected with this technique, which is the point of concern of the non-representational theory of Thrift (2008), because the interviews are understood as opportunities and moments for co-construction between the researcher and the participant, and not as extraction of truths or facts (ROLLEMBERG, 2013).

After this data collection stage, there was a deeper theoretical study by the researchers, leading to a theoretical and methodological shift. We realized that the study’s question could be more broadly answered by searching for a greater coherence between the theoretical framework and the methodology: if our experience with the world takes place at a pre-reflexive level, which precedes language, how can we then access and describe it with interviews (verbal language)? We thus made the choice to collect more data with the same participants in order to apply a different technique, based on the perspective of mobile investigations (LORIMER, 2011). It is worth highlighting that the technique was practiced with different groups and at different places before collecting the data, permitting safety and experience when the technique was actually applied.

In October and November 2014, we once again invited the seventeen participants for a morning walk in a Cerrado fragment located in interior São Paulo state. Ten of them accepted the invitation, with two going on one day (Walk 1) and eight on the other (Walk 2). The Cerrado fragment chosen was the campus of UFSCar (São Carlos-SP) due to ease of access and because this place is part of the participants’ daily lives (KUSENBACH, 2003; PINK, 2009). The two walks were performed in Spring; temperature on both days was pleasant (about 25 ºC), with cloudy weather and the sun appearing around ten in the morning.

In the literature review performed to subsidize this investigation, we did not identify one single model or regular pattern to follow regarding data collection procedures, enabling us to project our techniques according to our context and needs. Pink (2009) states that this variety is a result of the sensory turn in the social and human studies, resulting in a series of recent innovations. Given the diversity of techniques used during mobile walks or sensory ethnography, we opted not to use any sort of pre-established route or plan. The participants were free to chose the trail to be followed, the duration of the walk and which aspects of the landscape to experience. We did not use digital recordings, but instead simply wrote down some aspects that we considered important, in addition to key words, in a paper notebook. In the first walk, the affective responses to movement of the two participants (And and Betina)⁵ were recorded, whereas in the second walk we recorded the movements of four participants (Cassanda, Davi, Elvira and Frederico). We opted not to record observations for the entire group due to the limitation of the researcher herself in following all the people. This difficulty was perceived in pilot exercises in walking ethnography, influencing the decision to record the movements, expressions and actions of some persons of the group. The decision on which people to accompany was not made a priori, arising at the beginning of the walk and being based on the researcher’s perception of the people whose walking rhythm she could accompany.

Return from the walk and approximately one hour after the practice, the researcher, at her working place, wrote down a detailed description of the walk. Based on the description, we built narratives aiming to represent in a more poetical way the participants’ experience. The process of elaborating the narratives took a long time, with us writing and rewriting them many times, with the challenge of making them ecopoetical (PAYNE, 2013). This author defends this ecoartistic approach in the testimony of the experience as a way of making a more faithful description of the aesthetic experiences in nature. We opted to write one narrative per participant, to a total of six narratives (Ana, Betina, Cassandra, Davi, Elvira and Frederico), in order to not divide meanings according to categories or trends and to create stories that use metaphors and analogies as a way of exploring the different dimensions of the world (MCPHIE; CLARKE, 2015; PAYNE, 2013). The results of each data collection technique will be briefly presented in order to show the techniques’ potentialities and limitations.

Results and discussion

For the first data collection, we used as analysis corpus the interviews returned by the participants. During the interviews, a number of themes regarding the Cerrado were explored, including stories from childhood and adolescence, in which the role of the family was very important; ethical and political positioning with regard to expansion pressures on the Cerrado biome; and description of pleasant and meaningful moments of experience in the Cerrado. The following interview excerpts illustrate these themes⁶:

[...] my curiosity was awakened by this new information of how much this area was deforested or how much it is not considered institutionally, in Brazil, and constitutionally, by the legislation. All of this I sought to know during my living, my life here in São Carlos. (Interview - Raquel).

See, my parents live in an area where, when they moved there it was just rural houses and small farms. Now it’s quite urbanized. But since my childhood I’ve had contact with nature. Ever since I was very small they started camping with us. So they’ve always taken us to have contact with nature. (Interview – Camila).

In São Carlos, we have a very strong bicycling practice and, specifically, the use of the Cerrado for this practice [...] And the pleasure we get in knowing this place, in getting there. [...] But this contact of mine with the Cerrado through the bicycle made me expand my sight [...] In the occasions when I passed by an animal... This is very funny! I’m 31 years old, and I looked a child, happy as I was! (Interview – Márcio).

The second method enables the switch in the participants’ reference point, who, instead of describing memories through language, come to live the experience in/with/like the Cerrado. Another fundamental point is the researcher’s perspective, who was also perceiving and feeling the Cerrado with the participants. It is important to highlight that dialogues on other subjects arose during the walk, but our records focus on the affective response to being in movement in the Cerrado. From the walk by the Cerrado, we described the experience to elaborate, afterwards, ecopoetic narratives, considered to be a more appropriate representation of the data obtained. Unlike the interview methodology, the notes from the walk were not returned to the participants, and the narrative construction was a process of writing and rewriting over and over in an attempt to bring the reader to imagine the scenery experienced. Some excerpts of the narratives illustrate this perspective:

Ana walked, touching the leaves and the stems while at the same time conversing with me and with Betina. She sometimes saw something in the forest and called us to share the discovery. In one of these observations, Ana found a bee she had never seen before. A shine in her eyes showed the enchantment with the bee’s colors! (Walk 1 - Narrative Ana).

Cassandra saw an open flower which she had only seen closed before. She was marveled with the fact that the flower, when closed, is red, and, when open, is white and red, commenting on the tenderness of the Cerrado flowers by comparing them to lacework. Her enchantment was such that she would like to plant some Cerrado species in her yard! At one point, we ate a fruit typical of the Cerrado and, since then, Cassandra started looking for other Cerrado flavors. (Walk 2 - Narrative Cassandra)

Elvira saw a deer footprint and was happy to know they were also walking near the entrance. She walked with the group, paying attention to the forest next to the firebreak. At one point, suddenly, she stopped! She had seen a flower and, marveled as she was, wanted to make the flower into a pendant for her necklace. [...] At the end of our walk, the sun came out, and Elvira, satisfied, said that it was better to walk in the Cerrado on cloudy days. Shortly afterwards, she saw once more a deer footprint, this time in a different spot. It was then that she joked that we had taken the same route as the deer. (Walk 2 - Narrative Elvira).

The flavors and fruits of the Cerrado were not mentioned during the interviews but were very present during our second walk. Pink (2008) speaks of the importance of the researcher’s sensory knowledge for ethnographic techniques that include food practices produced by flavor sharing. Here, we extend this knowledge to the possibility provoked by this experience to motivate the body immersed in the Cerrado. In a sense, then, the fruits are part of the life cycle movement in which we are invited to participate.

The relation of curiosity and enchantment (as happened with Ana’s bee) and the desire to keep exploring the Cerrado, to the point of taking it home (as Elvira’s pendant and Cassandra’s yard plants) are more evident and explicit in the walk. In fact, at the end of her interview, Elvira has mentioned that she had not been able to put into words all her affective feeling and her history of engagement with the Cerrado. In the interviews, we also identified some difficulty in describing the emotions and explaining this affective relation, as was said by Frederico and Betina:

It’s... [silence] Because it deserves to be defended. Because I don’t agree with arguments of “oh, let’s defend it, because it has medicinal plants”. Let’s defend it because, I don’t know, like someone defends one’s house or defends the life or another person. Because it’s there, it deserves it. It does not deserve to be destroyed, you understand? It deserves to be defended, you know? It’s something more internal, I don’t know. Oh, such hard questions [laughter]. (Interview - Frederico).

Ah... [silence] I don’t know... [silence] Up to know it is something I remember very kindly. I really liked being there, spending days at the farm. Of walking through the regions, aye? It’s Cerrado, that region. (Interview - Betina).

The interview permitted to know a bit of the history of strife of some people for the Cerrado, which was not mentioned during the walk. At the same time, the emotions of being in the Cerrado do not have to be described to the researcher, as they were witnessed by her:

When we entered the Cerrado area, Frederico was concentrated in observing the forest next to the firebreak. He took his camera from his backpack and walked alone, separated from the large group. [...] Frederico showed no fear in entering and exploring the forest, whereas many of the group kept walking along the firebreak. He sometimes took several minutes to return after entering into the forest. (Walk 2 - Narrative Frederico).

Betina walked next to the forest and along the firebreak, always very calm, walking slowly. She touched and smelled the flowers and stems, observant of the details along the way. To her, the beauty of the Cerrado lies precisely in the velvety and hairy leaves and in the thick and spiny stems! (Walk 1 - Narrative Betina).

This switch in perspective is one of the strongest aspects of this methodology. The relation during the walk is not one of researcher-participant, but one in which all are experiencing the phenomenon (HORTON et al., 2014). The authors comment that both researcher and participant are looking at the world, and not looking at each other. According to our comprehension, the researcher is also immersed, and this appeared in the narratives with the use of the first person in plural, as shown by the following excerpt:

We once again reached the Cerrado, and Ana, with her slow walk, was observant of the environment, pointing at footprints and plants she recognized. At the end of the trail, we were surprised by an armadillo and, shortly after, a lizard, crossing the firebreak! We stopped where the armadillo entered the forest and tried to hear or see something. The shrub moved, and we were happy with this unexpected surprise! (Walk 1 - Narrative Ana).

The perception of the devastation of the Cerrado and of changes in the landscape were identified in the interviews, and we considered them as one of the factors that called attention to a political positioning regarding the Cerrado (IARED, OLIVEIRA, 2013). The interesting part was that this also came through in the walks, not as verbal language but as a response of the body to the affective engagement. During both walks, we passed by an eucalypt area and, both times, the group walked at a greater speed than in the Cerrado:

Betina hastened her steps when we were crossing the eucalypt area. In a few minutes, we once again reached the Cerrado area and the sun came out. Betina accepted the invitation of a tree shade to refresh herself. (Walk 1 - Narrative Betina).

The group was walking faster at the eucalypt wood, and Davi did the same. Even with the quickened pace, he was still observant of the trees and the sky, no longer touching, but always heedful of the landscape. We reached another Cerrado area, this one slightly impacted. The sun came out. Davi once more walked close to the forest, touching and smelling the leaves. (Walk 2 - Davi).

The affective response to a physical space was also identified in the walking rhythm in the study by Edenson (2010). Along the same lines, Myers (2011), in an investigation in which she walked through the city with refugee immigrants, noted that feelings of belonging are created by daily practices. Our argument here is that the participants seem to show a deep identity with the Cerrado when moving through this landscape, which did not occur in the eucalypt area. It was interesting to perceive this not only in the interviews, but also in the body movement along these areas. As said by Ingold and Vergunst (2008), walking is not simply what the body does, but also what the body is.

In agreement with the statement by Myers (2011) and Edenson (2010) that, in this walking ethnography method, our body responds to the landscape through which we are moving, we highlight another aspect that was different between the two data collections: the riparian forest in the Cerrado. During both walks the groups opted for a route that did not go through a riparian forest region, whereas in many interviews this forest was highlighted as an attractive during activities in the Cerrado. The interviews with Pietra and Davi highlight this enchantment with the riparian forest:

I really like the sun. In the Cerrado, we have a wide view. The sun shines on our backs. You are always walking on a plane, and so, after a while you find a... A... A small riparian forest. You have that wonderful contrast, and the water, which is marvelous, it becomes thirty times more marvelous because of the scorching sun. (Interview - Pietra)

Another interesting thing is that there, right in the middle of the Cerrado, there is a walking platform, made many years ago. And this platform is precisely in a place with a water spring. So, this is a place with lots of trees around. [...] And how interesting it is to observe the difference in temperature [...] The experience that you have of walking, cycling, whatever, in the middle of the Cerrado, and even in any part of the city, right? And suddenly, go to that environment in which the nature, where the trees are relatively large and are closed and the water spring. What an incredible difference in temperature between being in that place and outside of that place. Which helps us understand in a very direct manner phenomenons such as the melting of the polar caps, the greenhouse effect, a series of things we hear on the televesion (Interview - Davi).

As previously mentioned, walking ethnography is considered to be a contemporary methodology, and there has been a growth in the number of publications about it during the last decade. The combination, complementation or comparison between walking and traditional techniques has been explored in some studies. For example, Evan and Jones (2011) performed a comparative study between sedentary interviews and walking interviews. The results indicate that the data obtained in the walk are deeply affected by the landscapes where the walks take place, emphasizing the importance of the environment. In turn, Horton et al. (2014) used both techniques (semistructured interviews and walks) to discuss the importance of walking for the daily experiences of children and adolescents in England. Unlike Evans and Jones (2011), the two techniques were not put in comparison, but produced narratives for analysis and discussion, thus being used in a complementary manner. James and Bixler (2008) resorted to walking as one of the techniques in a wider project and concluded that walks are an alternative form to interviews, especially in the context of power relations, where visual contact and silence may cause discomfort and embarrassment. To these authors, the rhythm of the shared walk encourages a relationship of trust between researcher and participant. In fact, we also noted this aspect during the walk, as it is a less formal or more spontaneous proposal. In our interpretation, the participants felt more comfortable during the walk, not feeling as the targets or objects of our study.

Other studies used this methodology in different ways, as, for example, Wylie (2005) in an auto-ethnography, in which he produced a narrative of his experience of a day walking on a coastal area, or Mcphie and Clarke (2015), who elaborated stories based on a class during which they walked in a park. We agree with Kusenbach (2003) when she states that studies that use only interviews and do not propose an approach that is close to people’s reality run the risk of not bringing to the discussion aspects of the daily lives of these people. These experiences bring forth corporeal and sensory practice that are on the pre-reflexive level and are crucial elements to understand the experience in a phenomenological approach. Like this author, we defend that no data collection technique is superior to another, but it is necessary to reflect on the possibilities of broadening the comprehension of the phenomenon under study and, therefore, we may think of various data collection techniques that may be used in a complementary manner.

Final considerations

Phenomenology seeks to understand the experience that occurs on a pre-reflexive level, previous to language (MERLEAU-PONTY, 1971). Well, if our objective was to bring forth this level preceding language, does it not seem insufficient to access and represent it only by interviews? During our analysis, we identified that the interviews and the walk provide different perspectives, thus being complementary. We found that the interview permitted to know the childhood memories, the history of ethical and political engagement of the participants, whereas the focus of the walking ethnography was in the corporeal and multisensorial practices in the Cerrado, which may also unfold into affective aspects. This method showed itself to be coherent, as the researcher witnessed the affective and aesthetic responses of the people, permitting one more interpretation to the phenomenon being studied. Here resides another important fact with regard to which walking ethnography seems to be an interesting proposal for phenomenological studies. The aesthetic experience is a sensory practice, not being verbal/textual, culminating in the second concern. Thus, the proposal of being, researcher and participant, with the bodies engaged, witnessing the same experience, brings us to believe that we may broaden the comprehension of the phenomenon, as, in addition to describing or reporting by formal or textual forms, we all are with our bodies immersed in the experience.

When making this comparison, we consider that one technique expands the perspective of the other, broadening the comprehension of the reality being studied and permitting to find insights from different reality lenses. Thus, we suggest that other studies may use these techniques in combination, always paying attention to the study’s commensurability.

Beyond the technique itself, the ways of representing the data were also different: interview transcripts and narratives. We perceived this possibility of creating stories as a differential, as it permits us to incorporate elements that are closer to sensitivity and to emotion as an alternative to the formal and academic language. In this way, feelings and emotions could be represented in a different way, contributing to the comprehension of the phenomenon. We recommend that new studies explore these and other forms of representing the experience, so that we can go on reflecting on the research field based on the interpretative approaches.

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• 4
  - Tradução realizada por Pavel Dodonov. Contato: [e-mail]. CV: http://lattes.cnpq.br/9008153877455949
• 5
  - The names are fictitious in order to respect the anonymity of the study’s participants.
• 6
  - The original excerpts from the interviews were translated from Portuguese into English

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  2018

History

• Received
  02 Apr 2016
• Accepted
  10 Aug 2016