”It was a mistake to leave the house at 8:00 am. But what option did I really have? I barely slept last night…”
Describe the terrain of the walk.
Present numbers: kilometers, steps, hours.
Describe how the physical demands of the walk to San Pablo prompted you to askt he question: “Why am I even doing this?“
while confronting the question throigh journaling, it became clear to me that my desire to walk was closely related to identity issues, specifically, reconstructing identity
After several attempts to make sense of why I walk, I came to the following conclusion: I use walking to traverse this landscape between identity clusters. The former identity is clear. The new identity is unknown and still underconstruction.
A Liminal Wilderness
Introduce the concept of Liminality from Van Genep.
Discuss how Turner extended Van Genep’s conceptualization of liminality.
Present briefly how the concept of liminality has been used throughout history.
Segue into how individuals experience periods of liminality.
Segue into religious liminality.
Present my history of how I became an ex-Jehovah’s Witness.
Describe my experience of religious liminality.
Lots of uncertainty. Tendency to be unsure. Related to this was difficulty to commit. Uncover journal entries and notes about this and perhaps quote at least one.
Mention the state of your spirituality. Transitioning from a fundamentalist Christian textual life to one that is atheistic, agnostic, and almost religious naturalism, where spiritual emotions I used to have in the context of church I now experience alone under nature while moving.
State that in my experience, I wasn’t immediately aware that I was in a state of religious liminality. Even if the evidence points to it, I did not articulate this clearly. Further, I was not talking to my past religious identity, thinking that it is something I have to completely avoid and leave.
Daily walking, which culminated to the long walk, seem to have opened something in me, and so I turned to the literature on walking.
Walking Liminality
The desire to walk is most probably a physical expression (a symptom) of liminality. One could even say, walking is performed liminality.
Mention Craig Mod who has connected his desire to walk Japan with his background as an adopted child and a foreigner in a country far from home. His attraction to mobility also coincides with his attraction to material culture, specifically architecture, photography, and food. As if abandoned by society, people in liminal states cling to the material world for refuge.
After leaving church, I have always felt called by nature, physical space, and the outdoors. It was as if my subconscious was telling me, “You don’t belong in any social circle. Perhaps it is in geographic space, in land, in matter, where you belong.” For a long time I actually may have believed that.
Also, it became clear to me that I was walking because I was largely unsure: unsure of where I was going in life and who I was as a person. And being unsure, I chose to do what seems like a physical manifestation of this uncertainty: walking. And my appreciation to long walks, or short almost daily walks, reflected this need to express uncertainty through my body while at the same time hoping that perhaps through it, I could recreate mmyself.
An argument can also be made that the photographs I took while on these walks potray images of limen. For example, I was interestingly attracted to abandoned and derelict spaces, which are tightly related to how liminality is applied in architecture.
Share a few photogaph specimens here.
Say that there is something about walking that helps one traverse a liminimal state. “Walking carries with it the possibility for the exploration of the liminal” (Hickey et al., 2018).
According to ethnographers who used walking, walking has several characteristics that makes correspondence between researcher and researched easier.
Present these characteristics.
Walking opens the space for informality and candor within oneself as autoethngrapher (the researcher and the researched).
Walking allows the self to be “messy, uncertain, and multivoiced” (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005, p. 26).
Walking opens moments of experimental encounter
Identity/ies are negotiated while traversing space
Walking as Autoethnography
Walking can also be applied in autoethnography.
In autoethnography, the researcher is also the participant.
Walking unveils the liminal space and the distance between Old Self and New Self.
Walking provides a means to cross this liminal space between Old Self and New Self.
It makes the self relaxed and trust. Conversation with oneself is more natural compared to say journaling in a desk, natural breaks are allowed, and visual cues in the environment become prompts for reflection. For example, one afternoon, while walking, I noticed a long line of flowers with two colors. At first, I thought they grew from different plants: one flower being a variant of the other. Upon closer inspection, I was surprised to learn that the flowers, although different in color, grow from the same plant. I would later learn that these were Umbrellaworts or more commonly known as Four O’clocks, whose flowers open around the time of my afternoon walks, thus seeing them. This visual drama triggered thoughts on community. One of the things I lost after leaving my childhood religion was community. As a JW, I interacted with individuals who believed the same things I believe in on almost a daily basis. This was lost after I left. I tried hard even until now to find community and accepting that being in a liminal space such as where I am right now means coming at peace to the fact that I won’t be connected to people I share similar beliefs with as easily as before and that differences and learning to navigate differences shall now be my norm. Walking and noticing umbrellaworts and how two flowers of different colors could grow from the same plant made me ask whether it is possible to grow community despite differences.
“inbetween realm, which forms a third place, or threshold, that links as it separates two previously opposed conditions.” (Coleman, 2005, p. 202)
I argue that walking can be used by a researcher in a state of liminality to understand how their New Self Becoming relates to their Old Self. Walking does this by opening up correspondence.
Example: Before the long walk to San Pablo, I avoided my past as a JW. However, after the walk, my journal entries started to suggest that I was interested in inquiring about how my past could inform what I am currently doing, specifically that I am still performing work that can easily be considered “religious.” Show examples of these journal entries.
This correspondence that has opened between my New Self Becoming and my Old Self transforms the identity of both selves.
The ambulatory inquiry that happens through walking provokes an encounter with the environment, the Old Self, the New Self Becoming, and the New Self, that ever elusive ideal that one attempts to eventually become. As the autoethnographer walks and receives stimuli from encounters to geographic space and experience, their multiple identities change.
This identity transformation results to identity integration.
I now accept that somehow, walking now seems to be a way to revisit my past as a Jehovah’s Witness preaching to the Deaf, some of whom are scatterred around the hills of Baguio City and La Trinidad, Benguet. However, since I could no longer do that as I have left the church, walking has become a way for me to re-do my identity in a different context.
Perpetual Liminality
State that the original conceptualization for liminality is that it eventually ends. In identity discourse, this means that someone who left a former identity should one day be able to leave a state of liminality and find a new identity that they will embrace.
But identity is ever-changing. Further, there is reason to believe that some individuals choose to stay in perpetual liminality, never truly belonging to exisiting social frameworks and, therefore, are constantly recreated.
Contrast my old self and my new self becoming. Highlight that perhaps there is never an arrival. That we are always becoming and that this is okay.
In terms of religious identity, enter ideas from Andrew James Brown, specifically the idea “the freedom to be tomorrow what we are not today.”
Circle back to walking.
We have to use the body to remind us of of our perpetual liminality, lest we become static and embody that existential stasis. Mobility through methods like walking reminds us of this constant becoming, helps us embrace it, helps us traverse liminal spaces, and perhaps even, find ourselve feeling at home en route to nowhere.