‘Dutchness’ as an effect of walking Rogier wrote that we were walking in the ‘heart of Dutchness’. But what is ‘Dutchness’? The polders? The windmill? The light? Great work on the question on difference is currently undertaken by Amade M’charek . In looking at ‘race’ and ‘Dutchness’, she conceives of differences not as given, but as effects that come about in relational practices. In that sense, walking enacts a very specific version of ‘Dutchness’. Vorarlberger Boden Dutch Soil What do you wear? Hiking boots – all other kinds of shoes would be dangerous Whatever you like – from hiking boots to flip flop How do you get there? Take the car for, at least, half an hour in order to go from 500 meters to 1000 meters or 1500 meters above sea level. Take the train for 15 minutes. What do you see? In the beginning trees, later other mountain ranges, in the end...
What a heterogeneous group that had gathered for this walking seminar! The stories from the field and the people came from Lancaster and Japan, New York City and Mali, Bangladesh and New Newfoundland, Amsterdam and Utrecht, Europe and Afghanistan, Cameroon and Paris, Madrid and Barcelona, Brazil and India, Sweden and Belgium, Cambodia and the United States. The format of the conversations was slightly different this time. Instead of discussing a topic, we talked about words . Everybody had brought three words that are decisive for her/his research project which made us end up talk about: belief policy practice ordering life place browkerage social rist care persuasion attraction aesthetics appreciation bad will drive surprise pictoresque wasting saving recycling freezer coffee intervene crisis guilt womanhood technology scale order objectivity chocolate experience embeddedness resistance body recalcitrance between value waste
February surprised us with what one might call an ideal winter day: cold but as sunny as can be. We started our walk at Overveen. Walking and talking we discussed a topic that was not directly at hand, but is in every scholars life: literature. Although we did not read, also not in preparation for this seminar, we dedicated our time to the topic “how to relate to the literature”? Our question was not which literatures to relate to, but how it is variously possible to do so. It is possible to read hunting for facts. Eagerly; hungrily. Or it is possible to seek to be surprised by a text. Amused; seduced. Sometimes our reading is critical; it may also be generous, curious, rebellious. What more? When; what do these various modes of reading offer? How to maybe read friends critically; or enemies generously? How to relate to old literatures (what to learn about their ‘context’)? How to read new literatures (and not get too impressed by their hotness)? How t...
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