ABSTRACT
The groundlessness of modern society, characterised by the reduction of pedestrian experience to the operation of a stepping machine, and by the corresponding elevation of head over heels as the locus of creative intelligence, is not only deeply embedded in the structures of public life in western societies. It has also spilled over into mainstream thinking in the disciplines of anthropology, psychology and biology. This chapter provides a brief review of three thematic areas in which this overspill has manifestly occurred. The first concerns the perception of the environment, the second the history of technology, and the third the formation of the landscape. The chapter examines how there could be a cultural history of bodily techniques when the technology of footwear is already implicated in the very ideas of the body, its evolution and its development. Boots and shoes support the established notions of the body and of evolution, just as writing supports the notions of science and of history.
