ABSTRACT
This introduction sets out the book’s main aims, which are to investigate walking together in a dual role: as a recurring example in philosophical debates on shared action, and as a vital method in ethnographic fieldwork. By confronting theoretical insights with empirical findings, the book builds a bridge between philosophical and anthropological discourses, addressing key concerns shared by both disciplines. These include the conditions of relationality and joint attention, paradigms and particulars, embodied experience and its theorization, the politics of space and place, structural vulnerability and agency, pace bias, place ballet, and power dynamics in competing ideals of moving in public. The book as a whole is empirically anchored in the author’s long-term peripatetic fieldwork in post-apartheid South Africa. The introduction contextualizes this empirical foundation by outlining how the dissonance between lived racialized asymmetries and idealized methodological frameworks gave rise to the project’s central questions. It also previews the book’s structure, outlines the content of each chapter, discusses the main working concepts, and identifies the book’s intended audience across disciplines.
