ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the potential of walking together as a research method in the racialized public space of post-apartheid South Africa. Drawing on the author’s long-term fieldwork in Makhanda, a small town in the Eastern Cape, it examines both the methodological tensions and epistemic possibilities of walking in a context shaped by the legacies of apartheid. Building on critiques developed in earlier chapters – particularly of the methodological assumption that walking together offers a shared view ahead and functions as a power equalizer – this chapter embraces friction as an analytic. Focusing on moments of bodily recalibration, it shows how walking together can expose rather than resolve difference. Through the conceptual lenses of “pace bias” and “place ballet”, and their racialized occurrences in the author’s peripatetic fieldwork, the chapter explores how pedestrian movement in public can render structural vulnerability, agency, and waiting palpable. Rather than flattening difference, walking together reveals the uneven terrain of public life and the micro-negotiations it demands. Anthropological theory has long grappled with the tension between portraying people as passive victims or self-determined agents; this chapter argues that walking together offers a way to inhabit that ambiguity, attuning to both constraint and the subtle embodied forms of agency that emerge within it.
