CONCEPT
Wayfaring (Ingold)
Ingold's term for the mode of movement in which the traveler discovers her destination through the journey by attending to the landscape — contrasted with transport, in which movement connects predetermined endpoints.
Ingold distinguishes two fundamentally different kinds of lines: the line of transport and the line of wayfaring. A line of transport connects two predetermined points — origin and destination — and the movement along it is delivery from A to B, valued for the arrival rather than the journey. A line of wayfaring does not connect points; it grows through a landscape. The wayfarer does not know her destination in advance. She discovers it through the walking — by attending to the terrain, reading the slope, responding to what she encounters. Her knowledge is not positional (she does not primarily know where she is on a grid) but inhabitative (she knows what it is like to be here, moving through this specific terrain). The distinction is ethnographic before it is philosophical: Ingold developed it by observing how indigenous hunters navigate landscapes they know intimately versus how GPS-equipped travelers move through landscapes they do not know at all.
