*2.1. Walking (Transect Walks)*

As field investigations and empirical research are pivotal in this study, we use walking as a mode of inquiry beyond the logics of symbolic representation. It is a form of engagement in the tangible, immediate, and evolving perception of local places, through which our scholarship transcends the confines of archival and office space and "seek ways to examine vital, sensory, material, and ephemeral intensities" of places [16] (p. 2). Tim Ingold in his renowned volume, *The Life of Lines*, analogizes individuals as lines, and as individuals walk along the surface of the ground, "they thread their lines through the world rather than across its outer surface. And their knowledge ... is not built up but grows along the paths they tread" [17] (p. 47). Walking comprises a set of connected bodily performances, including observing, remembering, listening, touching, feeling, becoming sensitive and sensible, etc. It is through these performances, along the way, that our knowledge of Tayal foodways and foodscape is forged [18] (p. 5). This is how we understand indigenous knowledge as the indigenous communities accumulate ways of adapting and responding to changes along the path of their migration. In *Being Alive*, Ingold suggests that "all inhabitants are students and all students inhabitants—our task is not to take stock of its contents but to follow what is going on" [19] (p. 14). Walking as a method is not about collecting "contents" but about "following" the indigenous path of everyday life process and "becoming" indigenous inhabitants ourselves. When working with Tayal farmers, we recognize that we are all students in a learning process, and thus our responsibility lies not so much in documenting any static content of knowledge as in tracking closely an unending path of learning. Walking enables an ongoing process of embodied learning.

In fact, the original inhabitants of our island walk/migrate; as they walk, they thread their lines through the world rather than across its outer surface. Their knowledge, as Ingold puts out, is "not built up but grows along the paths they tread" [17] (p. 45). The Tayal community, like other Taiwanese indigenous groups, migrates. In Tayal tradition, migration is a communal activity, and more importantly, it is a way of coping with and responding to environmental changes. Throughout thousands of years in history, Tayal people have accumulated knowledge and experiences

of change and their adaptation has been embedded in their culture as well as everyday life practices. Whether the causes of migration were natural (floods, earthquakes, plagues, etc.) or human-made (wars, population booms, land shortages, etc.), Tayal ancestors had to take responsive actions in their migratory process. This process includes acknowledging a survival crisis, forming a consensus to leave the original location, sending people to scout ahead, and confirming the livability of the new land. Tayal migratory process has been well studied with participation from indigenous members and the result is an award-winning documentary film, titled *Once Upon a Time* (*Thousand Years of the Tayal*) [20].

Tayal people migrate and develop "situated knowledge" of their place. In our research, we feel the compelling necessity of "walking" their place as a method and in so doing, acknowledging ethico-political responsibility toward the land, which requires both reflexive thinking and communal engagement. We conceive our work through mediation and bodily affect as we "walk" through the land of the indigenous people. In "walking," we endeavor "to observe which is not to objectify; it is to attend to persons and things, to learn from them, and to follow in precept and practice" [17] (p. 157). It is as such that we define the indigenous land "not as a two-dimensional segment of a map but as *something on which an entity depends for its subsistence*" [15] (p. 263).
