Maps, mobility, and perspective: remarks on map use in producing an orienteering course

ABSTRACT

Orienteering presents a perspicuous setting for exploring the intersubjective and mobile methods of map use and wayfaring. We introduce an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic treatment of orienteering, with a focus on how natural features, a tree and boulder, are mapped and found. In doing so, we comment on the nature of map use and mobility, how ‘route logics’ and categorial perspectives develop, and how certainty and uncertainty are displayed when reading maps and landscapes. Drawing on video data from orienteering in Finland and the UK, we analyse the practices of those who plan and set out orienteering courses, as they navigate routes to be subsequently followed by competitors. We find that the map operates differently as a work site depending on the working conditions of its users, yet in each case the course planner’s (or map-maker’s) perspectives are topicalised as problems emerge. Natural features as wayfinding resources are encountered with less certainty than their urban counterparts, but play a critical role in the unfolding certainty and uncertainty of a route. Questioning, route repair, and comments are all occasioned by natural features, such that there are ‘appropriate’ places on a route to do these, similar to the work of conversation.

KEYWORDS:

• Orienteering map navigation ethnomethodology environmental objects

Acknowledgement

The authors wish to acknowledge the financial contribution of the HANS – Human Activity in Natural Settings (Academy of Finland, decision number 285393) project which funded part of this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 ’Chiasm’ may be defined according to this explanation: „every relation with being is simultaneously a taking and a being taken, the hold is held, it is inscribed, and inscribed in the same being it takes hold of.“ (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 266 in Liberman 2013: 53).