Publication details
Po paměti / Geografie „nevidomých“
| Title in English | Through memory / Geography of the ‘visually impaired’ |
|---|---|
| Authors | |
| Year of publication | 2019 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
| Citation | |
| Description | This chapter is motivated by an attempt to understand the multisensory experience of space; in other words, an experience that is not primarily based on sight but that is corporeal. Our communication partners move through space without or with very little sight; they learn this movement and they remember it. Their movement is therefore an endless source of inspiration for thinking about the bodily experience of space and movement using body memory. The chapter explores spatiotemporal movements of visually impaired people while choosing Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception and concept of body schema as a theoretical framework; we are most interested in the extension of body schema into space or the embodiment of space. In humanistic geography influenced by Merleau-Ponty’s tradition, an embodiment of space is understood only as an embodiment of places. However, the experience of our communication partners indicates that not only does embodiment of places exists but also embodiment of trajectories or paths in space. However, the theoretical concept for this phenomenon is missing. While the concept of place describes an intimate relationship, rooted and stable, the concept of space refers to movement, migration, or commuting, all in a coordinated system not in relation to intimacy. Neither of these concepts allows us to describe the relationship with space given by a coordinated set of follow-up motions—an intimate relationship given by movement. Thus, this chapter addresses the need for a new geographical concept: the concept of path which would describe an intimate relationship as the concept of place that is, however, given by movement not by stability. |