Phenomenology of Movement and Place

Introduction

Movement essentially has its place, its material supports and environmental affordances, and its fit with locales, habitats, and regions. This is clearly the case in hydrological terms with precipitation patterns, runoffs, and confluences of flows, currents, waves, and tides defining navigable waterways and in geological terms with distinctive landscapes affecting climatic conditions and animal habitations and migrations. Such large-scale correspondences between movement geometries and place typologies are reflected in incremental scales of biological, social, cultural, and historical life. Yet human movement seems curiously and anomalously abstracted from these scales of life by the natural sciences in terms of the putative functioning of a physiological, anatomical, and biomechanical entity. The social sciences may bring to mind the spaces and places that contextualize human movement, giving its functionality many varied forms. But something about the essential life...