WALKING TOURS AS NARRATIVE:
RECOVERING THE SPATIAL AND EXPERIENTIAL DYNAMICS IN THEORIES OF CULTURE
JONATHAN R. WYNN
CUNY - GRADUATE CENTER
ABSTRACT
Through walking and talking, tour guides weave together an array of stories and facts in order to reproduce the varied urban cultures and local histories of New York. Recent studies of culture have turned to narrative as a powerful way to transcend culture-as-system and culture-as-practice positions to address the circulation of culture but, as the oral and historical components of narrative and culture gain their places in prestigious collections and essays, they avoid the spatial dynamic. This essay offers an empirical reminder of the spaces of narrativity—an ethnographic study of urban characters who use storytelling in the city, tour guides evince the reproduction of the urban landscape, of history, culture, and meaning. In so doing, this talk is aimed at redressing the neglect of experience, engagement, and investigation, and in the end, recall the spatial as a powerful element of narrative, culture, and education.
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INTRODUCTION: THE PRESENTATION OF THE CITY
So proud of his 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, chief designer and architect Daniel
Burnham would personally show dignitaries around through a walking tour of its exhibits and buildings. He had a particular way he felt visitors should experience the main promenade, a patchwork quilt of the world’s cultures, falsity and all. The fair, aimed at overshadowing the 1889 Paris Exposition, served as a storytelling of cultures, a metanarrative of the world. It is interesting that the master architect’s fair-city of over 200 buildings across a square mile, was not enough: compelled as he was, he “sought to orchestrate the journeys so that his friends saw the fair the way he believed it should be seen, the buildings presented from a certain perspective, in a particular order” as to present them in the best possible light (Larson 2003:
253).
While his scope might have been vast, Burnham was neither the first, nor the last to offer up a narrative of a city and its cultures. Ancient Greek guides, called exegetai (‘explainers’), were professional storytellers who would often pose the offer to sea-weary travelers, “Give me a copper coin, and I’ll tell you a golden story.” Egyptian guides, for hundreds of years would ‘read’ the hieroglyphics for travelers long after the ability to read them was lost. The walking tour guides of today’s New York City, walking and talking through the city’s spaces, cultures, and histories, reproducing the urban landscape through storytelling. For dwellers and visitors of any age, a metropolis and its history can be confusing and overwhelming; this diverse group teaches about the public histories, spaces and cultures of Gotham, using storytelling to contribute to the urban fabric.
In New York City there are, for example, walking tours about the edible flora of Prospect Park, the
Radical Left history of the East Village, the Native American History of Manhattan, and the filming locations of ‘Sex in the City.’ The walking tour, as a social form, has become ubiquitous: Central Park and the New School University use tours as educational programming, the city government has them for jurors on lunch break, as does the hip health club ‘Crunch’ as a way to “work out the mind and body.” And it is curious that this practice of walking and talking—a hybrid of education and entertainment, of high culture and low, of ways of thinking about cities and ways of being within them—serves so many functions and institutions, is so multivalent and popular, yet wanders on, largely unscathed by academic inquisition.
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This presentation, a segment of a three year ethnographic study of 50 walking tour guides in New
York City,1 presumes that narrative, in the words of Bonnell and Hunt “provides a link between culture as system and culture as practice…an arena in which meaning takes form, in which individuals connect to the public and social world, and in which change therefore becomes possible” (1999: 17), and provides evidence for the notion of narrative is a spatial as well as temporal mechanism of cultural reproduction.
THE ‘VAST, HERITABLE GENOME’ OF THE CITY
Cities are a fusillade of overlapping meanings, histories, symbols, interactions, and practices.2 To say so isn’t exactly a revelation: Walt Whitman, who died the year before the splendor of the Chicago Fair, called New York City’s landscape a ‘shifting tableaux.’ The wonder of urban culture wasn’t lost on Suttles, who saw a “vast, heritable genome of physical artifacts, slogans, typifications, and catch phrases… most appropriately called collective representations” (1984: 284).
Theories on culture often polarize and reify structuralist-phenomenologist, order-action, system- practice, production-reception, and high-low dichotomies (inter alia Alexander 1990; de Certeau 1984;
DiMaggio 1992; Gans 1999; Peterson and Anand 2004; Sahlins 1985; Sewell 1999; Swidler 1986).
Theoretical positions that energized studies heavily structural, theoretical, and macro-sociological concerns
(see Logan and Molotch 1987, Zukin 1991, Sassen 1990), have contributed a great deal to the discipline,3 but have spurned some to remind us that cities, and their heterogeneous cultures, are still man-made
(Suttles 1990). This project, as a whole, positions the storytelling of guides as standing between these poles
(see Davies 1994; Sewell 1999; Ginzburg 1982; Benzecry 2002), and offers an empirical foundation for the circulation of the cultures of cities.
1 This essay is taken from a larger study and, thus, does not illuminate many key aspects of this social world. The study is exclusively of walking tour guides, a segment of the 1,300 licensed guides in New York City, as they maintain a less scripted path and talk than bus tour guides, draw equal parts visitors and locals, and are, obviously, more connected to walking. Exhaustive analyses of content, biographies, histories, and cultural capital of the guides, is not included here. All names are pseudonyms. 2 Studies have, since the era of classic ethnography, have countered presumptions to find culture as potentially contradictory, loosely integrated, contested, subject to change, and weakly bounded (Sewell 1999: 53-5). 3 In particular places, like South Street Seaport, Disneyland, and L.A.’s Citywalk, urbanists like Boyer and Crawford (1992) have lamented the commodification, homogenization of their content.
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Just as Burnham needed to provide a more grounded presentation of his fair, the complex context of New York City has led hundreds of visitors and locals4 to turn to walking tour guides to educate, investigate, or re-enchant the city. Shils believed that “[e]very society has a need for contact with its own past… Where this cannot be provided by the powers of individual memory within the kinship group, historical chroniclers and antiquarians are required” (1972: 4). It would appear that walking tour guides would fall into this category. Mr. Washington, an autodidactic guide, echoing Shils, is fond of saying that
“No place, and no people are without history,” and he and his fellow guides, make the urban fabric complex, rich, multifaceted, by unearthing old histories, pitching new ones, and sewing together disparate components for the pleasure of their participants, and themselves.
THE WALKING TOUR AS THE PRACTICE OF AN URBAN CHARACTER
Walking guides are not singular. History is rich with individuals who wrestled with cities. Urban ethnography, in turn, has produced a long succession of studies that focus upon such ‘urban characters:’ from Park (1925) and Anderson’s (1923) hobo, and Cressey’s taxi-hall dancer (1932), to Duneier’s sidewalk vendors (2001), Grazian’s blues musicians (2003), and Wacquant’s boxers (2004).5 Robert E.
Park saw his characters as “products of the conditions of city life; each, with its special experience, insight, and point of view determines for each vocational group and for the city as a whole its individuality” (1925:
25). Inspired by his teacher, Georg Simmel, Park’s conception of social actors eschews many of the dichotomies of culture that have hamstrung ethnographies of culture by fusing the city, mentalities, and practices.
Guides, as a urban characters, and in talking about what they do, will often portray touring as a practice, as an investigative method The largest company in New York, Big Onion Walking Tours sees walking tours as historical investigation and education—as the name of the company indicates, these guides examine the city as a series of layers to be peeled away. According to one guide:
4 Walking tour guides, as compared to bus guides, report that anywhere from 60 to 100 percent of their participants are locals—and some are surprised that visitors find them at all. In addition, it ought to be noted that walking tour participants are referred to as ‘tourists,’ regardless of whether they are from four states of four blocks away. 5 It should be noted that the lines of influence made here are neither distinct, nor consistent. Simmel’s social types—the Stranger, the Miser, the Nobility, etc.—were never paired with the systematic participant observation that quality ethnographic work provides, but was interested in general categories and the “terms of the characteristics of a particular position in an interactional structure” (Levine 1971: lxiv).
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At the heart of it, in order to be a guide, you’re naturally- You’re an inquisitive person,
you’re probably mostly intelligent, you’ve got a liking of people, you have some sort of
representation because if you didn’t it would be mortifying to try to stand in front of
them. You are probably a quick thinker. You have to, naturally, have more facts on hand,
than you are actually presenting, because that’s the nature of it. (…) You’re not in it for
the fifteen bucks an hour, or whatever you might be pulling in. The key characteristic of
these people is the willingness or desire to pass this information along. And then under
that, I think, how you do it and what you say and the enjoyment that you want to see back
from your audience.
Why, then, are guides worth the ink? First, as it appears that guides see their practices as method of investigation, of mining the urban culture for meaning (as well as for subsistence, to be fair, a topic that is taken up in other sections of the project), and turning them around to an audience. A number of sources are turning to such ‘cultural intermediaries,’ or ‘culture brokers’—people positioned within the circulation of culture “involving presentation and representation… providing symbolic goods and services” (Bourdieu
1984: 359, see also Florida 2002, Negus 2002; Portes et al. 1989; Sassen 2000). Second, it then appears that narratives are a central component of their lives that tie their identities with their city, appearing to have the necessary elements to contribute to an ethnographic tradition from Robert Park as well.
Of particular interest for this discussion is the guide’s relationship to narrative, a social form that, all too often, is interpreted as a function of orality and temporality.6 Yet those who define narrative as
“networks of patterned relationships connected and configured over time and space” (Somers 1999: 128), rarely engage in that second component. Franzosi’s stellar exposition of why sociologists ought to pay attention to narrative completely avoids the spatial dynamic (1998). Here, narrative takes on a social form in the walking tour by taking a cultural and historical context—a content of heterogeneous, multivalent, contradictory, and imaginary origin wrought with fits, loops, repetition, and half-starts and full of
6 The interaction between history, narrative, and orality has been fertile ground for studies of culture (inter alia Portelli 1997; Propp 1968; White 1973; Nye 1997) and an overview of that research is beyond the scope of this paper.
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THE CITY ON FOOT, NARRATIVIZING SPACES
Having read Rousseau, Thoureau, Emerson, Poe, Benjamin and Constant there’s a thread throughout which reinforces de Certeau’s claim that any story “begins at ground level, with footsteps”
(1984: 97).7 Quoting Carl Bücher, Park offers that every “advance in culture… commences, so to speak, with a new period of wandering” (1925: 132), and walking and public engagement have a long history—a genealogy that can be traced back to Aristotle, whose peripatetics brought together teaching and walking.
Bodily movement instigates experiential knowledge. Bourdieu sensitive to the experiences of the body on the inheritable dispositions of culture, felt it necessary to, in the opening of his chapter on bodily knowledge, to describe himself as “a body and a biological individual, I am, in the way that things are, situated in a place; I occupy a position in physical space and social space. I am not atopos, placeless, as
Plato said of Socrates” (2000: 133).
For geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, “transient feelings and thoughts gain permanence and objectivity though things" and spaces (1980: 463). Guides feel that they’re doing something special by getting visitors and locals outdoors and into New York’s public realm, providing information fused together with bodily experiences:
The thing that I’ve been talking a lot about now is space and how space determines
things. Um, like for the East Village or for the Bowery or for the Lower East Side, I’ll
talk about the crowdedness of the tenements, and the conditions, and instead of just
leaving it at that, then I say: ‘Imagine how that effects social life? So that’s going to be
the reason why everyone is going to the Bowery, because you don’t have room in your
tenement.’ And middle-class observers who come in and say: ‘Oh these immigrants don’t
7 For recent sociological analyses of pedestrian traffic see Demerat & Levinger (2003), and Kusenbach (2003). Three essays in Body & Society also focus on walking as well (see Slavin 2000, Edensor 2000, and Michael 2000).
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have the proper sensibilities when it comes to public and private space. And the ways that
their children are socialized—none of that makes sense to [tourists] in the context of the
space where they are living in. So that’s just a basic thing that I usually say.
Why was walking so important? New York City is no doubt a curious case—not only is it rich enough to support to image of culture described above, but New Yorkers also have a special relationship with public space and walking.8 It is one of the more fascinating forms of entertainment, is an integral part of urban life, and is surely the cheapest. Guides feel that because they are out in the world, telling a story about a building, or about the site of a particular event, where the tour takers can become their own participant-observers. Mr. Harrison, an free-lance, non-academic guide, in talking to me about a tour group he had from New Jersey and what differentiated them from New Yorkers, brought up both why walking tours were much more of a local phenomenon than a tourist one, as well how he saw the tour as akin to a story. In setting up a tour with the leader of the group, he realized:
People who are used to driving, people who are ‘suburbanly’ oriented are destination
oriented, (…) their whole trick in the ‘how many minutes can you shave off, from point
A to point B’ it is not ‘Oh look, here’s this building, and the façade, and my favorite little
whatever-it-is’- It’s not about the experience of travel, it is about the experience once-
you-get-where-you-are. (…) For me it relates to sentence structure: all he wants are the
hit words of the sentence as opposed to the glue of the sentence. There’s no fabric,
there’s no fiber that brings it all together. It really brought home that we were talking
two very different languages, using the same words. Because in his mind, if we didn’t
promise seven major hits, the tour was a flop, as opposed to what I do, which is ‘Well,
look at this building, let’s talk about who lived here, let’s talk about the origins, maybe a
8 According to a report to the NY State DoT, New Yorkers are likely to take more and longer trips outside of the house than the rest of the U.S., and the difference is “largely due to the predominance of walking trips in New York City” (Hu and Young 1999). The Washington Post finds New Yorkers walk four to five miles a day (Powell 2003). While studies of oral history concern themselves over the nonlinear time and discontinuous spaces of narrative, the tour guide has the continual spatial stream and referent of the path of the walk (not excluding stories told beyond the empirically evident surroundings).
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famous person, maybe a not famous person, how does it relate to the neighborhood, how
does it relate to the history, have you noticed this kind of detail before?
If, as Sennett says (and Burnham would agree), spaces are like good stories, then tour guides are one of their better storytellers (1990). Through their cultural practices, guides weave local knowledge and culture into the larger ‘set’ of cultural meanings. Guides make the abstract and expansive histories and cultural flows of the city present and tangible; merging physical space, mental map of information, and the social experience of the tour. It is, in essence, an effective set of practices because it invigorates each aspect of Lefebvre’s ontology of space: the physical, the mental and the social (1991). According to one academic guide, who originally didn’t see much of a difference between her teaching ‘academic history’ in classrooms and her ‘public history’ on the street, save for the fact that “one group that you have hasn’t done the reading” she realizes that the process does “Put their minds to work.” Another told me, “Walking is about your senses; it is about experiencing.”9
It isn’t too controversial a notion that the spatial dimension of cities plays an important role in the production and reproduction of culture—it is what gives artists their literary field (Bourdieu 1995: 51), the journalists fodder, the ethnographers their respondents, and even Neff (2005) shows urban spaces to be vital for the seemingly spaceless digital media industry. In both its spatial and temporal dimensions, the city serves as an engine for its own connections and stories; its codes and symbols “contain a schema that generates a narrative pattern, a kind of memory device that draws associations and establishes relations between images and places, resemblances and meaning” (Boyer 1992: 188).10
Similar to maps, censuses and museums (Anderson 1991), guides offer meaning-making social forms “through which the world is made intelligible” (Jackson 1989: 2). Whether employed by these institutions or freelancing, as purveyors of popular culture, guides engage in a process of meaning making by linking together and reproducing urban cultural forms. Depending less upon a savant’s storehouse of facts and figures than on their abilities as storytellers to manipulate unruly elements into a coherent
9 Hans Joas sees action as playing a central role in our understandings of the social world, that our bodies “capabilities, habits and ways of relating to the environment… form the background to all conscious goal- getting, in other words, to our intentionality” (1996: 158). 10 For example, Boyer tells us that South Street Seaport “is really an outdoor advertisement that narrates a story about trade and commodities and these narratives of adventure and conquest fill out the more intangible nostalgic desires of the consumer” (1992: 202).
Wynn, J. Page 8 of 15 narrative (see Sewell 1999). Any fact or figure can be found in a dozen dusty tomes in a dozen dusty libraries. Part of why people turn to the walking tour guides of New York City is to hear stories: unknown tidbits, hidden urban treasures, and amusing anecdotes woven into a tapestry that re-presents a neighborhood, a culture, or perhaps the city itself.
READING THE CITY, RE-READING THE CITY
Guiding is an active process; the sort that is central to de Certeau’s understanding of the way individuals ‘read’ their cities. He refers to such an endeavor as ‘poaching;’ where a person is actively, continually searching texts to incorporate fragments into their own ‘gardens of meaning’ (1984):
Through stories about places, they become inhabitable. Living is narrativizing. Stirring
up or restoring this narrativizing is thus also among the tasks of renovation. One must
awaken the stories that sleep in the streets and that sometimes lie within a simple name,
folded up inside this thimble like the silk dress of a fairy… Festivals, contests, the
development of ‘speaking places’ in neighborhoods or buildings would return to
narratives the soil from which they grow (Certeau and Giard 1998: 142-3).
De Certeau feels that walking through the city, the collective process of the city dwellers makes up a ‘space of enunciation’ (1984) and, while these pathways make up the quotidian, they can become a part of the rationalizing structure of space and time. Such a perspective transcends the dichotomies of production and consumption, towards a theory of cultural circulation. Guides quote a culture, patch together multiple elements into a narrative for presentation to an audience that sit before them.11
Just as the pleasure in the detective story is not in the solving of the crime but in the ways through which the mechanisms of murder are uncovered, the walking tour guide is a detective for hire, displaying the inner workings of the city’s stories. At the same time, the guide is akin to C. August Dupin in “The
Purloined Letter,” wherein he ‘uncovers’ a letter concealed from the view of police for 90 nights—an object that was, in the end, hidden in broad daylight. The tour guide too, attempts not only to uncover
11 On the storytelling acts and oral history of everyday, ‘ordinary’ people, see Zemon Davis (1987 and 1983), and Portelli (1997).
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For an autodidactic guide:
At the heart of it, in order to be a guide, you’re naturally- You’re an inquisitive person,
you’re probably mostly intelligent, you’ve got a liking of people, you have some sort of
representation because if you didn’t it would be mortifying to try to stand in front of
them. You are probably a quick thinker. You have to, naturally, have more facts on hand,
than you are actually presenting, because that’s the nature of it. (…) So with all of those
personality traits and characteristics, it’s fairly likely that you’re going to have a good
time doing this. You’re not in it for the fifteen bucks an hour, or whatever you might be
pulling in. The key characteristic of these people is the willingness or desire to pass this
information along. And then under that, I think, how you do it and what you say and the
enjoyment that you want to see back from your audience is all part and parcel of it too.
This public sphere, the agora, is the space where individuals can interact freely, and guides have the opportunity to layer (and replace) the city with their stories, with the now obvious benefits and deficits.
It is through the spatial narrative that the heteroglossia of culture becomes a form of play, loose from social interactions and particular content.
12 This notion of offering participants the opportunity to learn how to make sense of these complex layers and cultures implies a particular usage of culture and cities. Mentioned above, guides offer variations of Suttles’ collective representations, and depending upon the approach to a tour. Like any practice, where to start and which method to use depends upon the case, and the individual. Some guides will pick a theme: on eating, or McKim, Mead and White’s architecture. Others will focus on a particular geographic area, like Manhattanville or Brooklyn Heights. One guide was hired by a company that had put together a prize package as a promotion for a television show about gargoyles—and asked him to put together a walking tour on them as a part of it. Mostly, balancing their own interests with those that will attract participants, is often hit or miss. It is a happy medium when a guide’s own passions, as is in the case of one guide’s surveillance tours, which resonates with a large enough group of people to have participation.
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I don’t think people expect- When they are taking tours they [know that they] are a kind
of entertainment. They’re edifying. But they are not meant to be, generally, lectures.
You’ll have people who’ll show up on your tours and take notes, and then write down
everything you say verbatim. (…) One of the fun things about doing tours, you’re really
experiencing what you don’t get to experience looking through a bus window.
It is this level of engagement that perhaps best characterizes the distinction between bus tour participants and walking tour participants, between traditional historians and those on the street. Mr.
Auster, a free-lance guide, opined on the relationship between walking and learning by talking about passivity:
The more passive the tourist is, the more docile and infantilized he is. (…) So, a walking
tour is hands on, you’re walking—literally moving. You’re in motion in a number of
ways, and it’s facilitating interaction, among people and the guide, and among people and
each other. It’s more of a social experience (…) People on a tour bus have just about
surrendered everything, and are one step away from sitting at home and watching the
video. But walking tour people tend to be, in many ways- It’s like the difference between
network hit radio and NPR.
The tourist, to some, is “the epitome of avoidance” (Bauman 1997: 89), and to others “there’s probably no more acquiescent subject than the postindustrial tourist” (Sorkin 1992: 231). But this segment of the industry exposes just the opposite, and forecasts the final step in this presentation.
THE TRANSMISSION OF PRACTICE AND CULTURAL PRODUCTION
Guides, of course, through being educated by the urban world (and for some, the academic world) and educating others about it, the image of a cultural process of consuming and producing emerges. To close the loop of circulation, at least rhetorically (after all, this cultural production and re-production is a
Wynn, J. Page 11 of 15 process, not a single cycle), I conclude with a discussion of how guides attempt to develop the ethic of urban investigation in their participants. This presentation, an attempt to close loop of a city, mentality, and the particular practices of a social group that Simmel and Park proposed, has found the connection through spatial narratives. Somers writes that the veracity of a narrative “depends less on empirical verification and more on the logic and rhetorical persuasiveness of the narrative” (1999: 129). Storytelling, as a cultural practice, is an everyday activity unlike Hollywood productions, slick music videos, beaux-arts temples, sculptures, and big-budget cultural institutions highlighted in so many studies of urban culture.
Performance is “always restored behavior,” (Auyero 2003: 144), this performance of culture restores meaning, as well as re-interprets, re-enchants, and democratizes it for the everyday individual.
Despite their wide array of positions and dispositions, most guides, explicitly hope that their practices will be replicated in some fashion. Many hope that participants, while not wanting business competition per se, will become curious investigators of their social worlds. Such hopes would be empty without taking active steps to impart the practice to others. Rebeccah, a guide who is a Ph.D. candidate in history, and works for Big Onion, talked to me about nurturing her participant’s own investigations:
Rebeccah: “[Another guide] worked mostly with synagogue groups, these Jewish
teenagers from Nashville, or whatever. (…) she’s taking them through the Jewish East
Side and Chinatown and they are so unfamiliar with cities in general, not just New York
City. That they don’t know to read what they are seeing. They don’t know how to read
the neighborhood: Is it dirty or is it clean? Is it safe, is it not safe? Um, all that they know,
or that they can refer to is shopping: ‘Where is H&M? Where is Niketown?’ Because it is
something that makes sense to them. And then she was talking about how isn’t it
interesting that this is where their ancestors, you know, had settled, and that they are the
end of this historical trajectory: the suburban teenager, totally divorced from this
experience. But, what I was thinking about my Danish Trade Unionists, and it comes up
over and over again is that people don’t know how to read the city. And that is why it is
better to give the tour to New Yorkers than the tourists. They don’t know what they are
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seeing. They don’t know- they just see the dirt, the garbage. They are not attuned to the
minor architectural differences between the dumbbell tenements and-”
Jonathan Wynn: “Flemish bond…”
Rebeccah: “Yeah, exactly. It does- These tours really do presuppose something (…) How
I teach them how to read is [by] using this ‘Big Onion’ analogy of layers, and pointing
out the changes and- You know, there’s this one nice moment in the Immigrant New
York, or the Jewish East Side, or Multiethnic Eating tour where we’re talking about the
Forward Building. It’s down on Canal, where Canal and East Broadway kind of [split]
and Essex. So, it’s the Jewish Daily Forward, and it’s a socialist newspaper, then it was a
Chinese missionary church, and it’s now multi-million dollar condos. And then on the
corner is a place called the Wing Shoon restaurant, but it had been the Garden Cafeteria
where Emma Goldman and Trotsky used to hang out, and now it’s the Chinese restaurant.
And you can point very easily- There’s this new apartment building that’s under
construction. Those are selling for $85,000 a piece. So that’s where I can talk about these
layers, these changes in the neighborhood. So that’s how I try to teach them to read it.
And I say: ‘You see all these shuttered storefronts? They’re not out of business, they’re
nightclubs and bars.’
In the socio-historical context of the post-industrial city the urban tour guide comes to stand alongside the characters mentioned throughout this chapter as a revealing social role that investigates and communicates the social currents of our cities. Their spatial narratives hunt for clues, make up commodities and objects, tie the individual to the city, bring pieces of the city together, but they are also pedagogical.
Only a part of how guides teach is through the parroting of facts, but a less evident part is how— just like any good teacher—they teach a method of investigation based on engagement and experience. Just as everyday storytelling is a non-linear phenomenon, so too are stories of cities—full of metaphors, ironies, and juxtapositions—like that bricoleur, the jack-of-all-trades to whom “exploration is not so much a matter of covering ground as of digging beneath the surface” (Levi-Strauss 1995: 47-8)—paired with the offering up of that method to the public. While academic historian Halttunen writes that there are few historians
Wynn, J. Page 13 of 15 who experiment with multiple voices and perspectives willing to “abandon unified closure for open endings, highlight gaps and contradiction” (1999: 167), these ‘unconventional intellectuals’ (Shils 1972) do just that for as little as 10 dollars an hour. As such, guides offer a portable cultural practice, serve as a urban character resting within the circulation of culture, and enact Aristotle’s peripatetics of walking and talking.13
REFERENCES
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13 See Bourdieu’s discussion of separation of ‘experiential knowledge’ and ‘academic knowledge’ (2000), an issue that is raised in subsequent sections of this research.
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