Agi-agi, Agihan, ag Agimadmad (Walking, Walkways, and ‘Ways’ of Knowing): Multisensory Mapping and Tracing Epistemological 'Pathways' in Philippine Rice Terraces

Abstract (English)

This paper explores walking as both method and metaphor for understanding human-environment relations in the Maligcong Rice Terraces, Bontoc, Philippines. Drawing from a walk-based, multisensory ethnography, it investigates how pathways, linking rice fields, forests, homes, and sacred sites, carry ecological knowledge, memory, and social meaning. These footpaths are not merely routes of movement, but lived and negotiated spaces shaped by ancestral traditions, contemporary pressures, and global transformations such as tourism, climate change, and shifting livelihoods.

The study is grounded in the experience of walking alongside others, residents, farmers, elders, attuned to what is seen, heard, felt, and smelled along the way. It engages two vernacular notions of walking, pag-agi (Rinconada) and inpasyar (Bontoc), to frame the author’s reflexive positionality as both outsider and co-walker. This dialogic and embodied approach reveals how walking becomes a way of knowing, where pathways act as sensory and social lifelines connecting people, land, and more-than-human actors.

By mapping everyday routes and listening to stories told through movement, the research documents how touch, sound, rhythm, and proprioception mediate ecological care and adaptive strategies. Subtle sensory cues, such as changes in footfalls on eroded trails, the absence of birdsong, or the scent of overgrown paddies, signal broader environmental transformations. These encounters not only shape local ecological knowledge but also sustain memory, stewardship, and cultural resilience.

Pathways, then, emerge as spaces of negotiation, where care for land, adaptation to change, and intergenerational memory are continually renewed. Walking becomes a way of noticing, remembering, and caring. This study contributes to the sensory turn in ecological anthropology by proposing a reflexive, embodied cartography that values the small, everyday acts that hold people and places together.

Through walking as a multimodal and affective methodology, the paper invites deeper engagement with landscape, resilience, and multispecies care. It offers insights into how indigenous and local practices attune to and contest ecological change, and how embodied fieldwork can amplify situated knowledge and relational ways of living in a more-than-human world.