You'll never walk alone: Troubling the "auto" in autoethnography

This autoethnographic paper examines the paradoxical co-production of “aloneness” in nature spaces charged with a politics of memory. The settings are Highland Clearances ruins and bothies in Scotland. Bothies are rustic shelters in remote areas at which everyone is free to stay. The Highland Clearances (1750s—1860s) were a tumultuous period during which subsistence farmers were forcibly evicted from rural land as part of Enlightenment-era “development”.Walking “alone” —in every practical sense— to clearances ruins and bothies, I show how it is impossible to extract myself from wider assemblages. There are human others: the people whose houses the bothies once were and the people who make hiking mobilities possible. There are non-human others: deer ticks, Highland midges, and peat bogs. And there is the materiality of affect, in which ruined buildings and their broken heart(h)s are steeped in pain and meaning. Thus, even as I go “alone”, I am necessarily part of wider assemblages. For this reason, I question the fact of walking “alone” at all. Of course, this matters to autoethnography, because if we cannot walk alone, how can we write a solitary “auto” that putatively walks its own path? While the subject matter of this paper is hiking and Scotland and history, its contribution is a questioning of the autonomy of the “auto” in autoethnography more broadly. All of us walk within complex assemblages, such that solo-hiking subjectivity —like the solo writing of autoethnographies— is a paradoxical co-production. We are all embedded. You never really can walk alone.