Shay Rabineau
Associate Professor, Department of Judaic Studies, Binghamton University (SUNY)
New York, United States
András J. Molnár
Co-Founder, Pilgrimage Academy, Viatorum Trail Experts
Research Fellow, HUN-REN SZTAKI
Budapest, Hungary
This collection of short essays, entitled Trailology 1, is the first effort of the Trailology Collective to create a shared space in which trails are the focus of scholarly inquiry. At the time of this writing, no academic journals have made trails the central subject of study. Though trails exist everywhere in the world, interdisciplinary approaches to trail research are rare. Short academic works on trails are scattered across a constellation of publications, often in the form of articles and book chapters by authors who engage the topic of trails once and never return to it [Jeffrey Marion noted this at the World Trails Conference in Skiathos, Greece, 2022]. We see Trailology 1, released at the 2024 World Trails Conference in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, as an important first step in developing a more unified scholarly conversation on trails. Our goal is to showcase how trails relate to various areas, fields, and disciplines, and do so in a single, coherent volume.
Not all of the authors in this volume are academics, strictly speaking. But all of them have examined trails intently, and use their knowledge and expertise here to make interventions in various fields of study. All of them are connected to international conversations about trails, and are therefore positioned to think big about the interventions trails can make in the world. The authors of Trailology 1 were invited to write short essays on broad topics that engage wide audiences, show how trails can speak to entire fields and disciplines, and illustrate the surprising ways in which trails can offer unique vantage points for approaching the pressing issues of our time. Here in Chapter 1 of the volume, we offer an overview of the essays and how they relate to each other.
In Chapter 2, “Trailology and Sustainability,” Nat Scrimshaw and András Molnár expand the concept of trail sustainability beyond the narrow treadways of walking routes, and apply their lessons to the larger realms of economy, environment, and society. In Chapter 3, “Trailology and History,” Shay Rabineau argues that trails have their own histories that are intimately connected with the relationships between people and land. In Chapter 4, “Trailology and Landscape,” Cesar Augusto Aspiazu de Silva considers how “landscape” exists on different scales, and how long-distance trails allow people to view them from the microscopic to the continental. In Chapter 5, “Trailology and Governance,” Ming-Chien Hsu and Jacky Tao use approaches from sociology and political philosophy to craft a theory of how societies manage and maintain trail systems. In Chapter 6, “Trailology and Mathematics,” András Molnár and Borbála Benkhard show how network-analysis tools can solve many of the challenges trail networks face. In Chapter 7, “Trails and Transnationalism,” Steen Kobberø-Hansen shows how nationalist traditions of European hiking were subverted and undermined by transnational projects like the European Ramblers’ Association’s network of cross-border “E-paths.” In Chapter 8, “Trailology and Cultural Anthropology,” Pablo Vidal writes beautifully about how a historic long-distance travel route is the culmination of centuries of work by cooperating communities. In the final chapter, “Trailology and the Future,” we examine where trailology can go from here.
The Trailology Manifesto, which constitutes the preface and trailhead of this volume, informs the structure and appearance of this work: Trailology is a voluntary and collective effort, undertaken by practitioners of all backgrounds, scholars of all disciplines, and people from around the world. The articles are presented in English in this volume, but abstracts are given in the authors’ native languages, with a view toward the online publication of this entire work in a range of languages.
As noted in the Manifesto, “Trailology seeks to create spaces for airing ideas, discussing them, and moving the trail conversation forward.” This edited collection is one such effort in what is ultimately an iterative process. It is not complete, nor can it ever be. We may call it Trailology 1, but future volumes will eventually take other forms, written and otherwise.