The Politics and Poetics of O’odham Categories of Movement: Movement in Discourse and Practice

Abstract Through exploring the physicality of movement in general and walking in particular—while also attending to O’odham discourses on these movements—this article arrives at a general, albeit a contested and historically contingent, sketch of an O’odham ideology of walking (and dancing, and perhaps movement in general) as political discourse. More broadly, students of ideology, including religious studies scholars who have historically neglected practice in their fixation on texts, would do well to more carefully attend to movement itself, as well as discourses on movement, in order to more effectively observe, analyze, and theorize ideology at work in both discourse and practice. A focus on both the politics and the poetics of “walking” and what it means “to be a good walker” may also be useful for scholars interested in articulating indigenous (and also non-indigenous) theories of movement that go beyond abstract reifications of “pilgrimage.”