14 / 30 Strollology – the alienation from alienation

Yesterday I was blogging about my annoyance with tourists. Those alien-like figures, who always move slowly, appear in groups and block everything for everybody. I was annoyed by the greedy exotization. I was annoyed by the obsession to turn everything and everybody into a postcard memory. And one day later, I find myself here:

Yes, I joined a city tour. Yes, I look like a tourist. And yes, our group blocked the roads for some poor Salzburger bikers that shouted their characteristic “Hey, Aufbassen” at us. Yet, the tour that I joined was rather unusual. Jubril Olawumi was our guide. Born in Lagos in Nigeria he lives in Salzburg since 1991 and has become a known figure in town. Not only because he runs his own taxi company, but also because he is a connoisseur of Volksmusik, both Nigerian and Austrian folklorist music.

“Show me your city” was the only instruction he got from Bärbel Hartje who curates the walking series. In total there will be four walks during the summer academy. While in the past years dancers, architects and other locals with expert or particularly odd knowledge would be the guides, this year four Salzburgers that were not born in Salzburg run the tours. Bärbel tells me that the concept is inspired by Spaziergangswissenschaft, the science of walking: or strollology.

I google it and yes, this is an actual scientific discipline. It was founded by a German sociologist at Kassel University in the 1980s. Strollology does not only claim that walking can be an aesthetic practice. It further allows you to profoundly change your relationship to a space or landscape. Walking is the method to acquire what anthropologists call everyday knowledge: knowledge of a place that you have, but you are not aware of or you cannot easily express in language. An important aspect of strollology is to describe everything that you see. Usually, when coming home from a walk people describe only the beautiful sites that they have seen and forget about the factories and highways they passed. Against this notion strollology is an alienation from alienation as a fellow blogger calls it.

Leading our tourist group in his traditional African suit, Jubril Olawumi attracts some astonished gazes from passer-by. But to be honest, his walking tour is strikingly normal. The tour starts at parking space in the suburbs and goes to the some spots where Sound of Music was filmed and to his favourite places: the castles and local playgrounds. He says that he likes Salzburg because it is so relaxed. This all is so strikingly normal that I become aware of my tourist expectations: I want the exotic, the particular, the insider perspective. In a most charming way Jubril Olawumi insists on being just a regular Salzburger, who loves his city. Maybe that is what strollology is about: paying attention to the obvious and by that arriving somewhere: the alienation of alienation.