I learned a new word from the book On Trails: An Exploration by Robert Moore which I want to jot down here for future use. I don’t know what that use will be, mind you, but I like collecting topo-themed words.

Referencing an old Apache cowboy (described in another book I’ve discussed) who would occasionally recite lists of place names to himself, “a long list, punctuated only by spurts of tobacco juice, that went on for nearly ten minutes,” because “I like to, I ride that way in my mind.” Moore explains:

Anthropologists have a term for this practice of place-listing: topogeny. It is storytelling at its most spare, rendering a narrative down to a string of dense linguistic packets, like seeds, which flower in the mind.”

A topogeny can further be described as a form of shared cultural knowledge, somewhat similar to a genealogy, but using an ordered sequence of place names that can be attached to specific locations in a landscape. It can recount a journey, a migration, or transmission of an object, and represents “a projected externalization of memories that can be lived in as well as thought about” (source). A topogeny a specific history of a person or people, but embedded in the landscape, which is a concept I find fascinating.