Toward an Ecology of Materials∗

AN41CH26-Ingold ARI 16 August 2012 19:7 Toward an Ecology of Materials∗ Tim Ingold Department of Anthropology, School of Social Science, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen AB24 3QY, Scotland, United Kingdom; email: [email protected] Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2012. 41:427–42 Keywords First published online as a Review in Advance on materiality, embodiment, nonhumans, hylomorphism, things July 2, 2012 The Annual Review of Anthropology is online at Abstract anthro.annualreviews.org Both material culture studies and ecological anthropology are con- This article’s doi: cerned with the material conditions of social and cultural life. Yet despite 10.1146/annurev-anthro-081309-145920 advances in each of these fields that have eroded traditional divisions be- Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2012.41:427-442. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org Access provided by Washington State University on 12/26/19. For personal use only. Copyright c 2012 by Annual Reviews. tween humanistic and science-based approaches, their respective prac- All rights reserved titioners continue to talk past one another in largely incommensurate 0084-6570/12/1021-0427$20.00 theoretical languages. This review of recent trends in the study of mate- ∗This article is part of a special theme on rial culture finds the reasons for this in (a) a conception of the material Materiality. For a list of other articles in this world and the nonhuman that leaves no space for living organisms, theme, see this volume’s Table of Contents. (b) an emphasis on materiality that prioritizes finished artifacts over the properties of materials, and (c) a conflation of things with objects that stops up the flows of energy and circulations of materials on which life depends. To overcome these limitations, the review proposes an ecology of materials that focuses on their enrollment in form-making processes. It concludes with some observations on materials, mind, and time. 427 AN41CH26-Ingold ARI 16 August 2012 19:7 INTRODUCTION was evermore firmly gripped by the natural science paradigm, with the emergence of such One of the peculiarities of material culture approaches as behavioral ecology (Smith & studies over recent decades has been its virtual Winterhalder 1992) and gene-culture coevolu- divorce from the traditions of ecological tion (Durham 1991, Boyd & Richerson 2005). anthropology. This is odd, given that both It is no wonder, then, that students of material fields are broadly concerned with the material culture and ecological anthropologists ended conditions of social and cultural life. Students up glowering at one another from opposite sides of material culture are interested in people’s re- of the ring, in what had become an increasingly lations with things. Ecological anthropologists polarized academic arena. But that was then. study how human beings relate to their biotic Things have since moved on, and both sides and abiotic environments. For the former, have made strenuous efforts to moderate their persons and things are bound in relational net- earlier positions. Ecological anthropologists works; for the latter, human beings and other have been at the forefront of rethinking the organisms are bound in webs of life. Yet practi- received dichotomies between nature and soci- tioners of these two fields are speaking past one ety, and between biology and culture, that had another in largely incommensurate theoretical underwritten so much previous work, drawing languages. It is not hard to find reasons for instead from approaches in developmental this divergence in the recent histories of both biology, ecological psychology, biosemiotics, anthropology and archaeology. Throughout and even phenomenology (Ingold 1990, 1992, the 1960s and 1970s, the two disciplines had 2000b; Croll & Parkin 1992; Descola & been strongly linked, even identified, through Palsson 1996; Ellen & Fukui 1996). And in the development of neofunctionalism in the material culture studies, scholars have sought former and processualism in the latter. Pro- to recapture the physicality of the material ponents of neofunctionalism in anthropology world that had been neglected by the post- (Rappaport 1968, Vayda 1969) set out to show processualists in their quest for free-floating how diverse beliefs and practices could be “meanings” that had seemed only arbitrarily understood as adaptations that served to main- attached to their signifiers (Olsen 2003, tain a self-regulating equilibrium in relations Boivin 2004, Knappett 2005). Surely, then, between human populations and their environ- ecological anthropology and material culture ments. Likewise in archaeology, the processual studies should have now reached some kind of paradigm interpreted artifact assemblages and rapprochement. But they have not. Why? patterns of deposition as evidence for human In this review, I suggest three answers. First, behavioral adaptation to environmental con- material culture studies continue to operate ditions (Binford 1962, 1983). Both paradigms with a conception of the material world, and Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2012.41:427-442. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org drew for inspiration on models in animal of the nonhuman, that focuses on the artifac- Access provided by Washington State University on 12/26/19. For personal use only. ecology and were keen to present themselves tual domain at the expense of living organisms. as paragons of positive science. Second, the prevailing emphasis on material- What has been called the material cultural ity obstructs our understanding of the fields of turn (Hicks 2010) emerged at the end of the force and circulations of materials that actually 1970s as a humanistic reaction against the give rise to things and that are constitutive of the scientific conceit of processual archaeology. web of life. And third, once things have been cut Advocates of postprocessualism were deter- off from their source of vitality in flows of en- mined to show how objects of material culture ergy and materials, their generation, liveliness, carried meanings constituted within wider and capacities for perception and response are fields of signification and figured in practice stopped up. In what follows I consider each of as vehicles of symbolic expression (Hodder these impediments to the integration of ecolog- 1982a,b). Ecological anthropology, meanwhile, ical anthropology and material culture studies 428 Ingold AN41CH26-Ingold ARI 16 August 2012 19:7 and suggest how they may be overcome through publications on material culture, for authors to a focus on the active materials that compose the register a general complaint against academic lifeworld. I conclude with some observations on social science for its tendency to reckon as if materials, mind, and time. there were no things or objects in the world, only persons. One such author is Bjørnar Olsen. In mounting his recent defense of things, Olsen MISSING NONHUMANS (2010, p. 21) appeals to the authority of the A team of philosophically inclined chim- philosopher Michel Serres, who has this to say: panzees has embarked on the sociological study of a human group. One of the first things The only assignable difference between an- they notice is that activities they are used to imal societies and our own resides...in the performing directly on one another, such as emergence of objects. Our relationships, so- grooming, are displaced onto the manipulation cial bonds, would be as airy as clouds were of artifacts such as combs and brushes. They there only contracts between subjects. In fact, observe, too, that there is no point in the lives the object, specific to the Hominidae, stabi- of human beings, from cradle to grave, when lizes our relationships. (Serres 1995, p. 87) they are not being intimate with artifacts. They conclude that it would be a big mistake to How is life, then, for the animals? Serres’s separate out a domain of social or interpersonal contention is that the social science to which relations from the wider set of person-artifact we are accustomed—although intended for hu- and artifact-artifact relations within which they man beings—would actually be applicable, at are embedded. best, to animals, since it leaves out of account It is with this imaginary scenario that the objects that anchor the kind of sociality that Michael Schiffer introduces his study of “the is specifically human (Serres & Latour 1995, material life of human beings” (Schiffer & pp. 199–200). It may work, for example, for Miller 1999, pp. 2–3). Why, Schiffer wonders, a troop of baboons. Among members of the should a conclusion so evident to our simian troop, relations decay as fast as they are estab- philosophers escape the attention of most hu- lished, for without extrasomatic objects there is man sociologists, who continue to write as nothing to hold them down. Instead, they have though their conspecifics inhabited a world of continually to be reasserted (Strum & Latour their own, aloof from the materials of life? His 1987; Latour 2005, pp. 69, 197–99). answer is that the very familiarity of everyday Whatever the case may be for baboons, artifacts, and the intimacy with which we hu- however, it is simply not true that, for non- man beings routinely engage with them, blind human animals generally, social relations are us to their presence. We take these artifacts for free-floating rather than anchored in the mate- Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2012.41:427-442. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org granted. Although animals of many species in- rial world. Many migratory seabirds return to Access provided by Washington State University on 12/26/19. For personal use only. teract on a sustained basis with things of various breed, year in, year out, to the same cliffs and kinds, some of which they have made them- in the same pairs—as do herds of ungulates to selves, no other species comes close to humans the same calving grounds. Whether cliffs and in the extent to which they do so. “Incessant grounds can be understood as objects is moot, interaction with endlessly varied artefacts is,” but as I show below, they are most certainly Schiffer maintains, “the empirical reality of hu- things.

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