Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description

Being Alive ‘For three decades, Tim Ingold’s has been one of the most consistently exploratory and provocative voices in contemporary scholarship. This book leads us, in prose that is exactingly lucid and charged with poetic eloquence, on a journey through, amongst other things, Chinese calligraphy, line drawing, carpentry, kite flying, Australian Aboriginal painting, native Alaskan storytelling, web-spinning arachnids, the art of walking and, not least, the history of anthropology, none of which will ever look quite the same again! The work is at once a meditation on questions central to anthropology, art practice, human ecology and philosophy, a passionate rebuttal of reductionisms of all kinds, a celebration of creativity understood in the broadest possible sense and a humane and generous manual for living in a world of becoming.’ Stuart McLean, University of Minnesota, USA ‘Simultaneously intimate and all-encompassing, Tim Ingold’s second landmark collection of essays explains how it feels to craft an existence between earth and sky, among plants and animals, across childhood and old age. A master of the form, Ingold shows how aliveness is the essential resource for an affirmative philosophy of life.’ Hayden Lorimer, University of Glasgow, UK ‘In these iconoclastic essays, Ingold breaks the dichotomies of likeness and difference to show that anthropology’s subject, and with it that of the human sciences more generally, is not constituted by polarities like that of space contra place, but by a movement along paths that compose a being that is as alive to the sentient world as this world is to its human inhabitants.’ Kenneth Olwig, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Sweden Building on his classic work The Perception of the Environment, Tim Ingold sets out to restore life to where it should belong, at the heart of anthropological concern. Starting from the idea of life as a process of wayfaring, Being Alive presents a radically new understanding of movement, knowledge and description as dimensions not just of being in the world, but of being alive to what is going on there. Tim Ingold is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen, UK. He is the author of The Perception of the Environment and Lines. Being Alive Essays on movement, knowledge and description Tim Ingold First published 2011 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA & Canada by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an impr int of the Taylor & Francis Group, an infor ma business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2011. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. © 2011 Tim Ingold The right of Tim Ingold to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Ingold, Tim, 1948– Being alive : essays on movement, knowledge and description / Tim Ingold. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Anthropology–Philosophy. 2. Human ecology–Philosophy. 3. Human beings–Effect of environment on. 4. Geographical perception. I. Title. GN33.I45 2011 301.01–dc22 2010043941 ISBN 0-203-81833-4 Master e-book ISBN ISBN: 978-0-415-57683-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-415-57684-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-81833-6 (ebk) ‘It’s my life’ Zack Ingold (aged 3) to whom, with affection, this book is dedicated. CONTENTS List of figures ix Preface and acknowledgements xi Prologue 1 Anthropology comes to life 3 PART I Clearing the ground 15 2 Materials against materiality 19 3 Culture on the ground: the world perceived through the feet 33 4 Walking the plank: meditations on a process of skill 51 PART II The meshwork 63 5 Rethinking the animate, reanimating thought 67 6 Point, line, counterpoint: from environment to fluid space 76 7 When ANT meets SPIDER: social theory for arthropods 89 viii Contents PART III Earth and sky 95 8 The shape of the earth 99 9 Earth, sky, wind and weather 115 10 Landscape or weather-world? 126 11 Four objections to the concept of soundscape 136 PART IV A storied world 141 12 Against space: place, movement, knowledge 145 13 Stories against classification: transport, wayfaring and the integration of knowledge 156 14 Naming as storytelling: speaking of animals among the Koyukon of Alaska 165 PART V Drawing making writing 177 15 Seven variations on the letter A 181 16 Ways of mind-walking: reading, writing, painting 196 17 The textility of making 210 18 Drawing together: doing, observing, describing 220 Epilogue 19 Anthropology is not ethnography 229 Notes 244 References 254 Index 265 FIGURES 2.1 Wet stone 19 2.2 Ladder 27 2.3 Dry stone 32 3.1 Skeletons of the gibbon, orang-utan, chimpanzee, gorilla and man 34 3.2 Hand (a) and foot (b) of chimpanzee; hand (c) and foot (d) of man 36 4.1 The correct way to hold a saw and how to use the thumb and left hand as a guide when beginning the cut 52 5.1 Radiating life: an acacia tree in Tsavo National Park, Kenya 71 6.1 A line of becoming, in relation to the localizable connection of A and B (distance), or in relation to their contiguity 84 6.2 ‘Loose’ ligament tissue of the rat 87 7.1 ANT, the mound builder 89 7.2 SPIDER, the web weaver 90 7.3 The meshwork (spider/web/twig) and the network of relations between spider, web and twig 92 8.1 Mental models of the earth 100 8.2 (a) Ethan’s drawing of the spherical earth surrounded by the ‘sky’; (b) Darcy’s drawing of the sky, the ground (with houses) and the 103 spherical earth 8.3 Examples of the picture cards used in the experiment by Nobes, Martin and Panagiotaki 106 8.4 Adults’ drawings of the earth 107 9.1 The world brought indoors: René Magritte’s Poison (1939) 118 9.2 The exhabitant of the earth (a) and the inhabitant of the weather-world (b) 120 9.3 A pencil sketch by Vincent van Gogh dating from summer 1889, of a wheat field with cypress trees 122 9.4 Withered grasses in frozen snow, Goodnews Bay, Lower Kuskokwim District, Alaska 123 9.5 Fungi breaking through asphalt 124 x List of figures 13.1 The dual inheritance model of genetic and cultural transmission 158 13.2 Story and life 161 13.3 Wayfaring (top) and transport (bottom) 163 15.1 ‘This is not an A’: card, paper, ink and red cosmetic dye 182 15.2 As in plastic, from an alphabet set for pre-school children 184 15.3 Ox-head A and a scene painted on the wall of the chapel of Djar in the city of Thebes 186 15.4 Gothic A and quill, showing approved penhold 187 15.5 A line of writing: typed and handwritten on ruled paper 189 15.6 The sound of A: musical score, phonetic articulation and tuning fork 192 15.7 An embroidered A with needle and thread in fabric 194 16.1 Words in pictures and pictures in words: a page from the Aberdeen Bestiary 201 16.2 Figurative and geometric motifs in Yolngu art 203 17.1 Sight lines as threads: two engravings by Abraham Bosse 219 PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am an anthropologist: not a social or cultural anthropologist; not a biological or archaeological anthropologist; just an anthropologist. And in this book I present a very personal view of what, for me, anthropology is. I do not pretend that it is in any way representative: to the contrary, anthropologists reading this book may feel that it strays rather far from their usual preoccupations, and that its centre of gravity lies closer to other fields such as art or architecture. It has indeed been part of my purpose to shift anthropology in this direction, a purpose founded on the conviction that the convention according to which anthropology is committed to observing and describing life as we find it, but not to changing it, whereas art and architecture are at liberty to propose forms never before encountered, without having first to observe and describe what is already there, is unsustainable. The truth is that the propositions of art and architecture, to the extent that they carry force, must be grounded in a profound understanding of the lived world, and conversely that anthropological accounts of the manifold ways in which life is lived would be of no avail if they were not brought to bear on speculative inquiries into what the possibilities for human life might be. Thus art, architecture and anthropology have in common that they observe, describe and propose. There is, perhaps, a discipline waiting to be defined and named where these three fields meet, and if some readers would prefer to regard this book as a kind of manifesto for that discipline, then I shall not object.

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