The Life of Lines
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Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 12/03/2015; 3B2 version: 10.0.1465/W Unicode (Dec 22 2011) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/kcg/2-Pagination/TandF/LOL_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/9780415576857_text.3d The Life of Lines ‘In The Life of Lines Ingold develops a philosophical and ecological anthropology that is at once expansive, integrative, and inclusive. His poetic narrative interlaces bodies, minds, landscapes, topographies, and perceptions in a correspondence of lines. Taking us on a journey through movement, knots, weather, atmosphere and surfaces, he guides us to a critical conclusion: to human is a verb.’ Agustín Fuentes, University of Notre Dame, USA To live, every being must put out a line, and in life these lines tangle with one another. This book is a study of the life of lines. Following on from his groundbreaking work Lines: A Brief History, Tim Ingold offers a stunningly original series of meditations on life, ground, wind, walking, imagination and what it means to be human. A world of life is woven from knots; not built from blocks as commonly thought. Ingold shows how knotting underwrites both the way things join with one another – in walls, buildings and bodies – and the composition of the ground and the knowledge we find there. To study living lines we must also study the weather. To complement his linealogy, Ingold develops a meteorology that seeks the common denomi- nator of breath, time, mood, sound, memory, colour and the sky. This denominator is the atmosphere. Finally, Ingold carries the line into the domain of human life. For life to continue, he argues, the things we do must be framed within the lives we undergo. In continually answering to one another, these lives enact a principle of correspondence that is fundamentally social. This compelling volume brings our thinking about the material world vividly back to life. While anchored in anthropology, the book ranges over an interdisciplinary terrain that includes philosophy, geography, sociology, art and architecture. Tim Ingold is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen, UK. His books for Routledge include Lines: A Brief History (2007), The Perception of the Environment (reissued 2011), Being Alive (2011) and Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (2013). Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 12/03/2015; 3B2 version: 10.0.1465/W Unicode (Dec 22 2011) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/kcg/2-Pagination/TandF/LOL_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/9780415576857_text.3d This page intentionally left blank Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 12/03/2015; 3B2 version: 10.0.1465/W Unicode (Dec 22 2011) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/kcg/2-Pagination/TandF/LOL_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/9780415576857_text.3d The Life of Lines Tim Ingold Add AddAdd Add Add Add Add AddAdd AddAdd AddAdd Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 12/03/2015; 3B2 version: 10.0.1465/W Unicode (Dec 22 2011) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/kcg/2-Pagination/TandF/LOL_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/9780415576857_text.3d First published 2015 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2015 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- The life of lines / Tim Ingold. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Signs and symbols--History. 2. Writing--History. 3. Drawing--History. I. Title. GN452.5.I539 2015 301--dc23 2014039249 ISBN: 978-0-415-57685-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-415-57686-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-72724-0 (ebk) Typeset in Goudy by Taylor and Francis Books Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 12/03/2015; 3B2 version: 10.0.1465/W Unicode (Dec 22 2011) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/kcg/2-Pagination/TandF/LOL_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/9780415576857_text.3d Contents List of illustrations vii Preface viii PART I Knotting 1 1 Line and blob 3 2 Octopuses and anemones 9 3 A world without objects 13 4 Materials, gesture, sense and sentiment 18 5 Of knots and joints 22 6 Wall 27 7 The mountain and the skyscraper 32 8 Ground 37 9 Surface 41 10 Knowledge 46 PART II Weathering 51 11 Whirlwind 53 12 Footprints along the path 60 Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 12/03/2015; 3B2 version: 10.0.1465/W Unicode (Dec 22 2011) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/kcg/2-Pagination/TandF/LOL_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/9780415576857_text.3d vi Contents 13 Wind-walking 64 14 Weather-world 69 15 Atmosphere 73 16 Ballooning in smooth space 79 17 Coiling over 84 18 Under the sky 89 19 Seeing with sunbeams 94 20 Line and colour 101 21 Line and sound 106 PART III Humaning 113 22 To human is a verb 115 23 Anthropogenesis 120 24 Doing, undergoing 125 25 The maze and the labyrinth 130 26 Education and attention 134 27 Submission leads, mastery follows 138 28 A life 143 29 In-between 147 30 The correspondence of lines 154 References 159 Index 166 Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 12/03/2015; 3B2 version: 10.0.1465/W Unicode (Dec 22 2011) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/kcg/2-Pagination/TandF/LOL_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/9780415576857_text.3d Illustrations Figures 1.1 Blob and line 4 1.2 Transmission electron micrograph of the bacterium Vibrio parahaemolyticus 5 1.3 Henri Matisse, Dance (1909–10) 6 3.1 From knot to weave 14 5.1 Joining timber 24 5.2 Bones and ligaments 26 7.1 The skyscraper model and the extrusion model 34 9.1 The three stages of plant formation 44 11.1 The storm from space 55 11.2 Overlapping circles and inter-running spirals 56 11.3 Spindle whorl 57 11.4 Tree-knots 58 13.1 Wind-blown dune-grass describing circles in the sand 66 13.2 ‘Me walking home today’ 66 16.1 The atmosphere refilled with air 81 17.1 My being with the tree and the tree’s being with me 86 19.1 The Starry Night (De sterrennacht), by Vincent van Gogh 95 19.2 The beam of light 98 20.1 Some of the possible meanings of a line 102 20.2 The variations of colour 104 22.1 The story of Ramon Llull and the Saracen 116 23.1 Growing-in-making and making-in-growing 121 29.1 Intermediacy and midstreaming 148 29.2 Articulate and personal knowledge 149 Tables 11.1 Linealogy and meteorology 54 24.1 Humanifying : humanising : : anthropogenesis : anthropomorphism 128 Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 12/03/2015; 3B2 version: 10.0.1465/W Unicode (Dec 22 2011) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/kcg/2-Pagination/TandF/LOL_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/9780415576857_text.3d Preface 1 January 2014: feeling a bit depressed by the relentless passage of time, as I often do on New Year’s Day, I cheered myself up by writing in my note- book: ‘Today I am going to get back to work on The Life of Lines.’ Then I went for a walk in the hills and thought about it. And that was that. Life intervened, as it always does, in the form not of opportunities to write my lines, but of the incessant demands of academic employment. I had been meaning to complete the book for years, and had been accumulating bits and pieces of writing with a view to putting them all together once a suitable moment would arrive. But it never did. Days, weeks and months ticked by, and I was still no closer to composing the book than when the year began. Indeed almost seven years had elapsed since I first ventured into print on the subject of lines. My book Lines: A Brief History was published in 2007. Yet even before the ink was dry on the manuscript, I already knew that I would have to write some sort of sequel. Not knowing exactly what it would be about, I filed it in my head as Lines 2. All I knew was that it would have something to do with lines and the weather. For I had found, rather to my surprise, that thinking about lines always brought thoughts about the weather in its wake, and vice versa. Why was that, I wondered? Perhaps it only proved that I had completely lost the plot. Any level-headed reader, for whom the idea that an anthropologist can study lines is hard enough to swallow, would surely conclude that to take off into the atmosphere is to go completely off the rails. What business has an anthropologist encroaching on territory that rightfully belongs to the science of meteorology, or maybe to students of aesthetics? These doubts nagged at me too, and yet the idea of a unified field of linealogy and meteorology would not let me go. An opportunity to contribute to the inspirational series of seminars that anthropologist and ex-architect Trevor Marchand convened at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, in 2007, and to the subsequent volume, provided me with an excuse to begin to set my thoughts on paper, and a Professorial Fellowship funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council for the three years 2005–8afforded me a window of time to do so.