Tim Ingold

The temporality of the landscape

Abstract Landscape and temporality are the major unifying themes of archaeology and social‐cultural anthropology. This paper attempts to show how the temporality of the landscape may be understood by way of a ‘dwelling perspective’ that sets out from the premise of peoples active, perceptual engagement in the world. The meaning of ‘landscape’ is clarified by contrast to the concepts of land, nature and space. The notion of ‘taskscape’ is introduced to denote a pattern of dwelling activities, and the intrinsic temporality of the taskscape is shown to lie in its rhythmic interrelations or patterns of resonance. By considering how taskscape relates to landscape, the distinction between them is ultimately dissolved, and the landscape itself is shown to be fundamentally temporal. Some concrete illustrations of these arguments are drawn from a painting by Bruegel, The Harvesters.

Materials against materiality

This article seeks to reverse the emphasis, in current studies of material culture, on the materiality of objects as against the properties of materials. Drawing on James Gibsons tripartite division of the inhabited environment into medium, substances and surfaces, it is argued that the forms of things are not imposed from without upon an inert substrate of matter, but are continually generated and dissolved within the fluxes of materials across the interface between substances and the medium that surrounds them. Thus things are active not because they are imbued with agency but because of ways in which they are caught up in these currents of the lifeworld. The properties of materials, then, are not fixed attributes of matter but are processual and relational. To describe these properties means telling their stories.

Culture on the Ground The World Perceived Through the Feet

Classical accounts of human evolution posit a progressive differentiation between the hands as instruments of rational intelligence and feet as integral to the mechanics of bipedal locomotion. Yet evolutionists were modelling pedestrian performance on the striding gait of boot-clad Europeans. The bias of head over heels in their accounts follows a long-standing tendency, in western thought and science, to elevate the plane of social and cultural life over the ground of nature. This tendency was already established among European elites in the practice of destination-oriented travel, the use of shoes and chairs, and the valorization of upright posture. It was further reinforced in urban societies through paving the streets. The groundlessness of metropolitan life remains embedded not only in western social structures but also in the disciplines of anthropology, psychology and biology. A more grounded approach to human movement, sensitive to embodied skills of footwork, opens up new terrain in the study of environmental perception, the history of technology, landscape formation and human anatomical evolution.

Rethinking the Animate, Re-Animating Thought

Abstract Animism is often described as the imputation of life to inert objects. Such imputation is more typical of people in western societies who dream of finding life on other planets than of indigenous peoples to whom the label of animism has classically been applied. These peoples are united not in their beliefs but in a way of being that is alive and open to a world in continuous birth. In this animic ontology, beings do not propel themselves across a ready-made world but rather issue forth through a world-in-formation, along the lines of their relationships. To its inhabitants this weather-world, embracing both sky and earth, is a source of astonishment but not surprise. Re-animating the ‘western’ tradition of thought means recovering the sense of astonishment banished from official science.

Bindings against Boundaries: Entanglements of Life in an Open World

In this paper I argue that to inhabit the world is to live life in the open. Yet philosophical attempts to characterise the open lead to paradox. Do we follow Heidegger in treating the open as an enclosed space cleared from within, or Kant (and, following his lead, mainstream science) in placing the open all around on the outside? One possible solution is offered by Gibson in his ecological approach to perception. The Gibsonian perceiver is supported on the ground, with the sky above and the earth below. Yet in this view, only by being furnished with objects does the earth–sky world become habitable. To progress beyond the idea that life is played out upon the surface of a furnished world, we need to attend to those fluxes of the medium we call weather. To inhabit the open is to be immersed in these fluxes. Life is lived in a zone in which earthly substances and aerial media are brought together in the constitution of beings which, in their activity, participate in weaving the textures of the land. Here, organisms figure not as externally bounded entities but as bundles of interwoven lines of growth and movement, together constituting a meshwork in fluid space. The environment, then, comprises not the surroundings of the organism but a zone of entanglement. Life in the open, far from being contained within bounded places, threads its way along paths through the weather world. Despite human attempts to hard surface this world, and to block the intermingling of substance and medium that is essential to growth and habitation, the creeping entanglements of life will always and eventually gain the upper hand.

Companion encyclopedia of anthropology

Tim Ingold, University of Manchester, UK Phillip V. Tobias, University of the Witwatersrand Medical School, South Africa Clive Gamble, University of Southampton, UK Philip Lieberman, Brown University, USA David Premack University of Pennsylvania, USA Thomas Wynn, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, USA Roy Ellen, University of Kent, UK Igor de Garine, France Mark N. Cohen, State University of New York College, USA Stephen Kunitz, University of Rochester Medical Center, USA John Olding-Smee, Brunel University, UK Mary L. Foster, University of California Berkley, USA Daniel Miller, University College London, UK Francois Sigaut, Centre de Recherches Historiques, France Brent Berlin, University of California, USA Amos Rapoport, University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, USA Barbara E. Adams, University of Wales, UK. Brian V. Street, University of Sussex, UK Niko Besnier, Yale University, USA Gilbert Lewis, University of Cambridge, UK James F. Weiner, Australian National University, Australia Richard B. Schechner, New York University, USA Howard Morphy, University of Oxford UK Anthony D. Smith, London School of Economics, UK Robin Dunbar, University College London, UK Alan Barnard, University of Edinburgh, UK Fitz John Porter Poole, University of California, San Diego, USA J. de Bernadi, Henrietta L. Moore, University of Cambridge, UK Sutti Ortiz, Boston University, USA Chris Gregory, Australian National University, Australia Simon Roberts, London School of Economics, UK Robert A. Rubinstien, Northwestern University, USA Timothy Earle, University of California, USA Andre Beteille, University of Delhi, India Peter Worsley.

Becoming Persons: Consciousness and Sociality in Human Evolution

most closely related to us. Yet the clarification of these differences has been continually impeded by conceptual ambiguities surrounding the very notions of ’society’ and ’sociality’. Many biologists, working within a framework of modem evolutionary ecology, have posited a basic continuity from non-human to human sociality, taking social organization in both instances to comprise observable patterns of interaction, co-operation and communication among individuals of the same species. These patterns of behaviour are understood to be the phenotypic expression of genetically coded, heritable dispositions established in the course of evolutionary phylogeny through the mechanism of variation under natural selection. Thus sociality, in this view, is regarded as an inbuilt property of individuals, though one that is ’brought out’ only in the

Key Debates in Anthropology

Every year, leading social anthropologists meet to debate a motion at the heart of current theoretical developments in their subject and this book includes the first six of these debates, spanning the period from 1988 to 1993. Each debate has four principal speakers: one to propose the motion, another to oppose it, and two seconders. The first debate addresses the disciplinary character of social anthropology: can it be regarded as a science, and if so, is it able to establish general propositions about human culture and social life? The second examines the concept of society, and in the third debate the spotlight is turned on the role of culture in peoples perception of their environments. The fourth debate focuses on the place of language in the formation of culture. The fifth takes up the question of how we view the past in relation to the present. Finally, in the sixth debate, the concern is with the cross-cultural applicability of the concept of aesthetics. With its unique debate format, Key Debates in Anthropology addresses issues that are currently at the top of the theoretical agenda, which register the pulse of contemporary thinking in social anthropology. It will be of value to students who are not only introduced to the different sides of every argument, but are challenged to join in and to develop informed positions of their own.

When ANT meets SPIDER: Social theory for arthropods

Deep in the woods, amidst the undergrowth and detritus of a forest floor, two distinguished arthropods – renowned in the animal kingdom for their ingenuity and technical accomplishments – have struck up a conversation. One is ANT, the other is SPIDER. Both being philosophically inclined, their concern is to understand the world and their place in it. On this particular occasion, it is ANT’s turn to open the debate. ‘We ants’, he declares, ‘are not isolated individuals. Our brains may be no bigger than pin heads, yet we can achieve great things. Our nests are monumental mounds and our roads are highways through the forest, overrunning everything in their path. We can accomplish these feats because we collaborate. We live together in colonies, many thousand strong, sharing our food andwork. In a word, we are the most social of insects’. SPIDER, more solitary by nature, finds the idea of life in a colony hard to grasp. She admits that she would bemore inclined to eat others of her kind than to work with them. Curious to know what it means to be social, she resolves to press ANT on the issue. ‘In the course of your activities’, she remarks, ‘you have to deal with all sorts of things. I have seen you dragging worms and bugs that you have killed for food to your nests, along with building materials like twigs, pine needles and leaves, oftenmany times your body size. I have seen you ‘‘touching up’’ aphids and licking the honeydew from their bodies. And I have seen you picking up and carrying around the larvae of your own kind. Tell me, do you have social relations with these things or only with mature members of the colony like yourself ?’ ‘Now there, my dear SPIDER’, replies ANT, ‘you have touched on an issue that has been the source of some controversy in the formicoid world and I have to confess that my own views on the matter are somewhat unorthodox. To cut a long story short, there have up to now been two schools of thought. According to one school, we should think of the colony as a functioning totality that is more than the sum of its parts – a sort of super-organism – within which the life

Ways of mind-walking: reading, writing, painting

What is the difference between walking on the ground, in the landscapes of ‘real life’, and walking in the imagination, as in reading, writing, painting or listening to music? What does it mean to describe these various practices of walking as either visual or non-visual? In this article, the author approaches these questions through a comparison of answers gleaned from four sources: the monastic practices of early medieval Europe; the painting tradition of the Yolngu, an Aboriginal people of northeast Arnhem Land, Australia; the writings of the great pioneer of modern abstract art, Wassily Kandinsky; and a treatise by the tenth-century Chinese landscape painter Ching Hao. He concludes that the terrains of the imagination and the physical environment, far from existing on distinct ontological levels, run into one another to the extent of being barely distinguishable. Both, however, are inhabited by forms that give outward, sensible shape to an inner generative impulse that is life itself.