Writing my blog post 'The creativity of copying' was the first time I dealt with the writings of Tim Ingold who inarguably stands out in a crowd of anthropologist for his rather unusual research topics that deal with fundamental philosophical matter. To be honest, I had trouble reading my first Ingold text. But the more I read about Ingold the more ‘sense’ he makes.
Much like being introduced to a foreign world where you get to know more and more of the things in that world as you see and encounter them, Ingold’s ideas become clearer the more you read about them. Interestingly, in this process of getting to know Ingold his thoughts on all these different subjects that cover broad areas of life (from human ecology relationship to the practice of making) don’t get more numerous in count but instead add up like a pieces of a puzzle to a single great idea. By no means is this to say that his ideas are not complex in nature. But whether he talks about creativity or the essence of life, to me, it seems that he turns to a repertoire of the same basic ideas.
For the sake of organizing the vast amount of text that I came across, I’d like to condense these very ideas into three main points that I think constitute (in part) Ingold’s concept of the world and life. In no way do I intend to represent all of his fourteen or more publications or his numerous articles. This should only serve as an overview of the few text that I have read so far.
1) The world with all its things is alive
The world is never standing still and always in the making. The world itself is a fluid process of materials (Ingold doesn’t see ‘objects’). Ingold writes with the purpose of making things alive again.
The world and everything in the world consists of lines. Life is lived along those lines. The lines are open-ended and entangled. And that tangle is the texture of the world.
3) Making entails the alignment of movements
When dealing with the making of things and creativity we should eliminate the habit of reading backwards that is typical for modernity. Instead we should read the process of making things in a forward manner. If we understand that all things in the world are alive and always in progress then making things can’t start with the thought of an abstract idea in someone’s head that is simply translated into the ‘material world’. The maker has to improvise and follow the currents of the material world in order to make things.
As I mentioned, I don’t think these points should be viewed as separate from each other but rather as a single idea that comes with an overall critique to the current state of the art. As Ingold describes in all his books, with the notion of modernity comes a set of ideas that need to be questioned.
Finally, I’d like to quote Ingold on the question of questions: Where is anthropology heading?
"It is no wonder, then, that anthropologists are left feeling isolated and marginalized, and that they are routinely passed by in public discussions of the great questions of social life. I have argued for a discipline that would return to these questions, not in the armchair but in the world. We can be our own philosophers, but we can do it better thanks to its embedding in our observational engagements with the world and in our collaborations and correspondences with its inhabitants. What, then, should we call this lively philosophy of ours? Why, anthropology, of course!"
From: Ingold, T. (2011). Being alive. Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London: Routledge.
