Being Alive

289 Pages·2011·3.19 MB·English

by  Tim Ingold

Being Alive
‘For three decades, Tim Ingold’s has been one of the most consistently exploratory and
provocative voices in contemporary scholarship. T his 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 inform a business
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2011.
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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