Imagining for Real: Essays on Creation, Attention and Correspondence
... Our stance is that imagination is concurrently generative of phenomena and of the ideas by which we come to know them. Rather than considering imagination and creativity as "in an inputoutput relation that binds ideas to objects with a mechanical necessity" (Ingold 2021), we articulate a radical position that scientific inquiry in Information Systems is a process of worldmaking -pushing the boundaries of reality. ...
... This involves bringing together as mutually responsive all the "parts" which create an emergent whole that has novel and unexpected characteristics (Hovorka and Germonprez 2013;Lin and Cornford 2000) and also creating the language with which we come to understand the phenomena of this future world (Frank 2009;Hovorka and Peter 2021). This stance suggests that "(t)o imagine, then, is not to dwell in appearances rather than reality, but to participate from within, through perception and action, in the very appearing of things" (Ingold 2021). Imagination itself is insufficient and here we look to the role of designing in making imagination tangible with the varied materials of information systems. ...
... In addition, knowledge of the social, technological, information and political materials of the world is gained as imagination is resisted and accommodated during design. The concept of correspondence (Ingold 2021) provides a relational view supporting the evolution and continuous improvement of systems and artifacts. It also sensitizes researchers to the materiality of the world that are durable and resist change. ...
... In this action the self is a humble impersonal co-author for nature to make a subjective differentiation by meshworking (Ingold, 2013). The flow of physical rhythmattering, lyrical imagination made to happen for real (Ingold, 2022) in the sensuality of embodiment. ...
... "If perception is part and parcel of the activity of a being in its immediate, real-world environment, what happens to imagination then?" (Ingold, 2022): This is contextualised in the transversatility of eco-poetics by exploring the embodied human creation in sensual imagination. Philosophically it is inspired by the language and poetics of Gaston Bachelard (Bachelard, 1994) and in the evocation of imagination in nature (Bachelard, 2011). ...
... To provide the embodied sensation for artistic expression this is framed out of the common referential universe. In this particular contribution to the argument of crossing dualities we continue pay forward attributes to the interdisciplinary work of anthropologist Tim Ingold (Ingold, 2022) and the subversive foundations of Gaston Bachelard (McAllester Jones, 1991). They share essential characteristics in marketing theory and creative arts in marketing, poetry and nature in two requirements: disruptive particularity in imagination and differentiated singularity in idea expression in a subjective expressive life. ...
Chapter 2 of Lyrical Intelligence is the next itineration for poetic agency. Rhythmattering pollinates creative biodiversity in theory and praxis by growing imagination for real in the cosmopoiesis of botanic brandscapes. The chapter is democratically accessible for the inspiration of avant-gardening creatives, strategic planners and scholartists. www.lyricalintelligence.com
... Pope (2016) emphasizes the usefulness of visual autoethnography in excavating deeper, nuanced insights into the embodied practices of the experience under study by enmeshing narrative with personally meaningful images. In this work, I apply this autoethnographic inquiry inside my house, located in a Dayak village, drawing from Tim Ingold's concepts of correspondence and creation (Ingold, 2021). These two interchangeable concepts can help me understand my connection to the sounds I hear and how I interpret them visually. ...
... Tim Ingold, an anthropologist, has contributed significantly to the theoretical development of contemporary design anthropology (Pink, 2014). He offers the concept of correspondence, which refers to the dynamic relationship between the world and the people who inhabit it (Ingold, 2021). According to Ingold, the world is not a passive backdrop to human activity, but an active participant in it. ...
... I imagine how the sounds from the environment around me can be visualized, translated into visualizations through the process of creation. In Tim Ingold's idea, creation is not about producing something out of nothing, but rather shaping and transforming materials that are already present (Ingold, 2021). The foundation of my creation here is the sound material that is voiced by the environment around me. ...
Sounds exist, coexist, and inhabit the world with us, even though we cannot see them. This project explores how sound can be visualized and what it might look like. Through autoethnography, it emphasizes Tim Ingold's concepts of correspondence and creation to deploy visual autoethnography of daily sounds. This project discusses different levels of micro, meso, and macro inquiry, focusing on the design and visual communication context as a form of visual expression, creation, and reflection.
... Certain non-human animals, plants, hills, mountains, rivers, lakes, stones and artefacts can have a soul. Moreover, in contrast to the Western equation of one soul per individual, most living beings, human as well as non-human, have several souls that relate to the material body and its properties or, in the case of landscape features and things, its form and material presence in the world (Ingold, 2022; see also Armit, this volume). These are the most basic premises for the various kinds of animistic syncretisms existing worldwide, and how this network of reciprocal interdependence, or correspondences, as Ingold (2011aIngold ( , 2022 terms it in his later publications, works and how they are ontologically and culturally understood will vary between different groups of animists. ...
... Moreover, in contrast to the Western equation of one soul per individual, most living beings, human as well as non-human, have several souls that relate to the material body and its properties or, in the case of landscape features and things, its form and material presence in the world (Ingold, 2022; see also Armit, this volume). These are the most basic premises for the various kinds of animistic syncretisms existing worldwide, and how this network of reciprocal interdependence, or correspondences, as Ingold (2011aIngold ( , 2022 terms it in his later publications, works and how they are ontologically and culturally understood will vary between different groups of animists. ...
War is often viewed through the lens of strategy, statecraft, and technological progress. However, both war and violence in general are deeply rooted in social and cultural frameworks.
From Mesolithic conflicts to Early Modern naval warfare, this interdisciplinary anthology explores the practice and perception of various forms of violence in past societies, revealing patterns that prompt reflection on modern assumptions about war. Blending insights from Conflict Archaeology and War Studies, the work underscores the critical value of material culture in understanding the complexities of warfare, both theoretically and methodologically.
For Conflict Archaeology and war scholars, this work advances a perspective that situates violence and warfare within broader social and cultural contexts, emphasizing that war is more than just tactics and technology – it is a social reality embedded in both human action and material culture.
... For instance, a researcher moving abroad for a research project may encounter signs that are incongruent with his or her learned scheme in this practice. This variation in context, seeing other people engaging differently in the same practicearrangement tandem, may generate incongruent experiences that open up new ties with people and things and thus awareness of new possibilities of being and becoming (Deleuze, 2004;Ingold, 2021). ...
... Ingold (2000) talks about the art of attention and advocates for the need to cultivate a dialogue between us and the world to attend to the things in life. For Ingold (2021), this education of attention is the cultivation of an art of correspondence. To correspond is to observe, to watch closely, to attend, and to respond to things when the moment to do so opens up, both in terms of temporality and the degree of how and when things affect us. ...
Amid growing concerns that our era may be defined as a ‘crisis of sensibility’, possibility studies have predominantly addressed the possible from a pragmatist stance. While this approach is valuable in explaining how people navigate possibilities, it is limited in its capacity to account for the affective component that precedes and shapes their engagement with the world. How are people affected by the signs emitted through their ongoing engagement with possibilities as events of life? Adopting a vitalist stance, this article introduces the Aesthetics of the Possible. It is defined the degree of bodily affect and emotional experience elicited by the signs one either recognises or encounters, as emitted by people and things, which influence one’s awareness, representations, and engagement with possibilities. Awe, wonder, serendipity, and insights are phenomena embedded within this framework. The article theorises how ongoing engagements with the practice–arrangement tandem of the social complex elicit experiences of what is introduced here as ‘authentic’ possibilities. These refer to an awareness of possibilities arising from the randomness of events, altering one’s worldview.
... Lately, many of us have been reminded of the fact that we are living in 'intergenerational times' (see Ingold, 2022;Murphy, 2017). This means that our contemporary structural inequities of the present are bound together with experiences, infrastructures, and traumas of the past, which will take us into possible (un)liveable futures. ...
... This means that our contemporary structural inequities of the present are bound together with experiences, infrastructures, and traumas of the past, which will take us into possible (un)liveable futures. From a global perspective, we are becoming more intensively concerned about planetary survival and there is an increasing urge to develop new forms for social justice to figure out how to carefully rescue the earth we inherited, and how to solve urgent problems of demographic changes as well as the 'overheated' (Eriksen, 2016), accelerated and hypercapitalized world we are leaving for generations to come (Biswas, 2021;Clemens & Biswas, 2019;Ingold, 2022). This contemporary situation explains the renewed urgency of attention given to intergenerational relations and learning (IGL) on societal and global levels. ...
... The possibility that they might be connected to mutually exclusive values and goals needs to be communicated and given more attention. These possible paradoxes pushed my research in the direction of scholars writing about the neoliberal influence on education, like Giroux (2010), Ingold (2021) and Kalin, who write that paradoxes are sometimes ignored and that our "values, ethics, relationships to culture, fears, and responsibilities" seem to be taken care of so we do not have to (Kalin, 2018, p. 1). ...
... In this chapter I have presented the theory and concepts that I have engaged with in the different articles and, overall, in the thesis. The relevance of the concepts emerges when they Central to the notion of creating that I propose is the premise that imagination is not understood as an activity solely from the inside of the mind but rather as an activity that responds to, and is shaped by, dialogue and in relation with things, materials and environments (Ingold, 2021). Since all things constantly change, questioning and finding different approaches can offer new and more relevant understanding of what it means to execute a profession: to be an artist, designer, teacher or researcher. ...
The research that makes up this thesis takes place in the context of design education. However, the implications reach beyond the confines of design, education, and design education. The research, or the subject(s) of the research, and the processes that gave the research its form and content, can be seen as originating from two different sets of problems, distinctly different from each other but at the same time drifting in and out of a kind of intimate interconnection. On the one hand, the thesis is an exploration, through empirical studies of concrete situations in different educational settings, of problems, values, knowledge, hopes and aims that are at play in design education. On the other hand, it is an unfolding of processes that, in some senses, are also mine; the processes of making an academically relevant text out of material experimentations, knowledge, skills, and praxis that were located within, and working through, the body. The processes are different in that they are ‘about’ different things, from different spheres: education from the outside and me as a kind of inside. They are alike in that they thematise the intimate relationship(s) between the material world and the social world; education and values; body and mind; matter and meaning; and practice and research.
... Thus, these are spaces for a joint critique that resists colonially structured practices (Vidal, 2006). This involved the researchers learning with the educators and children (Ingold, 2017(Ingold, , 2021. Kovach (2009) stresses: 'In light of an indigenous episteme, it makes sense that the etymology of data is the gift and fits with "a learning for the gift"' (p. ...
... Our understanding of the theoretical and practical performance of scholarship as part of the same research process draws on Ingold's (2017Ingold's ( , 2021 notion of the researcher as a learner who corresponds with and in the world. This process involves the researchers learning with the educators and children, and together working on what the practices and stories told about and during skábma could mean in Sámi early childhood education today. ...
In Sápmi1, there are many stories and traditions tied to skábma, or the dark time of midwinter. Skábma is considered a sacred time and space. Some of the stories and traditions, which stem from Sámi Indigenous religion and are related to various invisible beings, are still passed on through oral traditions and storytelling. This article explores what it can mean for children, educators and researchers to creatively engage with lesser-known Indigenous religious traditions, stories told by older generations and current traditions, in ways that give further life to them. The research aim is twofold: the article studies both how co-research within an Indigenous context is conducted, and how educators and children in a Sámi Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) centre man-aged activities and searched for and created new stories based on skábma traditions. The research question is: In what ways can strengthening storytelling in the ECEC setting function as a contribu-tion to Sámi decolonisation processes? The research materials were collected through ethnographic fieldwork. The fieldwork was methodologically framed as critical utopian action research that considers the social learning of the children, educators and researchers that participated in the activities. Accordingly, this article shows how educators and children at an ECEC centre in Sápmi conducted activities to search for and create new skábma stories based on Indigenous traditions. The researchers were invited to learn about stories and traditions in which their attentiveness to the present was connected to valuing the past and taking responsibility for a sustainable future. The latter was achieved via storytelling by the educators, a duodji (Sámi craft) activity and children’s playtime. The article concludes by discussing how the search for and creation of traditions, such as sharing food with ancestors, involve decolonising processes. 1 The traditional land of the Sámi people is called Sápmi. It encompasses northern part of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Kola Peninsula in Russia.
... The ambiguous character of our eternal balance between the outside and the inside of the individual, can be described as "atmospheric." 18 Consider the modulation of the breath that accompanies the different stages of thought, the pauses we take to breathe and think at the same time: 19 the development of the mind is radically linked to the most material aspects of the environment. Sean Gallagher has proposed speaking in this regard of "affordance-based imagining," an imaginative action embedded and anchored in the environment, necessarily linked to the use of objects, a form of experimentation that he calls "active engagement with possibilities." ...
The intention of this article is to analyse some of the different ways in which the interactivity of inanimate objects has been discussed, with particular reference to images. In this context, it will be also proposed to consider a type of images, here called imagin-actions, which have specific characteristics different from those already considered in the debate. There is an extensive literary tradition according to which agency has since time immemorial been attributed to inanimate objects. Indeed, thanks to the imagination, human beings naturally relate to objects, and this would in fact constitute one of the fundamental elements for the development of the human mind. Now, with the advent of digital technologies, the actions of objects and images have acquired an operational quality, since they are capable of acting directly and concretely on the living world, and also of determining specific imaginative processes that entail the responsivity of things. However, in addition to having their own agency and operativity, imagin-actions do something more: they keep users in constant motion. By responding to a series of requests, they ask for something in return, intensifying the level of interactive exchange between people and things and inevitably reconfiguring human creative processes.
... A student can attempt to roll up the cloth to use it as a knife, but the lack of structural integrity will make it hard for others to perceive his gesture as to-stab-with. At this instant, the pupils have lost their "correspondence" (Ingold 2022) with the material, and crucially, with others. The imaginative circle vanishes, and with it the play that allows them to transform a piece of cloth into collective forms of imagination. ...
In this proposal, we present the folkloric performance of the Egetmann Pageant in Tramin as what we call a dynamic imaginative niche.We outline a notion of monstrous figures as “forms of trust” (cf. Ingold 2013). We suggest that the participatory enactment of such figures scaffolds material and interpersonal affective niches (Colombetti and Krueger 2015) for coping with future threats. We will develop a methodology of drawings and analysis in which we situated the monstrous figure, the Schnappviecher, in the context of both contemporary agro-pastoral communities in northern Italy and the 1940s under the influence of Himmler’s National Socialist cultural program. As we will illustrate, the enactment of “monstrous figures” in different historical situations can come to scaffold radically different feelings of belonging and shape who is included or excluded from a community. We will argue how interpersonal dynamics, of at first sight similar “socio-material niches” can either become an affirmation of rigid “bad moral habits” (Dewey 1916) or can scaffold communal exploration of new ways of relating to future threats, by affording moments of surprise in the participatory enactment of the monster.
... Indeed, this is the perspective of Ingold (2022), for whom to exercise imaginative perception is not merely to conjure up images that re-present an absolute reality "out there" but is rather to "participate from within, through perception and action, in the very becoming of things" (p. 32). ...
While humans explore and map the subsurface environments of earth, there remain unplumbed depths of nature that cannot be so exposed. This essay argues that along with a literal sense of depth as a spatial dimension, there exists a latent depth of nature hidden to everyday perception that may nonetheless manifest in/as attentive imaginative involvement. It begins by briefly comparing the ontological assumptions of Newton and Descartes with those of Merleau-Ponty before examining how the everyday phenomenon of sunrise might be interpreted through the latter. The practice of terrapsychology is then explored as a means to deepen our engagement with(in) nature and sensitively navigate the necessary ambiguity of imaginative involvement. This latter is highlighted as a corrective to the logic of certainty and control that attempts to maintain human “progress” at the expense of more-than-human nature.
... While some might view this as fabrication, alternatively, it can be considered a form of world-making. This perspective, as suggested by Ingold (2022), recognises Torfi's storytelling as a way to weave past narratives into the present, enriching his daughters' understanding of their ancestor's life and past times. ...
Places are significant for people, providing grounds for a sense of belonging, identity, and well-being. This article draws on a research project examining people-place relations within the everyday material environment of central Reykjavík. Grounded in a critical heritage studies perspective, the project aims to contribute to an understanding of how individuals ascribe meaning and value to the historic urban landscape and analyse the emotions and affective qualities that emerge through sensory engagement with places perceived as material embodiments of the past. The article addresses the method of solitary, self-led participant walks using audio-visual recording glasses, supplemented with follow-up interviews. This approach facilitates in-situ, on-the-move observations of participants’ spatial encounters, offering insights into their emotional and sensory experiences of the urban landscape. The article delineates how the method enabled participants to immerse themselves in the flow of their walks, evoking a variety of sensorial expressions, mnemonic fragments, and shared narratives prompted by encounters with the material facets of the city centre. The findings highlight the potential of the method to provide partial yet meaningful access to the affective and emotional dimensions of people’s interactions with urban spaces, offering insights into the ways individuals experience and value the historic urban landscape.
... Assim, os tais "passos para uma ecologia da mente" se transmutam em "passos para uma ecologia da vida". Ainda que a vida seja questão central em toda a obra posterior de Ingold, dificilmente ele arrisca uma definição, chegando talvez mais próximo disso quando afirma ser a vida algo que nunca está completo, mas sempre se supera (Ingold, 2022). ...
... This constant movement, intersection and divergence allows us to "speak of life processes as ways of going along together." (Ingold, 2022). Making sense of places as we walk through them is not restricted in any way to the individual on foot, but resonates towards the anthropological need to understand the "routes and mobilities of others." ...
'Estuary / Artery' is a written thesis and experimental multimedia documentary accumulated over 3 months of fieldwork walking the Thames estuary. Combining a meshwork of audiovisual data collection, this thesis approaches the ethnographic fieldsite of the estuary as produced through and beyond the socio-cultural and ecological imaginaries of its 'dwellers'. Rooted in embodied and theoretical reference to the site's spatial configurations as urban edgelands, this thesis reflects on the physical and virtual experience of moving through an in-between landscape - discussing how the estuary has been produced as a speculative frontier for redevelopment and the growing impact of climate change. Delving into the fieldwork process using mapping and sensory methodologies, ethnographic encounters with humans and non-humans along the estuary are discussed with close reference to the film. Considering the estuary as an 'urban wasteland' and ecological brownfield site, the potentiality of sensory attunement - with an emphasis on sound - is explored, asking how embodied practices can be utilised to bring us closer to imagining multi-species entanglement on this planet in late capitalism.
... 3 Of course, many kinds of creative and experimental practices have made important and enduring contributions to the on-going reshaping of anthropology. (For exemplary of creative anthropological research and/or commentaries on the significance of such approaches see, Rouch 1955Rouch , 1967Gardner 1986;Marcus and Clifford 1986;Michaels 1993;MacDougall 1998MacDougall , 2005Glowczewski 2001;Ginsburg et al. 2002;Taussig 2004Taussig , 2023Narayan 2007Narayan , 2012Hallam and Ingold 2007;Bourgois and Schonberg 2009;Schneider andWright 2010, 2013;Castaing-Taylor and Paravel 2012;Young 2012;Hinkson 2014;Cox, Irving and Wright 2016;Deger 2016;Tsai et al. 2016;Pink et al. 2016;Haviland 2016;Raza and Guillén 2017;Pandian and McLean 2017;Bakke and Peterson 2017;Geismar 2018;Pandian 2019;Ingold 2020Ingold , 2021Ballestero and Winthereik 2021;Bessire 2021;Otto et al. 2021;Sopranzetti et al. 2021;Dattatreyan and Marrero-Guillamón, 2021;Westmoreland 2022;Dovey 2024.) 4 These days, multimodal methods, outputs, and debates are on the rise. Yet even so, in our experience, researchers-junior and senior alike-face mounting pressures to produce journal articles rather any other forms of scholarly output (including books). ...
Epistemic attunements – Regenerating anthroplogy's form’ is a collective experiment in expanding the expressive and analytic repertoire of anthropology and related disciplines. It features eleven peer‐reviewed research articles published on a standalone website that has been designed, built, and maintained by our editorial collective, independent of Wiley's infrastructure and oversight. The result is a unique off‐grid adventure in academic publishing that seeks to contribute to the re‐orientation and outward opening of a discipline long committed to finding new ways to apprehend—and respond to—worlds undergoing constant, messy, and often‐brutal transformation. In this essay we describe the making of this double special issue of TAJA to make the case for intermedial research and co‐design as regenerative praxis.
... The monsters we encounter today in popular mass culture have inherited, to some extent, the police function of respect for boundaries, characteristic of their ancestors. Such contemporary monsters, however, are alienated, that is, placed on the margins of everyday life, relegated to designated places where we are called upon to enjoy them, according to that division between imagination and reality that characterizes the modern age (Ingold 2022). Among the countless examples that embody this police role, albeit in some ways depowered, particularly emblematic is the case of Ron Underwood's 1990 film Tremors. ...
The monster appears in geographical texts throughout the ages as a ‘guardian of the border’ that defines the limits of the possible, inducing action or averting behavior and restricting movement for political or economic purposes. Through a philosophy that uses unorthodox means, I intend to present a climate monster by which, based on a possible imagery about the current climate crisis, an invitation for a change in our habits is produced. I propose that repopulating maps with situated imaginary monsters can deploy specific education of attention that invites focusing on concrete aspects of our surroundings. To do this I will present the mixed media art project Biston betularia carbonaria, an eco-distopia created in collaboration with the photographer Valeria Scrilatti.
... This enables researchers to critically analyse their present conditions in the sense that international communities provide spaces to identify norms of local communities and question prevailing practices of producing ethnographic knowledge. In both cases, ethnographic communities act as spaces of culture that, paraphrasing Ingold (2022), open the world up to the ethnographer in new ways. ...
... This enables researchers to critically analyse their present conditions in the sense that international communities provide spaces to identify norms of local communities and question prevailing practices of producing ethnographic knowledge. In both cases, ethnographic communities act as spaces of culture that, paraphrasing Ingold (2022), open the world up to the ethnographer in new ways. ...
This edited volume is based o a conference at EUF in 2022. It tackles the theoretical, empirical and methodological questions of how novelty can be determined in and through educational ethnographic research.
Responding to the increasing need for new and innovative methodological and theoretical foundations for the field, chapters draw on a variety of empirical, critically examined data sets such as observation protocols of pedagogical practice, digital communication and visual representations to bridge the gap between empirical and theoretical approaches, ultimately combining different traditions and discourses within educational ethnography. Collating perspectives and accounts from over 30 authors based in European centers of excellence such as Germany, the Czech Republic, Switzerland, Italy, Austria and Denmark, the book provides an epistemological reflection on what we can understand as ‘new’ in theoretical and methodological research.
This volume will be of use to researchers, academics and postgraduate students involved with research methods in education, ethnography and the theory of education more broadly. Those involved with research design, innovation and European research methods will also find the volume of use.
If a filter is something that acts as a medium and has the effect of modifying the appearance of something for someone, then signs are filters. Comparing the two notions, I propose (a) that the actions conveyed by a sign (as a kind of filter) are part of the meaning of the sign itself; (b) that we can distinguish signs from surrogates and proxies, following a recent distinction by Floridi (2015), as kinds of filters; and (c) that surrogates, signs and proxies entertain different relations with the concept of truth. If surrogates are like fake-signs (Eco, 1990), because if taken as signs of something else they cease to be surrogates (a surrogate is a proxy that is not a sign), through the reflection on signs and proxies as filters it is possible to obtain a notion of truth coherent with the semiotic epistemology. This line of thought suggests that semiotics should reconsider the role of truth in its theory.
Managing the symptoms of long-term conditions presents a challenge to patients, clinicians and health systems worldwide. In seeking to explain such symptoms, diagnostic models tend to be 2D, and hence unrealistic if reliant narrowly on just Disease processes or Drug effects. Here, I argue that symptoms which appear refractory to pills or procedures can nonetheless be rehabilitated, if a 2D prognostic model is used in addition. Distress and Discouragement are reproducible syndromes defined as arising from prognostic fears for the proper function and integrity of body and self, respectively. Often, these attract just symptomatic treatment, being medicated as anxiety and depression and/or diverted toward talking therapies. But, when managed in isolation, this is just another unrealistic 2D model, analogous to divorcing nausea from chemotherapy or thromboprophylaxis from surgery. Instead, with changes to our clinical manner, a more realistic medicine can diagnose, for each person, how specific elements from their diagnostic model (Disease, Drugs) drive complications in their prognostic one (Distress, Discouragement). Rather than perpetuate a succession of 2D appointments, a holistic dialogue using the 4D model helps patients to formulate how their symptoms fit together. This can support them to soothe and triage their everyday symptom experience. Confidence with the 4D model can then help patients and clinicians advocate for treatments that are better targeted and integrated. This review facilitates clinical use of the 4D model, with example cases and lay explanations—plus its further theoretical development, using the fit with philosopher Elizabeth Barnes’ latest accounts of health.
Iatrogenesis is a recognised aspect of healthcare. But could kindness, a prized ingredient in such work, be implicated in some of the iatrogenic harm? In a recent paper, I noted how healthcare professionals and institutions that appear to value and vaunt kindness can, in practice, fall not just occasionally short, but often systemically so. Rather than insisting on these as aberrations, I wondered whether, our practice of kindness may, as with use of antibiotics or X-rays, have its own less considered but nonetheless harmful side effects. Here, encouraged by the resulting interest, I reflect further, including on two quite different responses to my paper from Cheung, and from Tan and Neo. In some aspects, we hold common ground. Cheung agrees the discretionary nature of kindness can pose ethical problems. Moreover, none of us are arguing kindness should be abandoned, cannot be virtuous, is merely favouritism, or forms the sole or proven cause of healthcare failures. Cheung suggests we infuse our practice with curiosity, reducing harms from discretionary kindness. Tan and Neo appear reluctant to concede such harms. They argue kindness is protected against these, including by its virtuous nature. Seasoned doubters might respond ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’. In real-world conditions, when healthcare professionals and their institutions profess kindness but behave differently, is it sufficient for our learning simply to condemn them as unvirtuous? Cautiously, we could be more curious. We could ask if, by offering kindness to those close around them, this carries the side effect of depriving others, people perhaps wider afield and less considered.
Archaeological interpretations of prehistoric humanoid figurines, made and used by the hunter-gatherers of the Stone Ages, have traditionally relied on Western concepts of hylomorphism and iconology. Consequently, these figurines are depicted as finished and static objects of art, often separated from their archaeological contexts. Analysis of these figurines has been focused on identifying what they represent, rather than considering what they do or how people used them. This paper draws on new animism and Indigenous knowledge, combined with visual ethnographic analysis to create a visual ethnoarchaeology of northwestern Siberian humanoid figurines, here viewed as material spirits, within their animistic contexts. We argue that archaeologists’ interpretative focus on representation should be abandoned in favour of attending to animation and the material and immaterial ecological relations these figurines shared with their prehistoric makers.
By drawing insights from artistic practice and utilizing conceptual and methodological approaches from the philosophy of embodied cognition, my purpose is to investigate the transformative possibilities embedded in creatively exploring social unease. To do so, I will present an art project, Biston betularia carbonaria, which involves the performative activation of a cast of a moth chrysalis through the waving of a flag and the ignition of a black smoke grenade. Biston betularia is a lepidopteran of the family Geometridae; the most widespread species is the typica, whose white color, in the course of its evolution, has enabled it to camouflage itself on birch trunks and thus escape predators. In nineteenth-century cities, air pollution caused by industrialization darkened the bark of trees, therefore promoting the survival of the melanic species called carbonaria, characterized by its black color. As pollution diminished, the typical form gradually regained its status as the dominant species.
This essay seeks to lay out the process that went into the making of Dark Things , which I co-directed with Deepan Sivaraman based on Ari Sitas's oratorio on the Silk Road, by repurposing the production notes of the performance, which opened in Delhi on 18 April 2018 at the Ambedkar University Delhi and later played at the International Festival of Kerala in January 2019. Both the method and the form of Dark Things , I suggest, were a collaboration. Collaboration as a method intimates collective creation, usually by means of improvisation, where authorship is distributed between theatre-makers (actors, scenographers, musicians) and materials (objects, site, landscape). Collaboration as form intimates that the performance's explicit grammar has been shaped by a sensuous give-and-take between the practitioner and the material. In this essay, I ask, from my perspective as a theatre-maker, how handling actual objects and tools obviously leaves an imprint on the performance, scenography, dramaturgy and mise en scène . In writing this article, I have retained the stylistic features of production notes – their provisionality and incompleteness; their sliding timescale; their looking forward to work that is to be done and backwards at work already done, marking failures, solutions and openings.
This publication presents a discussion of the article “Elements of Assemblage in Northern Informal Fisheries: Solidarity, Norms, Pink Salmon, Atlantic Salmon”, in which the authors (K.Y. Kotkin, A.M. Sergeev, V.M. Voronov, and V.V. Simonova) approach informal fisheries in the Murmansk region, employing Manuel DeLanda’s concept of horizontal ontology as an alternative to the traditional vertical structures that advocate a hierarchical understanding of the world and the exclusivity of humans. The authors argue that DeLanda’s horizontal ontology allows considering different-level components of fishing in two interdependent axes (“material – expressive” and “synthetic – variable”), and that the analysis of these axes lets us analyze the problem of the lack of positive attitude of local population toward the abundance of pink salmon, which is one of the most significant material components of the assemblage of informal fisheries in the Murmansk region. The discussion includes critical contributions: “Academic Fashion as a Conceptual Bricolage” (S.V. Sokolovskiy), “On Fish and Assemblages in the Murmansk Region” (N.S. Goncharov), and “DeLanda ‘Eats’ Salmon: The Kidnapping of Anthropology by a Supposedly ‘New’ Social Ontology” (A.G. Kuznetsov), as well as the response of the authors of the original article (“Figures and Background, or on the Logic of the Growth of Reviews”).
In this article, as a part of an ongoing dialogue, we reflect on the relevance of Tim Ingold’s recent theoretical propositions for our own anthropological experiences with indigenous people in Andean Bolivia and Argentina. First, we briefly retrace the development of some of his central concepts, homing in on “correspondence” and “attentionality” as a possible basis for an integrated socioecological theory and its concomitant ethics. Then, we explore how these concepts can help us arrive at an understanding of the way in which attentive correspondence, based on care and respect, allows people to carry on their lives through Andean temporalities and relational environments, considering specifically their “troubledness”: discrepancies, ambiguities and conflicts, both in connection with local cosmopraxis (our main focus) as it is evolving amidst postcolonial scenarios and the global ecological crisis. In this sense, the abilities of human groups to correspond can be seen as ways of coping with ecological and social turbulences. Finally, we discuss Ingold’s vitalism as a form of “organic materialism”, and as a non-anthropocentric “new humanism”, one which considers the lines of life of humans and non-humans as they entangle with each other.
This essay focuses on the impossibility of considering food as ‘a thing.’ It addresses the legal profiles of food from an interdisciplinary perspective by treating the production, signification and consumption of food as semio-spatial categories. The argument starts from the foundational premise that the dynamics of food, as a magmatic flow, comprehensively connect and transform all human activities and ecological aspects of life. Like a stream of radial projections in a mass of fluid, food functions as a semiotic membrane, embodying the fundamental relationality of each human body to the whole globe. The main implication subsequently drawn from this view of ‘food’ is that to eat is always and everywhere to incorporate the entire world. Since food is the epitome of the space and time proactively and enactively involved in its production, in terms of both human activities and natural resources, by the mere fact of eating no human being can avoid recognizing themselves as a space–time cannibal. The consequences of this conclusion for food justice and its spatial dynamics are enormous, and even more so in light of the current ecological crisis. The essay thus critiques many categories related to the food politics of the ecological footprint, including sustainability, bio-diversity, food systems, and the circularity of food and resources. One proposed alternative offered is a chorological reading of human rights and their possible use as semantic-spatial transducers of the activities and phenomena inherent in the ‘food-as-omnilateral-relationship.’ The dynamic and transformative relationship between space, human rights and ecological change emerges clearly. Human action, and thus law are, then, constitutive ‘ingredients’ of food, which comes to the fore as a ubiquitous icon of the interpenetrative relationship between humanity and the becoming of the Earth; being and becoming blur. In the same vein, spaces and actions, facts and values are transformed into moving elements of an overall evolving situation that makes each a means of the other and thereby a generative factor of its significance.
Being out on the land, experiencing oneself on the land and engaging with the surroundings, including the land and water, are central parts of Sámi life. In this article, we explore experiences and tell our story from our visits to two cold springs with a group of children and educators from a Sámi early childhood centre. We discuss how educators and children, by engaging with traditional stories and cultural values of gratitude and respect contribute to decolonising pedagogical practices. The explorations and stories in this article are based on our ethnographic fieldwork. To put it more precisely, we present a story following the Indigenous methodologies of storying that account for experiences of the days when we engaged in adventures because of the invitations of the educators who told traditional stories beside the cold springs. The present was entwined with the past and previous generations in their storytelling. Living such an adventure created spaces for shared learning and decolonised pedagogical practices. The values of gratitude, respect, and a sustainable lifestyle were lived through the stories told and what children and educators did while being on the land and fetching water. The central Sámi values include the need to work in harmony with the land and water.
This article discusses the potentials of a/r/tography aka artography against the background of life in an accelerating academia that is increasingly shallow and unfulfilling, and where quality is only indirectly measured using bibliometrics. We find Hartmut Rosa's concept of resonance to be useful when discussing the values that get lost in such a system. We appreciate the arguments for a slower, deeper, and more collegial way of working. It is where the distractions of ordinary life intersect with the vision of a more profound, qualitative way of working that we make our arguments for an artographic way of being. However, we also identify challenges by drawing on experiences in our own working lives, and specifically our ongoing collaborative research project. Exploring options for navigating around the constraints, we suggest a "toolbox" for how the individual artographer can contribute to making academia a more resonant space.
Background The curriculum for the courses given at the music specialization of the upper secondary school’s aesthetic program in Sweden includes the concept of artistic expression (AE). Being a criterion for assessment, no definition is provided by the National Agency of Education and there exists no consensus of how to interpret artistic expression among music teachers and music teacher students. Methods In order to explore how teachers understand, teach, and assess the concept and phenomenon of artistic expression, twelve qualitative interviews with music teachers were conducted and analyzed through an open coding process. Results The findings show that the concept of artistic expression is multifaceted and evasive. The results focus on two analytic threads: (i) situatedness and (ii) entanglement. (i) AE is situated due to context-specific parameters which underpins the meaning of the concept in this particular educational setting. (ii) Furthermore, the phenomenon of artistic expression is entangled (a) with the ongoing relationship between teacher and student, and (b) in a temporally unfolding and interactive musical event. The phenomenon of artistic expression as entangled is discussed, primarily through Hartmut Rosa’s concept of resonance, which brings into focus the intersubjective character of aesthetic experience. Doing so questions understandings of – and assessment procedures surrounding – artistic expression that relies on skill-based interpretations or reductions of entanglement. One example of such reduction is assessment of recordings of student performances which limits (a) the relational perspective (if assessed by a third person) or (b) the entanglement with the musical event. The perspective of resonance brings forth the teacher’s role during a student performance as characterized by self-efficacy and active listening, thus co-constitutive of artistic expression. Conclusions The article concludes with reflections on how the findings may contribute to the continuous discussion on how scientific grounding and proven experience may inform both the music education at upper secondary school and music teacher education. The concept of resonance provides a possibility to reframe conceptions of artistic competence in art education as being grounded in intersubjective and relational terms, rather than being reified as a set of measurable skills, an understanding which in turn risks replacing learning with criteria compliance.
The article introduces a special theme of the issue onthe “Anthropology of Affective Atmospheres”, featuring contributions by S.V. Sokolovskiy,D.A. Radchenko, S. Runkel, and an interview withT. Griffero.Readers of this thematic issue are acquainted with the new area of philosophical and socialresearch, which until now has practically not attracted the attentionof Russian anthropologists, despite the fact that the so-called “atmosphericturn” has deeply influenced quite a wide range of socialsciences and humanities, including anthropology. The main goal of thisissue of the journal is to familiarize Russian anthropologists andethnologists with theoretical and methodological foundations of (affective) atmospheres researchand specific case studies in this field. The main taskof this introduction to the topic is to review relevantconcepts, to recommend the most influential publications, the familiarity withwhich is expected to facilitate the introduction of these subjectsinto field ethnography programs, and to provide a brief overviewof the current “atmospheric” research in the country.
Conversations with Tim Ingold offers a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the work of Tim Ingold, one of the leading anthropologists of our time. Presented as a series of interviews conducted by three anthropologists from the University of Glasgow over a period of two years, the book explores Ingold's key contributions to anthropology and other disciplines. In his responses, Ingold describes the significant influences shaping his life and career, and addresses some of the criticisms that have been made of his ideas.
Following an introductory chapter, the book consists of five edited and annotated interviews, each focusing on a specific theme: 'Life and Career,' 'Anthropology, Ethnography, Education and the University,' 'Environment, Perception and Skill,' 'Animals, Lines and Imagination,' and 'Looking Back and Forward.' Each chapter ends with a 'Further Reading' section, referencing Ingold's work and that of other scholars, to assist readers who want to follow up particular issues and debates. It concludes with an ‘Afterword’ authored by Ingold himself.
The category of the nomad has gained a newfound salience in recent decades, ranging from public interest in “digital nomadism” to academic debates about “nomadic theory.” Faced with this upsurge of interest in nomadism, this collective discussion brings together five scholars of diverse theoretical and academic backgrounds to investigate the pasts, presents, and possible futures of the nomad category. The contributions excavate the conditions under which the category first arose in European social and political discourse, explore the historical baggage that this category has carried with it into the twenty-first century, and inquire under what conditions nomadism has come to be regarded as a promising or emancipatory trope. Keeping with the open-ended ethos of international political sociology, the aim of the collective discussion is not to seek conceptual mastery over the category of the nomad, but to foreground the multiple, ambivalent, and often contradictory ways in which this category has been deployed through space and time. More broadly, the collective discussion is an invitation for scholars to explore the international social and political lives of our concepts in a way that destabilizes disciplinary and institutional boundaries.
Background The curriculum for the courses given at the music specialization of the upper secondary school’s aesthetic program in Sweden includes the concept of artistic expression (AE). Being a criterion for assessment, no definition is provided by the National Agency of Education and there exists no consensus of how to interpret artistic expression among music teachers and music teacher students. Methods In order to explore how teachers understand, teach, and assess the concept and phenomenon of artistic expression, twelve qualitative interviews with music teachers were conducted and analyzed through an open coding process. Results The findings show that the concept of artistic expression is multifaceted and evasive. The results focus on two analytic threads: (i) situatedness and (ii) entanglement. (i) AE is situated due to context-specific parameters which underpins the meaning of the concept in this particular educational setting. (ii) Furthermore, the phenomenon of artistic expression is entangled (a) with the ongoing relationship between teacher and student, and (b) in a temporally unfolding and interactive musical event. The phenomenon of artistic expression as entangled is discussed, primarily through Hartmut Rosa’s concept of resonance, which brings into focus the intersubjective character of aesthetic experience. Doing so questions understandings of – and assessment procedures surrounding – artistic expression that relies on skill-based interpretations or reductions of entanglement. One example of such reduction is assessment of recordings of student performances which limits (a) the relational perspective (if assessed by a third person) or (b) the entanglement with the musical event. The perspective of resonance brings forth the teacher’s role during a student performance as characterized by self-efficacy and active listening, thus co-constitutive of artistic expression. Conclusions The article concludes with reflections on how the findings may contribute to the continuous discussion on how scientific grounding and proven experience may inform both the music education at upper secondary school and music teacher education. The concept of resonance provides a possibility to reframe conceptions of artistic competence in art education as being grounded in intersubjective and relational terms, rather than being reified as a set of measurable skills, an understanding which in turn risks replacing learning with criteria compliance.
In this paper we question current trends in the evaluation and ranking of academic research and propose, as a possible alternative, what we call "reverse scholarship," which values solidarity and everyday creativity.https://culturemachine.net/archives/vol-23-publishing-after-progress/
The Bronze Age (1700–500 BCE) petroglyphs of southern Scandinavia comprise a unique tradition of rock art in northern Eurasia. Despite a limited repertoire of motifs such as cupmarks, boats, anthropomorphs, zoomorphs, podomorphs and circles, it shows great variability in design, elaboration and articulation. This book is a study of the Mälaren region in southern-central Sweden that includes one of the most prominent rock art clusters of southwest Uppland as well as the hinterland of Södermanland county. The rock art in this region is studied on three scales: regional, local and particular. This allows for comparisons between dense and small sites, an exploration of how the Bronze Age rock art tradition developed over time in the area, and equally how the design and articulation of certain motifs relate to contemporary settlements, waterways and varying environmental settings.
Patterns and structures in the distribution and articulation of the petroglyphs show that the different motifs are not only visual expressions but very much material enactments. The motifs often physically relate to each other, the flows of water, and the microtopography and mineral contents of the rocks. The study is therefore not as much about rock art as images and symbols as it is about the ecology of rock art – the web of social and physical relations in which it was enacted and employed. From this perspective, the petroglyphs are seen as petrofacts, that is something akin to tools or devices articulated in various ways to affect humans, other-than-humans and the animacies of the coastal milieus where they were made.
Em face do reducionismo cognitivista, que transforma a rica experiência do enxadrismo em meros cálculos frios, este artigo busca restaurar a atmosfera do xadrez. Para tanto, a partir de revisões bibliográficas, observações participantes e autoenográficas, o escrito se propõe a fornecer uma caracterização inicial da atmosfera que chamaremos de “floresta de peças”. A fim de captar as nuances atmosféricas de cada modalidade, compara-se, aqui, as condições de engajamento no xadrez físico e virtual. A seleção bibliográfica elenca nomes e obras concernentes direta (como Tim Ingold e Hans Gumbrecht) ou indiretamente (como James Gibson e Anna Tsing) ao discutir o conceito de “atmosfera”. Quanto aos exemplos de campo, os dados obtidos presencialmente foram coletados ao longo das vivências pessoais de um dos autores com a prática nos últimos anos, enquanto os dados obtidos remotamente – através de vídeos e redes sociais – foram obtidos ao longo da escrita deste texto. O escrito conclui que as condições atmosféricas da partida, longe de figurarem como mero acessório ou pano de fundo, são constitutivas da experiência enxadrista e, portanto, devem ser levadas a sério em qualquer investigação sobre a prática.
Architectural Ethnography as a performative knowledge practice
Notre ethnographie des méditations avec projection anatomique ou planches de méridiens guidées par l’instructeur interroge la méthodologie d’enquête anthropologique. Nous avons pris le parti d’une ethnographie de participation observante et de faire de ce texte le lieu de l’exercice de notre réflexivité, tout en contextualisant notre propos grâce aux retranscriptions des pratiques que nous avons vécues sur le terrain, les interventions de l’instructeur, Marc Gutekunst, et de certains des participants au stage. L’objectif de cet article est de partager l’essence de notre travail de ces huit dernières années, le temps qu’il nous a fallu pour écrire une thèse de doctorat. En effet, les données exploitées dans cet écrit viennent de nos observations de terrain lors du doctorat, mais sont de première main, car jamais utilisées dans le contenu de la thèse. Nous insistons ici sur la difficulté de témoigner de pratiques « internes », ou de conscience (Midol et Chenault, 2017).
Kinship, diverse webs of relationship generated by people in their social practice, has long been analysed and debated by anthropologists, from an earlier dominance of lineage theory to the current, much more fluid emphasis on relatedness. Since the days of processualism, archaeologists have given more attention to kinship than in the early years of the discipline, but in rather limited and general ways until very recently. With the advent of successful aDNA investigations, and with some prompt from posthumanist theory, that interest has been renewed recently. I discuss some inconsistencies between the accounts of kinship by anthropologists and archaeologists, notably the emphasis by the former on diversity, relatedness, the possibilities and implications of bilateral descent, and the uncertain relationship between biology and kinship. To begin to investigate how this might all work out in archaeology, I sketch three scenarios from successive parts of the Neolithic in Britain and Ireland, across the fourth to third millennia cal BC, attempting specific rather than generalised models and indicating the outlines of a possible trajectory through time.
Background The concept of artistic expression is present in the curriculum for upper secondary school music program in Sweden. Being a criterion for assessment, no definition is provided by the National Agency of Education and there exists no consensus of how to interpret artistic expression among music teachers and music teacher students. Methods In order to explore how teachers understand, teach, and assess the concept and phenomenon of artistic expression, twelve qualitative interviews with music teachers were conducted and analyzed through an open coding process. Results The findings show that the concept of artistic expression is multifaceted and evasive. The results focus on two analytic threads: (i) situatedness and (ii) entanglement. (i) AE is situated due to context-specific parameters which underpins the meaning of the concept in this particular educational setting. (ii) Furthermore, the phenomenon of artistic expression is entangled (a) with the ongoing relationship between teacher and student, and (b) in a temporally unfolding and interactive musical event. The phenomenon of artistic expression as entangled is discussed, primarily through Hartmut Rosa’s concept of resonance, which brings into focus the intersubjective character of aesthetic experience. Doing so questions understandings of – and assessment procedures surrounding – artistic expression that relies on skill-based interpretations or reductions of entanglement. One example of such reduction is assessment of recordings of student performances which limits the (a) relational perspective (if assessed by a third person) or (b) the entanglement with the musical event. The perspective of resonance brings forth the teacher’s role during a student performance as characterized by self-efficacy and active listening, thus co-constitutive of artistic expression. Conclusions The article concludes with reflections on how the findings may contribute to the continuous discussion on how scientific grounding and proven experience may inform both the music education at upper secondary school and music teacher education. The concept of resonance provides a possibility to reframe conceptions of artistic competence in art education as being grounded in intersubjective and relational terms, rather than being reified as a set of measurable skills, an understanding which in turn risks replacing learning with criteria compliance.
One of the foremost intellectuals of his generation, French philosopher of science Michel Serres (1930–2019) broke free from disciplinary dogmas. His reflections on science, culture, technology, art, and religion have proved foundational to scholars across the humanities. The contributors to Porous Becomings bring the inspirational and enigmatic world of Serres to the attention of anthropology. Through ethnographic encounters as diverse as angels and religious conversion in Ethiopia, the percolation of war in Bosnia, and incarcerated bodies crossing the Atlantic, the contributors showcase how Serres’s interrogation of the fundamentals of human existence opens new pathways for anthropological knowledge. Proposing the notion of “porosity” to characterize permeability across boundaries of time, space, literary genre, and academic discipline, they draw on Serres to map the constellations that connect humans, time, technology, and planet Earth. The volume concludes with a conversation between the editors and Vibrant Matter author Jane Bennett.
One of the foremost intellectuals of his generation, French philosopher of science Michel Serres (1930–2019) broke free from disciplinary dogmas. His reflections on science, culture, technology, art, and religion have proved foundational to scholars across the humanities. The contributors to Porous Becomings bring the inspirational and enigmatic world of Serres to the attention of anthropology. Through ethnographic encounters as diverse as angels and religious conversion in Ethiopia, the percolation of war in Bosnia, and incarcerated bodies crossing the Atlantic, the contributors showcase how Serres’s interrogation of the fundamentals of human existence opens new pathways for anthropological knowledge. Proposing the notion of “porosity” to characterize permeability across boundaries of time, space, literary genre, and academic discipline, they draw on Serres to map the constellations that connect humans, time, technology, and planet Earth. The volume concludes with a conversation between the editors and Vibrant Matter author Jane Bennett.
The Material Culture of Basketry argues for the recognition of practical basketwork as a culturally significant practice, as a theoretically rich discipline which has much in common with mathematics and engineering, as a mode of sustainable craft and design and as a socially beneficial source of skill and care. The book presents basketry as an understudied and underappreciated discipline, which in fact has much to offer the modern world.
Contributors show how local knowledge of materials, plants and place are central to the craft. Case studies include an investigation of perishable materials and the passing of time, an assessment of craft ‘culture loss’ and a photo-essay exploring the theme of memory in Andean khipu knots. Similarly, the structure and skill in basketwork are shown to represent a significant form of textile technology, and the book argues that the patterns and geometric forms that emerge through basketwork reflect an embodied knowledge which parallels mathematics and engineering.
Basketry’s inherently sustainable nature is also considered. An illustrated case study focusing on the Osmia bee and thatched roofs casts new light on how we perceive craft and nature, and an exploration of recycled materials in basketry is included. And finally, the therapeutic value of the craft is recognised through a selection of case studies which consider basketry as a healing process for patients with brain injuries, and as a memory aid for people living with dementia. This reclaims basketry’s significant role in occupational therapy as an agent of recovery and well-being. Above all the book envisages basketry as an intellectually rewarding means of knowing. It presents the craft as embodying care for skilled making and for the social and natural environments in which it flourishes.
How do we live well? The first sentence of Grace and Gravity raises the fundamental question that constantly occupies our minds—and of all those who lived before us. Paradoxically, the impossibility of answering this question opens up the very room needed to find ways of living well. It is the gap where all disciplines fall short, where architecture does not fit its inhabitants, where economy is not based on shortage, where religion cannot be explained by its followers, and where technology works far beyond its own principles.
According to Lars Spuybroek, the prize-winning former architect, this marks the point where the “paradoxical machine” of grace reveals its powers, a point where we “cannot say if we are moving or being moved”. Following the trail of grace leads him to a new form of analysis that transcends the age-old opposition between appearances and technology. Linking up a dazzling and often delightful variety of sources—monkeys, paintings, lamp posts, octopuses, tattoos, bleeding fingers, rose windows, robots, smart phones, spirits, saints, and fossils—with profound meditations on living, death, consciousness, and existence, Grace and Gravity offers an eye-opening provocation to a wide range of art historians, architects, theologians, anthropologists, artists, media theorists and philosophers.
Metaphor is a useful way of explaining how to do things. The literature on metaphor in the learning of physical skill has generally explicated its efficacy by examining its actionable directives for motor enactment. And yet from the perspectives of phenomenological philosophy, ecological psychology, and enactivism, action is immanently intertwined with perception, so that models of metaphor-based learning should foreground the role of sensory activity modulating motor behavior. As such, metaphor is retheorized as a sensorial constraint one imaginarily projects into one’s action–perception phenomenological landscape. I present two metaphors from an instructional video on cello technique. Whereas these metaphors are couched in action language (what one should do), their potential impact, I argue, lies in emergent goal sensations (what one should feel). These explorative sensorimotor accommodations may, in turn, bring forth yet new scopes of latent sensations coupled to unanticipated performance possibilities, which suggest further modifying and calibrating enactment in the target domain. Attending to, achieving, and maintaining emergent intermediary goal sensations regulates instrumented action by forging new affordances that bring forth new motor coordination. As teacher and student co-imagine images for action, they should attend to sensory perceptions. And the same goes for scholars of metaphor.
To conclude the discussion of breath and breathing in the foregoing contributions, this comment sets out from a critical perspective on embodiment. For a being that breathes out and in, should we not add to embodiment its complement of vaporisation? Breath, after all, is fluid, animate and fundamental to human conviviality. While it can temporarily be put on hold, breath cannot be contained. That is why bodily breathing is unlike the ventilation of buildings. Moreover, breathing in and breathing out are dissimilar movements which cannot be reversed. This presents particular problems for those with breathing difficulties, above all in societies where speech, carried on the outbreath, is modelled on print, and where thought is attributed to a self whose powers of cognition transcend bodily experience. In place of the complementarity of self and body, we posit the soul as a vortex in which breathing, thinking, speech and song all flow into one another.
The yoik is a vocal technique practised by the Sámi of Northern Europe. It relies on circular melodies, chanted in everyday life and a cappella, with or without lyrics. Each melody evokes a particular being, usually a person, an animal species, or a place. ‘Yoiking them’ is a way of making them present, exploring an attachment, and unfolding memories. The yoik is considered by many of its practitioners as a gift received from the environment, a mysterious craft that they come to know through personal experience and experimentation.
This thesis is based on conversations with yoikers, active in either the ‘traditional’ or ‘modern’ practices, and an apprenticeship in the craft of yoiking. It constitutes a series of essays, or ‘philosophical variations’, aimed at taking the yoik seriously and unfolding some of its philosophical affordances. As in the musical variations on popular melodies by classical composers, writing the yoik in variation means hosting it within another practice bearing its own constraints and possibilities. Practices of yoiking and writing are thus put in a dialogue at times converging, at times diverging, but always intended to be mutually stimulating. Various voices from social anthropology, ethnomusicology, psychology, theology, ethology, and the history of philosophy join the dialogue along the way.
The variations are ‘philosophical’ in that each of them creates one concept: horizon, enchantment, creature, depth, echo, primordial. Each concept seeks to capture a layer of depth perceived in the yoik’s practice: (1) the risks of metamorphosis; (2) the chants of animals and the wind; (3) the creation of yoiks as outgrowths of the sensuous world; (4) the inner landscapes of humans; (5) the resurgence of past memories and of the dead; (6) the roots of human chants in a chthonic, original past; and (n) the power of repetition and interruption.
In this paper we propose the conceptual framework of the assemblage of practice as an effective middle-range heuristic tool that bridges deep theory and the data available to archaeologists. Our framework foregrounds vibrant things as opposed to static objects, and sympathetically articulates the current concepts of entanglement, correspondence, and assemblage. To us an assemblage of practice is a dynamic gathering of corresponding things entangled through situated daily and eventful human practice. Once reassembled by comprehensively and critically marshalling all the evidentiary lines available to archaeologists today, the assemblage of practice becomes a powerful analytical tool that illuminates changes, continuities, and transformations in human-thing entanglements and their impacts not only on local and short-term socio-cultural developments, but also their repercussions on phenomena of much larger spatiotemporal scale. Our goal is to present archaeologists with a pluralistic, integrative, and evolving middle-range framework that pays close attention to terminological precision and theoretical clarity and is conceptually accessible and widely applicable.
What might become of anthropology if it were to suspend its sometime claims to be a social science? What if it were to turn instead to exploring its affinities with art and literature as a mode of engaged creative practice carried forward in a world heterogeneously composed of humans and other than humans? Stuart McLean claims that anthropology stands to learn most from art and literature not as “evidence” to support explanations based on an appeal to social context or history but as modes of engagement with the materiality of expressive media-including language-that always retain the capacity to disrupt or exceed the human projects enacted through them. At once comparative in scope and ethnographically informed, Fictionalizing Anthropology draws on an eclectic range of sources, including ancient Mesopotamian myth, Norse saga literature, Hesiod, Lucretius, Joyce, Artaud, and Lispector, as well as film, multimedia, and performance art, along with the concept of “fabulation” (the making of fictions capable of intervening in and transforming reality) developed in the writings of Bergson and Deleuze. Sharing with proponents of anthropology’s recent “ontological turn,” McLean insists that experiments with language and form are a performative means of exploring alternative possibilities of collective existence, new ways of being human and other than human, and that such experiments must therefore be indispensable to anthropology’s engagement with the contemporary world.
This collection of essays on anthropological approaches to art and aesthetics is the first in its field to be published for some time. In recent years a number of new galleries of non-Western art have been opened, many exhibitions of non-Western art held, and new courses in the anthropology of art established. This collection is both part of and complements these developments, contributing to the general resurgence of interest in what has been until recently a comparatively neglected field of academic study and intellectual debate. Unlike some previous volumes on `primitive art' this collection is resolutely anthropological. The contributors draw on contemporary anthropological theory as well as on analyses of classic anthropological topics such as myth, ritual, and exchange, to deepen our understanding of particular aesthetic traditions in their socio-cultural and historical contexts. In addition, the cross-cultural applicability of the very concepts `art' and `aesthetics' is assessed. Each essay illustrates a specific approach and develops a particular argument. Many present new ethnography based on recent field research among Australian Aborigines, in New Guinea, Indonesia, Mexico and elsewhere. Others draw on classic anthropological accounts of, for example, the Trobriand Islanders of Melanesia and the Nuer of the Southern Sudan, putting this material to new uses. Sir Raymond Firth's introductory overview of the history of the anthropological study of art makes this volume particularly useful for the non-specialist interested in learning what anthropology has to contribute to our understanding of art and aesthetics in general. With its wide geographical and cultural coverage and plentiful illustrations, many of which are in colour, Anthropology, Art, and Aesthetics will be a valuable resource for all serious students of the subject.
In this classic collection of wide-ranging and interdisciplinary essays, Stanley Cavell explores a remarkably broad range of philosophical issues from politics and ethics to the arts and philosophy. The essays explore issues as diverse as the opposing approaches of 'analytic' and 'Continental' philosophy, modernism, Wittgenstein, abstract expressionism and Schoenberg, Shakespeare on human needs, the difficulties of authorship, Kierkegaard and post-Enlightenment religion. Presented in a fresh twenty-first century series livery, and including a specially commissioned preface, written by Stephen Mulhall, illuminating its continuing importance and relevance to philosophical enquiry, this influential work is now available for a new generation of readers.
William Paley (1743–1805) argues for the existence of God as the intelligent creator of the world in this, his last book, published in 1802. He builds on early modern natural theology including the works of John Ray, William Derham, and Bernard Nieuwentyt, and most of his examples are taken from medicine and natural history. Paley uses analogy and metaphors, including a particularly well-written version of the 'watchmaker analogy', to prove that the world is designed and sustained by God. This sixth edition also contains a detailed bibliography, appendices on Paley's courses, and background notes on key figures. It was an influential best-seller throughout the nineteenth century, read by theologians and scientists alike, and reprinted in cheap editions for the middle classes. It inspired many nineteenth-century works on natural theology, including the Bridgewater Treatises (which also appear in this series), and is a landmark of Western thought.
Francis Bacon (1561–1626), the English philosopher, statesman and jurist, is best known for developing the empiricist method which forms the basis of modern science. Bacon's writings concentrated on philosophy and judicial reform. His most significant work is the Instauratio Magna comprising two parts - The Advancement of Learning and the Novum Organum. The first part is noteworthy as the first major philosophical work published in English (1605). James Spedding (1808–81) and his co-editors arranged this fourteen-volume edition, published in London between 1857 and 1874, not in chronological order but by subject matter, so that different volumes would appeal to different audiences. The material is divided into three parts: philosophy and general literature; legal works; and letters, speeches and tracts relating to politics. Volume 5, published in 1858, contains the English translations of the remainder of the Instauratio Magna and his other philosophical writings.
This article explores the valences of monastic wastepaper and binding waste in post-Reformation England. It argues that wastepaper and parchment is palimpsestic, capable of telling stories (to those who care to look) through its traces and tears. I focus on two texts that respond to and provide evidence of this non-textual legibility: John Bale’s The Laboryouse Journey & serche of John Leylande, for Englandes Antiquitees (1549) and John Aubrey’s ‘Digression’ in his Natural History of Wiltshire (1656-1691). Writing a century apart both authors extract narratives from the old, dismembered books they encounter. Whereas Bale shapes an aggressively Protestant account of English religious history from the scattered sheets of dispersed monastic manuscripts, Aubrey reads a tale of violent loss and jarring historical change. More generally, however, monastic waste material forms part of an all-encompassing narrative in the early modern world: the trajectory from animal skin or flax, to manuscript, to waste readily demonstrates the universal trajectory of organic matter. Finally, reading the creases and folds of salvaged sheets enables a reconsideration of their phenomenological categorization as waste: waste is neither empty nor worthless. Instead, it evinces an abundant proliferation and potentiality, teeming with meaning, utility and ink.
Modern thinking about the ground tends to take it as a purely material base for the unfolding of history and ideas emerging on its surface. In this article, I question above-ground visions of city building by drawing on both the history of ground engineering and ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Paris with geotechnicians. I address the difficulties that theorists have faced over past centuries in modelling soils, and the contemporary practice of building piles underneath buildings to anchor them. From this unfolds an understanding of the ground as produced through an equilibrium between forces and materials in which buildings become participants, rather than a solid base upon which they stand. Looking at the activities of foundation builders, we find that the inertia of the urban soil no longer betokens an absence of activity or movement, but is rather a continuous achievement, a slow and dangerous process of balancing tensions.
The Material Culture of Basketry argues for the recognition of practical basketwork as a culturally significant practice, as a theoretically rich discipline which has much in common with mathematics and engineering, as a mode of sustainable craft and design and as a socially beneficial source of skill and care. The book presents basketry as an understudied and underappreciated discipline, which in fact has much to offer the modern world.
Contributors show how local knowledge of materials, plants and place are central to the craft. Case studies include an investigation of perishable materials and the passing of time, an assessment of craft ‘culture loss’ and a photo-essay exploring the theme of memory in Andean khipu knots. Similarly, the structure and skill in basketwork are shown to represent a significant form of textile technology, and the book argues that the patterns and geometric forms that emerge through basketwork reflect an embodied knowledge which parallels mathematics and engineering.
Basketry’s inherently sustainable nature is also considered. An illustrated case study focusing on the Osmia bee and thatched roofs casts new light on how we perceive craft and nature, and an exploration of recycled materials in basketry is included. And finally, the therapeutic value of the craft is recognised through a selection of case studies which consider basketry as a healing process for patients with brain injuries, and as a memory aid for people living with dementia. This reclaims basketry’s significant role in occupational therapy as an agent of recovery and well-being. Above all the book envisages basketry as an intellectually rewarding means of knowing. It presents the craft as embodying care for skilled making and for the social and natural environments in which it flourishes.
The Material Culture of Basketry argues for the recognition of practical basketwork as a culturally significant practice, as a theoretically rich discipline which has much in common with mathematics and engineering, as a mode of sustainable craft and design and as a socially beneficial source of skill and care. The book presents basketry as an understudied and underappreciated discipline, which in fact has much to offer the modern world.
Contributors show how local knowledge of materials, plants and place are central to the craft. Case studies include an investigation of perishable materials and the passing of time, an assessment of craft ‘culture loss’ and a photo-essay exploring the theme of memory in Andean khipu knots. Similarly, the structure and skill in basketwork are shown to represent a significant form of textile technology, and the book argues that the patterns and geometric forms that emerge through basketwork reflect an embodied knowledge which parallels mathematics and engineering.
Basketry’s inherently sustainable nature is also considered. An illustrated case study focusing on the Osmia bee and thatched roofs casts new light on how we perceive craft and nature, and an exploration of recycled materials in basketry is included. And finally, the therapeutic value of the craft is recognised through a selection of case studies which consider basketry as a healing process for patients with brain injuries, and as a memory aid for people living with dementia. This reclaims basketry’s significant role in occupational therapy as an agent of recovery and well-being. Above all the book envisages basketry as an intellectually rewarding means of knowing. It presents the craft as embodying care for skilled making and for the social and natural environments in which it flourishes.
The Material Culture of Basketry argues for the recognition of practical basketwork as a culturally significant practice, as a theoretically rich discipline which has much in common with mathematics and engineering, as a mode of sustainable craft and design and as a socially beneficial source of skill and care. The book presents basketry as an understudied and underappreciated discipline, which in fact has much to offer the modern world.
Contributors show how local knowledge of materials, plants and place are central to the craft. Case studies include an investigation of perishable materials and the passing of time, an assessment of craft ‘culture loss’ and a photo-essay exploring the theme of memory in Andean khipu knots. Similarly, the structure and skill in basketwork are shown to represent a significant form of textile technology, and the book argues that the patterns and geometric forms that emerge through basketwork reflect an embodied knowledge which parallels mathematics and engineering.
Basketry’s inherently sustainable nature is also considered. An illustrated case study focusing on the Osmia bee and thatched roofs casts new light on how we perceive craft and nature, and an exploration of recycled materials in basketry is included. And finally, the therapeutic value of the craft is recognised through a selection of case studies which consider basketry as a healing process for patients with brain injuries, and as a memory aid for people living with dementia. This reclaims basketry’s significant role in occupational therapy as an agent of recovery and well-being. Above all the book envisages basketry as an intellectually rewarding means of knowing. It presents the craft as embodying care for skilled making and for the social and natural environments in which it flourishes.
The Material Culture of Basketry argues for the recognition of practical basketwork as a culturally significant practice, as a theoretically rich discipline which has much in common with mathematics and engineering, as a mode of sustainable craft and design and as a socially beneficial source of skill and care. The book presents basketry as an understudied and underappreciated discipline, which in fact has much to offer the modern world.
Contributors show how local knowledge of materials, plants and place are central to the craft. Case studies include an investigation of perishable materials and the passing of time, an assessment of craft ‘culture loss’ and a photo-essay exploring the theme of memory in Andean khipu knots. Similarly, the structure and skill in basketwork are shown to represent a significant form of textile technology, and the book argues that the patterns and geometric forms that emerge through basketwork reflect an embodied knowledge which parallels mathematics and engineering.
Basketry’s inherently sustainable nature is also considered. An illustrated case study focusing on the Osmia bee and thatched roofs casts new light on how we perceive craft and nature, and an exploration of recycled materials in basketry is included. And finally, the therapeutic value of the craft is recognised through a selection of case studies which consider basketry as a healing process for patients with brain injuries, and as a memory aid for people living with dementia. This reclaims basketry’s significant role in occupational therapy as an agent of recovery and well-being. Above all the book envisages basketry as an intellectually rewarding means of knowing. It presents the craft as embodying care for skilled making and for the social and natural environments in which it flourishes.
Introduction
The nature of the following work will be best understood by a brief account of how it came to be written. During many years I collected notes on the origin or descent of man, without any intention of publishing on the subject, but...
A new philosophy of movement that explores the active relation between sensation and thought through the prisms of dance, cinema, art, and new media.
With Relationscapes, Erin Manning offers a new philosophy of movement challenging the idea that movement is simple displacement in space, knowable only in terms of the actual. Exploring the relation between sensation and thought through the prisms of dance, cinema, art, and new media, Manning argues for the intensity of movement. From this idea of intensity—the incipiency at the heart of movement—Manning develops the concept of preacceleration, which makes palpable how movement creates relational intervals out of which displacements take form.
Discussing her theory of incipient movement in terms of dance and relational movement, Manning describes choreographic practices that work to develop with a body in movement rather than simply stabilizing that body into patterns of displacement. She examines the movement-images of Leni Riefenstahl, Étienne-Jules Marey, and Norman McLaren (drawing on Bergson's idea of duration), and explores the dot-paintings of contemporary Australian Aboriginal artists. Turning to language, Manning proposes a theory of prearticulation claiming that language's affective force depends on a concept of thought in motion.
Relationscapes takes a “Whiteheadian perspective,” recognizing Whitehead's importance and his influence on process philosophers of the late twentieth century—Deleuze and Guattari in particular. It will be of special interest to scholars in new media, philosophy, dance studies, film theory, and art history.
Surfaces are often held to be of lesser consequence than deeper or more substantive aspects of artworks and objects. Yet it is also possible to conceive of the surface in more positive terms: as a site where complex forces meet. Surfaces can be theorized as membranes, protective shells, sensitive skins, even thicknesses in their own right. The surface is not so much a barrier to content as an opportunity for encounter. Surface tensions includes sixteen essays that explore this theoretically uncharted terrain. The subjects range widely: domestic maintenance; avant-garde fashion; the faking of antiques; postmodern architecture and design; contemporary film costume. Of particular emphasis within the volume are textiles, which are among the most complex and culturally rich materializations of surface. As a whole, the book provides insights into the whole lifecycle of objects, not just their condition when new. The contents will be of interest to any practitioner or scholar who considers the surface within their work, whether from the perspective of fine art, craft, design, history or anthropology.
Due to the simultaneous linguistic and musical quality of voicing, voiced breath poses theoretical challenges to notions of ‘embodiment’, especially as they are used in theatre practice/studies. In this article, I make two intertwining arguments to address questions of the place of semantic meaning and conscious thought in performance practice/theories as they arose in my anthropological engagement with laboratory theatre. Firstly, theatre and performance practice/theories keen to embrace ‘embodiment’ often leave out things like explicit analysis, reflexivity, referential or semantic meaning and so on because, as my ethnography shows, they are judged as secondary, and thus belonging implicitly more closely to disembodied ‘mind’. I engage in anthropological comparison to show how other ways of being/knowing complicate any sense in which practices labelled ‘embodied’ can be seen as primary in contrast to conscious, linguistic or explicit knowing. Instead I outline an onto/epistemology of emergence that offers an alternative imaginary in which no binaries exist a priori. Rather all is a matter of ongoing mutual constitution. Secondly, while the discourses of embodiment in performance practice/theory that I critique may continue to reproduce dualist assumptions, theatre approaches influenced by Grotowski’s anti-method, focusing on continual revision of practice, offer insights for scholarship concerned with the ontological indistinguishability of social, psychological and physical phenomena. Laboratory theatre practices offer a prospective way of knowing, enabling an exploration of the ontological equality of breath, in this case in song, and the sorts of meaningfulness associated with language and analysis. In 2011, my Nanna (grandmother in Maltese) passed away in circumstances that remain traumatic to me. I turned with to my daily practices to find ways to scream, to grieve: to anthropology and to a particular practice of song in laboratory theatre, where encounter is actively sought. Arising from ethnographic and analytic engagement with such practices, in this article, I offer an anthropologically inflected critique of notions of embodiment in performance studies and performance philosophy. I present the alternative imaginary of emergence onto/epistemologies and the prospective investigative practices of laboratory theatre. I do this by weaving autobiographical, ethnographic and anthropological threads to explore my own practice relating to the work of my collaborator Gey Pin Ang, a Singaporean director, actor and pedagogue.
This article builds upon previous assertions that the ocean provides a fertile environment for reconceptualising understandings of space, time, movement and experiences of being in a transformative and mobile world. Following previous articles that urged scholars to adopt a ‘wet ontology’, this article presents a progression of, and a caveat to, these earlier arguments. As we have argued previously, liquid ‘materiality, motion, and temporality…allows for new ways of thinking that are not possible when only thinking with the land’. This article maintains that critical perspectives can be gained by taking the ocean’s liquidity to heart. However, it also questions the premise of this vision. For the ocean is not simply liquid. It is solid (ice) and air (mist). It generates winds, which transport smells, and these may emote the oceanic miles inland. Although earlier attention to the ocean’s liquid volume was a necessary antidote to surficial static ontologies typically associated with land, this is insufficient in light of how the ocean exceeds material liquidity. This article thus explores what might emerge if, instead, one were to approach the ocean as offering a more-than-wet ontology, wherein its fluid nature is continually produced and dissipated.
Jakob von Uexküll is mostly known for his concept of Umwelt—the meaningful surrounding of animals. von Uexküll insisted vehemently on the fact that Umwelt vindicated Kant’s subjectivist epistemology in the biological domain. However, we argue that a crucial yet widely overlooked development in von Uexküll’s theory of meaning implies a more radical vision strikingly germane to J. J. Gibson’s own direct realist epistemology-ontology and in tension with his own subjectivist concept of Umwelt. Gibson argued that organism and environment are complementary and meaning is not constructed via a subjective act but is directly available in the world as opportunities for action, namely, affordances. We show that von Uexküll’s notion of “functional tone” is similar to Gibson’s concept of affordance in that it includes action in perception. More important, von Uexküll introduces the musical metaphor of harmony to characterize the relationship between animal and environment. Like Gibson’s reciprocity, harmony implies an unmediated isomorphism between the dispositions of the animal and those of the environment that allows for direct perceptual contact with the world and action upon it.
Focusing on a process where a designer embeds herself in craftspeople’s workshops with the intention of ‘learning from inside’ and ‘making together’; this paper proposes pathways for considering collaboration between designers and craftspeople via digital fabrication and weaving. The tension of forces that make weaving possible, act as an analogy for this collaboration as well as providing the title of the project as ‘One Over, One Under’. The project proposes a mode of working and a spectrum of outcomes where the designer has a first-hand experience of production techniques, engages in a serious and continuous dialogue through making, and develops an intervention that also brings forth her own skill set (introducing digital fabrication and structural variations), thus transforming the conventions and boundaries between established roles and manufacturing techniques. An experiment that resulted in a series of objects considering both the technologies of production and the input of the designer, this process not only increases the potentials that crafts hold for the field of design, but it also offers possibilities of collaboration and a further articulation of the design act.
With audacious dexterity, David Howes weaves together topics ranging from love and beauty magic in Papua New Guinea to nasal repression in Freudian psychology and from the erasure and recovery of the senses in contemporary ethnography to the specter of the body in Marx. Through this eclectic and penetrating exploration of the relationship between sensory experience and cultural expression, Sensual Relations contests the conventional exclusion of sensuality from intellectual inquiry and reclaims sensation as a fundamental domain of social theory.