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Tim Ingold,
Robert Gibb,
Philip Tonner and
Diego Maria Malara
Anthropology,
education
and life
SCOTTISH
UNIVERSITIES
PRESS
CONVERSATIONS WITH TIM INGOLD
CONVERSATIONS
WITH TIM INGOLD
Anthropology, education and life
Tim Ingold, Robert Gibb, Philip Tonner
and Diego Maria Malara
SCOTTISH
UNIVERSITIES
PRE
SS
First published in 2024 by
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CONTENTS
Notes on authors vii
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction
Robert Gibb and Philip Tonner 1
Conversation 1: Life and career 17
Conversation 2: Anthropology, ethnography,
education and the university 63
Conversation 3: Environment, perception and skill 101
Conversation 4: Animals, lines and imagination 137
Conversation 5: Looking back and forward 175
Afterword
Tim Ingold 203
References 2 1 1
Index 221
Notes on authors vii
NOTES ON AUTHORS
Tim Ingold is Professor Emeritus of Social Anthropology at the
University of Aberdeen. He has carried out fieldwork among Saami
and Finnish people in Lapland, and has written on environment, tech-
nology and social organisation in the circumpolar North, on animals in
human society and on human ecology and evolutionary theory. His
more recent work explores environmental perception and skilled prac-
tice. Ingold’s current interests lie on the interface between anthropology,
archaeology, art and architecture. His recent books include The
Perception of the Environment (2000), Lines (2007), Being Alive (2011),
Making (2013), The Life of Lines (2015), Anthropology and/as Education
(2018), Anthropology: Why It Matters (2018), Correspondences (2020),
Imagining for Real (2022) and The Rise and Fall of Generation Now
(2024). Ingold is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society
of Edinburgh, and a Knight (First Class) of Order of the White Rose
of Finland. In 2022 he was made a CBE for services to Anthropology.
Webpage: https://www.timingold.com/
Robert Gibb teaches anthropology and sociology at the University
of Glasgow. He has conducted anthropological research on the
antiracist movement in France and on questions of translation and
interpretation in the asylum process in France and Bulgaria. His most
recent publications are ‘Metaphors and practices of translation in
anglophone anthropology’ (Social Science Information, 2023) and
‘Re-Learning Hope: On Alienation, Theory and the “Death” of
Universities’ (The Sociological Review, forthcoming).
Webpage: https://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/socialpolitical/staff/
robertgibb/
viii Conversations with Tim Ingold
Philip Tonner is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at
the University of Glasgow. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from the
University of Glasgow, a DPhil in Archaeology from the University
of Oxford, and a PGDE in education from the University of
Strathclyde. His work explores themes at the intersection of philos-
ophy, anthropology, archaeology and education. He is the author of
three books, Heidegger, Metaphysics and the Univocity of Being
(
Continuum 2010
), Phenomenology Between Aesthetics and Idealism
(Noes
is Press 2015) and Dwelling: Heidegger, Archaeology, Mortality
(Routledge 2018).
Webpage: https://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/education/staff/
philip tonner/
Diego Maria Malara is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology
at the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow.
He holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of
Edinburgh and has studied in Italy, Sweden and the UK. His research
to date has focused on religion and politics in Ethiopia, specifically
Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity. His publications explore themes
including secrecy, kinship, healing, historicity, ethics, food, embodim-
ent, religious pluralism and nationalism. He has recently edited
special issues on ‘Lenience in Systems of Religious Meaning and
Practices’ (Social Analysis) and ‘Ethnographies of Ethiopian Orthodox
Christianity’ (Northeast African Studies), and co-authored a report
entitled ‘Religion in Contemporary Ethiopia: History, Politics and
Inter-religious Relations’ (Rift Valley Institute).
Webpage: https://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/socialpolitical/staf f/
diegomariamalara/
Acknowledgements ix
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Robert Gibb, Diego Maria Malara and Philip Tonner are grateful to
Tim Ingold for his willingness to be interviewed five times over a
period of two years, and for his contribution to the work of editing
and revising the transcribed conversations for publication.
Philip Tonner would like to thank William P. Tonner and Philip Wallace
for their help with the transcription process. Particular thanks are
due to William P. Tonner for his supportive role during this work.
Philip would also like to thank Lynsey Tonner for her support during
the Zoom interview process.
Diego Maria Malara wishes to express his gratitude to Fatima Raja
for her valuable editorial guidance and for proofreading selected
sections of the interviews he transcribed.
All four authors thank Dominique Walker and Gillian Daly at Scottish
Universities Press for the information and guidance they kindly
provided at regular intervals over a 15-month period. The book also
benefitted from the comments on the initial proposal by two an-
onymous reviewers and members of SUP’s Editorial Board. Funding
to cover the production charge of the book was generously provided
by the University of Glasgow Library.
Introduction 1
INTRODUCTION
Robert Gibb and Philip Tonner
Summary: In this chapter we provide a brief introduction to
Ingold’s work and to the rest of the book.1 We highlight some
of the key contributions Ingold has made to advancing thinking
and research, not only within anthropology, but also in many
other fields across the arts, humanities and natural sciences,
and point to where these are discussed in the conversations
that follow. In so doing, we consider how Ingold’s ideas have
changed over time, the place of empirical research in his work
and influences on his recent work from outside anthropology.
We also acknowledge anthropology’s complicated history
and discuss how in the subsequent conversations Ingold
reflects on this. Finally, we present a rationale for the interview
format and reflect on the processes involved in producing a
book of this kind.
‘. . . life is not confined within generations but forged in the
collaboration of their overlap’
(I
ngold 2024: viii).
Tim Ingold is one of the world’s leading anthropologists. Over the
past five decades, he has not only advanced thinking and research
within the discipline of anthropology but also made significant
contributions to a wide range of debates in both the arts and human-
ities and the natural sciences. Characterised by a series of highly
1 We are very grateful to Tim Ingold and Diego Maria Malara for their helpful
comments on the first draft of this chapter.
2 Conversations with Tim Ingold
original attempts to synthesise and develop ideas and concepts
from an impressive variety of fields – notably anthropology, archae-
ology, evolutionary biology, ecological psychology, phenomenology,
education, art and architecture – his work is innovative, accessible
and thought-provoking. It offers an original perspective on, among
other topics: human–animal relations; evolution and social life; the
perception of the environment; technology and skill; the history and
anthropology of lines; art and architecture as making and knowing;
education and attention; anthropology and ethnography; creative
practice and imagination; and what it means to be human.
Conversations with Tim Ingold: Anthropology, education and life
provides a wide-ranging and readable account of Ingold’s life and
career in the form of a series of interviews he gave over a two-year
period to three anthropologists based at the University of Glasgow:
Robert Gibb, Diego Maria Malara and Philip Tonner. The interview
format allows Ingold to present his ideas in his own words – high-
lighting in the process how engaging he is as a speaker and as a
thinker – and to explore with the interviewers some of the key
debates surrounding his work. The discussion covers the entirety of
Ingold’s career to date, from his earliest publications to his most
recent collection of essays, Imagining for Real ( 022a) and his latest
book The Rise and Fall of Generation Now (2024).
The five interviews or conversations – the terms will be used inter-
changeably here – gathered in the present volume focus in turn on
the following themes: ‘Life and Career’; ‘Anthropology, Ethnography,
Education and the University’; ‘Environment, Perception and Skill’;
‘Animals, Lines and Imagination’; and ‘Looking Back and Forward’.
At the start of each conversation the reader will find a short para-
graph which summarises the main topics covered therein. Each also
concludes with a ‘Further Reading’ section, containing references
to specific texts by Ingold and other scholars; this information is
intended to help interested readers explore further the issues and
debates reviewed in the chapter concerned. In fact, part of what
prompted the three of us (Gibb, Malara and Tonner) to approach
Ingold in the first place, with the idea of a series of interviews, chimed
2
Introduction 3
with a view expressed by the editors of a recent multidisciplinary
collection devoted to his work, namely, that it ‘deserves wider recog-
nition and productive and critical engagement’ (Porr and Weidtmann
2024: xiii). We hope that Conversations with Tim Ingold can play its
own part in attracting further attention to his writing internationally,
both within anthropology and in many other fields of study.
With this end in mind, what the interview-based chapters have in
common, beyond the different thematic focus in each, is a concern
to explore four key questions: (1) What are the most significant
contributions Ingold has made to anthropology and to other disci-
plines in the arts and humanities and the natural sciences? (2) What
are the key influences that have shaped his life and career? (3) What
criticisms have been made of his work, and how has he responded
to these? (4) What are the likely future directions his work will take?
In the rest of this introduction, we highlight some of the most impor-
tant answers to these questions that emerge over the course of the
five conversations, before concluding with some brief comments on
the process of producing a book such as this, based on a series of
interviews. In an ‘Afterword’, Ingold offers some additional reflections
of his own on these conversations.
• • •
A recurrent feature of Ingold’s career to date, which he talks about
in the final conversation included here, has been the attempt to
‘synthesise’ anthropology with a range of different fields or disci-
plines: for example, evolutionary biology, ecological psychology, art,
architecture and design, education. This has often involved chal-
lenging, and seeking to move beyond, binary distinctions such as
between biology and culture, and between evolution and history,
that are so characteristic of Western modernity (see the final section
of Conversation 3). Similarly, in his most recent collection of essays
(Ingold 2022a), Ingold tackles the opposition between ‘imagination’
and ‘reality’, as he discusses towards the end of Conversation 4.
These are all exciting, thought-provoking contributions, which have
attracted considerable attention and influenced debates not only
4 Conversations with Tim Ingold
within anthropology but also across the arts, humanities and natural
and social sciences.
Given this sustained effort over many years to transcend disciplinary
divisions and conceptual dichotomies, it might seem paradoxical
that another of Ingold’s major contributions has, at the same time,
been his prominent role as a passionate advocate for the particular
field of anthropology (for example, 2018a and b). How can these
two, equally fundamental yet apparently conflicting aspects of his
work be reconciled? The answer lies in the fact that what attracted
Ingold to the subject in the first place, and has made him remain
with it since, is his sense that ‘anthropology is constitutionally in-
between all the other disciplines’. He explains what he means by
this in Conversation 2:
The thing about anthropology, as we’ve always said, is that it
doesn’t concentrate on any particular slice of human life.
Sociology deals with society; theology with religion; economics
with the economy; politics with the state. But anthropology
deals with the whole lot. It starts with humanity unsliced. And
that, I think, is one of its great virtues.
Ingold is, of course, well aware of the discipline’s complicated history,
and he is very critical both in his published work and in these conver-
sations (notably in Conversation 2) of how legacies from the
colonial past continue to run through not just anthropology but
academia more generally. In addition, he recognises that anthropolo-
gists have not been very successful in explaining to the general
public why their discipline is so important, and that this has left it
‘vulnerable institutionally’ and subject to cuts during periods of
contraction. One of the main underlying problems, he suggests, is
that ‘we have been less than clear in our own minds about the
purpose of anthropology in today’s world’. A contributing factor
here, in his view, has been a growing tendency since the mid-1980s
to reduce anthropology to ethnography. He has opposed this devel-
opment (Ingold 2008, 2014a), for reasons discussed in the third
section of Conversation 2.
Introduction 5
Against this background, what in Ingold’s view is the value and
distinctiveness of anthropology? In several of his recent books (for
example, Ingold 2018a, b), he has presented an original and provoc-
ative case for ‘why anthropology matters’, and this is a theme that
runs through all the conversations assembled here. As he explains
in Conversation 4, he has in general terms been ‘trying to think of
a different way of doing anthropology’, one that builds on the disci-
pline’s key strengths. His starting point is the assertion that ‘every
way of life is itself an experiment in how to live’, an attempt by a
particular society or group of people to answer the fundamental
human question: ‘How should we live?’ Ingold claims that anthro-
pology is virtually the only discipline which is ‘actually listening to
people, interested in what they have to say, and anxious to learn
from it’, rather than simply treating it as data. In other words, it is
– or should be – committed to ‘taking others seriously’, one aspect
of which is thinking about what can be learned from their various
experiments in living. As Ingold states in the fourth section of
Conversation 2:
If we go to study with other people, it is because they have
wisdom and experience from which we could potentially learn;
it might help us all, collectively, in our future endeavours. That’s
why we do anthropology, in my view.
From this perspective, anthropology is fundamentally a process of
learning and education (see also Ingold 2018b). Elaborating on this
point, he argues that for anthropologists:
The first priority . . . must be educational rather than ethno-
graphic. We’re not here to describe or catalogue other people’s
lives; we’re here to open ourselves up to them. If we understand
education in this sense, then that’s what we do in anthropology.
At least, it is what we should be doing; it should be our first
priority.
According to Ingold, then, there is more to anthropology than the
ethnographic documentation of particular ways of life, valuable
6 Conversations with Tim Ingold
though the latter can be; crucially, it is a form of education that is
concerned with investigating ‘the conditions and possibilities of
human life’ – past, present and future (see also Ingold 2018a: 8). As
he puts it later in Conversation 2, anthropology ‘offers the possibility
to reflect seriously on the big questions of how to live in a way that
engages with real life’. It can thus be said that one of the major
promises of Ingold’s work is nothing less than a revitalised philo-
sophical anthropology, one that ventures out into the flow of the
world and engages with the voices it hears there in order to explore
possible answers to the question of how to live.
One further aspect of Ingold’s general perspective on anthropology
is worth highlighting here before we mention more briefly some of
the specific issues and themes he discusses in the following conver-
sations. Given his conceptualisation of anthropology as a form of
education, it is perhaps not surprising that he views teaching as
central to the discipline. In the final conversation he outlines his own
approach to teaching and explains why he believes that ‘teaching
is an essential part of doing anthropology’. As the following extract
makes clear, the reason why he attaches so much importance to
teaching is directly related to his view of anthropology as a form of
education that involves learning from the wisdom of others:
What I’ve learned is that if we are going to study with people
‘out there’, to study their experiments in living . . . then we are
under some sort of obligation, if we have been transformed by
what we’ve learned, to give something back. How do we give
things back? Not primarily through publication, but through
teaching. . . . I feel really strongly about this. I think it is appalling
that teaching is so often regarded as the delivery of second-
hand goods. In some ways, it is the be-all-and-end-all of
anthropology.
As Ingold points out, most anthropologists working in universities
spend considerably more time teaching students in classrooms than
they do carrying out research in the field. Even though it rarely
receives the same amount of prominence as fieldwork, teaching,
Introduction 7
Ingold believes, is a fundamental element of anthropological prac-
tice. In the final conversation, he provides fascinating insights into
his own approach to, and experiences of, teaching.
Over the past five decades, Ingold has made numerous other
original contributions, enhancing our knowledge and under-
standing concerning a wide range of questions. Many of these are
discussed in this book. In
C
onversation 3, for example, Ingold talks
about his influential collection of essays, The Perception of the
Environment (2000/2011b), as well as his writing on ‘the mycelial
person’, the dwelling perspective, landscape, anthropocentrism,
materials and materiality, and technique and skill. A further three
key themes are explored in Conversation 4: Ingold’s long-standing
interest in human–animal relations and his argument for an
‘anthropology beyond humanity’; his fascinating work on ‘the
anthropological archaeology of the line’ and subsequent devel-
opment of the notion of ‘correspondence’; and the focus in his
most recent collection of essays on imagination and reality, crea-
tion and creativity, and the meaning of ‘one-world anthropology’.
In the conversations, Ingold is also asked about many other
aspects of his work and career, including, to give just two final
examples, how he set up an anthropology department at the
University of Aberdeen and his views on matters of religious belief
(see Conversations 2 and 4, respectively).
In mapping here how Ingold’s major contributions to anthropology
and many other fields are explored in the following five conversa-
tions, our aim has been to provide an initial overview of the book’s
contents. We hope these interviews will provide readers new to
Ingold’s work with a wide-ranging and accessible introduction to his
key ideas and arguments, while giving those already familiar with his
writing further insights into it. We will address the latter now by
briefly indicating what these conversations tell us about the influ-
ences that have shaped Ingold’s work over the years, and about his
views today on some of the debates it has stimulated.
• • •
8 Conversations with Tim Ingold
The conversations included here explore both continuities and
changes in Ingold’s thinking over the five decades of his career to
date. In the process, Ingold reflects on the various influences that
have shaped the development of his ideas over this period. These
range widely, and there is not space to mention all of them here.
Nevertheless, some particularly important ones are worth high-
lighting. At the start of the very first conversation, Ingold discusses
the influence of his parents, noting, for example, that what he
absorbed as a child from observing his father’s work as a mycolo-
gist at home undoubtedly lies behind his subsequent interest in
lines and the notion of the ‘mycelial person’ (In
gold
2003
,
2018
c).
He also explains that the anthropologists Keith Hart and Fredrik
Barth were crucial influences during his undergraduate and post-
graduate studies at the University of Cambridge in the late 1960s
and early 1970s. In the years immediately following this, the early
writings of Karl Marx played a significant role in helping Ingold
develop his own ideas, as he outlines towards the end of the third
conversation.
Surprisingly perhaps, the main intellectual influences on Ingold’s
work over the past four decades have come from outside his ‘home’
discipline. With the exception of the French archaeologist and
ethnologist André Leroi-Gourhan, philosophers – including Henri
Bergson, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Susan Oyama – and psycholo-
gists – notably James Gibson – have been theoretical ‘guiding lights’
for him, more so than social anthropologists. Ingold offers an explan-
ation for this in the final conversation, suggesting that ‘from the
mid-1980s onwards, anthropology began to turn in on itself’,
following the publication of Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus,
1986) and the debates that ensued. ‘And the more introverted it
became,’ he continues, ‘the more it assumed an ethnographic and
anti-theoretical posture.’ As a result, in recent years ‘the really inter-
esting, exciting theoretical developments always seemed to be
coming from somewhere else’ – that is, from outside social anthro-
pology, and this is reflected in the way he himself has taken
inspiration from authors working mostly in other disciplines.
Introduction 9
It remains the case, however, that more than any other, one particular
group of social anthropologists have shaped Ingold’s current thinking,
namely, his PhD students. In the final conversation, he declares that
so far as practitioners of his own discipline are concerned, over the
past several decades, ‘they are the people from whom I’ve learned
the most, and most enjoyed working with’. For example, one of the
reasons he became interested in the relationship between writing and
musical notation, which he went on to explore in Lines (2007a), lay
in his supervision of a doctoral student, Kawori Iguchi, who was
researching Japanese traditional music (see the final section of
Conversation 1). Ingold explains why he has learned so much from his
supervisees: ‘It’s not just because of what they’re thinking, but also
because of what they’re reading. You get to know work in all sorts
of areas that you would otherwise have never encountered’
(Conversation 5). This can be related, more generally, to Ingold’s view
of anthropology as a form of education, and also to his approach to
teaching. Reflecting on the latter in the final conversation, he states
that: ‘To teach is to bring students along with you, as fellow travellers,
on a journey of intellectual discovery which you undertake together.’
Accompanying his doctoral students on their respective journeys has
clearly taught Ingold much that has enhanced his own work.
Finally, these conversations also identify some of the other factors
that have played a part in changing Ingold’s ideas over time. In
Conversation 1, he explains that after publishing Evolution and Social
Life (Ingold 1986a) and The Appropriation of Nature (1986b), he
concluded that his attempts in these books to combine social
anthropology, respectively, with evolutionary biology and ecology
had ‘ended in failure’. What helped him find an alternative path
forward was a suggestion from the ecological psychologist Edward
Reed that he read the work of James Gibson. Invitations to deliver
lecture series have stimulated his thinking in productive ways too.
For example, being invited by the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland
to give the 2003 Rhind Lectures subsequently led to the publication
of his influential book Lines: A Brief History (
2
007a). Similarly, he
developed his argument about ‘anthropology as education’ (Ingold
2018b) through an extensive engagement with John Dewey’s
10 Conversations with Tim Ingold
writings, in the course of preparing the 2016 Dewey Lectures (see
the final section of Conversation 2).
• • •
Ingold’s work has been, and continues to be, the focus of lively
debates not only in anthropology but also in many other disciplines
(important recent contributions include Howes 2022; Kochan 2024;
and Porr and Weidtmann 2024). It would have been impossible to
cover the full range of these in the conversations collected together
in the present volume. Nevertheless, the interviewers invite Ingold
to respond to some of the key objections that have been levelled
against his ideas and arguments over the years. To take two specific
examples, he discusses some of the criticisms of his influential
articles, ‘The Temporality of Landscape’ (1993) and ‘Materials
Against Materiality’ (2007b) in the first and second sections of
Conversation 3.
A recurrent criticism of Ingold’s approach more generally, which has
been levelled even by otherwise sympathetic commentators (for
example, Hornborg 2018 and Howard 2018), is that it devotes insuf-
ficient attention to politics and political economy. To date, his fullest
and most direct response to such criticism has been in an article
published almost two decades ago (Ingold 2005). How does he
view the matter today? The present conversations provide many
valuable insights into Ingold’s current assessment of this aspect of
his own work, as well as into his practical involvement in institutional
politics, notably at the University of Aberdeen, where he has worked
since 1999.
The place of politics and political analysis in Ingold’s work is explored
at some length in the first section of Conversation 2. Ingold begins
by acknowledging that he is ‘often criticised for leaving politics out’,
and for failing to engage adequately with questions of political
power. It is certainly the case, he admits, that the latter are rarely
the explicit focus of his writing. Nevertheless, he goes on to insist
that ‘my work is intensely political, but the politics lies in the writing,
Introduction 11
in the arguing’. To illustrate this, he points to the ways he has chal-
lenged the claims of cognitive science and neo-Darwinian biology,
fields that in his view are underpinned by, and help to reproduce,
the power of neoliberal corporations and the state. As noted above,
his work has sought to dissolve various dichotomies characteristic
of Western modernity, such as biology versus culture, and evolution
versus history; these interventions can also be considered highly
political. The same can be said of his most recently published book
(Ingold 2024), which proposes that how we think about generations
is crucial to addressing climate change and other urgent contem-
porary issues.
When Ingold maintains that ‘the politics lies in the writing’, however,
he is referring not only to the specific arguments he advances but
also to how he writes. The effort he makes to write in a clear and
accessible manner reflects his opposition to what he describes as
‘scholarly gobbledygook’ and the ‘exclusionary’ nature of much
academic writing. This is related to a wider aim, which Ingold has
stated in a recent publication and discusses in the second section
of Conversation 2: ‘to demolish the walls that divide the land of
academia from the rest of the world, and to expose the conceit of
its inhabitants – a conceit that lingers as an uncomfortable legacy
from the colonial past – that they alone are equipped to tackle
questions of so deep a nature as to elude ordinary folk’ (2021a: 143).
Ingold’s participation in the ‘Reclaiming Our University’ movement
at the University of Aberdeen, a fascinating account of which he
provides in the final section of Conversation 2, is a further concrete
example of his commitment to questioning and attempting to trans-
form structures of academic power.
The present volume also throws valuable light on the series of signific-
ant but controversial interventions Ingold has made over the past
decade in disciplinary debates about the relationship between
anthropology, ethnography and participant observation. In the third
section of Conversation 2 he summarises the arguments he has
developed on this question and the concerns that prompted them.
He acknowledges some of the difficulties inherent in clarifying the
12 Conversations with Tim Ingold
difference between anthropology and ethnography, including how
to explain the nature of the discipline to outsiders, both members
of the general public and those working in other fields. In the process,
he also explains how he thinks ‘research’ and ‘methods’ should be
understood, and comments on the effects of a professionalisation
of research in recent decades that has led to an institutional preoc-
cupation with ‘research methods training’.
At several points in the conversations, Ingold also talks at some
length about his own fieldwork in the early 1970s, as a doctoral
student, with the Skolt Sámi in northeastern Finland. In the second
section of Conversation 1 he explains how he ended up carrying out
research there in the first place, before providing a detailed account
of his fieldwork. He discusses key issues such as language learning,
relationships with key interlocutors in the field, how he wrote field-
notes (he describes how he analysed these in section 3 of
Conversation 2) and the role played by his PhD supervisor, John
Barnes. Reflecting on his fieldwork in Lapland, Ingold comments: ‘I
didn’t think I was a very good fieldworker, and I’ve never been one
of those whose passion is always to go back, to take every possible
opportunity to return to the field.’ In the final section of Conversation
5, he also talks about what he would do differently now if he were
able to wind back the clock and conduct his first fieldwork again.
In this connection, a noteworthy observation about Ingold’s work
was made by one of the anonymous reviewers of the proposal for
the present book, which we had submitted to the publishers. The
reviewer commented that:
Ingold has a complicated relationship with the idea and practice
of ethnography. His own in-depth field experience is largely
confined to the Skolt Lapps, and it has often puzzled me that
in the rest of his career he rarely returns to the subject. There
is an absence of immersive long-term fieldwork. Beyond the
very early work, there are no detailed, systematic analyses of
his own data.
Introduction 13
Although the interviewers did not ask Ingold about this directly in
their conversations, his answers to other questions throw valuable
light on the issues identified by the reviewer. Looking back over his
career in the final section of Conversation 5, for example, Ingold
comments: ‘Overall, I am not by any measure a field anthropologist’,
acknowledging that he has conducted ‘very little’ actual field
research. He explains – and we will return to this below – that one
of his main regrets is that he was never able to write up fully the
subsequent fieldwork he conducted in Lapland in 1979–80, because
he found himself ‘drifting’ into work of a more theoretical nature.
According to Ingold, his later interest in lines, paths, atmospheres
and landscapes – decades after the publication of The Skolt Lapps
Today (1976) – was nevertheless influenced in part by his early
fieldwork experience in Lapland. He claims that:
It is this kind of sensibility, which soaks into you without your
realising it at the time, that then leads you to develop your
ideas along particular lines. That, I think, is the real reason why
fieldwork is so important. It isn’t because of the data you collect
and the study you might write up on the basis of them, but
because of something deeper that sinks in and affects the way
you live your life, including scholarship.
Even though Ingold felt that his PhD thesis failed to capture ‘the
feel of the place’ where he had conducted fieldwork, he suggests
that the experience of inhabiting a particular kind of northern land-
scape, where each human and animal path has a history, fostered a
sensibility that remained with him and has helped to shape his
subsequent work.
Taken together, Ingold’s reflections on his own fieldwork experience
suggest a way of understanding how the different pieces of the
‘puzzle’ described by the reviewer cited above relate to each other.
An additional element is provided by the very last exchange in these
conversations, where he answers a question about his plans for the
future. As Ingold explains, his immediate task was to complete work
14 Conversations with Tim Ingold
on an edited collection and a single-authored book. Both of these
have since been published (Ingold 2022a, b), as has a further book
(Ingold 2024). His intention after that, he tells us, is to return to
Lapland and to resume the fieldwork he started there in 1979–80,
but was unable subsequently to write up properly. These conversa-
tions therefore end at a point of new beginnings for Ingold: ‘Having
said all these things about ethnography . . . I shall nevertheless
reinvent myself as an ethnographer again!’ It will be fascinating to
follow how this next stage of his life and career develops.
• • •
In his most recent book, The Rise and Fall of Generation Now, Ingold
encourages us to think of generations as more like overlapping,
entwined threads in a rope than as discrete layers stacked one on
top of the other (2024: 1–5). He also uses the metaphor of the rope
to understand academic fields of study, such as anthropology, writing
that: ‘Every discipline so named is a lineage of begetting, wound
like a rope from the overlapping scholarly lives of its numerous
practitioners’ (2024: 112–13). In a similar way, the present volume
can be viewed as the result of a collaboration that brought together
four anthropologists from different but overlapping generations in
a series of five conversations. As will be apparent from comments
in several of these, it did so during the Covid-19 pandemic: the first
interview took place on 9 October 2020 and the final one on 13
May 2022.
For each interview/conversation, Gibb, Malara and Tonner prepared
a list of questions, compiled from suggestions they had made indi-
vidually (shaped in part by their own respective intellectual interests),
and sent this to Ingold in advance. They then asked him these
questions in a video meeting on Zoom, and he responded, his
answers sometimes leading to additional ‘follow-up’ questions and
discussion of themes not covered by the interviewers’ initial ques-
tions. All the interviews were recorded. The interviewers transcribed
them and produced an initial edited version of each conversation.
The latter was sent to Ingold, along with the full unedited transcript
Introduction 15
of the interview, to which he added more editing of his own and
corrected some transcription errors. The interviewers then reviewed
the amended version and made any final editorial changes they
considered appropriate.
In response to the opening question of the very first conversation,
Ingold notes that being interviewed has sometimes helped him to
clarify his own thinking. An interview can be extremely useful too,
we believe, for readers interested in learning more about a particular
scholar and their work. The question-and-answer format lends itself
to an engaging and accessible presentation of key ideas and argu-
ments. Previous interviews with Ingold published in academic
journals, such as those we’ve mentioned in the ‘Further Reading’
section at the end of Conversation 1, illustrate this very well. What
is distinctive about Conversations with Tim Ingold is the enhanced
breadth and depth of discussion made possible by a book-length
volume in which no fewer than five interviews, each with a different
thematic focus, are included. As the reader will discover, these
conversations range widely, exploring in some detail not only Ingold’s
original contributions to anthropology and many other fields over
the past five decades, but also his early life, undergraduate and
postgraduate studies and subsequent academic career.
As Ingold has argued, anthropologists ‘study with people, rather than
making studies of them’ (2018a: 11, italics in original). We suggest,
finally, that therein also lies part of the rationale for this book of
conversations with Ingold himself. Anthropology requires of us that
we re-learn how to look at the world from within so that we might
be able to express something of its very becoming. A conversational
approach provides opportunities for this. A true conversation is a
listening participation in emergence that is open to the future of
what we might become. This is what we have attempted to pursue
in the conversations that follow.
Life and career
17
CONVERSATION 1:
Life and career
Summary: This is an edited version of a wide-ranging inter-
view that Gibb, Malara and Tonner conducted with Ingold
about his life and career on 9 October 2020. It covers in turn
Ingold’s childhood and school experiences, his undergraduate
and postgraduate studies and his academic career at the
universities of Manchester and Aberdeen. Ingold reflects on
the influences that have shaped his personal and intellectual
development and how his interests have evolved over this time.
A fascinating account in itself, this also helps to situate the
specific themes explored in the subsequent conversations in
the wider context of Ingold’s life, and of an academic career
spanning five decades.
Robert Gibb
First of all, Tim, thank you very much for agreeing to this series of
interviews, just as you’ve previously agreed to be interviewed by
other colleagues from around the world, working not only in anthro-
pology but also in other fields and disciplines. When did you start
receiving interview requests?
18 Conversations with Tim Ingold
Tim Ingold
I don’t remember exactly. Over the last three or four years maybe,
but not much before then. It is true that they’ve multiplied over the
last few years. Most often correspondents email questions to which
I then respond. It’s more usual for me to do it in that way than
directly, as we are doing now. I don’t accept all such requests. But
if the interviewers are serious and have really good things to talk
about, then I have often found it quite helpful for clarifying my own
ideas. It helps to have someone pose a question which you are
compelled to answer, and it can sometimes be quite challenging.
It’s been of great benefit to me.
(A) CHILDHOOD AND SCHOOL EXPERIENCES
Philip Tonner
Please can you tell us where you were born and about your parents
and grandparents.
Tim Ingold
I was born in 1948, in a small town called Sevenoaks in the county
of Kent, in southeast England. My father was a botanist; his specialism
was mycology, the study of fungi. When I was born, he had already
taken up a post at Birkbeck College, London, where he was Professor
of Botany. My mother was trained as a geologist, but in those days
it wasn’t easy for a married woman to have a career, so basically
she was at home, looking after me and my three elder sisters. My
eldest sister is 13 years older; the next one, eight years older; and
the next one, five years older. So I turned up as very much the
youngest in the family. And of course, that was soon after the end
of the Second World War. It was the period of the postwar baby
boom. I don’t remember very much about my grandparents. I didn’t
Life and career
19
get to know my two grandfathers at all. Of my two grandmothers,
one was enormous fun, but the other I remember as stern and
bedridden.
Philip Tonner
Where did you go to school and what subjects did you study in
secondary school?
Tim Ingold
My parents sent me to what was called a preparatory school –
meaning a private, single-sex primary school – which was run by a
gentleman in a splendid country mansion. It was mostly a happy
place, though looking back, I do wonder about one particular teacher,
not to mention the gentleman-headmaster’s predilection for the
cane, weakly administered to the hand, or occasionally the backside,
of any miscreant pupil. Then they sent me to Leighton Park School,
which is also a public (meaning private, fee-paying) school, situated
on the outskirts of Reading. I have never quite forgiven my parents
for this, because I was only 11 when I was packed off from home, and
the early years of boarding were really hard. Once I’d got through the
worst of the teenage years and had reached the top (sixth) form,
the independence from home was wonderful, but up until then it was
awful. I was bullied a lot, and sometimes caused consternation by
walking in my sleep in the dormitory. Because I was considered clever,
they bumped me up by one year. That made it even more difficult
because most of my classmates were a year older than me, and that
makes a big difference when you’re 13 or 14. It meant that I took what
were called O levels in those days – that is, ordinary level exams –
when I was only 14. I then went straight into Advanced level, and it
was simply assumed that since I was good at maths and science, I
would take maths and science subjects. I never really thought twice
about it. I took my A-level exams in mathematics, advanced math-
ematics, physics and chemistry, when I was 16. I was still very
20 Conversations with Tim Ingold
immature, having led a thoroughly sheltered life. I had no idea about
the world or about anything, really, and there I was, already slated to
be a scientist. I took a year off in between school and university, but
then started off at university studying natural science.
Philip Tonner
How formative do you think your childhood and school experiences
were for your subsequent career and intellectual projects?
Tim Ingold
That’s hard to say. Family experiences were probably more formative
than school experiences: things like going for walks in the countryside,
and topics discussed around the dinner table at home. I think these
affected me more than anything I did at school. But I’m not sure; it
was all so long ago! I am in no doubt, however, that my father had an
extremely strong influence on how I think. I had a wonderfully happy
home. Both my parents were amazing. My mother gave me all the
stability one could possibly ask for, so I could feel safe and secure, and
my father gave me a sense of intellectual curiosity and rigour. Putting
the two together, I couldn’t really have asked for better parents.
Diego Maria Malara
Could you elaborate a bit more on what these conversations were
about, what the intellectual climate at home was, and more specif-
ically how your parents influenced your thinking?
Tim Ingold
My dad, as I mentioned, was a mycologist. There’s something about
fungi – I mean, fungi are very curious organisms! They don’t behave
Life and career
21
as organisms should. My dad was completely in love with these fungi,
and his approach to studying them was very innovative for its time.
He was one of the first, in the early 1930s, to insist on the importance
of field experience in botanical education. Until then, students would
simply encounter pickled, preserved specimens of plants or fungi in
a laboratory. My dad was the one who said: ‘You cannot possibly
understand a fungus unless you go into the woods, find it, see where
it’s growing, what it’s doing with everything else.’ It seems obvious
now, but at the time, it was revolutionary. He would sometimes bring
his students to our house for fungal forays and they’d all go wandering
in the woods and come back and have tea at home and discuss what
they’d found. I was a little boy observing all these things going on
around me. Here was a group of grown-ups who were completely
fascinated by these odd things that crop up in the forest. I couldn’t
help but absorb some of this atmosphere. So that was one thing.
The second thing was that my dad’s specialism was not in fact the
fungi you find growing in the woods, but microscopic fungi known
as aquatic hyphomycetes. There’s actually a genus of Ingoldia fungi,
named after him! My dad was especially interested in the mechanisms
by which these fungi contrived to discharge their spores. He would
observe this going on under the microscope, in real time. He could
practise this kind of science and make genuinely new discoveries
without needing a fancy lab; indeed, he did a lot of his work on our
dining-room table. He would find the fungi by going for walks along
the river bank, take a few glass tubes with him, fill up the glass tubes
with mucky water from the side of the stream, bring it home, put it
under the microscope and discover all these marvellous organisms.
There he would be, sitting with a mapping pen, Indian ink and Bristol
board, drawing what he saw – very, very carefully and very beautifully.
It was obvious to all of us that he was completely besotted with his
fungi. But he was a very rational, empirical man, who refused to admit
to his feelings for what he studied. He would say: ‘I’m just a scientist.
I’m observing. I don’t talk about love. That’s got nothing to do with
it.’ But we all knew that this is really what it was. As a child, watching
him at work, I must have absorbed a certain attitude towards lines
and drawing, and towards the curiously reticular nature of fungi.
22 Conversations with Tim Ingold
My dad could never understand anthropology or why I should want
to study it. Half a century later, when I wrote my book about lines
and gave him a copy to read, he said: ‘I have no idea what all this is
about.’ I tried to tell him: ‘Well, look, your fungi are right there, at
the heart of it.’
The other thing I loved, when I was a boy, was trains. I spent a lot of
time trainspotting on station platforms, and built a model railway. I
would go for walks in the countryside and take black-and-white photo-
graphs with the sort of Kodak camera you could buy in those days,
and make drawings of interesting buildings. Then I would use the
photos and drawings to make miniature-scale models, which I included
in the railway layout. This too was very important, because through
photographing and model-making you develop an eye for landscape
and for buildings. My mother was my main supporter in all this railway
modelling, whereas my dad wasn’t interested in it at all.
These were very strong influences. The conversations we would have
around the dinner table were about modern art, politics and religion,
of which I had zero understanding at the time. One of my elder sisters
had taken up painting; another was very active in the communist
students’ movement. My dad was a fervent atheist, but my mum
wasn’t quite so sure. So there would be lots of very vigorous conver-
sations around things like that. My main problem was that I was always
being left out. I wanted to talk about my trains, but I could never get
a word in edgeways because my sisters would be having these intense
arguments about art, politics and religion that I didn’t understand.
(B) UNDERGRADUATE AND POSTGRADUATE
STUDIES
Robert Gibb
What did you do in your year out between secondary school and
university?
Life and career
23
Tim Ingold
Technically, it was nine months: I still spent the final autumn at school
to take the Cambridge entrance exams. Then I left. I worked in a
supermarket for a bit, unloading lorries and stocking shelves, before
travelling to Finland. That was my first trip to Finland. I travelled
north through the country, through Lapland, and even visited the
place where I would eventually carry out fieldwork. I had seen an
advertisement for student labour to work on farms in Norway. I
applied, and was given a placement on a farm on the coast of
northern Norway, in a little village called Alstahaug, near the town
of Sandnessjøen.I decided that to get to this place, I may as well
travel through Finland. I had just been to see the film Dr Zhivago,
newly released, and had been especially captivated not only by its
heroine, played by Julie Christie, but also by some of the railway
scenes, filmed along a line in Finnish Karelia. I imagined Finland as
a country of wood-burning locomotives and girls as beautiful as
Julie Christie! I was also very much attracted to the idea of the
North. My family home was full of books about the North because
both my parents were rather keen on it, although they didn’t travel
north themselves. I worked on this farm for a couple of months and
then came home again. That was my period in between. It introduced
me to Finland and to a part of the world that was subsequently to
become of great importance in my life.
Robert Gibb
You’d applied to do science at Cambridge?
Tim Ingold
Yes, without even thinking about it. It was just an assumption on
everybody’s part that I would read natural sciences, because I’d done
the standard Advanced level exams required for it: maths, further
maths, physics and chemistry. I gave no real thought to the matter
24 Conversations with Tim Ingold
of what I should be doing until long after I arrived at university. I
went to study natural sciences, and that was that.
At Cambridge, the quality of teaching was dreadful. You’d be sitting
there, in a pretty large class, in a big, old lecture theatre, and some
Nobel prize-winning scientist would be standing, usually with his
back to the audience, writing stuff on the blackboard in chalk, which
we then all had to copy down. And that was it! There was no sense
of critical engagement, no discussion, nothing. I was massively disil-
lusioned by the whole thing. At that time, the Vietnam War was at
its height and there were big protests going on, including a campaign
for social responsibility in science, which I joined. Though I was not
really politicised, I did get the sense that something was seriously
wrong with science, and that our teachers were being utterly compla-
cent about it. I never reacted against science itself, but I did come
to the conclusion, by the end of my first year at university, that there
was no way I could be a professional scientist. I was disillusioned
less with science itself than with what had happened to it. I was
appalled not only by the way it was taught, but also by the way in
which it had allowed itself to be co-opted by the military-industrial
complex, as we would call it now. With the Vietnam War going on,
this was very much ‘in your face’.
That was the first year. I had to decide what to do next, so I browsed
through the Cambridge University Reporter, a kind of gazetteer that
lists all the possible courses you can take. I was looking for some-
thing that would bridge the gap between the natural sciences and
the humanities, while at the same time remaining close to real life.
I found two possible alternatives: one was the history and philosophy
of science and the other was anthropology. My dad happened to
know the anthropologist Jean La Fontaine, because they’d both
been teaching at Birkbeck, before Jean moved to the London School
of Economics. He arranged for me to go and meet Jean and talk
about anthropology and, as I recall, she was very helpful. She told
me that I should read Fredrik Barth’s book, originally published in
1959, Political Leadership Among Swat Pathans. I read it, and that
was it! I was bowled over by the book, and decided there and then
Life and career
25
that I would read anthropology, and not the history and philosophy
of science.
Here, I thought, is a discipline that really does bridge the divide
between the sciences and the humanities, while also staying close
to life. That’s why I chose it. I was allowed to retake the first year,
which meant that I did all three years of the Archaeological and
Anthropological Tripos, as it was then called. The first year
included courses in Archaeology, Physical Anthropology and Social
Anthropology, and at the end of the year we had to choose which
line to take. I chose Social Anthropology, which at that time was
blessed with a fiery lecturer who got everyone excited, namely
Edmund Leach. Leach was keen on introducing the structuralist
approach of Claude Lévi-Strauss to British anthropology, so we
students heard quite a lot about this, and found it super-interesting.
It appealed to me as a kind of pure mathematics of social life. My
other lecturers were Meyer Fortes, Jack Goody and, for a while, Ray
Abrahams. Their styles of lecturing were, respectively, monotonous,
chaotic and dull. The person who inspired me most, however, was
Keith Hart, who had been doing fieldwork in northern Ghana with
the Tallensi people whom Fortes had studied earlier. Keith was my
supervisor in that second year, and he basically taught me how to
write. He could be ruthlessly critical without ever being dismissive
– an excellent guide and a wonderfully intelligent person to argue
with.
These, in the late 1960s, were the last days of structural-functionalism,
so our bible was A. R. Radcliffe-Brown’s Structure and Function in
Primitive Society, a collection of essays dating from 1952. My own
copy of the book had originally belonged to one of my elder sisters,
to whom it had been presented as a school prize in 1958! Nobody
reads the book nowadays, but we all had to learn it virtually by heart.
At that time, however, British structural-functionalism was under fire
from the new-fangled structuralism coming in from France, led by
Lévi-Strauss. Fortes was on the side of structural-functionalism and
Leach on the side of French structuralism – although having originally
been trained as an engineer, Leach was keen to convert Lévi-Strauss’s
26 Conversations with Tim Ingold
rather abstract, quasi-geometrical structures into systems that actu-
ally worked. Goody was somewhere in the middle, developing his
own ideas, which were something else again. At that time, also,
transactionalism, pioneered by the Norwegian anthropologist
Fredrik Barth, was making its mark as a possible successor to
structural-functionalism, and I was very attracted to it. Indeed, I was
so taken with Barth’s ideas that I would later go on to study with
him in Norway.
Assuming that I would go on to postgraduate study, I then had to
decide where to do my field research. By that stage I’d resolved that
I wanted to work in Lapland, in the very community I had visited on
my first trip through Finland. The Department had no idea how to
deal with this, because most students carried out their fieldwork in
formerly British colonies, mainly in Africa, India or southeast Asia.
They could not understand how anybody would want to do their
fieldwork somewhere in the north.
The thing was that at the end of my first year of anthropology, in
summer 1968, I had found myself back in Finland. I had joined what
in Britain was called Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO): you would
sign up, and then be sent off to a summer workcamp somewhere.
It was a great way of meeting people from different countries and
of doing something useful at the same time. But you had to go
where you were told. It just happened, by pure chance, that I was
told to go to a place in Karelia, in eastern Finland, to help with the
harvest. There were many farms there with big families in which the
male head of the household had passed away, usually due to heart
disease. Mortality from heart disease was especially high in rural
Finland, especially among middle-aged men, due in part to a diet
heavy in saturated fats, but in part, also, to the long-term health
effects of wartime hardships. A lot of women were therefore having
to manage their farms, with their children still too small for heavy
work. We went to help with the haymaking. We had a fabulous time,
and formed many friendships there that have remained with us for
the rest of our lives.
Life and career
27
I was one of the first to arrive, and was immediately set to work
peeling potatoes for dinner. On the opposite side of the potato
bucket was a girl from the western side of Finland, and it was imme-
diately apparent to this girl, whose name was Anna, that I had
absolutely no idea how to peel potatoes. I’d probably never peeled
potatoes in my life! But we ended up having many long walks and
conversations, and continued to correspond by mail after the camp
was over. Then, the year after that, she and I together ran a similar
workcamp in Sevettijärvi, in the very place in Lapland where I would
later go on to do my fieldwork. The local building inspector had
decided that the Skolt Sámi people, who were living there, ought to
eat more potatoes, and our task was to build semi-subterranean,
concrete cellars, in which potatoes could be preserved from frost
over the winters. Most of these cellars, though now put to other uses,
are still standing. During that time, I got to know many of the people
in the Skolt community. That was the obvious reason why, when it
came to deciding where to do fieldwork, I resolved to go there. At
that time, moreover, Anna was studying in Turku, in southwestern
Finland, so she could be with me, during university vacations, in the
field. She is still with me now, my wife of fifty-one years and counting!
So that’s how it happened. In those days, research grants were
relatively easy to obtain. I received a studentship from the College,
because I’d got a First Class degree, as well as a studentship from
what was then called the Social Science Research Council,1 and I
was able to combine the two. So funding was not a problem. But
the Cambridge department was a bit stuck as to whom to appoint
to supervise my PhD, because they had no-one with expertise in
that area. In the end they settled on John Barnes. John had just
1 In the United Kingdom, state support for research is primarily delivered through
the research councils, and research in social anthropology came under the remit
of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), founded in 1965. Subsequently,
in 1983, it was renamed the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), on
the instigation of Conservative government ministers for whom the economy
naturally took precedence over society, and who could not countenance the
idea that the study of society could ever be scientific.
28 Conversations with Tim Ingold
been appointed, in 1969, to the newly created Chair of Sociology
at the University of Cambridge. The Chair had been established in
the face of strong resistance from dons who refused to recognise
sociology as a legitimate subject of study, and the issue had been
resolved, in typical Cambridge style, by appointing a social anthro-
pologist rather than a sociologist to the post! John had worked
mostly in Central Africa, but had also done some fieldwork in Papua
New Guinea. But apart from his work in Africa and PNG, John had
also spent some time in Norway, on a little island quite close to the
city of Bergen, called Bremnes, and had used this work to develop
what was called ‘social network theory’.
Thus, when I began my doctoral research in 1970, John became my
official supervisor, and for me he was perfect. He didn’t really do
anything much. I saw him before I went to the field; I saw him again
when I had my complete PhD; he turned up once in the field itself,
when we got him to help mend the roof of the cabin where we were
staying and dig a waste pit. And I will always remember the dark
midwinter’s night when one of my Sámi neighbours knocked on the
door of our cabin, bearing a mystery package. When I opened it, I
found a copy of John’s book, just published, Three Styles in the
Study of Kinship. It was the sheer incongruity of this incident that
stayed in my mind. John was the nicest of men; he and his wife
Frances became good friends. And he sometimes helped with prac-
tical questions to which I didn’t know the answer – for example, when
I first thought I’d try to submit an article to the journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute, then called Man. The journal’s instructions
for authors said that you had to submit your manuscript on ‘A4 or
foolscap paper, double-spaced’. I had no idea what all that meant.
Nobody had told me about A4 or foolscap, or explained the meaning
of single-spaced and double-spaced. John could answer questions
like these, which was really helpful. But I also had an unofficial super-
visor in Fredrik Barth. After an autumn in Cambridge, I went off to
Bergen and worked with Fredrik in the Bergen department for a
term before I left to the field. And I spent another term there after
my return from the field, following which I went back to Cambridge.
Life and career
29
Diego Maria Malara
Who were the students you discussed anthropology with and how
did these discussions shape your own approach to anthropology?
Tim Ingold
During that time, while I was a research student at Cambridge, I
didn’t talk much with anybody. I remember having lots of discussions
with my fellow students in Bergen, because they were all followers
of Fredrik Barth, and all heavily into transactionalism, which, for me
too at the time, seemed to be the answer to everything. Fredrik was
incredibly charismatic, and one only had to be in his circle to become
a follower. Thus, prior to my departure for the field, I thought of
myself as a Barthian, as a transactionalist. But when I returned, a
year and a half later, transactionalism was dead and the new thing
was neo-Marxism, recently arrived from France. In Cambridge, I
found myself in a complete bubble, like most PhD students there.
People tell me that it is little better today – that Cambridge is still
full of people writing doctoral theses, sitting in libraries, or in lofts,
or rooms somewhere, working away in almost total isolation, with
almost no-one remotely interested in their existence. That’s certainly
how it was for me. No-one seemed to care that I existed at all. As
a doctoral student, you were supposed to attend the weekly Social
Anthropology seminar. But the seminar had a fixed seating plan in
which all the important people sat around the central table, and all
the research students around the edge of the room. You wouldn’t
dare ask a question until those around the table had asked their
questions first. It was certainly not the most inspiring of academic
environments in which to work. In fact, I remember it as a time of
great intellectual isolation, which only ended when I finally arrived
in Manchester.
The idea that students should be trained in fieldwork, that they
should spend a year on research training before they can even think
about going to the field – all that came later. I know that for many
30 Conversations with Tim Ingold
students nowadays, this can be deeply frustrating. The pendulum
has swung from one extreme to the other, from there having been
no training at all – when it was just assumed that you would muddle
through – to there being far too much, forcing students to spend
ages being trained in techniques which will likely be of no conceiv-
able use to them. It’s annoying because it gets in the way: when
students should really be spending time learning the language or
languages they will need to speak in the field, for example, they’re
having to practise multivariate statistics. It’s really unhelpful. But I
don’t think I received any training in fieldwork, nor did anybody else
at that time.
Robert Gibb
What language learning did you undertake for fieldwork?
Tim Ingold
I had to learn Finnish. I should have systematically learnt the Skolt
Sámi language, but I didn’t. My teacher in Finnish was my future wife,
Anna. She was a very strict and demanding teacher! Finnish is not an
easy language, but I found that once I’d got the hang of the basic
grammar, and once I was actually there in the country and having to
use it every day, it came pretty quickly. I needed to be fluent in Finnish
to be able, obviously, to talk to Finns, as well as to read the literature,
newspapers, archives and documents of all sorts. That was essential.
In the field, the people themselves were speaking a mixture of Finnish
and Skolt Sámi. Though I’ve forgotten most of it now, I did pick up a
bit of Sámi. I could roughly follow what people were talking about,
but could not really speak it myself. I never sat down to learn it
systematically, and that was definitely a shortcoming. In retrospect, I
should have done that. But one of the difficulties in doing so is that
it is rather difficult to learn two closely related languages, like Finnish
and Sámi, at the same time. You get interference effects. Coping with
both languages was simply too much, although in hindsight I should
Life and career
31
have made the effort. But I didn’t. For most practical purposes, I got
by with Finnish. But that’s partly because my study was focused on
what we would now consider a rather traditional theme: it was a study
of social organisation. I wasn’t dealing with myths or ritual or story-
telling or folklore or poetry or placenames or landscape. I wish now
that I had addressed these themes! To do so I would have had to
learn the language. But in those days, it was not on the agenda. Social
anthropological research, then, meant studying kinship, local-level
politics, economic life, that sort of thing.
Philip Tonner
What was your first fieldwork like? You’ve already spoken about this
a little, but would you like to elaborate?
Tim Ingold
I was there in the first instance for 16 months, from May 1971 to
September 1972. So, it ran over spring, summer, autumn and winter,
and back to spring and summer again. I started off living in a tent
in the yard of a family that I had got to know from my previous visit.
Then I found out there was a cabin going spare which I could rent,
and I lived there. Finally, we had to move to another empty cottage,
when the owner of the cabin – a Finnish labourer who had married
a Skolt woman – wanted it back. So, apart from that first month or
two, I was looking after myself in my own place. One of the diffi-
culties or oddities of doing fieldwork in a place like this is that there
are so few people. The community I was studying had a population
of just over three hundred, spread over a vast area. It’s not like sitting
in the middle of a village and watching life going on around you;
you have to find the people, and finding them can sometimes be
pretty difficult.
Over the summer, for example, people go off to fishing cabins that
are dotted all around a vast landscape. To reach them you might
32 Conversations with Tim Ingold
have to hike for twenty kilometres through the forest, and then you
might find them or you might not. I remember that one of the things
I had to cope with during fieldwork, from time to time, was intense
loneliness. I could be on my own for quite long periods. That’s life
up there, and people get used to being on their own, but for me, it
was one of those things I had to learn. And I found out lots of things
about myself in the process. Not much happened. Life, for a lot of
the time, was pretty dull. I remember thinking, many times, ‘What
am I doing here? Days are just passing, with absolutely nothing going
on. I’m stuck here in this place, while somewhere beyond the horizon,
life must be happening.’ I didn’t think I was a very good fieldworker,
and I’ve never been one of those whose passion is always to go
back, to take every possible opportunity to return to the field. I was
quite glad to finish it off.
Figure 1
Tim Ingold with Enoch, his neighbour’s tame reindeer
(Sevettijärvi, Finland, summer 1971) © Tim Ingold
Life and career
33
But my 16 months in the field was also, in many ways, an incredible
experience, and I would not have missed it for anything. I certainly
didn’t envy my contemporaries in other fields of study, buried deep
in libraries or archives, ‘moving bones’, as someone once said of
doctoral research, ‘from one graveyard to another’. By comparison,
my life as a researcher, largely lived in the open air, was full of
adventure. I was still so young – just twenty-three or twenty-four
– and still growing up, so the experience literally changed me. I
discovered quite a lot about who I thought I was. But it’s the same
for everyone else who has carried out fieldwork. It is potentially
transformative for anyone who undertakes it, and it certainly was
for me. Afterwards, colleagues would ask: ‘How on earth could you
go there? It must have been so cold!’ There were contemporaries
of mine who had done fieldwork in India or Africa, for example, and
had contracted every illness under the sun. They had spent much
of their time in the field suffering from one bug after another, from
dysentery to malaria, yet they would still ask of me: ‘How did you
manage when it was so cold?’ But if it’s cold, you just put on more
clothes until you’re warm enough. There may have been lots of
mosquitoes in the summer months, but none of them carried malaria.
I never suffered from dysentery. On the whole, it was a pretty healthy
place to work.
Diego Maria Malara
Can you reflect on how the peculiarity of your research in Lapland
shaped the ways in which you came to see anthropology and your
attention to specific themes, such as the atmosphere, lines, trails,
landscape and so on?
Tim Ingold
It definitely had an influence. But the odd thing is that in my thesis,
and in the book based on it, this doesn’t show at all. In writing up, I
brought in lots of detailed analysis about economic life, householding,
34 Conversations with Tim Ingold
kinship, local politics and the rest of it. Yet all the experience of life,
the feel of the place, seemed to vanish as through a sieve. I
remember feeling very disappointed that in the kind of thesis I was
supposed to write, I could capture none of this. Yet it is precisely
what passed through the sieve of analysis that has stayed with me,
long after I had forgotten all the details. It was only later on, really,
that I began to think about why I was becoming so interested in
lines, paths, atmospheres, landscapes. It must have come partly from
childhood experience, but also partly from fieldwork.
It is this kind of sensibility, which soaks into you without your realising
it at the time, that then leads you to develop your ideas along par-
ticular lines. That, I think, is the real reason why fieldwork is so
important. It isn’t because of the data you collect and the study you
might write up on the basis of them, but because of something
deeper that sinks in and affects the way you live your life, including
scholarship. If you’re working in the North, there’s something about
those northern landscapes. One thing is that whenever you’re
walking through or following a path of some kind – it might be an
animal or a human path – that path has a history. As you go along
you see the remains of old fireplaces, each with its stories, of things
that happened here and there. You cannot inhabit this kind of land-
scape without beginning to think of life as something that happens
along pathways.
This is how Sámi people think, as a matter of course. People are
their lines in the landscape. It’s just obvious; it goes without saying.
It’s the same when it comes to things like weather and atmosphere.
You cannot help but soak these up. There’s something about the
immensity of a northern landscape, of its summer light and winter
darkness. I’ve called it an intimate immensity, the feeling of a world
which is very, very huge but at the same time very, very close. It is
rather special to northern landscapes. You don’t find it elsewhere,
and it does shape the way you think and feel. It is about seasonality,
about long hours of darkness, long hours of daylight. These sorts
of things really do affect the way you think. This is not to say that
environment determines thought, but it does mean that somehow
Life and career
35
the landscape you’re in, and the people inhabiting that landscape,
get inside you and shape the way you think and feel. That’s certainly
what happened with me.
Diego Maria Malara
We often ask people what influence specific teachers had on them,
but we seldom ask about the influence of one’s interlocutors in the
field. I was wondering who, among your interlocutors, had the
greatest impact on you and why?
Tim Ingold
Well, there was a particular man who, for most of my fieldwork in
Lapland, was my next-door neighbour. His place was just up the
road from the cabin where I was staying. He was called Piera
Porsanger. He would have been 48 years old when I was in the field
at around 23 years old, so he was 25 years older than I. Piera was
a real philosopher but a hopeless reindeer herder, so his family was
very poor. He had lost most of his herd. He had an enormous wife
and lots of children who were always round at my place, ever inquisit-
ive and asking about things. They were hyper-intelligent children.
Piera spoke five languages fluently: Finnish, Norwegian and three
kinds of Sámi. He was himself a Mountain Sámi and his wife was a
Skolt Sámi. He was just immensely curious about everything. He
was short, thin, wiry, myopic and wore thick spectacles. But what a
brilliant mind he had! I remember him talking about one of the big
issues during my fieldwork, concerning the construction of reindeer
fences. There was an intense argument about where to build these
fences, particularly a new fence to be built between the territories
of two neighbouring reindeer-herding associations. But Piera told
the story from the perspective of a reindeer. This reindeer is following
his usual route, and comes up against this fence. And he says to
himself: ‘Where the hell do I go from here?’ It somehow captured
the whole thing. Piera is thinking of his animals and wondering:
36 Conversations with Tim Ingold
‘Where am I supposed to go with this fence in the way?’ It just
resonates.
Then there was the elderly couple with whom I first stayed when I
arrived, Pekka and Liisa Feodoroff. Liisa was a powerful and
outspoken woman, but Pekka was a small, mild and rather shy man,
very much dominated by his overbearing wife. But they always used
to tell of how, as a young man, Pekka crossed the newly drawn
international frontier between Finland and Russia in order to rescue
his future wife from behind the lines and bring her back. It’s a great
story of kidnapping. There were lots of stories like that from the
field.
Diego Maria Malara
You said that you saw your supervisor before you left and then when
your thesis was basically written. I suppose you submitted a draft
for him to read, right?
Tim Ingold
Yes, more or less. So perhaps I was not quite fair to suggest that
John, my supervisor, never looked at it until it was finished. I did
see him on other occasions, but not really to go through the mater-
ial in any depth. Put it this way: I was quite happy to do my own
thing, and I didn’t really want to have somebody poking their nose
into everything I was doing or everything I was writing. So, from my
point of view, it was fine. I could just get on with it, knowing he was
always there in case I needed help with any practical questions. He
was very supportive in that way; I felt I had someone in whom I
could completely trust, someone I knew was always there for me if
I needed.
I wrote my fieldnotes in four copies. I had used very thin paper, with
carbon paper in between, so that I could write a top copy and
Life and career
37
instantly produce three additional copies. I would send the bottom
copy periodically in the post back to John, as an insurance in case
I lost everything else. So I thought of John, in some ways, as a
backup.But he also used to ask very practical and occasionally odd
questions. I remember talking, for example, about how Sámi people
would send joints of frozen reindeer meat to relatives who had left
to live in the cities down south, and his immediate response was to
ask what happened in the post when the meat began to melt. I had
never thought of that! Where necessary, he could also pull a few
strings. For example, he managed to fix it for me to attend the
Decennial Conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists,
held in Oxford in 1973. In those days PhD students were definitely
not welcome at professional anthropology conferences, but he
managed to smuggle me in and, as a result, I was able to meet a
whole lot of famous names. I met Mary Douglas, for example, who
at dinner one evening was kind enough to point out to me who
everyone else was.
Diego Maria Malara
That same year, 1973, saw the publication of Talal Asad’s Anthropology
and the Colonial Encounter. What is your perspective on colonialism
and racism within social anthropology at that time?
Tim Ingold
Any thoroughgoing critique of colonialism had yet to set in. Maybe
it was just beginning, but it didn’t really gather steam until the late
1970s and early 80s. At that time, old colonial attitudes were still
entrenched. It would be wrong to accuse anthropologists of that
generation of being out-and-out racists; they were not. But they
hadn’t really sat down to interrogate many of the things they took
for granted. An undercurrent of implicit racism was always there. For
example, if someone came from Africa to do a PhD, or maybe even
an undergraduate degree, and if they had a black skin, it was assumed
38 Conversations with Tim Ingold
that once they’d finished, they would go back home: they had no
business in the British academic establishment. Then there was the
gender bias. That was scarcely questioned at all. If you were a female
anthropologist, you would be regarded as an honorary male. This
happened to a string of famous women anthropologists, like Audrey
Richards, Monica Wilson and Lucy Mair. Only by treating these
women as men could they be accepted as ‘one of us’. This attitude
was still very deep-rooted at the time.
I even felt it in myself. It sometimes comes back to me with an
intense sense of shame. When I was a child, my father was away a
lot visiting various African countries, as he was heavily involved in
setting up universities in former British colonies on the continent.
But he also had a very paternalistic attitude towards Africans. He
would come back and joke about the funny conversation he’d had
with a native who had asked him how much he would have to pay
for one of his daughters – that kind of thing. God Almighty! I was
completely innocent, in a bad sense. It never even occurred to me
how offensive this was, because I’d come through a thoroughly
sheltered upbringing, upper-middle-class home, private education,
straight to Cambridge. I had had absolutely no exposure to the rest
of the world. I knew nothing about colonial history. And there was
nothing in the basic anthropological training I had received to shift
these attitudes. One could feel entirely comfortable. Looking back
on those days, it makes me cringe with embarrassment. But then I
think that, well, I’ve come a long way since then, and perhaps our
society and system of education have too.
(C) MANCHESTER
Robert Gibb
You arrived at Manchester University in 1974. Had you applied for
other jobs prior to that?
Life and career
39
Tim Ingold
Yes, I had. There had been a possible job at University College
London. Just the year before that, I was awarded a scholarship from
the Finnish government to allow me to spend a year writing up in
Helsinki, but at the same time as I was applying for this, I was also
looking for other jobs. I remember applying for one in Birmingham,
but it never came to anything, while Cambridge refused even to
cover travel costs to the interview. Eventually, I had a choice between
Manchester and UCL. There was no shortage of positions – quite
the reverse of the situation today. But I made it only just in time.
There were contemporaries of mine who opted for postdoctoral
positions that would give them the chance to do more fieldwork
and to spend more time on research and writing. They would get
fellowships for one, two or three years, but by the time they came
back on the job market for lectureships, a few years later, there was
nothing left. They ended up having to leave the academy and go
into development work, or something similar. We lost quite a few
people that way. I was lucky to sneak in just in time. This was the
period of the big cuts to universities imposed by the Thatcher
government. After that there were no jobs for a decade, and a lot
of redundancies as well.
Robert Gibb
When you started in Manchester, what did you find? What was the
Department like?
Tim Ingold
It was a vipers’ nest! I arrived in the dying days of the so-called
Manchester School, and its great leader was Max Gluckman. By then
he had retired and was going around the world giving lectures and
being famous. He died a year after I arrived, so I met him maybe
only once or twice. He never got my name right. He always called
40 Conversations with Tim Ingold
me Tom. I ended up having to play my cello at his memorial event,
in front of my external examiner-to-be. It was terrifying.
The Head of Department was Emrys Peters, who had spent much
of his professional life in the shadow of Gluckman. There were
others from that era: Richard Werbner, Paul Baxter, Martin
Southwold. I had replaced another of them, Basil Sansom, who had
just left to go to Australia. And then there were more recent arrivals,
including Keith Hart, David Turton and John Comaroff; they had
all come a few years before me. Chris Fuller arrived at the same
time as I did. There was thus a mixture of old Manchester School
types and new arrivals. I just walked right into it. Emrys was a very
divisive figure who loved to play people off against one another. I
think he wrote two articles in his lifetime. They were both very
good articles, but that was the sum total of his production. I think
his behaviour, and his inability to publish, must have been partly
in reaction to years of intimidation under Gluckman. He once joked
that one day, he would publish his collected book contracts! But
he never did.
When I arrived, they were looking for somebody to supervise the
PhD research of Pnina Werbner, Dick Werbner’s wife. Pnina would
go on to become a very distinguished anthropologist in her own
right, but at the time she was only just starting out on her research
career.2 Her research was on the Pakistani community in Manchester.
Who on earth, they asked, could supervise this research? ‘Ah, Tim!
He’s done research on an ethnic minority.’ Because I’d worked with
Sámi reindeer herders, they thought, I would be just the right person
to supervise research on Pakistanis in Manchester. They’re both
ethnic minorities, after all! That’s how I ended up as Pnina’s super-
visor. She was my very first doctoral student. In practice this was
fine, because she was already a very competent researcher and
knew exactly what she was doing. But I was of no help to her at
2 Pnina Werbner passed away in 2023. An obituary was published in The Guardian
newspaper: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/mar/29/pnina-
werbner-obituary.
Life and career
41
all.What I didn’t know at that time, however, was that Emrys Peters
and Pnina’s husband, Dick Werbner, were scarcely on speaking terms,
and that Pnina was the niece of Max Gluckman! There were all these
personal and kinship-related issues going on in the Department,
which I blindly walked into and then had to figure out. It was hardly
a harmonious environment, but it could be stimulating. There was a
tradition in the Manchester School that seminars should be abrasive.
The departmental seminar had this reputation: an invited speaker
would turn up, give their paper and be basically torn to pieces.
Stories would be told of great occasions when this or that anthro-
pologist had been entirely dismembered. There was still a bit of this
left – it took a while to go altogether – and it was strange to find
myself in the middle of it all.
I was often made to feel ashamed of my fieldwork. My more senior
colleagues in the Department – those remaining from the Gluckman
era – couldn’t understand that I had been working in Lapland, and
not somewhere in Africa or the Middle East. They thought I had got
pastoralism all wrong because they understood pastoralism to be
what people in Africa do with cattle, or what people in the Middle
East do with sheep and goats. They were quite unwilling to accept
that northern pastoralists might do things differently with reindeer.
You’d get these jibes like ‘Are you the anthropologist with the antlers
on?’ or ‘Did you meet Father Christmas?’ Yes, it was sometimes as
bad as that! As a rather insecure neophyte trying to find his feet
there were times when I was made to feel that because I hadn’t
been working in Africa, the Middle East or South Asia, I hadn’t done
proper fieldwork at all – that what I had done was worthless, or good
only for poking fun at. It was pretty difficult; not a healthy or
supportive atmosphere at all.
But in other ways Manchester was great. I had some good colleagues
among the more recent arrivals: Keith Hart, David Turton, John
Comaroff, Chris Fuller. When I first arrived only one or two members
of staff had telephones in their offices; it was a mark of high status.
John Comaroff’s office was on the other side of the corridor from
mine. He had a telephone, and he would have his door open and be
42 Conversations with Tim Ingold
sitting there with his feet up on the desk and his telephone in his
hand, like some newspaper proprietor, talking at great speed and
using long and complicated words like ‘ontology’ and ‘epistemology’
that I’d never heard before. It was all very intimidating. I thought: ‘I
don’t understand what’s going on, and I don’t have a telephone.’
Then the following year, Marshall Sahlins came to visit. John made
a thing of chatting up Marshall, and the next thing you know, he was
off to take up a new position in Chicago. So that was that. John
was a convivial colleague, but I could only ever understand half of
what he was talking about.
Robert Gibb
Were there any women within the Department as colleagues?
Tim Ingold
Sue Benson came for a couple of years as a temporary lecturer. But
it was a very all-male place, and the way they behaved towards Sue
was appalling. It was basically a men’s club; horrible. All that would
later change – and change dramatically – but that’s how it was when
I first arrived. Moreover, in meetings and seminars you had to sit in
rooms thick with smoke. Everyone smoked a pipe or very smoky
cigarettes. Having never smoked myself, I would leave meetings
coughing and spluttering, and with my eyes watering.
Robert Gibb
What teaching did you do in the first years? Was there a big under-
graduate programme? Did you have other PhD students apart from
Pnina?
Life and career
43
Tim Ingold
I gradually acquired more doctoral students. Though Pnina was the
first to start, she was not the first to finish because her research
was interrupted by a period of maternity leave. My next student – in
fact, the first to finish – was Gísli Pálsson. He, too, has gone on to
have a very distinguished anthropological career. Gísli and I have
been good friends and close colleagues ever since. But in those
days, you just had to accept what PhD students you could. It had
little to do with common interests; it was just a case of someone
needing a supervisor.
The teaching I was first given to do was a course called ‘Environment
and Technology’. It was, in effect, a course in cultural ecology, and
had been initiated by my predecessor, Basil Sansom, whom I had
replaced following his departure to Australia. I was basically ordered
to teach the course, so I did what I was told, which is perhaps the
main reason why I got into ecological anthropology. I didn’t know
much about the subject, but teaching the course forced me to read
up on it. ‘Environment and Technology’ was abbreviated to ET, so
when the Spielberg film came out, it was nicknamed the Extra-
Terrestrial. The course was indeed considered a bit alien by my
colleagues in the Department, but I very much enjoyed teaching it.
Apart from that, I did stints of teaching one part of the first-year
introductory course. I also taught a second-year course called
‘Culture and Society’, charting the history of anthropological thought
along an axis from Durkheim to Mauss to Lévi-Strauss. In the third
year, I alternated ‘Environment and Technology’ with a course in
‘Anthropological Theory’. Then, when Keith Hart – who had been
teaching economic anthropology – left to take up a position at Yale,
I picked it up, converting ‘Environment and Technology’ into
‘Environment and Economy’. That way, students would get a bit of
both.
This all happened over the first ten years or so. I had always wanted
to teach a course on the circumpolar North, but they said I couldn’t
44 Conversations with Tim Ingold
teach a course on a region where no-one lived and for which there
was no literature! I recall that when I was in Lapland in 1979–80,
doing a second 12-month stint of fieldwork, I received a letter from
Emrys, my Head of Department, instructing me that on my return,
I was to teach a course on Central Africa. This region was considered
sacrosanct in the Department, since it was the original cradle of the
Manchester School. But I thought: ‘This is ridiculous. Why should I
be teaching a course on a region where I have never been and which
I know nothing about?’ Well, I managed to get out of it. But at the
time, it was assumed that some regions of the world exist anthro-
pologically, and others don’t, and the region in which I was working
definitely did not. Finally, in 1984, Emrys Peters retired. He was
already ill with lung cancer thanks to having been smoking like a
chimney, all day every day, and he eventually passed away in 1987.
Following his retirement there was a brief interregnum, and then
Marilyn Strathern arrived, in 1985. She brought in new people, and
of course everything changed.
Philip Tonner
Tell us about your work at that time.
Tim Ingold
In 1986, I brought out two books. One was called Evolution and Social
Life, a heavy-duty theoretical inquiry into how the idea of evolution
has been developed and applied in the fields of history, biology and
anthropology, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. The
other was called The Appropriation of Nature: Essays on Human
Ecology and Social Relations. This latter book was largely based on
my teaching for the course on environment and technology. What
I’d been trying to do, and the way I had set it out in the course, was
to bring together what I saw as two dimensions of human being: as
a social being or person, positioned in a network of relations with
other persons, and as an organism, bound with other organisms into
Life and career
45
what ecologists call a web of life. If social anthropology studies the
first dimension, ecology studies the second. The question for me
was: how can they be combined?
I was much influenced at the time by the work of scholars like Maurice
Godelier and Emmanuel Terray, pioneers of the new school of
anthropological neo-Marxism. Godelier, in particular, was attempting
to show how the problem could be addressed within a Marxian
analytic framework. His idea was to substitute the dichotomy
between ecological and social relations for the classic Marxian divi-
sion between forces and relations of production. One could then
attempt to understand the interplay between the ecological and the
social in some sort of dialectical fashion. I was trying to show how
you could apply this model to thinking about hunter-gatherers and
pastoralists, and I was keen to work on it. So that was one side of
what I was doing, trying to combine ecology and social anthropology,
and it was my principal theme in The Appropriation of Nature. On
the other, evolutionary, side, I was trying to figure out how we can
reconcile what we know from anthropology about people and history
and relationships, with what we know from biology about human
evolution. I thought it ought to be possible to put them together,
somehow. Evolution and Social Life was my attempt to do so. It was
a long book, however, and as tough going to write as it would be to
read.
Both books ended in failure. With The Appropriation of Nature, I
finally had to admit to myself that I could not carry on with this
dichotomous model of the human being as one part organism, one
part person; it just doesn’t make sense. In writing about evolution,
I had discovered the philosophical works of Henri Bergson and
Alfred North Whitehead, and this had pointed me towards a third
way, beyond the dichotomies of ecology and society, biology and
culture, evolution and history. But to develop this third way would
require a complete rewriting of biology. I couldn’t carry on with the
standard Darwinian or neo-Darwinian model. There followed a
decade of work, closely linked to my teaching in ‘Environment and
Economy’, trying to figure out how to reconcile social anthropology,
46 Conversations with Tim Ingold
human ecology and evolutionary biology, and finding that the only
way forward is with a different ecology and a different biology. That
was mostly what I was working on.
Whilst all this was happening, the Department in Manchester was
going through the floor. Student recruitment fell to almost zero.
There were some pretty disastrous years, from the late 1970s to the
early 1980s. Emrys Peters was not well. The Department didn’t have
effective leadership. Nobody was interested. There was no proper
PhD programme. There were a handful of doctoral students knocking
around, but nothing like a programme, no recruitment. At the same
time, new degree programmes were being established in subjects
like Accounting and Law, which were pulling in huge numbers of
students. We found ourselves in the same Faculty, of Economic and
Social Studies, as the newly formed Department of Accounting and
Business Finance. Of the quota of students admitted to the Faculty,
most were going to Accounting, and we were left with the dregs.
Numbers literally plummeted.
The great advantage of this, for me, was that with so few students,
I hardly had any teaching to do. Instead, I holed myself up and got
on with writing my big book on evolution. There wasn’t much else
to do, and nobody else in the Department was remotely interested.
So I had peace and quiet to get on with it. It was just lucky for me
that this low point for the Department came at the very moment
when I wanted to get on with some serious writing.
I was looking for a way to reconcile social anthropology with evolu-
tionary biology. Those were the days of the great sociobiology
debate. In 1975, Edward O. Wilson had published his big textbook
on the subject, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, and it went on to
have a massive popular impact. Everyone was going on about it.
Among my social anthropological colleagues, however, it was
assumed that anyone who even talked about evolution must be
either some sort of relic from the Victorian era or a sociobiologist
and therefore a rabid genetic determinist. You had to be one or the
other. My fellow social anthropologists, both in the Department and
Life and career
47
beyond, were avidly hostile to evolutionary thinking and wanted
nothing to do with it. As a result, I was largely left on my own.
When my book, Evolution and Social Life, eventually came out, it
sank like a lump of lead. In social anthropology, the book was largely
ignored. The whole topic of evolution remained pretty much taboo.
But it fared no better in biology. Darwinism, at that time, was tanta-
mount to a creed, which no-one in their right mind would presume
to question. To any biologists who even looked at the book it was
obvious that having done just that, I had either completely lost my
mind or didn’t know what I was talking about. Why else would I refer
to such utterly discredited philosophers as Alfred North White-
head and Henri Bergson? The few reviews were contemptuously
dismissive. Thus the book, which I had meant to be my masterpiece,
fell between the two stools of anthropology and biology, and never
took off. It was a disaster. But I suppose I had to go through all this
in order to find an alternative path. It is a path I discovered in the
late 1980s, and I spent the 1990s following it.
Philip Tonner
At a certain point in your career, you became more attracted to
phenomenology. Can you tell us why and what were the conse-
quences of this?
Tim Ingold
Yes, it came rather belatedly. It was never my intention to become
a phenomenologist. The initial influence was not phenomenology;
it was James Gibson’s ecological psychology, to which I was intro-
duced almost by accident by one of its leading exponents, Edward
Reed, who sadly passed away far too soon, in 1997. Ed happened
to have read something I’d written; I think it was my essay – which
began life as the 1982 Malinowski Memorial Lecture, and was
published the following year – ‘The Architect and the Bee: Reflections
48 Conversations with Tim Ingold
on the Work of Animals and Men’. In a letter, he told me that he had
read this article of mine and that I really ought to read the work of
James Gibson – that I would find it helpful in my effort to reconnect
ecology and anthropology. Eventually I read it, and it did indeed
help. More than that, I realised that in this work, which was about
the possibility of a perception that is direct rather than mediated
by signs and symbols, potentially lay the key to solving the problem
of how to rethink human-environment relationships.
I thus began to think about how we could bring this Gibsonian idea
of direct perception into anthropology. Could we see ideas, usually
called ‘cultural’, as having their generative source in the immediate
perceptual engagement of living, attentive beings, whether human
or animal, with their environment? Yet despite my enthusiasm for
Gibson’s approach, it seemed to me rather one-sided. For while the
perceiver is pictured as actively moving around in and exploring the
environment, the environment itself is treated as if it consisted only
of objects to be perceived. It’s just there, and then the perceiver
walks around in it, like an actor on a stage set. But what if the envir-
onment is just as active, just as dynamic, as the perceiver?
With this question in mind, I reached out to the work of Martin
Heidegger first, and only then to Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Heidegger
came first because I happened to have met an architect who told
me I really had to read his essay of 1954, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’.
On first reading, I couldn’t understand it at all. But I nevertheless
felt there was something there, and I liked the idea of dwelling. But it
was Merleau-Ponty, in his magisterial Phenomenology of Perception,
who provided the key to understanding what it means to perceive
in an environment that has not yet precipitated out into the objec-
tive forms of this or that. It was in his understanding of perception
as pre-objective that Merleau-Ponty takes us beyond Gibson,
despite the many things their approaches have in common. And this
gave me the tools I needed.
Thus, I got into phenomenology because it offered a possible way
forward for where I wanted to go, not because I wanted to study
Life and career
49
phenomenology for its own sake, or wanted to become a phenom-
enologist. I wasn’t interested in that. But among philosophers,
Merleau-Ponty is remarkable for his genuine interest in empirical
studies of perception; I liked that. He isn’t holed up, like so many of
his profession, in a philosophical bubble.
Diego Maria Malara
I have a follow-up question on the Manchester Department. You
mentioned that when Marilyn Strathern came many things changed,
and I wonder if you could elaborate on what these changes were.
At a time when there were still few women in the Department, did
the new foregrounding of gender relations create tensions?
Tim Ingold
Some would talk mockingly about our ‘great leader’ when Marilyn
arrived. I might even have done so myself! In the first few years she
was hard at work on the book that would become The Gender of
the Gift, but she also brought along her interests in kinship and
reproductive technology, which were further strengthened with the
appointment of Janet Carsten in 1989. And, of course, there was
her regional interest in Melanesia, which was new to the Department,
and reinforced with the arrival of Jimmy Weiner, in 1990.3 Marilyn
and Jimmy were both speaking an anthropological language that
owed a great deal to the writings of Roy Wagner, and which many
of us – and I’ll put my hand up here, because I am as guilty of this
as anyone – found next to incomprehensible. So, there may have
been a certain scepticism. Whether this had a gender dimension I
cannot say, but it might have done. Maybe ‘we’ men, who had been
3 James Weiner, alias Jamie Pearl Bloom, sadly passed away in 2020. An obituary
by Francesca Merlan and Alan Rumsey, published in The Asia Pacific Journal of
Anthropology, can be accessed at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.108
0/14442213.2020.1831229.
50 Conversations with Tim Ingold
around in Manchester for quite a few years, thought we knew how
to write clearly and how to explain things. And then along comes
this woman who’s talking stuff we don’t understand, and who doesn’t
have much experience of teaching or running a programme . . .
There were certainly strains between Marilyn and myself, which
increased in the years running up to her departure, in 1993, to take
up the William Wyse Professorship in Social Anthropology at
Cambridge. In those years I was editing the journal Man from a tiny
cupboard of an office, affectionately known as ‘the manhole’, at the
far end of the Departmental corridor, while she occupied the profes-
sorial suite halfway down, and this continued even for a few months
after I had taken over from her as Head of Department. To put it
as diplomatically as I can, I don’t think there was room for both of
us on the same corridor. I felt more comfortable once I could run
things my way. I was Head of Department from 1993 to 1997. During
that time the Department’s fortunes were on the rise again, with
many new appointments and a flourishing doctoral programme. And
as for the journal, although I had by then completed my stint as
editor, I had at last managed to get its name changed. Can you
imagine a journal entitled Man, in which the ‘instructions for authors’
recommend the use of gender-neutral language at all times? From
1994, it reverted to its historic title, Journal of the Royal Anthro-
pological Institute. Future editors would no longer receive invitations,
as I did, to sumptuous gentlemen’s fashion events.
(D) ABERDEEN
Diego Maria Malara
In 1999 you were appointed to a Chair in Social Anthropology at the
University of Aberdeen, and you had also been invited to set up a new
department there, which was established in 2002. This is not something
one is asked to do every day. What was it like to do such a thing? What
was your vision at the time, and what were the challenges?
Life and career
51
Tim Ingold
No, it isn’t something one is asked to do every day. One of the things
that attracted me was the chance to make a fresh start. The alter-
native would have been to stay in Manchester for the rest of my
days, getting in the way of a younger generation wanting to make
their mark. I was invited to set up a new anthropology programme
at Aberdeen, initially within the framework of the Department of
Sociology. Apart from a brief stint in Helsinki in 1973-4, I had never
worked in a sociology department before, or had sociologists as
colleagues, so this was a new and challenging experience in itself.
But anthropology had previously been taught in the Sociology
Department, back in the early 1980s, before it fell victim to the
Thatcher government’s cuts. Three of the four anthropologists on
the staff at that time were redeployed to other institutions and the
fourth, Mark Nuttall, stayed in place as a member of staff of the
Sociology Department. They weren’t therefore completely new to
anthropology. Nevertheless, most of the sociologists had a picture
of anthropology dating from something like the mid-1960s. It was
a view of anthropology that I scarcely recognised, and which I only
vaguely remembered from my student days.
Strictly speaking, I had not been invited to set up a department.
But it was always my intention to do so. And it was bound to be
subversive, at least in the eyes of my new colleagues in Sociology.
The question was: how to go about it? How, starting virtually from
scratch, was I to begin setting up a proper anthropological outfit, a
real department? At that time, the university was small, a bit chaotic,
but very dynamic. It had gone through a bad patch in the 1980s. By
the early 1990s, however, it had a new Principal, Duncan Rice. Duncan
was a historian and an intellectual who loved big ideas. There was
a real sense that you could do things. But the administration was
so chaotic that nobody could tell me exactly what I was supposed
to do. I could just get on with it, and do what I wanted.
I began by looking around the University for anyone with anthropo-
logical interests. And I found a few, in two places in particular. There
52 Conversations with Tim Ingold
was a programme in cultural history which was based in the History
Department but actually led by an anthropologist, Elizabeth Hallam,
and there was also the so-called Elphinstone Institute, which special-
ises in the people and culture of northeast Scotland. The Institute
functioned, in effect, as a department of regional ethnology. Under
its previous leadership it had become somewhat moribund, but a
new director, Ian Russell, had just been appointed, and was seeking
to revive its fortunes. So the first thing to do, I thought, would be
to set up a seminar that would bring together all these colleagues
from cultural history and the Elphinstone Institute, along with anyone
else with similar concerns, to talk among ourselves about shared
interests. Then, once we had got used to meeting together, we would
start inviting outside speakers. The seminar came to be known as
SAnECH, an acronym for ‘social anthropology, ethnology and cultural
history’. This, then, served as the foundation stone for our programme.
I took my model for building a department from my earlier fieldwork
with small farmers in Lapland. If you are a farmer, and you’re creating
a new farm out of the wilderness of forest and swamp, the first thing
to do is build a sauna. You and your family live in the sauna while
you build the cowshed. And once you have a place for your cows,
then you can build your dwelling house, move in and start living
there. So that was the model I adopted.
The seminar was the sauna. You start with a seminar, get a bunch of
people with anthropological interests together, get them talking. Thus,
we had our seminar, which was meeting every week. My sociological
colleagues were very worried about this: ‘What’s he up to?’ they would
whisper in corridors. ‘He was supposed to be with us, but now he is
sleeping with all these other people.’ They weren’t too happy about
the SAnECH seminar, but it was very successful. Then, we used the
seminar as the basis to establish a postgraduate programme, which
meant going through a lot of bureaucratic hoops to get ourselves
‘kitemarked’ by the Economic and Social Research Council. The
programme was officially recognised in 2000. With that, the cowshed
was in place. Then, all we had to do was build our department, the
dwelling house. We were able to establish a new department in 2002
Life and career
53
because, at that time, the university abolished Faculties and set up
a structure of Schools in its place. We had been in the Faculty of
Economic and Social Studies, as I think it was called. But with the
establishment of the new School of Social Science, we had the oppor-
tunity to join with the Departments of Sociology and Politics &
International Relations (PIR) as a separate Department of Anthropology.
It was a trick of a sort, but we got away with it. Nevertheless,
Departments weren’t officially recognised in the School model. They
existed only de facto, so all we needed to get our own Department
established in 2002 was to have the University printer supply us with
headed notepaper with ‘Department of Anthropology’ proudly
displayed at the top of the page! With that, we had a department.
Our undergraduate programme started with its first year in October
1999. Thus, the first students, following the four years of the Scottish
degree, graduated in 2003. Though we gradually built on this, my
view from the start was that the way to grow the Department was
through the development of its postgraduate programme: we had
to recruit Masters and PhD students, particularly the latter. If the
graduate programme is functioning well, and bringing students in,
then, I believed, the undergraduate programme would take care of
itself. One of the reasons why it was so important for us to have
our own Department was that the Sociology Department was
following the opposite strategy under its then head, Steve Bruce.
Steve was trying to put as many ‘bums on seats’ as possible, and
that meant the mass teaching of undergraduates: ‘That will ensure
our numbers are sound,’ he explained, ‘so we get the resources we
need.’ And it worked for him, because there were lots of students
wanting to read sociology. But he couldn’t care less about graduate
students. ‘Who on earth would want to come to Aberdeen to do a
PhD in sociology?’ he once said to me, ‘maybe the odd oil-wife.’
Aberdeen, of course, is one of the world’s leading centres for the
oil and gas industry, on which the city’s prosperity largely depends.
Perhaps the wife of an oil-rig worker, having nothing better to do
with her time, might fancy studying for a higher degree in sociology?
That was what Steve thought. But I was convinced that if we were
54 Conversations with Tim Ingold
going to succeed in building up an anthropology department, then
we would have to focus our energy on doctoral students. Within the
space of a decade, we already had 35 PhD students working in the
Department. I recently counted up the total number of PhD students
who have graduated from our Department since its foundation, and
it is close to ninety! We’ve had two or three times as many PhD
students as they’ve had in Sociology and PIR put together.
I also had a certain vision of anthropology in terms of where I wanted
it to go. We started off with a focus on the anthropology of the North,
and it worked very well for us, because it meant we could start by
positioning ourselves within a network of other institutions spanning
the Nordic countries, the Baltic States, Russia, Canada and Alaska.
So, to the people down south who would say: ‘Aberdeen? Where on
earth is that? Somewhere near the North Pole, I suppose. Why have
anthropology in such a remote place?’ we could respond: ‘You are in
fact the ones who are remote; we’re actually in the centre of what is
an international network from the start. And by the way, much more
interesting anthropology is going on in places like Copenhagen, Oslo,
Tromsø, Stockholm, Helsinki, Reykjavik, Tallinn, St Petersburg, Toronto,
British Columbia and Alaska than in Oxford, Cambridge and London!’
But I also wanted to bring in a set of interests around environmental
perception, human–animal relations, creativity, art and architecture.
From the start we had these two strands: the anthropology of the
North, and what we called ‘culture, creativity and perception’. We devel-
oped both in parallel. We had a very clear vision of where we were
taking anthropology. It was not exactly a school of thought; rather a
particular sense of what the discipline is, and where we wanted to go
with it, to take it forward. As I keep saying, if you want to build a
department with a reputation, it’s no good simply following the trends.
Rather than ‘Everybody else is doing this, so we had better do the
same ourselves’, you have to say: ‘Where do we want anthropology to
be ten years from now? What are we going to do to get it there?’
When I became Head of the School of Social Science a decade
later, in 2008, and found myself having to deal with colleagues in
Life and career
55
Sociology and in PIR, I would attend departmental meetings and
find them obsessed with strategies and rankings. I’d say to them:
‘Well, where do you want Sociology, or PIR, to be in 10 years’ time?’
They had no idea. ‘What do you need to do to take Sociology, or
PIR, there?’ Again, they hadn’t thought about that. They were only
interested in how to improve their rankings. It never occurred to
them that they might devote a departmental meeting to discussing
the future of their subject. One of the great things about our
Department, which I’m very proud of, is that this is precisely what
we do. Visitors to the Department always remark upon the fact that
there seems to be a bunch of people here who are actually talking
anthropology amongst themselves: not just about how we can keep
up with the discipline, but about where we are going to take it, in
the ways we want.
Diego Maria Malara
That’s very interesting. No other anthropology department in the
UK focuses so closely on that specific geographical area. . . .
Tim Ingold
There have been departments which, at various times in their history,
have had a very strong regional focus. Remember the Manchester
School and Central Africa! Here in Scotland, Edinburgh has an
African Studies Centre and a very strong tradition of research in
India and South Asia. St Andrews has long been specialising in Latin
America. We in Aberdeen do the circumpolar North. That makes for
a good complementarity of regional interests. But although we
started off with the North and our research is still concentrated
there, you can’t build a department on one geographic region alone.
There came a point when we had to diversify. So we now have staff
working in Latin America, such as Maggie Bolton in Bolivia, Martin
Mills in Tibet, Johan Rasanayagam in Central Asia, and so on.
56 Conversations with Tim Ingold
Diego Maria Malara
Did the results match the plan?
Tim Ingold
Yes, on the whole. I remember it felt like climbing a mountain – and
not quite knowing, for the first few years, if it was going to work out
or if we would slide back down again – and then reaching some sort
of plateau. Once we had consolidated undergraduate and research
numbers, and staff numbers had reached 12 or 13, I really had a sense
that that we’d made it. I know it sounds a bit corny, but I did have
a vision of a sort, and I think we managed to realise it. But the trouble
is that under current conditions, you can never say: ‘Whew! We’ve
made it to the summit. Now we can sit back and relax and enjoy the
ride.’ Because there’s always the possibility that everything you’ve
worked for will suddenly be wiped out. This very nearly happened
to us because we had a change of leadership at the top of the
University when Duncan Rice retired. We had to appoint a replace-
ment Principal and we got Ian Diamond, whose tenure at the
University was something of a disaster. He replaced what had been
the laissez-faire intellectualism under Duncan Rice with a regime of
intense micromanagement. Everything was about performance
management, assessment, rankings. Everybody was under the screw,
morale slumped, there were threats of redundancies, good people
were leaving.
In 2015 we held a big international conference to celebrate the
achievements of the Department.4 But the University management
had not the slightest interest in it. And it went on against the back-
drop of most of our staff not knowing from one day to the next
whether they still had a job. We lost a few without replacement, but
we survived. Today, there’s a worrying drop in undergraduate
4 This was the conference ‘Beyond Perception 15’, held in Aberdeen, 1–4 September
2015.
Life and career
57
numbers, but I think this is happening in anthropology programmes
across the board in the UK. It has so often happened in the past, in
so many institutions, that everything seems to come together very
nicely, only to fall apart again after a few years. This has always been
the worry at the back of my mind.
Philip Tonner
Around the time you arrived at Aberdeen, your intellectual interests
changed again. Can you tell us more about that change?
Tim Ingold
Throughout the 1990s, I had been trying to put together a synthesis
of anthropology with phenomenology, ecological psychology and
developmental biology, and all that came together in my big book
of essays, The Perception of the Environment. I was literally doing
the final tasks, like checking the proofs and whatnot, just as we were
moving to Aberdeen. So that was a Manchester book, although it
was published in 2000, the year after I arrived. Once I had finished
it, I felt for a while that I had nothing new to say. Every time I tried
to say something, I ended up merely repeating what I had said
already. So I didn’t mind taking time out to build a department. I
could put all my energy into that, while pondering where to go next
with my own research. Just at that time, moreover, new possibilities
were beginning to emerge in the intersection of anthropology, art
and architecture. In the years just prior to my leaving Manchester,
we happened to have had a wonderful group of doctoral students
with a shared background or interests in art, architecture or both.
We had begun to think about how to put these fields together, and
to this end, we had established what we called an ‘art, architecture
and anthropology’ seminar. The seminar had been immensely
productive, and it had been my ambition to develop it further in
Aberdeen, alongside our interests in the North.
58 Conversations with Tim Ingold
But at some stage in all this, I also got interested in lines. In 2003
I was invited to give the Rhind Lectures, an annual series organised
by the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland and held at the Royal
Museums of Scotland in Edinburgh. The lectures were called ‘Lines
from the Past: Towards an anthropological archaeology of inscriptive
practices’. They became the basis for my book Lines: A Brief History,
first published in 2007. Several things lay behind my project on lines.
One was that I had become interested in the relationship between
writing and musical notation, in part through supervising the doctoral
research of Kawori Iguchi. Kawori had been working on Japanese
traditional music, and had learned to play the Japanese flute. She
came back from the field with samples of musical notation, of a kind
I had never seen before. We were working on it together. I became
fascinated by how musical notation had evolved, both in Japan and
in the West, and wanted to explore how it related to writing and its
evolution.
At that time, I was still based in Manchester. But soon after my arrival
in Aberdeen, I developed an interest in walking. This came about,
above all, through working with an Aberdeen-based colleague in
cultural geography, Hayden Lorimer. On Hayden’s initiative, we
undertook a collaborative project on ways of walking, with first Katrin
Lund and subsequently Jo Lee Vergunst as the lead researcher.
Hayden eventually left to take up a position in Glasgow, and is now
Professor of Geography in Edinburgh. But as our walking project
evolved, I was also getting interested in issues around the meaning
of creativity. In 2005, the Department hosted the annual conference
of the Association of Social Anthropologists on the theme ‘Creativity
and Cultural Improvisation’, and with my colleague Elizabeth Hallam,
we went on to edit an eponymous conference volume, published in
2007. So I tried to pull these three things together: lines, walking,
creativity. Eventually, I began writing again, and thinking about how
I could move beyond the position I had developed in The Perception
of the Environment. This was to think more about lines, meshworks
and atmospheres. All this grew into another book of essays, Being
Alive, published in 2011.
Life and career
59
The other thing I should mention, in closing, is that for years I had
been working in the field of hunter-gatherer studies, with a strong
emphasis on ecological anthropology. There had been a series of
international conferences on hunting and gathering societies,
going right back to one held at the London School of Economics
in 1986, which I had helped to organise. The ninth conference in
the series was held in Edinburgh in 2002. I co-convened the
conference with my Edinburgh colleague Alan Barnard.5 It was
held on the campus of Heriot-Watt University. Though extremely
stressful to organise, the conference was a great success. However,
I made a conscious decision, there and then: that once it was over,
I would have nothing more to do with hunter-gatherer studies. I
would completely draw a line under it, because I had said everything
I had to say on the subject. I couldn’t contribute anything more
– not, at least, without doing a whole lot more research. Instead,
I wanted to pursue my new interests in lines, meshworks and
atmospheres. So, to anyone who asked me to write anything on
hunter-gatherer studies, or to contribute to a conference, I could
respond: ‘No, I’m not doing that anymore.’ That was really a life-
saver for me, because it left me free to develop this new field on
the interface between anthropology, art and architecture. And
that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.
Further Reading
Previously published interviews with Ingold include Ergül (2017),
Ferrández (2013) and Kaartinen (2018). Gibb, Malara and Tonner
also interviewed Ingold in an online event organised by the
Glasgow Anthropology Network (2020).
Ingold has reflected on his upbringing in a number of publications,
including the Preface to the 2016 edition of Lines (2016a: xv–xviii)
5 Alan Barnard sadly passed away in 2022. An obituary, by Thomas Widlok and
Akira Tahada, is published in the journal Anthropology Today 39(3), June 2023,
page 26.
60 Conversations with Tim Ingold
and his article ‘From Science to Art and Back Again: The
Pendulum of an Anthropologist’ (2018c). Amongst the first books
Ingold encountered in social anthropology, he mentions Barth’s
Political Leadership Among Swat Pathans (1965) and Radcliffe-
Brown’s Structure and Function in Primitive Society (1952). For
general accounts of the development of British social anthro-
pology in the twentieth century, see Kuper (2014) and Mills
(2008). On the Manchester School of anthropology, see Evens
and Handelman (2006).
Ingold’s explorations of the relation between social and ecological
systems began with his 1982 Malinowski Memorial Lecture, ‘The
Architect and the Bee’ (Ingold 1983), and developed into his first
essay collection, The Appropriation of Nature (Ingold 1986b). In
this he was influenced by works in neo-Marxist anthropology,
including Godelier’s Rationality and Irrationality in Economics
(1972) and Terray’s Marxism and ‘Primitive’ Societies (1972), as
well by Gibson’s The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception
(1979). His book Evolution and Social Life (Ingold 1986a), written
in the shadow of Wilson’s Sociobiology (1975), was strongly influ-
enced by the philosophical works of Bergson (Creative Evolution,
1911) and Whitehead (Process and Reality, 1929). On his introduc-
tion to phenomenology, Ingold mentions Heidegger’s seminal
essay from 1954, Building, Dwelling, Thinking (Heidegger 2013),
and Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, dating from
1945 (Merleau-Ponty 1962).
Ingold also refers to the work of Strathern (The Gender of the
Gift, 1988) and Weiner (The Empty Place, 1991), both influenced
by Wagner’s The Invention of Culture, first published in 1975. A
new edition of Wagner’s classic, including a foreword by Ingold,
was published in 2016. The Aberdeen-based walking project to
which Ingold refers led to a volume co-edited with Lee Vergunst,
Ways of Walking (Ingold and Lee Vergunst 2008), and the 2005
ASA conference to a volume co-edited with Hallam, Creativity
and Cultural Improvisation (Hallam and Ingold 2007).
Life and career
61
For reasons of space, Ingold’s work on hunter-gatherers, which he
mentions towards the end of this interview, is not explored in
depth here. Interested readers are referred in particular to
Hunters, Pastoralists and Ranchers (Ingold 1980) and Hunters and
Gatherers, Vols I: History, Evolution and Social Change, and II:
Property, Power and Ideology (Ingold, Riches and Woodburn
1988).
63
Anthropology, ethnography, education and the university
CONVERSATION 2:
Anthropology, ethnography,
education and the university
Summary: In this interview, Ingold considers the nature of
anthropology as a discipline, the relationship between anthro-
pology and education, and the contemporary university. He
begins by outlining his views on ‘theory’ in anthropology,
including the importance of theoretical debates and the polit-
ical nature of theory. This is followed by a series of reflections
on how legacies from the colonial past continue to shape
anthropology and how the discipline still needs to be ‘decol-
onised’. Ingold then summarises his understanding of the
relationship between anthropology and ethnography, and
reflects on the debate that his essay ‘anthropology is not
ethnography’ has provoked. This leads on to a discussion of
the relationship between anthropology and education and,
finally, to an account of his involvement in the ‘Reclaiming Our
University’ movement at the University of Aberdeen. The inter-
view took place on 12 April 2021.
(A) ANTHROPOLOGY, THEORY AND DEBATES
Robert Gibb
In 1987 you initiated a discussion with some colleagues based in
British anthropology departments that led to the creation of the
64 Conversations with Tim Ingold
‘Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory’ (GDAT). In the
‘Preface’ to the published version of the first six debates, in the book
Key debates in anthropology, you write that ‘Debate . . . is the very
modus vivendi of theory. And theory, since it is about how we engage
with the world and not just about how we represent it, is inherently
political.’1 Please could you tell us more about your views on ‘theory’
in anthropology, including the importance of theoretical debates and
the political nature of theory.
Tim Ingold
Well, the first thing I mean is that theory is another word for
thinking. I’m strongly against the idea that theories are coherent
frameworks or structures, which you can pick up ready-made, and
then apply to some body of data. I don’t think many anthropologists
would hold such a view, but it is common in other disciplines,
particularly in the sciences. That’s what a theory is understood to
be: you should get your theory; then you should get your data; you
should analyse the data by means of the theory and come up with
some results; and then those results might make you want to
modify the theory in this way or that. But in my understanding,
theory is a process, not a structure, and as a process it carries on.
It is carried on in a kind of thinking that is not private to any one
individual but in some way collective, like a conversation. Theorising
is something that people do together, a way of thinking together
with your colleagues or students, or with the authors of the works
you’re reading. But it’s a thinking that is inherently dialogical. With
this approach there can be no real distinction between theory and
practice, or between pure theory and its application; it’s just theory.
So that’s the first thing. I wanted to stress that this is what we
mean when we talk about doing theory in anthropology. We need
to make this clear, particularly to students. We have to get across
the point that we can’t go shopping for theory as in a supermarket,
picking up what we need off the shelf, ready to use. And we need
1 See Ingold (1996a: xi).
Anthropology, ethnography, education and the university
65
to remember, too, that theory is never finished. It is always work
in progress.
Secondly, on the political dimension: the politics lies in the very fact
that you are thinking with the world. It is a form of engagement.
And for this reason, it cannot not be political. What is politics, after
all, if not a field of public engagement? We don’t have to bring in
issues of power and exploitation and all that, though we could if we
wanted. Dialogical thinking in the public domain: that basically is my
understanding of what politics is. And it is also what theory is. That’s
why it is political.
I would like to say the same about writing. We think as we write; we
write as we think. It’s very hard – maybe impossible – to say where
thinking ends and writing begins. If dialogical thinking in the public
domain is political, then the same goes for writing. The act of writing
is political. It makes no difference whether we write about politics
or not; indeed, it doesn’t matter what we’re writing about, or thinking
about, or theorising about. It’s in the theorising itself, the thinking
and the writing – that’s where the politics is.
Robert Gibb
The other question I had in this section relates directly to this. A
recurrent criticism of your work, including from many who are other-
wise sympathetic (Alf Hornborg and Penny Howard are two recent
examples), is that it pays insufficient attention to ‘politics’ and
notably the role of political economy. In an article published in 2005,
in the journal Conservation and Society, you reflect on precisely this
point, but I was wondering if you could you tell us how you would
respond to such criticism today. You’ve started talking about it in
your first answer, but what is the place of politics and political ana-
lysis in your work?
66 Conversations with Tim Ingold
Tim Ingold
Yes, I am often criticised for leaving politics out. Sometimes I think
this is fair; sometimes not. To be honest, I feel a bit ambivalent about
it. There is substance to the criticism. It’s certainly true that if you
were to look up almost anything I’ve written, apart from that one
article you mention in which I address the issue head on, you would
find no explicit reference to politics. If you look up the word ‘politics’
in the index or do a word search in any of my books, you will hardly
find any instances of it. This is because I’m not really writing about
politics, nor do I offer much by way of political analysis.
To my mind, there’s a weak excuse and a strong excuse for this
absence. The weak excuse is: ‘Well, why should I?’ I mean, as scholars
we can be interested in all sorts of things. If we happen to be polit-
ical analysts, then we’re obviously interested in politics. But let’s
imagine an archaeologist interested in the manufacture of flint tools
from the so-called Levalloisian period. Suppose you say to this
specialist in Middle Stone Age lithic technology: ‘I don’t like your
work; there’s no mention of politics in it. Where’s the political ana-
lysis?’ They’d likely respond: ‘Look here, that’s just not what I’m
working on.’ I could say the same, I could say: ‘Look, my interests
are in perception, in skill, in the ways things are built and made. Why
should this be invalidated or weakened by the fact that I don’t
explicitly address politics?’ One could even put the boot onto the
other foot, and ask of those who do spend their lives writing about
politics whether they have even one useful thing to say about
perception, or skill acquisition, or making. They don’t! So why is it
all right to write about politics, but not all right to write about these
other themes? This, however, is a weak excuse – to say: ‘Well, I can’t
be bothered with politics. I’m interested in other things.’
The strong excuse is one I’ve already hinted at. I believe my work is
intensely political, but the politics lies in the writing, in the arguing.
This writing and arguing has involved direct, hands-on struggle,
in which I’ve faced real intimidation. I get rather annoyed with
academics who pose as political analysts, occupying a comfortable,
Anthropology, ethnography, education and the university
67
protected pulpit from which they can deliver their analyses, as if
from on high, without ever having to engage with the opposition on
the pitch. A lot of what I’ve written, for example, takes issue with
cognitive science and neo-Darwinian biology. When you look at the
conceptual underpinning of these fields, their funding, their institu-
tional position, the ways they work, you see at once that they are
largely feeding on the power of corporations and the state, which
they in turn reinforce. By attacking them, you’re attacking the very
political structure on which these paradigms rest, or on which they
thrive. And yet neo-Darwinian biology and cognitive science present
themselves as if they were entirely apolitical, as purely scientific. But
we know very well that they’re not. We know that they rest on struc-
tures of power. For example, the way in which neo-Darwinists rank
scientists like themselves, who claim to reason from evidence, over
tribespeople alleged to be mere puppets of their genetically or
culturally inherited traits, is manifestly colonial! But scientists are
unaware of this presumption of superiority, and never address it.
Engaging with their arguments, calling out the biases they contain,
is not just political, it is viscerally so. You feel it in the brickbats you
get from those who consider themselves to be beyond critique,
especially if it comes from an anthropologist. I’ve been there; it’s
tough and you have to be pretty thick-skinned to survive. That’s
where the politics is.
There’s one other way in which I think we should understand our
own writing as political, and that is in how we address our readers.
So much academic writing is deliberately exclusionary. It’s exclu-
sionary in that it assumes on the part of readers a knowledge of a
certain body of literature, which the author happens to be vested
in, and a facility in using often quite arcane concepts. You have to
be able to talk the talk. One of the worst offenders in this regard is
postcolonial theory. Theorists of this persuasion couch their argu-
ments in a deliberately obfuscating language that only other
academics working in their field can be expected to understand.
What this does is reproduce the very structures of academic power
that they claim to be deconstructing, and which themselves have a
colonial foundation. I find that downright hypocritical!
68 Conversations with Tim Ingold
Diego Maria Malara
I have a couple of very quick follow-ups, Tim. First of all: would it
be correct to say that underpinning your complex explanation or
justification is actually a significantly different vision of politics?
Tim Ingold
It could be, yes. It’s certainly a different vision, I think, of democratic
politics. Democracy is one of those words that can be understood
in a million ways and, as you know, some pretty atrocious things
have been justified in its name. It’s not a good in itself unless we
can explain what we mean by it. We’ll come later to the writings of
John Dewey but, for me, in recent years, they have been inspirational,
particularly in his understanding of democracy as a way of living
together in difference – as a way in which we engage unceasingly
in conversation with others, and in which common ground is some-
thing we work collectively to co-create rather than a necessary and
assumed point of departure. That’s not majoritarian; it has nothing
to do with who gets the most votes. It has to do with the quality
and nuance of public discourse.
I feel that in many spheres of our society, nowadays, politics is being
cheapened. You know how sociologists go on about intersection-
ality? There’s race, power, gender, class, ethnicity and maybe a few
other things – and that’s it. For them, politics lies in the way these
intersect. This idea, that individual selfhood is effectively determined
by the intersection of a bunch of sociological categories, is so reduc-
tionist! It takes the atomisation of hyper-modernism to a new level.
I find it deeply dehumanising – insensitive to difference, to the
variations of human experience which can so enrich democratic
conversations. There’s such a negative, even cynical, tone to it. So,
I think, yes, if we go back to the idea of politics as dialogue, as
conversation, of living with difference in the public domain, then it
would be a different definition from the kind that starts directly from
the power relations of class, race, gender and exploitation.
Anthropology, ethnography, education and the university
69
Diego Maria Malara
Thanks. You say that theory for you is not just about representing
the world; it’s about how we engage with it. What does this state-
ment about engaging with the world rather than representing it
concretely mean? I was wondering if you were responding to the
kind of debates associated with Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus
1986)?
Tim Ingold
Not really, no. I have to confess that I find all these debates around
the crisis of representation, which students are still expected to
wade through, unbearably tedious. I have tried to keep them at
arm’s length. I didn’t want to bother with them. I’m not sure why.
Partly I just felt that it was very inward-looking – a case of anthro-
pologists looking at their own navels. Obviously, there was cause
for it. There is no doubt that we were transiting from the old days
of structural functionalism, when you would go out to the field,
collect your material, do your analysis, and write it up as an author-
itative account of how the society in question functions. Clearly,
we had reached a stage in anthropology where this no longer
worked; structural functionalism was collapsing along with the colo-
nial apparatus on which it rested. We were in a state of flux, and
unsure where to go instead. The crisis of representation was part
of this.
But I found the whole way the debate was conducted terribly intro-
verted. There was no real interest in engaging with the thinking of
other disciplines. To my mind, it was largely responsible for turning
anthropology into the study of itself. A student contemplating going
to study anthropology at university might be thinking: ‘This looks
like a great subject. I want to learn about my fellow human beings,
what they do, how they live.’ And so they go to university with their
head full of hopes and dreams about anthropology and what
it’s going to give them. And what do they get? Angst-ridden
70 Conversations with Tim Ingold
explanations of how to do (or not to do) anthropology. They find
anthropologists apparently uninterested in other human beings,
worrying only about themselves. This is to get our priorities back to
front: as though people existed for the purpose of writing anthro-
pology, rather than anthropology for the purpose of understanding
people. While all this Writing Culture thing was going on, I was still
with Marx. I was thinking: ‘Here’s a world. What’s it like? How can we
change it?’
(B) ANTHROPOLOGY, POLITICS AND THE
COLONIAL LEGACY
Robert Gibb
In an ‘Afterword’ to a recent edited collection discussing your work,
Tim, you write: ‘My purpose is . . . to demolish the walls that divide
the land of academia from the rest of the world, and to expose the
conceit of its inhabitants – a conceit that lingers as an uncomfort-
able legacy from the colonial past – that they alone are equipped
to tackle questions of so deep a nature as to elude ordinary folk.
Are humans not all students of social life by the very fact of living
it?’2 Please could you tell us more about this: the nature of this aim,
how it might be achieved and what some of the key obstacles are
that will need to be overcome.
Tim Ingold
This anticipates the questions about anthropology and ethnography
that we’re going to come to later, because I think one of the major
obstacles lies in the structure of the academy. I believe the profes-
sionalisation of anthropology, in the practice of ethnography, upholds
that structure.
2 See Ingold (2021a: 143).
Anthropology, ethnography, education and the university
71
Maybe by comparing ourselves with another discipline, say
psychology, we can see more clearly where the problem lies. If you
were a psychologist, you would consider your discipline to be one
that studies people – or ‘carries out research among human subjects’,
as research funders like to put it. Anthropologists would say the
same. So, what’s the difference? You might answer that psycholo-
gists are interested in the mind, whereas anthropologists are
interested in society. But that doesn’t get us very far. If you were
to ask them, most psychologists would explain that theirs is primarily
an experimental discipline, and that what it tries to do is find out
about human minds, how they work, what’s inside them. So the
people with whom, or rather on whom, the psychologist works are
a resource from which to extract data. The researcher might, for
example, be carrying out attitude surveys, finding out what attitudes
people hold and how they influence behaviour. But whatever the
specific topic of inquiry, they are treating the people as repositories
from which to extract information, whether through conducting
experiments or administering questionnaires. They will then analyse
the data in order to come up with pronouncements about how minds
work, or how their owners behave. What they’re not doing is listening
to what the people themselves have to say, for its own sake, or
engaging in any kind of conversation with them.
The best thing about anthropology, it seems to me, is that regard-
less of what subsequently happens with their material, as least during
fieldwork anthropologists are actually listening to people, interested
in what they have to say and anxious to learn from it. Most anthro-
pologists today would acknowledge that the people with whom they
work are every bit their equal. They’re just as intelligent, their ideas
are worth as much. When we speak together, it’s a conversation, a
dialogue; it’s not us researching them. Most anthropologists would
accept this. But when you look around at other disciplines, anthro-
pology does indeed appear unique in this regard. What other
discipline is doing this, having serious conversations with the people
with whom they study? I don’t think this is true of any other disci-
pline. But the trouble is that as soon as we present the conversations
we’ve been having, and the ideas that emerge from them, as
72 Conversations with Tim Ingold
ethnography, then it is immediately back to ‘us’ versus ‘them’ again,
the researcher versus the researched.
Suppose that, as an educator, you are having conversations in the
classroom with your students. Would you say you were making an
ethnographic study of them? Of course not! Nor would anyone
suppose, when the students are listening to their professor, that
their purpose is to collect the ethnographic material they would
need to write the professor up. Clearly, then, ethnography is under-
stood as something to be done outside the academy. Anthropology,
by contrast, is what you do with students and colleagues inside it.
My big worry is that in rendering what we do outside the academy
as ethnography, and inside it as anthropology, we are actually
complicit in protecting and reinforcing this barrier between the
academy and the rest of the world. In my view, the mission of anthro-
pology is to break this barrier down! I want to insist that we are
doing anthropology wherever we are, as much in conversations with
people beyond the academy as with students and colleagues within
it. And this is the point at which we can begin to think of anthro-
pology as primarily educational rather than ethnographic – in a
specific sense of education that we’ll come to later.
When all is said and done, however, this logic – which turns accounts
of others, or of our engagements with them, into ethnography – is
merely a local anthropological manifestation of a much more general
move by which the academy preserves its authority as a place dedicated
to producing superior knowledge of how the world works, destined to
be disseminated to the supposedly ignorant masses. This is a colonial
legacy, or a legacy of the Enlightenment, or actually both, seeing as
the Enlightenment and colonialism have always been joined at the hip.
Robert Gibb
Just to follow on from that: as you know, there’s currently (and there
has been before as well, it’s not entirely new) a debate on how
anthropology, and other disciplines, could be decolonised. What other
Anthropology, ethnography, education and the university
73
legacies from the colonial past, apart from the one you’ve just been
discussing, do you think continue to shape contemporary anthro-
pology? In what ways do you think anthropology still needs to be
‘decolonised’?
Tim Ingold
I don’t know if you’re seeing the same thing in your Department,
but in ours in Aberdeen, students are now actively debating the
whole issue of decolonisation. The debate is long overdue. Since
I’m now retired, I’ve been watching it from the sidelines. It’s been
interesting. I recently read the report of a student group from another
Department (not ours); they brought up a point with which I abso-
lutely agree, concerning the notion of cultural diversity. That is:
there’s a distinction to be made between diversity and difference.
As soon as we render difference as diversity, we position ourselves
as standing above all the variation, boxing it up into varieties, so
that everyone in each box is the same in being of this variety or
that, and exporting all difference onto the dividing lines between
them. This is definitely a colonial move.
One thing I think we urgently need to do is to expunge the idea of
cultural diversity from the anthropological curriculum, and insert
difference in its place, while making it quite clear how and why the
two concepts are not the same. I mean, difference is ongoing differ-
entiation; it’s about the way in which we continually forge our own
sense of who we are in and through our relations with others. It’s
about becoming different. That’s where all the creativity of social
life is to be found, and it is where anthropology comes into its
element. But as soon as we render this as diversity, we’ve got it all
wrapped up. Difference becomes division, between one social or
cultural category and another. It is quite a challenge to liberate
anthropology, and particularly the teaching of anthropology, from
this sort of mentality. I think it’s the biggest task of decolonising we
have – bigger than all these intersecting categorisations of race,
gender and so on. Or rather, it subsumes all of them.
74 Conversations with Tim Ingold
Diego Maria Malara
I’m not entirely sure I understand: what is diversity for you then, and
how do you concretely go about liberating teaching from this kind
of emphasis?
Tim Ingold
Well, diversity, to my ear, implies difference that has precipitated
out, as it were, from the flow of social life, and is already partitioned
into categories. With this, difference gives way to division, to the
logic of ‘us’ and ‘them’, according to which I belong to this group
because I’m not of that group. It is based on the presumption that
the world of human relations, or indeed of relations among living
creatures of any kind, is primordially divided. It is classificatory. This
of course was long built into the assumptions of mainstream social
anthropology. When I was an undergraduate in Cambridge in the
late 1960s, and we were all reading Edmund Leach, that’s exactly
what he said: it’s just the way the world is, divided into in-groups
and out-groups, and we have to start from there. As Leach put it in
his BBC Reith Lectures of 1967, all difference is contrastive: ‘I iden-
tify myself with a collective we, which is then contrasted with some
other.’3 This is nonsense. We know very well that the world isn’t sliced
up like that. But that’s what was assumed at the time.
It might help to compare the way anthropologists talk about cultural
diversity with the way biologists talk about biodiversity. By that, they
usually mean an environment with room for lots of different species.
But they’re already assuming they can map out, from a superior
vantage point, what all these different species are. Every species is
like an entry in a catalogue, compiled by science. But scientists
themselves aren’t in the catalogue! Nor are anthropologists in their
catalogue of culture. If you were an ant in the rainforest, you
3 These lectures were subsequently published under the title A Runaway World?
(Leach 1967). The quotation is from page 34.
Anthropology, ethnography, education and the university
75
probably wouldn’t see the rainforest in terms of biodiversity; you
would see it in terms of what you have to do to live as an ant! You
wouldn’t see all these different types, because you would not have
a bird’s eye view of the whole thing. It’s the same with people.
Diego Maria Malara
Your interest, then, is on the emergent nature of concepts and
categories and how they are made and unmade?
Tim Ingold
Yes, that’s right.
(C) ANTHROPOLOGY, ETHNOGRAPHY
AND PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION
Robert Gibb
We’ve already started talking about this a bit, so let’s move on to
anthropology, ethnography and participant observation. As we’ve
already discussed in relation to the Group for Debates in Anthro-
pology, you view debate as central to theory and, more generally,
to the intellectual vitality of disciplines such as anthropology.
Through a series of articles from your 2007 Radcliffe-Brown Lecture
onwards, you have initiated and helped to develop an important
debate about anthropology and ethnography. As you’ve already
intimated, your understanding of the relationship between anthro-
pology and ethnography seems to differ from conventional
understandings within the discipline, and you also take issue with
the conflation of ethnography and fieldwork. Could you explain here
what you mean by these terms and why you see the need to refor-
mulate the relation between them?
76 Conversations with Tim Ingold
Tim Ingold
Let’s start with ethnography and fieldwork. The thing is that what
we call fieldwork is simply a period of time you spend as a researcher
with a bunch of people somewhere, in whose lives you are interested,
for whatever reason. You do your participant observation, you write
your diary every day, you do all these things you should do. It’s
conventional in the discipline to describe this person, who is doing
their fieldwork and writing their fieldnotes, as an ‘ethnographer’. I
feel this is wrong, or at least that it brings in presumptions which
are ethically problematic. It comes, for example, when we refer to
‘the ethnographic encounter’. I mean, in ordinary life – forget about
anthropology, just in ordinary life – you encounter people all the
time. When you bump into a friend in the supermarket and stop to
chat, you wouldn’t call it an ethnographic encounter. It’s just an
encounter. You might learn things from your chat; you might even
write about them in your diary. You might reflect on what you’ve
heard, or tell your friends about it, or in your letters to them. So, all
this is going on. And my feeling is that, well, that’s also what goes
on in the course of fieldwork: that there’s only one difference
between fieldwork and ordinary life, namely, that you are likely to
be more systematic about remembering what people have told you,
and more insistent in asking questions. You might be a bit like a
detective – someone who has really got their ear to the ground and
is following every possible clue in order to uncover the plot, rather
than listening with only half an ear, as we commonly do in everyday
life, while thinking about something else. A good fieldworker is a
person who is ever attentive, who really listens and who writes down
what they’ve heard as an aid to memory.
That’s all fine. But what happens if you say: ‘I encountered this
person, we had a conversation,’ and then add, ‘It was an ethno-
graphic encounter,’ and ‘I’m not just anyone, I’m an ethnographer.
I wasn’t merely having a conversation with a friend; I was doing
ethnography’? What do you mean by that? It means, in a sense,
that you have turned your back on this person. You are saying, ‘I’m
not just having a conversation with you because you and I are good
Anthropology, ethnography, education and the university
77
friends, and we’re interested in what each other is doing. I’m having
a conversation with you because I want to get some information,
which is going to be material for an account I’m intending to write
up.’ And that’s where the problem arises. For most of us, while
we’re in the field, we’re probably not too bothered by this. We just
let life go by, and write everything down. The problem comes when
we’re done with all that and return home with our stash of field-
notes. It’s then that we turn round and declare, ‘During all that
time, I was an ethnographer, and look what I’ve got, here are my
ethnographic data!’ That changes the relationship completely. It is
not just that you have left the community you were working with;
you’ve actually turned your back on it, and all those things you
learned from people have now become raw material for analysis.
It turns out that all the time that you were with them, you were
actually trying to collect information on them. That’s why I think
it is so problematic.
In practice, this implies that the ‘ethno’ in ethnography only comes
to the fore after you’ve left the field. Perhaps, then, we should turn
the prefix ‘ethno’ into a verb. What happens when you ‘ethno’ people,
or ‘ethno’ a particular field of their activity? I’ve recently been in
discussion with a group of colleagues talking about ethno-
mathematics, and there are all sorts of other ‘ethno’s out there:
ethno-botany, ethno-science, ethno-medicine, ethno-this, ethno-
that. What does this ethno-ing of things actually do? What it does
is to take a body of discussion around certain themes – things people
know, things people talk about – and package it up, as if to say:
‘Right, this is part of the corpus that belongs to these people, this
ethnos, as a kind of collective property. But it is now, at least partly,
in my possession and I’m going to write it up. It will now be my
ethnography.’ I think this ethno-ing move is very dangerous. It comes
in retrospect, when we’re no longer with the people and subjected
to the kinds of everyday pressures we experience when they are all
around us. It is when we remove ourselves that they suddenly morph
into this ethnos, this folk, to whom we go on to attribute all sorts
of qualities. That’s where the problem lies, and I’ve been trying to
get anthropologists to think about it, because I believe the way we
78 Conversations with Tim Ingold
use ‘ethnography’ to refer interchangeably both to participant obser-
vation in the field, and to the work we do in writing up afterwards,
has brushed it under the carpet.
Robert Gibb
In a recent commentary on anthropology and ethnography, you write:
‘I should admit at the outset that the matters at stake in the trou-
bled union of anthropology and ethnography are by no means as
settled in my mind as they are on the page, and while I have endeav-
oured to set them out as clearly as I can, the long-running argument
that I have been having with myself continues and shows no sign of
abating.’4 I was really intrigued by this, and was wondering if you
could tell us more about the doubts, uncertainties and ambivalences
you continue to experience.
Tim Ingold
Absolutely! Because I do have these doubts, all the time. The thing
is that when you write something you have to come out with a
position and argue for it, which is what I try to do. But I always have
at the back of my mind the possibility that I could just as well have
argued otherwise. I am by no means as convinced of my own posi-
tion as I sound. To be honest, I still feel torn, not so much in
discussions with anthropological colleagues as when I find myself
explaining or justifying what we do to non-anthropologists. Much of
the problem with the way we have been using the notion of ethnog-
raphy is that it doesn’t help people from outside anthropology to
better understand what we actually do. We know that anthropology
has a big problem when it comes to public understanding. The
subject is terribly misunderstood, and I feel that projecting ourselves
as ethnographers only makes matters worse.
4 See Ingold (2021a: 141).
Anthropology, ethnography, education and the university
79
If you find yourself in conversation with a philosopher, a cultural
theorist, a political analyst or whatever, you soon discover that these
people very rarely do anything akin to what we would call fieldwork.
They spend most of their time reading the work of researchers who
are doing the same as they are. They read lots of books and articles,
engage in critique and attend conferences where they vigorously
defend their positions amidst the fray. All of this is supposed to hold
a mirror to the world, but it is a world they are reluctant ever to
enter themselves. When you talk with them, you soon discover that
they know next to nothing of what goes on in the world of which
they profess such exalted insight, because it has never occurred to
them to study in it. And that’s the point. I would say to them: ‘Look
here, we anthropologists know a thing or two about what is going
on in the world. Why? Because we do fieldwork! Just look at our
ethnography!’ Then I realise that, in saying this, I have made a
perfectly good argument for why ethnography is so fundamental to
anthropology, which goes right against the grain of what I said in
response to your earlier question. It looks as if I’m directly contra-
dicting myself!
For me, however, it all depends on whom I am talking to. With fellow
anthropologists it is not so much of an issue because, call it what
we will, we have a common unwritten understanding of what we’re
really up to, whether in the field or in writing up afterwards. But in
conversations outside of anthropology the issue really hits me on
the head, because I then have to explain that we know what we
know precisely because we have been involved in so many conver-
sations with so many people from different parts of the world with
different experience. This is a lot of words. Could ‘ethnography’
simply be a less long-winded way of saying the same thing, in just
one word? If you get into a debate with a theorist, and you want to
point out that you are knowledgeable about something that’s going
on in the world, because you’ve talked to people and bothered to
listen, you might say ‘Look, it’s in my ethnography!’ It’s a short-cut
word for all that. The fact is, however, that it’s not a good word,
because it evokes this idea of the ethnos, the ‘folk’, the people,
which is problematic in itself, not to mention -graphy, which is ‘writing
80 Conversations with Tim Ingold
about’. Literally, ethnography means writing about the people. But
for that reason, it is entirely ill-suited to capture the essence of
anthropological inquiry, which is with rather than about, and not
bound to any ethnos. Why use ‘ethnography’ to mean the very
opposite of what it stands for?
Robert Gibb
In your original 2007 Radcliffe-Brown Lecture, and in subsequent
contributions to the debate, you have stated that neither anthro-
pology nor ethnography is ‘prior to’ or ‘better than’ the other; they
are just different. Nevertheless, it could be argued that when you
say that anthropologists ‘do their thinking, talking and writing in and
with the world’, while the ethnographer ‘retrospectively imagines a
world from which he has turned away in order, quite specifically, that
he might describe it in writing,’5 you are making an implicit value
judgement in favour of anthropology. How would you respond?
Tim Ingold
That’s a fair criticism, and I have long worried about it myself. Maybe
I’m guilty of double standards. There must be a certain value in
detachment. Think about the resources we have. For example, in my
work with northern circumpolar peoples, one of my most cherished
sources is the classic account by Waldemar Bogoras, dating from
the years 1904 to 1909, of the Chukchi people, indigenous to the
northeastern tip of Siberia. Bogoras found himself in this remote
region, at the turn of the twentieth century, as a political exile, and
his account is based on many years of living with them. His enormous
work, The Chukchee, originally published in three volumes, is packed
with details of Chukchi life. I keep returning to it, and always find
something new. Bogoras worked in what we would now regard as a
very traditional way, collecting everything he could about the people
5 See Ingold (2008: 88, italics in the original).
Anthropology, ethnography, education and the university
81
and their ways. But now we have it; it’s available as a resource, not
only for us but also for Chukchi people themselves.
There is an intrinsic value to this, just as there is an intrinsic value
to works like encyclopaedias. We now have a record of ways of life
which may have either disappeared or changed beyond recognition
– a record that we wouldn’t otherwise have. That must be a good
thing. Indeed it is, so long as we don’t pretend it to be anything
other than what it really is. It isn’t part of an inquiry into the condi-
tions and possibilities of human life. It simply documents, as
accurately as it can. It doesn’t pretend to be more than that and as
such, it is not a means to the end of anthropology. It stands in its
own right, I think, in a way comparable to the artefacts collected in
a museum. Some might be critical of museum collecting, or the
museumisation of material culture, which takes things out of context
and packages them, arranging them into cases. But despite all of
that, we wouldn’t want to say that museums are a waste of time –
that they serve no purpose. They do have a purpose to serve. And
so does ethnography. On the one hand, we wouldn’t want to be
without it; but on the other, we shouldn’t pretend that it is other
than what it is.
Diego Maria Malara
Your 2014 paper on ethnography rests on a sharp distinction
between anthropology and ethnography, as well as between partici-
pation and observation. In particular, ethnography as the actual
writing of research experience is conceived as a decidedly retro-
spective operation, something that one does at home, generally
with the goal of publishing a piece. It seems to me that to make this
point you have to rely on a model of research that might not match
the experience of many anthropologists. Importantly, data collection,
interpretation (even if tentative) and writing are, to an extent, often
simultaneous practices for many researchers (see Shyrock 2016).
So why do you think that we should maintain the temporal (and
spatial) divides that underpin this conception of ethnography as a
82 Conversations with Tim Ingold
fait accompli operation? Is this a distinction that you have extrapo-
lated from your own research experience?
Tim Ingold
Well, in my own experience, and I think that of others too, the sort
of writing we do with fieldnotes is completely different from the
kind of writing we do when we write an article, a thesis or a book
based on those notes. It’s a quite different business. The kind of
writing we do in the field is very similar to letter-writing or writing
a diary. We are not really pulling stuff together. You might make a
note of what you need to do tomorrow, what questions need to be
asked next. But you remain very local, very situated, all the while
thinking: ‘Following the journey so far, what are my next steps?’ So
long as you remain in the field, you can never have a synoptic view
of things. You cannot possibly gain such a view, since you are in the
thick of it. Not until you finish, can you see what happened early on
in your fieldwork in the light of what happened later on. You can’t
do that while it’s still going on. So there is a shift of perspective,
which takes its time.
I’m sure you’ve heard the adage that for the first three months or
so after returning from fieldwork, you are ‘too close to the field’ to
write anything coherent. You have to get your head around things
after returning from the field, before you can even begin writing.
And while this is happening, you can usefully spend time digesting
and organising your fieldnotes in a way that makes them manageable.
As you read and think them through again, things begin to take
shape, to form a pattern. Only then can you begin writing. But this
writing could not be more different from the kind you do in the field.
Field writing is prospective, and in that sense temporally on a par
with everything else going on. You are conversing, you are partici-
pating in everyday activities, you are writing a diary. It’s all part of
a daily routine. The writing that you do later on – the ‘writing up’,
as we say – is an altogether different task. It is retrospective rather
than prospective. It’s a mere accident that we use the same word
for both.
Anthropology, ethnography, education and the university
83
Robert Gibb
As you explained in the Radcliffe-Brown lecture, one of your aims
in initiating a debate about ethnography and anthropology was to
liberate ethnography from what you called ‘the tyranny of method’.6
You appear to have a similar aim in relation to participant observa-
tion, as in a 2016 interview with Susan MacDougall, in which you
insisted ‘that participant-observation is not a research method but,
more fundamentally, an ontological commitment: an acknowledge-
ment of our debt to the world for who we are and what we know’.
Please could you say a little more about the argument you are
making here. In particular, if participant observation is an ‘onto-
logical commitment’ rather than ‘a research method’, is it something
we can ‘teach’ our students as part of their preparations for field-
work? If so, how? And how can we argue for such a view of
participant observation in the face of pressure from institutions and
funders to provide ‘research methods training’?
Tim Ingold
This is a big one! My first inclination is to say no, you can’t teach
what is, in fact, the ontological commitment that underpins the
practice of teaching itself. To try to teach it would be to turn this
commitment into its own object. The apprentice woodworker learns
woodwork through apprenticeship, not apprenticeship through
woodwork. Likewise, I don’t think that you can teach participant
observation as such, and I don’t believe it has ever really been taught.
All that anybody can do in practice is tell students about their own
experiences, about how they learned things through their own
apprenticeship to masters in the field, in the particular and probably
unique set of circumstances in which they found themselves,
knowing full well that everyone else is going to find themselves in
different circumstances. The idea that there is a rule book to follow,
or that participant observation can be formally operationalised, is
6 See Ingold (2008: 88).
84 Conversations with Tim Ingold
absurd. But it’s an absurdity put about by funders, research councils
and so on. I think this has to do with professionalisation. Over the
last two or three decades, the practice and vocation of research has
been hooked up to a model of the professional as expert. And the
professional expert has to be qualified and accredited, which means
they have to demonstrate that they are in possession of technical
qualifications that non-professionals lack. Hence the need for formal
accreditation.
I recently read up on this and discovered that the ‘curriculum vitae’,
as we know it today, is a rather new phenomenon. It scarcely existed
before the 1980s, when it suddenly took off. It was part of the trend
towards the marketisation of skills that really got going at that time,
and has been with us ever since. Nowadays, to get a job, everyone
needs a CV. So, if your research is intended to help you build a
professional career, and if research councils are disbursing the funds
that enable you to do so, then you have to end up with something
to put on your CV. Prior to that, the researcher was understood
basically as an amateur – in the literal sense, meaning that they
would do their research for the love of it. For them it wasn’t a way
of staging a career; it was simply a way of living a good life. It could
be living a good life with books, or by spending time with whatever
you are interested in. Of course, this had its own problems, because
it meant that only those with independent means could actually do
it. The great naturalists of the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin
included, were all ‘gentleman scholars’, and they had the money to
do whatever they wanted. Their studies were amateur rather than
professional, in today’s sense of what being professional means.
What has happened since is that research methods have become
akin to professional qualifications, something to put on your CV.
And the result is that they have, to a degree, been fetishised.
But you could tackle the question another way, by looking more
closely at what the word ‘method’ actually means. Literally, it means
‘the way beyond’, from the classical Greek hodos (‘way’) plus meta
(‘beyond’). Thus, a method is a way of going beyond where you are
now. And ‘research’? It means to search and search again, in which
Anthropology, ethnography, education and the university
85
every new search both doubles up on what you did before and, in
the process, takes you beyond where you were. Taken literally, then,
both ‘method’ and ‘research’ mean pretty much the same thing.
Research is method; and method is research. And if that’s what we
mean by research and by method, then I am absolutely fine with it.
It’s the path we take to seek a way beyond where we are now.
But as soon as these two things, research and method, become
hooked to a ladder of professional qualification, they immediately
descend into the nonsense typical of the research proposals we are
required to submit to funding bodies, in which we try to pretend
that in carrying out our research, we deliberately apply certain
prescribed methodological protocols. To take just one invidious
example of this kind of nonsense: instead of talking with whoever
happens to pass by, and following up if they suggest other useful
leads, we propose to apply what is known as a ‘snowball technique’.
This comes to exactly the same thing, of course, but makes it sound
more methodological. We all know, indeed, that what we actually do
is not what we say on the research proposal. We need to say one
thing in order to get the money, then we go into the field and do
something altogether different. We all know that. So we are having
to get by with what I would call ‘tolerated mendacity’, and I don’t
think this is a good place to be. I wish we could find a way to be
more truthful. But it’s extremely awkward when what is involved is
the distribution of public funds. It was easy so long as everybody
had the means to do whatever they wanted, but that is no longer
the case. And, to be honest, I don’t know what the solution is.
Diego Maria Malara
In your paper ‘That’s enough about ethnography’, you tell us that
there is an issue with ethnography, and you propose an original
framing. One cannot help wondering about methods, about the
practicalities of being in the field, such as taking notes. You say very
little about these things, both in the paper as well as in other works.
You seem to tell us that there is an issue, and a big one, with how
86 Conversations with Tim Ingold
anthropologists do things, but there are no substantive suggestions
on how things can and should be done. Or, better, your suggestions
tend to be quite abstract. Could you tell us something more about
your views on the concrete aspects of fieldwork, how you do it and
what advice would you give to a student who is about to leave for
his or her field today?
Tim Ingold
True, I haven’t written much about it. But I have lost count of the
number of times I have spoken about it, mainly in conversation
with students. I have talked endlessly about my research and how
I did it. As everyone’s circumstances are so different, however, this
is better done in conversation than in print. The thing is that my
fieldwork was done in pre-digital days; everything had to be done
by hand. I couldn’t type; I am still a hopeless typist! The key thing,
and the most important message I try to get across to every
student, is the importance of writing comprehensive fieldnotes. It’s
as simple as that. Writing notes involves time, discipline, concen-
tration, and it is incredibly hard work. Sometimes you will be up all
night writing, while everyone else is asleep. Students need to realise
this. They need to know that there is more to fieldwork than just
participating in things, taking photos and jotting down the odd
note in the evening. Writing fieldnotes is time-consuming and
extremely laborious.
That’s the first thing I tell them. ‘Never imagine,’ I say, ‘that events
that seem unforgettable at the time, that even seem to change your
life, will stay that way. A couple of years later, you will have forgotten
all about them. Picture yourself sitting in your study, in a completely
different environment, and trying to write based on what you
remember. If you have failed at the time to write everything down,
you will later be wringing your hands in despair. For there’s no other
way of bringing things back. And because, at the time of occurrence,
you have no idea what will turn out to be important in retrospect,
and what will not, it is essential to get everything down, everything
Anthropology, ethnography, education and the university
87
you have observed. You will need to write pages and pages and
pages of notes.’
The other thing I tell students is that there’s no point in having a
system of notation and record-keeping which turns out to be unman-
ageable once you have finished in the field and begin to use it. For
example, it’s no use thinking that you can avoid taking notes simply
by recording everything on some kind of device, because you would
then have to spend the next ten years transcribing all the recordings,
even before having anything to work on. There’s absolutely no substi-
tute for proper old-fashioned fieldnotes.
The technique I developed was to write on very thin paper. I could
mount four sheets on a clipboard, with three sheets of carbon paper
in between. I would write with a ballpoint pen, pressing hard, in a
very small hand to economise on paper, and in that way, I would
instantly get three copies. The last copy was difficult to read, but
that was my insurance copy, which I would post at intervals to my
supervisor. I would have it as a backup, in case anything got lost. I
kept the top copy intact. But I spent the first two or three months
after returning from the field cutting the second and third copies
into strips, with scissors, which I glued with Pritt Stick onto backing
paper. I arranged these glued strips into two files, one organised by
the household to which the people mentioned in the snippet
belonged, the other by the activity in question: reindeer herding,
fishing, local politics and so on. This meant that if I needed to find
out anything about particular people I could immediately do so, by
consulting the relevant entry in the household file; and likewise with
the other file, if I wanted to check on any particular activity.
And it worked! It took me three months after returning from the
field to organise my materials, in the course of which I read everything
through, very carefully. Maybe researchers are doing the same thing
now as I did, only using digital means; they can easily use a search
function to track down what they need. There are shortcuts available
now that weren’t available then. But I sometimes wonder whether
these shortcuts are such a good thing, because they don’t force
88 Conversations with Tim Ingold
you to reflect on your materials as I had to do. Working by hand
with scissors and glue, I think I gained a feel for the material that I
would not otherwise have done, had I been working solely at a
keyboard.
There’s one more thing I would tell every student. The point about
fieldnotes, I would tell them, is not that they are a compendium of
data for analysis. Rather, they are a mnemonic aid. They enable you
to sit in your study, busily writing, and to be back there in the field,
at one and the same time. It’s extraordinary! When you reread your
fieldnotes, even after the lapse of years, it is as if it had all happened
only yesterday. And because it’s really fresh in your mind, you can
write about it in a way that you would not have been able to do
otherwise. These are things that you learn from experience and that
can be easily explained. It is what I did in my fieldwork, in concrete,
practical terms, and it is the advice I would offer to any student
intending to carry out fieldwork today.
(D) ANTHROPOLOGY AND/AS EDUCATION
Philip Tonner
What is the role (beyond just influences) of past thinkers, such as
John Dewey, on your educational and anthropological thinking?
Tim Ingold
I came upon Dewey absurdly late. I really didn’t read his work prop-
erly until I had to give the Dewey lectures, on which my education
book is based, and when I did, I was astonished. We are all expected
to wade through the writings of Marx, Weber, Durkheim and the rest.
Why not Dewey? Why is his work not on every undergraduate reading
list? It is not, and I don’t know why. It’s a curious thing, because I
believe Dewey’s thought is incredibly relevant to our times and, in
Anthropology, ethnography, education and the university
89
many ways, an advance on the sort of sociological thinking to which
we are normally treated from the masters, the grandfathers of our
discipline.
Some years ago, in 2014, I had to write a short piece for the Journal
of the Royal Anthropological Institute, ‘A Life in Books’, for which I
was asked to choose the five books that I felt had had the greatest
influence on my thinking, and to write a paragraph on each. The first
on my list was naturally Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution. I was
reading Bergson in the early 1980s, long before he came back into
fashion, as has increasingly happened today. I came across Creative
Evolution more or less by accident, but it blew my mind. Bergson
was already saying everything I wanted to say. His has been a huge
influence for me. I often find myself saying things that come directly
from his writings, but which have become so much a part of my own
thinking that I had forgotten that this was where they originally came
from.Second on my list was James Gibson’s The Ecological Approach
to the Visual Perception, which I also came across by accident,
following the advice of the prominent ecological psychologist Ed
Reed.7 Gibson’s approach turned out to be fundamental to the way
I was trying to rethink ecological anthropology. Next was Merleau-
Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. I never set out to be a
phenomenologist, but I discovered this work because I was interested
in perception, and it helped me resolve some doubts I was having
with Gibson’s take on it. Then, as part of my engagement with
evolutionary biology, I read a book by the philosopher Susan Oyama,
The Ontogeny of Information. It’s a terribly neglected work, but I
consider it to be one of the most important ever written in the
philosophy of biology. It was foundational to the perceptual-
cum-developmental approach I was trying to develop. My fifth
choice was André Leroi-Gourhan’s Gesture and Speech. Leroi-
Gourhan was a veritable polymath, a student of Marcel Mauss,
working across the history of technology, archaeology and prehis-
toric art. The breadth of his vision was incredible: completely chaotic,
but very inspiring.
7 I have described my encounter with Reed in Conversation 1.
90 Conversations with Tim Ingold
These, then, were the five books that have had the greatest influence
on me. And what is interesting about them is that with the possible
exception of Leroi-Gourhan’s, none is specifically anthropological. I
never found that depth of inspiration from my reading in anthro-
pology, although as a student in Cambridge I was much influenced
by Edmund Leach and learned a good deal from both Meyer Fortes
and Jack Goody.I have learned from plenty of people, but their
influence was not formative in the sense of actually making me
change the way I think about things. I think this says something,
because if you were to ask what works have been most influential
for the development of specifically anthropological theory over the
past few decades, it is unlikely that any of my choices would be
included in the list.
Philip Tonner
You’ve also argued for something of an equivalence between anthro-
pology and education. Can you explain your reasoning for this?
Tim Ingold
It means having to think about education in a particular way.In my
book Anthropology and/as Education, based on the Dewey lectures,
I argued against the standard transmission model of education – that
there is a body of knowledge to be transferred from adults who
know to children who don’t – and for an idea of education as a way
of leading life, as a way of taking oneself out of one’s existing stand-
point so as to experience the world directly, with a certain intensity,
and to learn from it. Besides Dewey, I was engaging in particular
with the work of two contemporary educational theorists: Gert
Biesta and Jan Masschelein. Though their approaches differ in many
ways, they have in common a desire to think of education as a
practice of what the former calls ‘weak’ and the latter ‘poor’ peda-
gogy. By way of contrast, a ‘strong’ or ‘rich’ pedagogy would be one
that has a body of authoritative knowledge to transfer. It would arm
Anthropology, ethnography, education and the university
91
us with this knowledge, offering a protective shield in the battle
against adversity in an inherently competitive environment. But weak
pedagogy, for Biesta, is a process of disarmament; while for
Masschelein, poor pedagogy is a process of exposure. Instead of
shoring ourselves up with knowledge so that we can defend ourselves
against adversaries, it strips our defences away, leaving us so
exposed that we can actually notice our fellow beings in the world,
attend to them and learn from them.Both Biesta and Masschelein
are trying to elaborate on the meaning of education in this sense.
I found this really exciting, since it immediately occurred to me that
this is exactly what we’re doing in anthropology! Fieldwork is
precisely a practice of exposure in Masschelein’s sense – of being
pulled ‘out of position’ – or what Biesta calls disarmament. You arrive
in a place and think: ‘I don’t know anything, butI’m here to learn, by
paying attention to what people do and say.’ It’s sometimes uncom-
fortable; it’s risky, and there is no clear body of knowledge to be
acquired, but you discover a lot about both yourself and the world
in the process. It seemed to me, then, that what anthropology is
doing in the posture of fieldwork, and what education in this weak
or poor sense is doing, are pretty much the same thing. It would
follow, therefore, not only that anthropology can provide a model
for how this kind of education could work, but also that the role of
anthropology in our society could be regarded as fundamentally
educative. That’s how I came to the view that the first priority, in
anthropology, must be educational rather than ethnographic. We’re
not here to describe or catalogue other people’s lives; we’re here
to open ourselves up to them. If we understand education in this
sense, then that’s what we do in anthropology. At least, it is what
we should be doing; it should be our top priority.
Philip Tonner
Education, for you, is to open yourself up to a way of living with
others, being responsive to them and to your shared world, of
attending to things in terms of process. Education is about opening,
92 Conversations with Tim Ingold
to quote you again, paths of discovery and growth. Given this, what
advice, perhaps based on your own experience as an educator, would
you give to teachers who would wish to develop your thinking in
their practice?
Tim Ingold
The first word of advice I would give to a teacher is to assume that
the students you are teaching are as intelligent as you are: never
ever talk down to them, never say that learning is easy or try and
make it any less difficult for them. Instead, present things in all their
difficulty and say: ‘Look, this is a struggle, and it takes effort. I’m
not going to make things easy for you, but I’m going to respect your
intelligence and understand that you are just as capable of under-
standing as I am, although maybe you haven’t read all the things I
have.’That would be the first thing.
Then, just explain that the point about the teacher is not that
they’ve got the knowledge and the students haven’t, because this
would simply reproduce the image of the student as ignorant –
and students are not ignorant. Aim instead to be a constant
companion, someone to whom students can always turn for guid-
ance, for advice, for assistance and for careful criticism. Read what
students write, listen to what they say and respond in your own
voice, as best you can – but don’t claim always to have the
answers.The idea is to take students along with you, like going
on an expedition where you have no more idea than anyone else
of where, if anywhere, it will fetch up. That, I think, is what good
teaching is.
Diego Maria Malara
You have written, Tim, that ‘More than any other discipline in the
human sciences, [anthropology] has the means and the determina-
tion to show how knowledge grows from the crucible of lives lived
Anthropology, ethnography, education and the university
93
with others.’8 We find this formulation particularly intriguing. Could
you explain what this means in relation to your suggestion that we
don’t simply study our interlocutors, we study with them?
Tim Ingold
Let me return to the start of the passage you quoted: ‘More than any
other discipline in the human sciences . . .’ That’s critical. It returns us
to something we discussed earlier. If we were to compare anthropology
with other disciplines that work in one way or another with human
subjects, anthropology is the only one, I believe, which actually listens
to what people say or do in its own right, rather than simply treating
it as data. We listen to what people tell us, rather than for what it tells
us about them. In my little book Anthropology: Why It Matters, I have
called this ‘taking others seriously’. Other disciplines, even in the
humanities and social sciences, are not really doing that. It’s because
we take people seriously that the knowledge coming out of our work
grows, and is grown, from these conversations. That’s what I mean by
‘the crucible of lives lived with others’. If we go to study with other
people, it is because they have wisdom and experience from which
we could potentially learn; it might help us all, collectively, in our future
endeavours. That’s why we do anthropology, in my view.
Diego Maria Malara
OK, so here’s a very basic question,Tim. What does anthropology
offer to an 18-year-old student today?
Tim Ingold
I think it offers the possibility to reflect seriously on the big questions
of how to live in a way that engages with real life. If I were an
8 See Ingold (2014a: 387).
94 Conversations with Tim Ingold
18-year-old today, I would be intensely worried about the state of
the world. I’d be worrying about climate change, about the environ-
ment, about authoritarian regimes, about violence, about the military,
about poverty. I’d have hundreds of things to be desperately worried
about. I would not be so naïve as to suppose that there’s any one
discipline out there that can provide all the answers, but I would
want to find some space in which it is possible to think and to reflect
seriously on all these issues in a way that is rigorous and informed
and, most importantly, in touch with people’s lives. If you were to
review all the possible disciplines in which to study, I think you would
find that anthropology is the only discipline that offers such a space.
So that’s what I would say to the 18-year-old. Disciplines like philos-
ophy, politics and economics have different priorities. Anthropology,
I think, is the most exciting and intellectually challenging, precisely
because of the wealth of human experience it embraces.
Robert Gibb
And is that, do you think, what would distinguish anthropology from,
say, sociology?
Tim Ingold
That’s a tricky question, as you know, because sociology itself is so
riven. You’re caught between the data crunchers, the positivists, who
in many ways still rule the roost, and the arch-theorists who consider
themselves above such things. It has always seemed to me that the
recent history of sociology is almost entirely bound up with positivism
and what to do about it. You are either for it or against it. And
whichever side you take, sociology continues to carve out the domain
of the social from everything else in ways that I find extremely
problematic. Anthropology doesn’t do that. The thing about anthro-
pology, as we’ve always said, is that it doesn’t concentrate on any
particular slice of human life. Sociology deals with society; theology
with religion; economics with the economy; politics with the state.
Anthropology, ethnography, education and the university
95
But anthropology deals with the whole lot. It starts with humanity
unsliced. And that, I think, is one of its great virtues.
(E) THE ‘RECLAIMING OUR UNIVERSITY’
MOVEMENT
Robert Gibb
Our final questions today are about the ‘Reclaiming Our University’
movement at the University of Aberdeen. How did you become
involved with this and what do you think some of the effects of the
movement, notably its manifesto, have been, both at the University
of Aberdeen itself and more widely?
Tim Ingold
Well, that’s a long story, but what happened was that the University
was going through a crisis. We had a failing management; morale
was very low; and there were cuts or threatened cuts everywhere.
This was in 2015. Things were getting really bad and colleagues,
both from my own Department and from other parts of the
University, kept coming to me and saying: ‘Tim, what are you going
to do about this?’ I thought: ‘Why are they coming to me?’ I think
it was because I was considered bulletproof. Colleagues at that time
were genuinely worried that if they raised their voices in any sort of
criticism, they would end up being eased out of their jobs, as indeed
happened in many cases. So, they were too nervous to speak out.
But they thought I could, because I was senior and there would have
been a scandal if they had tried to kick me out.
I had a lot of meetings over the summer of 2015, in coffee shops,
which would often end with the words ‘This meeting never took
place!’ In a way it was quite exciting cloak-and-dagger stuff, which
was new to me.We decided to do things in the traditional way. I had
96 Conversations with Tim Ingold
posters printed and we stuck them on lampposts and walls around
the campus. It was a race to get them up before the authorities
pulled them down. We convened a meeting out of hours, in a church
hall just off the campus, to discuss three questions: ‘What kind of
university do we want?’, ‘How should it operate?’ and ‘How should
we achieve it?’ Two hundred people turned up, including some from
management, who stood at the back, taking names. Then we
discussed the problem of what to do next. We decided to arrange
a series of seminars which would be open to all: students, staff,
everyone. These focused on what we saw as the four pillars of the
university: freedom, trust, education and community. They were lively
events, and they culminated in the production of our manifesto,
launched in November 2016. By summer of 2017 our Principal, Ian
Diamond, was out and we got an entirely new management team,
which professed to be enthusiastic about the manifesto and
committed to its principles.It’s been doing reasonably well within
the limits of what is possible, especially given the difficult situation
all universities are in just now. Eventually, the Reclaiming Our
University movement in Aberdeen was disbanded, on the grounds
that it had fulfilled its purpose. We won the battle, though perhaps
not the war.
What we proved was that this sort of thing is possible, but only if it
is done from the ground up; it has to be a local movement. Similar
movements have been underway in many other universities, with
differing degrees of success. It sometimes feels like turning an oil
tanker, but I think it’s the only way to revive our universities for
generations to come. It could be that the current crisis, the ongoing
pandemic, will hasten some sort of change.But the situation across
the university sector is generally dire, especially in England, where
universities are hugely in debt, or have built prestigious buildings on
which they will have to pay interest. They will end up either going
bankrupt or having to lay off staff in order to pay for empty build-
ings. The situation is manifestly unsustainable.But you do find much
more open public questioning of the marketisation agenda than
even as little as two or three years ago. And that’s a hopeful sign.
Anthropology, ethnography, education and the university
97
Robert Gibb
What struck me about what you said is the importance of a
bottom-up movement, but also one in which professors like you are
involved. People are very scared, aren’t they?
Tim Ingold
People are indeed scared, and they have good reason to be so. I
was even a little scared myself. These were tense times. I am aston-
ished by how many people in my position, either retired, close to
retirement, senior or well established, are not doing anything. They’re
sitting in high places, having learned discussions, meeting with
important people, sitting on committees, giving each other honours.
But they’re doing absolutely nothing. It’s really depressing, the lack
of leadership from my level. I find it sad. These people are perfectly
well aware of the problems of precarity, of how difficult it is for the
younger generation of scholars. Do they do anything about it? No,
because they can rest on their laurels. I get very angry about this.
Diego Maria Malara
What do you think are the biggest institutional obstacles to over-
coming the problems we’ve been talking about?
Tim Ingold
It’s really difficult.The thing is that many people have lost sight of
what universities are for. In a way, that’s the biggest obstacle. The
purpose of universities is not to cultivate a meritocratic and cosmo-
politan elite, or to reproduce the global knowledge economy, or to
support business, or to make Britain more productive.There is no
well-formulated alternative because we currently lack a proper idea
of what the purpose of education is, in relation to creating a future
98 Conversations with Tim Ingold
for coming generations. I think that’s the problem. You cannot have
institutional change unless you’re crystal-clear about what it’s
changing to, and why.
We need to define the meaning and purpose of higher education
in the contemporary world, so as to offer a coherent and convincing
alternative to the neoliberal business model.This means putting the
emphasis, just as Dewey did in his 1916 masterpiece, Democracy and
Education, on the importance of an educated citizenship for democ-
racy. We made the same point in the first paragraphs of our
manifesto. You cannot have a mature democracy without educated
citizens. Educating citizens is an intergenerational necessity. It is a
collective, moral and ethical task, from which everyone should stand
to benefit, not just a meritocratic few. These things need to be
clearly formulated. Only then can we chart a way forward. Rather
than destroying the institutions we have, or allowing them to destroy
themselves by going bankrupt, we can instead steer them in a direc-
tion which offers hope for the future.
The changes required are enormous. They have a lot to do, for
example, with relationships between universities and the communi-
ties or regions in which they are situated. With the current emphasis
on international rankings, the ways universities can be of service to
their communities and regions have been all but ignored. They are
accorded little value, beyond local marketing campaigns. This needs
to be reversed. We have to start thinking about universities in rather
the same way that we think about public libraries, as places where
anyone can go for any period, and at any time of life, to enhance
their knowledge or wisdom in some area that matters to them. We
have to rethink the purpose of university education and scholarship
in terms of their contribution to the common good.
There is, however, one major obstacle which we encountered with
the Reclaiming movement, and it is still there. That obstacle is what
we could call ‘big science’.I don’t mean all scientists. I mean the kind
of science that depends on massive investments and huge infra-
structure projects, for example the Large Hadron Collider, or the
Anthropology, ethnography, education and the university
99
aerospace facilities for sending rockets to the moon. This kind of big
science not only has a blinkered vision of the future, which revolves
around escaping the planet rather than inhabiting it. It is also abso-
lutely committed to, and reliant on, the business model of education,
research and development, with its obsessions with technological
innovation, artificial intelligence and so on. Big science has its hands
on the levers of power, while we in the arts, humanities and social
sciences are relegated to the scrap heap.This is a real problem. One
way to tackle it would be for those of us working in the arts, human-
ities and social sciences to be much clearer than we generally are
about the purposes and potentials of our own scholarship. We need
to show why it is so fundamental. Even science depends upon it;
indeed, I would argue that at the present juncture, we alone can save
big science from itself, from its destructive, escapist and totalitarian
instincts. We are nowhere near there yet. There’s so much to be done.
Further Reading
The first six debates organised by the GDAT were edited by
Ingold and published in 1996 under the title Key Debates in
Anthropology. His ‘General Introduction’ to the volume (Ingold
1996b) includes a discussion of the nature and role of theory in
anthropology. As noted in the interview, Ingold reflects on the
place of ‘politics’ in his work in an article, subtitled ‘towards a poli-
tics of dwelling’, published in 2005. Examples of recent work
sympathetic to Ingold’s general approach, but arguing that it pays
insufficient attention to questions of political economy, include
Hornborg (2018) and Howard (2018).
On the question of difference versus diversity, Ingold refers in the
interview to Leach’s 1967 Reith Lectures, A Runaway World?
(Leach
1967)
. Ingold offers a critical reflection on Leach’s argu-
ment in the second chapter of his Anthropology: Why It Matters
(Ingold 2018a),
Ingold lists the five books that have influenced him most in ‘A Life
100 Conversations with Tim Ingold
in Books’ (Ingold 2014a). The five are Bergson’s Creative
Evolution (1911), Gibson’s The Ecological Approach to Visual
Perception (1979), Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception
(1962), Oyama’s The Ontogeny of Information (1985) and Leroi-
Gourhan’s Gesture and Speech (1993).
On the difference between anthropology and ethnography, see,
inter alia, Ingold (2008, 2014a). For a range of different perspec-
tives on this question, see the special issue of the journal HAU
(da Col, ed. 2017) and the recent collection edited by Ahmad
(2021). On professionalisation and how it has affected the status
of ethnography, see Ingold (2021c). The relationship between
anthropology and education is explored in Ingold’s book
Anthropology and/as Education (2018a), and more recently in his
edited volume Knowing from the Inside (2022b). In his discussion
of the meaning of education, Ingold refers to the classic work of
Dewey (1966), and contemporary writing by both Biesta (2006,
2013) and Masschelein
(2010a
, 2010b). The Manifesto of the
Reclaiming Our University movement is available online at: https://
reclaimingouruniversity.wordpress.com/.
Environment, perception and skill
101
CONVERSATION 3:
Environment, perception and skill
Summary: This conversation explores some of the key ideas
and arguments Ingold developed in The Perception of the
Environment (2000), an influential collection of essays that has
stimulated much debate, not only within anthropology but also
in many other disciplines and fields of study. In the first part,
Ingold outlines his perspective on the perception of the en-
vironment and discusses some of the key concepts he has
used, notably ‘the mycelial person’, ‘landscape’, ‘taskscape’,
‘dwelling’ and ‘habitation’. He also reflects on how his work
relates to current developments in environmental debates
about sustainability and the ‘global climate crisis’. The second
and third parts of the interview focus on Ingold’s writing on
‘materiality’ and ‘skill’, respectively, and provide an accessible
and stimulating introduction to these two key themes in his
work. In this conversation Ingold also discusses at some length
how reading Marx’s work helped him develop his ideas.The
interview took place on 12 August 2021.
(A) THE PERCEPTION OF THE ENVIRONMENT
Diego Maria Malara
The Perception of the Environment is a collection of your essays
that addresses rather diverse topics, and at times it’s quite difficult
102 Conversations with Tim Ingold
to detect a unifying thread. What lay behind the book and what
were the key arguments you made in it?
Tim Ingold
Maybe the first thing to say is that originally The Perception of the
Environment was intended to be three separate books. I collected
all these essays and I thought: ‘There’s going to be a book about
livelihood, mostly about hunting and gathering; and then there’ll be
a book about perceiving environments and landscapes; and then
there’ll be a book about technology and skill.’ The publisher very
sensibly persuaded me to put them all together in one. They said
that if I published three books, they would end up competing with
one another. Prospective readers would buy just one, and ignore
the other two. It would be much better to publish them all between
two covers. But perhaps that’s also why, as you say, it’s quite hard
to find a unifying thread that links them all. In a sense, there’s a
thread for each of the parts of the book, but they are still to some
extent separate from one another. That is just because of the way
the whole thing was assembled.
Behind the book was my dissatisfaction with a number of approaches
coming from biology, psychology and philosophy. Though they
arrived by various routes, all are ultimately traceable to Kant or
Descartes. Common to them all was the idea that human beings on
the one hand, and their environments on the other, can be treated
as separate entities which would then interact. I wanted to construct
an alternative to the dominant synthesis formed of Cartesian philos-
ophy, cognitive science, neo-Darwinian biology and the rather
orthodox kind of cultural theory that was still prevalent in anthro-
pology. That was the dominant synthesis at the time.
What all those approaches had in common was the a priori separa-
tion of the individual human being, as a living, thinking subject, from
the environment in which it lives. It seemed to me that it is an exis-
tential condition of life for a being to inhabit a world, and I wanted
Environment, perception and skill
103
to develop an alternative that would unite phenomenology – which
starts from this assumption of being-in-the-world – with develop-
mental biology, ecological psychology and a relational approach in
anthropology. I thought that if I could put these together, I could
then build a much better synthesis than the dominant one consisting
of cognitivism, neo-Darwinism and so forth. That’s really what I was
trying to do.
So far as the social sciences are concerned, I have always felt them
to be somewhat marginal to the whole enterprise, and in a way I still
do. Of course, that’s a little unfair – you can’t tar all the social
sciences with the same brush; but the thing that makes anthropology
distinct for me is that it has not sliced up human life into different
levels, as if to say ‘here’s the sociological level; here’s the psycho-
logical level; here’s the biological level.’ For me, the point of an
anthropological approach is to refute this idea of different levels. If
we’re to talk about human existence, then you have to regard it as
all-in-one. The problem I still see with the social sciences is that
they presuppose the existence of a distinct domain, which you could
call ‘the social’, and which social scientists profess to study, as against
domains of other kinds: linguistic, biological, psychological and so
forth.
I don’t know whether there’s a path to redemption for the social
sciences. If you look at their history, it seems that much of it turns
around the debate over positivism, the great debate about whether
or not there can be such a thing as a science of society. There’s a
whole range of views, on a spectrum from strongly for positivism to
strongly against it. Sociologists are still so mired in this debate; it’s
hard for them to move on from it. But anthropology, I think, has
largely sidestepped the issue, to its great advantage.
Philip Tonner
You explore a notion of the ‘mycelial person’ in your work, and you
relate this not only to comparing the person to the fungal mycelium,
104 Conversations with Tim Ingold
as a bundle of lines or relations along which life is lived; you also
connect this idea to the disciplines of anthropology and to the
biological sciences, in terms of its potential for subversion. When
did you start to formulate these ideas and where do you stand in
relation to them now? And do you perceive any connection in your
thinking here to what has been called either ‘postmodern’ or ‘post-
structuralist’ theory?
Tim Ingold
Well, the image of the mycelium, as you know, goes back to my
childhood and as the son of a mycologist, I was bound to draw on
it. It always struck me that mycology is a subversive discipline within
the context of the botanical sciences, because fungi just don’t
behave in the way that organisms are supposed to behave. It seems
to me that anthropologists, who tend to take a very relational view
of things, are subversive of the mainstream social sciences in much
the same way.
I first formulated the idea of the mycelial person sometime in the
mid-1990s. It kind of grew on me. Then I started thinking about lines.
Obviously, if you’re thinking about people as bundles of lines, the
mycelial image fits rather well. Then I noticed that Gilles Deleuze
and Félix Guattari, in their sprawling meditation A Thousand Plateaus,
were drawing on the image of the rhizome, and they were using it
to mean pretty much the same thing. I prefer the mycelium, as I
think it’s botanically more accurate. So, where they talk about rhizo-
matic thinking, I talk about mycelial thinking, but we’re basically on
the same page.
I don’t really relate my thinking to postmodernism. Though it was all
the rage when the whole modernist thing began to collapse, I think
it has virtually run out of steam by now. The whole point about post-
modernism was that it wasn’t anything in particular; it was just a kind
of licence to try out anything you want. Some experiments were silly,
and some weren’t, but nearly all were self-indulgent and, thankfully,
Environment, perception and skill
105
I think we’ve moved beyond them. Not many nowadays would want
to stand up and identify themselves as ‘postmodern’. They might
even feel a little embarrassed to do so. They might call themselves
poststructuralists, and if they were identifying poststructuralism with
a basically Deleuzean, neo-vitalist, neo-animist cast of thought, then
I’m in the same ballpark, so to speak. I always go back to Bergson,
whose ideas are centrally implicated in all of this. I’m quite attracted
to the idea of bringing a kind of vitalism back into our thinking. If
you call that poststructuralism, then I guess I’m in! But some thirty
years have passed between the early days of poststructuralism and
the present. The truth is that I don’t find this labelling of currents of
thinking particularly helpful. I just think about what I do, and never
mind what school of thought, if any, it belongs to.
Diego Maria Malara
Your essay of 1993, ‘The Temporality of the Landscape’, which is
rightfully considered one of your most influential, suggests an alter-
native to the dualistic perspectives that populate academic
cosmologies. Could you explain your main argument with reference
to the concept of landscape, the dwelling perspective and the tasks-
cape?
Tim Ingold
I first wrote that paper during 1992, at what was personally a difficult
time. I was going through a period of rather deep depression, which
made it extremely hard to write.
Archaeologists, of course, had always been talking about landscape,
and it had long been a central concept in art history and human
geography as well. Up until then, however, it had figured rather little
in anthropology. But around that time, in the early 1990s, several
anthropologists began to pick up on the idea, and to think about
what a specifically anthropological approach to landscape might be.
106 Conversations with Tim Ingold
A flurry of articles and books on landscape followed, and I needed
to sit down with them to work out a view of my own. The reason I
needed to do so was that I had been preoccupied, until then, with
the concept of environment, while also teaching a course in the field
of ecological anthropology, in which the concept is pivotal. The
problem for me – the question I was asking myself – was: what, if
anything, is the difference between what I mean by environment and
what others are calling landscape? Are we talking about the same
thing, but just using different terms, or is there some fundamental
difference between the two, between environment and landscape?
Initially, since the concept of environment had come out of ecology,
it seemed to be biased towards a natural science perspective,
whereas the concept of landscape, having been appropriated by the
art historians, implied a perspective that came more from the
humanities. For me, the question was: how can we get beyond this
division between the natural sciences and the humanities? Could
we find a place where the two perspectives would converge?
Could we find a way of talking about our surroundings that would
not be split between humanistic and scientific approaches? That
was the challenge. In line with how I was thinking at the time, I
decided that the way to address this was to think processually – to
imagine a world not as if it were already laid out for us to perceive,
to value aesthetically, perhaps to analyse and write about, but as
perpetually coming into being around us. If you think in this way,
then the question of time must obviously come into it. Whatever it
is – landscape or environment or whatever else you want to call it
– time must somehow enter into its constitution. I invented the
concept of taskscape initially to deal with this. Ultimately, however,
I wanted to show that if landscape itself is understood as a tem-
porally unfolding phenomenon, then landscape and taskscape are
one, and we no longer have need of a separate concept of taskscape
at all. I introduced the concept, in short, precisely in order to get rid
of it. That, anyway, was the general idea.
Around the year 1990, I was presenting one part of the introductory
course in social anthropology to first-year undergraduate students
Environment, perception and skill
107
at the University of Manchester. I wanted to convey to these
students, who were encountering anthropology for the first time,
what it means to study social life. I found a wonderful painting by
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, ‘The Fight between Carnival and Lent’
(1559), which shows a market scene in sixteenth-century Flanders.
The scene is packed with people doing all manner of things. I
projected a slide of this picture and announced: ‘Look, that is social
life! All these people, they’re all doing things: there are people buying
and selling, there’s a troop performing a play, there’s a couple copu-
lating, there’s somebody begging. All sorts of stuff is going on.’ But
the painting is not of a landscape, at least in the conventional sense.
What, then, is it a painting of? ‘It’s a painting of a taskscape,’ I said,
‘because there are all these people doing things. They’ve all got
their different tasks, but they are carried on not in isolation but in
relation to one another.’ It had dawned on me that this is the way
to explain to students what we are studying, when we say we study
social life. We study the taskscape.
But then I switched my attention to another of Bruegel’s paintings,
‘The Harvesters’ (1565). It is one of a series of paintings that Bruegel
made for each month of the year, many of which are now lost. ‘The
Harvesters’ is for the month of August. It’s one of my favourite
paintings, and a reproduction of the original, now housed in New
York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, hangs on my study wall. Here
in this painting is much more of what we would conventionally call
landscape, with hills and valleys, trees and fields, a scattering of
buildings and a distant shore. It is a rural scene, with only a few
people.
The two paintings, ‘The Harvesters’ and ‘The Fight between
Carnival and Lent’, were painted only a few years apart. Let’s
compare them. One I have called a landscape; the other a task-
scape. But why? What’s the difference? Only that the latter is
crowded with people doing things, while the former is mostly
scenery. But if we place both into the current of time, we realise
that the lives and activities of the people are nested within the
lives of trees and buildings, which are nested within the lives of
108 Conversations with Tim Ingold
hills, and so on. Temporally, everything is nested within everything
else. Once this is acknowledged, we can bring these two ideas
together, of landscape and taskscape, to find a holistic way of
talking about the process.
The issue was: how we can we think of not just human beings, but
everything else as well, as part of such a process, which we can
follow only by taking up a position from the inside of its unfolding?
That’s where the dwelling perspective came in. It is the perspec-
tive I adopted as I imagined myself standing inside the scene
which Bruegel had painted in ‘The Harvesters’. Let’s imagine we’re
there, along with the harvesters working their scythes, or eating
together, or asleep under the tree. We’re there, and the harvesting
is going on all around us. What would it feel like, and what would
we see?
The art historians were horrified. ‘You are not supposed to do that!’
they said. ‘You are supposed to be analysing the painting, not putting
yourself inside it.’ But that’s where this idea of the dwelling perspec-
tive came from. It developed from there. Particularly in archaeology,
however, the notion of taskscape, along with the dwelling perspec-
tive, was picked up rather uncritically as a conceptual tool that could
be ‘used’. It gained a life of its own, in studies of the reconstructed
‘taskscape’ of this, that and the other prehistoric site. Most of these
studies unfortunately missed the point, namely, that the reason for
introducing the concept of taskscape was to show how, in the end,
we don’t need it.
Philip Tonner
You have recently indicated that you might prefer the term ‘habi-
tation’, to draw out the implications of the position that you have
been developing. Adopting this term would mark a departure from
the term ‘dwelling’. So my question is: what’s in a name – dwelling
or habitation?
Environment, perception and skill
109
Tim Ingold
The trouble with dwelling lay in its association with the writings of
Martin Heidegger, although I actually settled on the term some time
before I read Heidegger’s famous essay of 1954, ‘Building, Dwelling,
Thinking’. But, anyway, for many critics, when they see a word like
dwelling, an image of Heidegger immediately comes to mind, and
with it a plethora of Heideggerian associations. Some of these asso-
ciations are fine, and some are inspiring, but many are not. The ones
that are not are where dwelling gets coupled with the idea of
Lebensraum, space for living, the space you’ve cleared out in the
forest. To dwell then becomes a very local thing: here you are sitting
cosily by the fire in your peasant cottage, surrounded by your fields,
with the trees around marking the horizon – an enclosed life space.
There are so many problematic things about this, and not only
because of the way Lebensraum was adopted as a keyword in Nazi
propaganda. For my part, I wanted to emphasise that it is precisely
not by staying in one place that people dwell in the world. They
dwell by moving around.
It was partly a strategic choice. I had been using this word ‘dwelling’,
and thought I knew what I meant by it. But others would read all
these Heideggerian overtones into it, leading to what I felt was
unwarranted criticism. I was being criticised for ‘Heideggerisms’
that I never intended. To deal with this, I thought, I had better adopt
a more neutral word. So I switched to habitation. This turned out
to be a profitable move, however, because I soon discovered that
the word ‘habit’, or ‘to inhabit’, opened up all sorts of new perspec-
tives that I hadn’t really thought about before, and which I’m still
exploring now. There’s a lot of really interesting writing about habit,
beyond the reductionist view of it as something you do automatic-
ally, without thinking. For me, habit is primarily about the way in
which one inhabits a world. The term has connotations of customary
use, of dress and of care. It’s such a tremendously interesting and
productive concept that in retrospect, I’m rather glad to have taken
it on board.
110 Conversations with Tim Ingold
Philip Tonner
Given this terminological shift, how should we remain sensitive to
what you have described as a ‘poetics of dwelling’, both in our lives
and in our works?
Tim Ingold
What I mean by a ‘poetics of dwelling’ is that we are perpetually
making a world through our activities. We make this world, however,
from within our involvement in it. That’s what ‘poetics’ says to me.
It comes from poiésis, making, and tells me that whatever we are
making, whether it be artefacts or knowledge, or other people, or
history, or all these things, it is carried on from within the world that
we inhabit. And this applies to science too. I’m not in principle
anti-science, but I do insist that we could do much better science
if we could only understand that science itself is a fundamentally
poetic endeavour. The problem I see with scientists is that they
insistently deny this, at least in their rhetoric and in their public
pronouncements. They want to believe that scientific knowledge is
completely independent of our habitation of the world, and that it
is on precisely this independence (framed as ‘objectivity’) that its
authority rests. This seems to me to be an incoherent position, which
weakens science rather than strengthens it. I think our ways of
knowing, scientific or not, could be made more honest and ethical,
if their poetics was built into them from the start and regarded not
as a problem or a weakness, but as a source of strength and indeed
power.
Diego Maria Malara
You have equated the perception of the landscape to an act of
remembrance, clarifying that remembering is not so much a matter of
calling up an internal image stored in the mind, but more a matter
of engaging perceptually with an environment that is itself pregnant
Environment, perception and skill
111
with the past. How did you come to this realisation and what
approaches were you pushing back against?
Tim Ingold
I don’t remember exactly what triggered this, but what I do
remember is reading a brilliant article, which summed it all up for
me. It’s by a psychologist called David Rubin. I know nothing about
him or about what else he has written, but a short essay of his
happened to be included in an edited volume on the psychology
of memory, edited by Ulrich Neisser and Eugene Winograd,
published in 1988. Rubin’s essay was called ‘Go for the Skill’.In
it he says there are two ways in which you can approach just
about anything. One way is what he calls ‘a complex structure,
simple process model’, and the other is a ‘complex process, simple
structure model’. The ‘complex structure, simple process model’,
which Rubin is criticising in his essay, has long been the dominant
one in cognitive psychology. This says that what we have in the
mind, in our cognitions, are exceedingly complicated structures,
but that the action that follows from these cognitions is entirely
straightforward. Speaking of memory, the idea is that to do
anything from memory means acting out a structure recalled from
the store in your head – a structure already implanted there,
perhaps from the previous generation, through some mechanism
of transmission.
You could compare this to playing a piece of pre-recorded music.
Suppose it has been recorded on vinyl, for an old-fashioned gramo-
phone. It might be a symphony, an exceedingly complicated piece
of work, and on the groove of the record it is captured in an incred-
ibly complex line, which the needle follows when the record rotates.
However, the mechanism of the record player, which translates the
vibration of the needle into an auditory signal, is relatively simple
– it’s straightforward mechanics. So that would be a ‘complex struc-
ture, simple process’ model. But in the live performance of the
symphony by an orchestra, the situation is entirely different. There’s
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an incredibly complicated process, out of which the music emerges,
but for which there are relatively few structural prerequisites. The
difference between the recorded music on the record player and
the actual performance by a symphony orchestra is equivalent to
the difference between the two models.
Now, of course, the instrumentalists of the symphony orchestra are
remembering how to play the piece, even as they play it. They might
even play from memory, but the remembering is done in the perform-
ance. It’s not as if they first go inside their heads to retrieve the
structure, and then simply act it out. That was Rubin’s point. It is
such an elegant contrast, and sums it all up. Out of this comes an
idea, which goes back to the psychology of Frederic Bartlett, back
in the 1930s, that we should start not with memory, but with remem-
bering. Instead of saying there are structures of memory, and that
when we remember something, we access the structure, and then
write it out; we say there are processes of remembering. This is to
say that remembering is itself an environmentally situated and inten-
tional activity, something we do in the world. Whatever we’ve
remembered, or whatever we claim to remember, emerges out of
that activity. The music is not pulled out from a storehouse; it’s not
retrieved ready-made from the attic. It’s continually recreated in
performance. The act of performance, in giving birth to the music,
is itself the act of remembering. It’s a way of keeping the thing alive.
It’s a life process.
That’s what I was trying to get at. What I was pushing against, just
like Rubin in the essay I mentioned, is the cognitivist approach that
always wants to put as much structure as possible into the mind,
right from the start. The alternative strategy would be to say, ‘Let’s
see how far we can get by having as little structure in the mind as
possible.’ If we find we can’t do it all, then we’ll put a bit of structure
in there. But instead of assuming a priori that all the structure is in
the mind, let’s assume that none of it is, and see how far we can
get.
Environment, perception and skill
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Diego Maria Malara
In 2016, ‘The Temporality of the Landscape’ was at the centre of a
polite, but rather lively debate published in the pages of the
Norwegian Archaeological Review, and stemming from an extended
revisitation of your piece by archaeologist and curator Dan Hicks. If
I read your reply correctly, one of the main problems you saw with
Hicks’s critique is that he sidelines your main arguments. What, in
your view, is at stake in this debate?
Tim Ingold
I don’t really have any major disagreements with Dan. It’s just that he
is basically a curator, and he starts from there. He is keen to promote
what he calls an ‘archival turn’. He is concerned with what we do with
objects from the past, and with how practices of archiving and
curation can contribute to the growth of archaeological knowledge.
I have no problem with this, but it is not what my essay was about.
My concern, in writing ‘The Temporality of the Landscape’, was rather
to understand the processes through which the world we inhabit
comes into being. Thus, we were really just starting from different
ends. If Dan missed the point of what I was trying to do with the
essay, it is because he read it from the wrong end. He was already
looking at the landscape from his curatorial perspective, and thinking
about what archaeologists do when they’ve excavated a site, when
they’ve interpreted the objects discovered there, and when they’re
in a position to start telling a story about this landscape and how it
was formed. These are all genuine problems, which museum curators
routinely face in dealing with their material. But they are not the
problems I set out to address in my essay. I wasn’t thinking about
what archaeologists do with all the stuff they’ve dug up, how they
display things in museums, how they write accounts, reports, records
and so forth. I was at the other end, trying to think about what it
means to live in a landscape that is always on the point of coming
into being.
114 Conversations with Tim Ingold
I guess the lesson of the exchange is that scholars read things
differently, and that where they’re coming from depends very much
on the sorts of practical, day-to-day problems on their minds. I had
one set of problems, concerning the temporality of the landscape,
Dan had another, concerning the temporality of remains in the land-
scape. This is entirely reasonable and legitimate. His blunder, however
– and it was a blunder – was to have confused the two.
Philip Tonner
You’ve written about parallels between growing artefacts and
growing children. Interestingly, both involve education. Can you
reflect on these parallels in connection with your recent work on
education, and can you indicate how you’re thinking about growth
and related matters in relation to your earlier concept of the task-
scape?
Tim Ingold
To start from your last question, the point is that with the taskscape
I was thinking about what happens when you take what people are
doing in an environment as your point of departure. It’s through
doing things that people grow and are grown. Suppose you are an
anthropologist and you land up in some community, and you ask
people when you meet them: ‘What are you making?’ Alternatively,
you could ask: ‘What are you doing?’ I think you’d probably get
different kinds of answers to these two questions. If you ask ‘What
are you making?’, then probably the answer will be ‘I’m making a
basket’ or ‘I’m making a pot’ or ‘I’m making dinner’. The answer will
be in terms of some sort of end-product, some objective that the
person has in mind at that moment. But if you ask ‘What are you
doing?’, then you will likely get an answer in terms of a task that is
still underway. The emphasis is on the process, on the task, not on
the object that might be produced through carrying out that task.
Naturally, the taskscape leads immediately to the idea of ‘doing’
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rather than ‘making’, and doing then leads, naturally, to growing
things, which is the process: the process by which things come into
being, rather than the final end product.
What I’ve been attempting all the way through, I think, is to reverse
the priority of ‘making’ over ‘growing’, or ‘making’ over ‘doing’. For
me, the ‘doing’ or ‘growing’, rather than the ‘making’, comes first.
This reversal is there in the way in which I have been talking about
artefacts and children, but it’s also at the back of my rethinking of
education, where I argue that the point of education is not to produce
children in a certain mould, with a certain destiny, and with their
potential realised, but rather to make it possible for children to grow
– thinking of growth, here, not as a movement from a start point to
an end point, but as a movement of continuous birth, of ongoing
maturation. It’s not a question of one or the other – of choosing
between ‘making’ and ‘doing’, or between ‘building’ and ‘dwelling’.
It’s a question of which comes first; to which do we grant onto-
logical priority? Let us give priority to ‘doing’ and ‘growing’ over
‘making’ and ‘building’. What then happens if we introduce this
reversal of priority into the way we think about education? We’re
always hearing about students’ grades, as if in the end these were
all that mattered. Kids are of course pleased to have good grades;
it gives them an entry ticket to a career, and all the rest of it. But
what has happened to education, when the point of it is simply to
come out at the other end with your grades? Is it not also important
that your mind was actually expanded along the way, that you could
learn things, notice things you didn’t notice before? None of that
seems to matter once you’ve got your grades. I believe it is imper-
ative that we get our priorities sorted out, because as things stand
at the moment, they are seriously distorted.
Philip Tonner
You have written about a genuinely anthropocentric and spherical,
as opposed to a global, approach to environmental thinking.
Can you explain what you mean by this and relate it to current
116 Conversations with Tim Ingold
developments and debates about environmental sustainability and
the global climate crisis?
Tim Ingold
Yes, I have been concerned about the misuse of the term ‘anthro-
pocentrism’. I think we’ve got ourselves into a terrible muddle over
this particular concept. Most people who would sign up to the green
agenda, as indeed I would, tend to say that we need to get beyond
anthropocentrism, which is responsible for so many bad things, for
environmental destruction and consequent climate change. By
anthropocentrism, they seem to mean a way of thinking which puts
humans on top, over and above everything else, as though the planet
were simply theirs to possess and exploit for their own ends. Fair
enough; this attitude is harmful. Yet these same people – many of
them academics – who say we need to get beyond anthropocentrism
also argue for a more body-centred approach. We need to recentre
our way of life, they say, by putting sensuous, bodily existence at
the heart of things.
But how on earth can you say, on the one hand, that we should
place the human body and its experience at the centre, and on the
other hand, that anthropocentrism is bad? It doesn’t make any kind
of sense to say that you are overcoming anthropocentrism by placing
the human body at the centre of everything. In fact, the view that
humans are somehow in possession of the world doesn’t put them
at the centre of it at all; it puts them either at the apex of a pyramid
with the rest of the world at its feet, or outside the world altogether.
Humans, in this view, live all around on the outside of the world.
From there, they have colonised it and taken possession of it. But
that’s the very opposite of being at the centre. Literally, it is
‘anthropo-circumferentialism’!
It’s high time to sort this out. First, we should detoxify the idea of
anthropocentrism, so as to enable us to say that putting our human
selves at the centre of the world is absolutely right and proper, and
Environment, perception and skill
117
moreover ethically necessary if we are to take any kind of respon-
sibility for what goes on in it. How can we claim to be ethically
responsible for what is going on in the world, and yet object to
anthropocentrism? Then we should find a way of thinking about
environmental sustainability which doesn’t demonise humans. It
doesn’t help to blame humans for everything and demand that they
should be excluded from the equation; that we should aspire to an
environment that is human-free. This would not only be a betrayal
of coming human generations; it would also reinforce the very exte-
riorisation of humans from the environment which caused the
problem in the first place. Rather, we need a way of thinking about
environmental relations that allows humans to be there, in the midst
of things. Only if they’re in the midst, able to experience things
directly and to develop a sensitivity towards them, can they assume
responsibility for what goes on there.
It is the Bezoses and Bransons of this world – these guys who believe
that having messed up our own planet, the future lies in taking off
into outer space and finding other planets to live on – who are the
real culprits. They would rather shoot off from the surface of the
earth than stay on the ground and make themselves at home on it.
(B) MATERIALITY
Diego Maria Malara
In your article from 2007, ‘Materials against materiality’, you suggest
that while we speak increasingly about materiality in anthropological
circles, our discussions are, paradoxically, becoming more and more
abstract and removed from the tangible properties of materials and
their concrete affordances. Why do you think that materiality as
opposed to materials has become central to anthropological
debates? And how do you think these debates should be re-
oriented?
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Tim Ingold
There are indeed multiple paradoxes here. We have a wealth of
literature on the new materialism, much of it expressed in the most
obscure, abstract and self-referential of terms, which nevertheless
exhorts us to engage with real stuff. If only the materialists would
practise what they preach, and get closer to materials themselves,
they might write in a language that doesn’t consistently shy away
from them. But they don’t. There’s a famous story about Sir James
Frazer1, who, when asked whether he had ever met any of the
‘savages’ he wrote about at such length, replied: ‘Heaven forbid that
I should have such misfortune.’ It’s a bit the same, I think, with many
of these theorists of materiality. If you ask them: ‘Well, have you
ever sawn a plank or done anything else useful with your hands?’,
they’d say: ‘For God’s sake, I am a scholar! I work at a laptop, don’t
put me in front of these crazy materials, I wouldn’t know where to
start.’ You would expect any self-respecting anthropologist to say:
‘Well, if we’re going to understand materials, it would be a good idea
to get our hands dirty and work with them and get to know them,
in much the same way as any DIY enthusiast, builder or joiner would
do – it would be worthwhile experience from which we could learn.’
I still feel this paradox. It hasn’t gone away, for the simple reason that
it is intrinsic to academia. Compared with scholars of many other
disciplines, anthropologists aren’t too bad. We do tend to keep our
feet on the ground, for obvious reasons, but if you visit the literature
in human geography, or in some areas of philosophy, art history, or
science and technology studies, it’s completely ridiculous: you can’t
talk about anything without it being cast as one or another kind of
materiality! I have called it the ‘concretisation of hyper-abstraction’:
you start with the concrete stuff and say: ‘Right, that’s matter’; then
you say, ‘and matter is material’ – and that’s a bit more abstract; but
then you turn ‘material’ into an even more abstract noun, ‘materiality’.
Next thing you know, the different kinds of stuff you started with
1 Sir James Frazer (1854–1941), prominent evolutionary anthropologist and folk-
lorist, author of The Golden Bough (1890).
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119
reappear as ‘multiple materialities’. Instead of wood, you have the
materiality of wood; instead of brick, the materiality of brick! This is
academic snobbery, pure and simple, dressed up as scholarship. The
simple carpenter or bricklayer speaks merely of wood and brick; but
look at us: we can speak of the materiality of wood and the materiality
of brick! This is to lift the tenor of our discourse onto an altogether
higher intellectual plane. I once asked an archaeologist who was
working on mud-brick houses in Ancient Egypt how she would distin-
guish the materiality of mud from the mud itself. She hadn’t a clue!
So let’s get back to the stuff itself. In part, this is no more than a
protest against scholastic gobbledygook, of which there’s a vast
amount; trying to make something look deeper, more scholarly, more
sophisticated theoretically than it really is by dressing it up in fancy
language that turns out to be completely redundant. Behind the
words, there’s nothing more than what you started with.
That’s part of it. But my essay ‘Materials against materiality’ came
out a few years before the new materialism really took off. It is a
label that covers all sorts of different approaches, not all of which
are compatible with one another. But the one thing these approaches
have in common is a commitment to take materials seriously, and
that was also the plea at the core of my essay. Until then the study
of material culture was focused almost exclusively on objects – on
how objects are used and consumed rather than produced or made.
Materials were left in the dark. So, there’s been a welcome shift of
emphasis from objects to materials, and maybe my essay played a
small part in bringing this about.
But at the time I wrote it, the problem was that the concept of
materiality was being used in a way that reproduced and reinforced
the old dichotomy between humanity and nature. The concept of
humanity itself had become duplicitous, referring at one moment
to humans in the raw, so to speak – that is, as a biological species,
on a par with other species in nature – and at the next moment, to
a condition of being – the ‘human condition’ – which was held to lie
over and above the natural world. It seemed to me that the same
120 Conversations with Tim Ingold
thing had happened to materiality: there was something called ‘raw
materiality’, which is the stuff in itself, and then there was materiality
in its other sense, referring to its incorporation into particular human
projects. So the term was being used in this duplicitous way: at one
moment, for the raw stuff and, at another moment, to its humani-
sation. And this merely reproduced the division between humanity
and nature that I was determined to dissolve.
Diego Maria Malara
Responding to ‘Materials against materiality’, Christopher Tilley
(2007) finds your fundamental distinction between materiality and
materials unhelpful. He suggests that we need the concept of materi-
ality in order to account for how brute materials become important
for specific groups and social relations. While recognising the impor-
tance of your emphasis on properties, Tilley argues that only a limited
number of materials and properties become significant to people
and acquire social life in relation to them. How would you respond
to this objection today? And do you think that your model can
account for Tilley’s emphasis on social entanglements?
Tim Ingold
This carries on from what I was just saying. The approach which
Chris has taken, and with him the entire school of material culture
studies centred on University College London,2 rests on the distinc-
tion between ‘brute materiality’, so called, and the way in which
specific materials become important to people or societies in their
particular, culturally and historically situated projects. The limitations
2 Along with Daniel Miller, Chris Tilley was among the founders of this School,
which is represented by its own journal, Journal of Material Culture, published
since 1996. Sadly, Chris passed away in March 2024, just as this text was in the
final stages of editing. For a tribute, see https://www.ucl.ac.uk/social-historical-
sciences/news/2024/mar/memory-professor-christopher-tilley.
Environment, perception and skill
121
of the approach, for me, lay in its insensibility towards the life or
vitality of materials. A material may have certain properties that
make it useful for some purposes but not others; but when you try
to pin down what is this stuff, this material, it turns out not to be an
object of any kind, but something living, continually moving and
transforming, to some extent of its own accord.
Take wool, for example. You might say: ‘Wool has certain properties
and, if you’re going to spin it into yarn, and use the yarn for knitting
or weaving, then some properties are more important than others,
and we can concentrate on these properties and forget about the
others.’ But then you ask yourself: ‘What about the history of wool?
This is stuff that’s grown on the backs of sheep, then it’s been
sheared, it’s been cleaned, washed, carded and combed before being
eventually spun, even before it gets into the hands of the weaver
or knitter, who will then use a variety of instruments and micro-ges-
tures to bind it together in certain ways – unless of course the wool
is used to make felt.’ If you think about all of that, then what we call
wool turns out not to beanything of which you could say, definitively:
‘Here it is; this is wool.’ It rather turns out to be a story, of growth
and transformation, in which whatever properties it may have are
ever emergent. Properties are always coming into being and
changing and being transformed through the things that are done
to the material. Wool has different characteristics on the back of
sheep than it does in a piece of felt, or in a woven blanket.
This, I thought, is what is missing from the standard material culture
approach, partly because of the latter’s greater concentration on
consumption than production. It wasn’t really looking at how things
get made, at what materials do, what their proclivities are, the ways
they mutate. If instead you focus on these processes, then the
various kinds of treatments become central rather than peripheral.
It’s a bit like what we were talking about earlier with ‘making’ and
‘growing’. It’s saying that we need to focus on the processes first,
and to realise that the material is perhaps better understood as a
verb rather than as a noun. It’s a going on; it’s things happening.
That’s what I was trying to say.
122 Conversations with Tim Ingold
As ever, it all began with teaching. I had the students in my class sit
around the room, in a circle. In the centre was a small table, on which
I had placed a stone – a particularly beautiful, rounded stone, which I
had collected from the beach near my home in Aberdeen. But before
placing the stone there, I had put it under the water tap. It was wet
all over. At the start of my class, I told the students to take a good
look at the stone. Then, at the end, I asked them to look again. ‘It’s
not the same as when we started, so what has happened?’ As soon
as you ask this question, all sorts of other questions come up: What
is the stoniness of stone? Why does it look so different, now that
it’s dried out, from when it was wet? What’s the relationship between
the stone, tapwater and atmospheric air? The students realised that
a whole lot of things had been going on, under their very noses but
without their paying any attention, even as the class was going on.
All of this requires a much more dynamic understanding of materials,
which anyone who works with them needs to know. It’s part of their
competence.
Diego Maria Malara
Tilley essentially claims that in approaching the recursive relation
between things and people you tend to ignore the ways in which
the experience of materials has profound effects on people’s lives
and their understanding of the world they live in, as well as of their
actions. Thus, he claims that you seem to analyse materials only in
terms of themselves. Do you think this aspect of the relation between
people and things is neglected in your paper?
Tim Ingold
No, I don’t. I am often accused, along these lines, of isolating things
from one another and of neglecting the social – neglecting the ways
in which things are incorporated or enrolled into human lives. I think
this accusation misses the point, which is that I am trying to find
another way of talking about how human lives and lives of other
Environment, perception and skill
123
kinds are bound up with one another. It’s not through some sort of
networking, but rather through the ways in which they ‘correspond’
(that’s the word I’ve used), the ways in which they go along together,
answer to one another, and differentiate themselves from one
another as they go.If you miss this point, then you can easily misun-
derstand the argument precisely as Tilley does. He’s still partitioning
the world between people here and things there, so as to frame
material relations as between people and things. He is so stuck in
this mindset that he doesn’t get the point.
(C) SKILL
Robert Gibb
You’ve written extensively about skill. What prompted you to start
working on this topic? What can anthropology gain from a focus on
skills? And what kind of epistemological assumptions should we
consider as decidedly outdated?
Tim Ingold
It is hard to say how it all started. I had been thinking about tech-
nology – the anthropology of technology – partly because I was
teaching a course at Manchester, in ecological anthropology, called
‘Environment and Technology’.3 I felt at the time that existing anthro-
pological approaches to technology were inadequate, in all sorts of
ways. There was an assumption that technology wasn’t really a
matter for anthropologists at all, it was just an external factor, like
climate, having nothing directly to do with social relations. If you
really wanted to understand technology, then you should talk to
engineers and not go asking anthropologists. I felt there was some-
thing wrong with this – that technology had become disembedded
3 For more on this course, see Conversation 1.
124 Conversations with Tim Ingold
from social relations in a way not dissimilar to what had happened
with the economy. Economic anthropology is founded on a critique
of the idea that the economy can be cut out from social relations
– showing that this idea has its roots in the economic history of the
western world – and I was sure the same thing could be said for
technology. I wanted to bring technology back into the fold of the
social.
In the course of doing this, of considering how we might think of
technology as a social practice, I began to worry about the distinc-
tion between technology and technique. Surely, I thought, ways of
working, which we call techniques, are not to be confused with
technology, by which we tend to mean the machines, the tools, the
equipment or perhaps a body of formal, objectified knowledge
surrounding them. But it also seemed to me that the very idea of
technique is a rather narrow refinement of the much more general
idea of skill. I suppose I wandered into an approach to skill from that
angle: starting from technology and then trying to think how we can
re-embed it within a performative and processual understanding of
social practice. This re-embedding of the technical with the social
was by no means unique to my own endeavours. It was going on
more widely in the mid-1980s. Others were thinking along the same
lines, most notably Bryan Pfaffenberger.
The question of skill, then, became quite central to my work. The
problem was how to define it. And it seemed to me that it had to
be defined not in terms of particular technical operations for doing
this or that, but as the coordination of perception and action in any
given task. On this, I drew inspiration not only from the ecological
psychology of James Gibson, to which I have often referred in our
earlier conversations, but also from other sources – most notably
the pioneering work of the Russian neurophysiologist Nicholai
Bernstein, ‘On Dexterity and its Development’. With Gibson and
Bernstein, I recognised that skill is something that can be trained
and educated, and that when we compare differences between
people of the kind that we would traditionally have called cultural,
what we’re really dealing with are differences in skill.
Environment, perception and skill
125
Through your upbringing in a particular cultural environment, you
learn to do certain things – you become skilled in certain practices.
Learning these skills is learning how to attend to things as you go
along, learning how to coordinate perception and action. A
clumsy person is someone who lacks the necessary coordination;
a skilled person is someone whose perception and action are well
coordinated. Once you start thinking about variations of culture in
terms of variations of skill, all sorts of possibilities open up. In my
case, it enabled me to break down the boundaries between social,
psychological and biological dimensions of human existence. In
thinking about skill, these all come together as one.
When it comes to obsolete assumptions, the key assumption has
to do with the relative priority – again, it is a question of priority,
these are not mutually exclusive – of skill and knowledge. The
mainstream view, which remains so in educational circles, is that
knowledge trumps skill: the knowledge comes first, skill lies merely
in its application. You go to school to acquire the knowledge; then
you go out into the world to apply it in skilful practice. Skill, in this
view, is the application of knowledge already acquired. If you are
looking for an epistemological assumption that is definitely
outdated, this is it! We need to invert it. This is to argue that there’s
skill, and there’s knowledge, but knowledge emerges out of skill,
not the other way around.
Robert Gibb
In your essay ‘Of string bags and birds’ nests: Skill and the construc-
tion of artefacts’, you state that ‘the study of skill, in my view, not
only benefits from, but demands an ecological approach’.4 Please
could you explain what you mean by this, and how the approach to
understanding skill that you have adopted differs from other
perspectives?
4 Ingold (2000/2011b: 353, italics in original).
126 Conversations with Tim Ingold
Tim Ingold
It goes back to thinking about skill as the coordination of perception
and action. The ecological approach means looking at action and
perception as the functioning of a system of relations set up by
virtue of the presence of the skilled practitioner in an environment.
The alternative would have to lie in a literal application of Marcel
Mauss’s idea of ‘techniques of the body’. Mauss’s eponymous essay,
dating from 1934, was remarkable in that it was the first to put these
issues on the table. But in his view, practitioners embody particular
techniques for doing things simply due to their enculturation. People
have different techniques of walking, for example, because they’ve
been trained to walk in this way or that, deemed appropriate to their
age, gender and social status. This would have nothing to do with
the relations between your feet and the ground; it was the way you
walk, period. In Mauss’s theory the environment doesn’t really come
into it, except as a setting in which you can apply the cultural know-
ledge you’ve received through your training. In an ecological
approach, by contrast, the environment enters actively into the
formation of the skill; it’s not simply a setting in which you apply
rules of movement that you’ve already acquired.
Robert Gibb
From several of the chapters on skill in Part III of The Perception of
the Environment (notably Chapters 15 and 17), I gained the impression
that you have found the work of Karl Marx ‘good to think with’ (for
want of a better expression). Would you agree? And if you do, please
could you tell us when you started to read Marx, and how a critical
engagement with his work has helped you to develop your own ideas.
Tim Ingold
That’s absolutely right! I’m not a Marxist by any means, but the
great thing about Marx – particularly the early work – is that he’s
Environment, perception and skill
127
really thinking: it’s tremendously engaging and stimulating to read,
and it helps you to work out your own ideas. It doesn’t mean you’re
simply following what he says, as a matter of dogma; it’s actually
very open-ended writing that invites you in and says: ‘Well, look,
let’s think about this.’ So yes, the early works of Marx were
definitely good to think with. I can’t remember exactly when I
started reading them, but it must have been around the early
1980s, when I was teaching a course on anthropological theory at
Manchester. This was also a time when neo-Marxism suddenly
became du jour in anthropology: Maurice Godelier, Emmanuel
Terray, Claude Meillassoux, Étienne Balibar and others, many of
them influenced by Louis Althusser, were all writing around the
same time, and they had quite an impact. There was a brief spurt
of writing in neo-Marxist anthropology. It lasted only about five
years, and then completely vanished, as suddenly as it had
appeared. But for that brief while, it was very prominent and I got
caught up in it. There was a great deal of mindless jargon; every-
body was trying to figure out what everybody else meant. Some
of it was nonsense, but yes, I did find it ‘good to think with’, and
it helped me develop all sorts of ideas.
In many ways, Marx was anthropologically ahead of his time. For
example, there’s one place in his notebooks from 1857–58 (subse-
quently published as the Grundrisse), in which he discusses the
relationship between the individual and society, explaining how what
we call the individual can only exist as a social being, can only be
constituted as such within the fabric of social relations.5 How long
did it take for anthropology to get beyond the classic Durkheimian
dichotomy between the individual and society? Marx was already
there, but nobody was reading his work. Then I read Marx, and
thought: ‘Well, there it is. Perfectly clear.’ If you want to understand
human slavery, for example, you have to start from this position.
Marx asks such big but basic questions: What is a human being?
What’s the relationship between a human being and the earth? What
5 Marx (1973: 265). I discuss this passage at greater length in Evolution and Social
Life (Ingold 1986a: 256–7).
128 Conversations with Tim Ingold
does labour mean? These are questions I felt were important, and
he was already struggling with them.
I even came to the idea of dwelling – although Marx didn’t use
the term – when I was trying to figure out what we should mean
by ‘to produce’, and how we can get beyond the idea of produc-
tion as simply producing commodities. ‘To produce’ means,
originally, to bring forth. There’s a wonderful passage in a text
that Marx co-wrote with Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology,
in which he explains how producers produce their own and others’
material lives: producing is actually living. This, I thought, is to
understand ‘to produce’ as an intransitive verb, not a transitive
one. It is not that you are producing this or that; rather, you are
producing, period; that is to say, you are living. And I asked myself,
is this not the same as dwelling? To produce is to dwell. And that
was before I had even read Heidegger! I’d already come to this
idea of dwelling because I was thinking of something equivalent
to producing your ‘actual material life’, as Marx and Engels called
it. Then I read Heidegger, and realised that this is exactly what he
was saying as well.
So in that sense, yes, reading Marx was great. I wish people would
go back to reading him, without any kind of preconceptions about
Marxism or about the history of communism or about the terrible
things that have happened in the world in his name. He was just a
very interesting thinker. A bit muddled perhaps, but all the more
stimulating because of that!
Robert Gibb
In your essay ‘Work, Time and Industry’, which appears as Chapter
17 of The Perception of the Environment, you distinguish between
two different ways of understanding time, activity, production and
exchange: the ‘dwelling’ and ‘commodity’ perspectives, respectively.
You suggest that people subject to ‘the temporal dynamic of indus-
trial society’ are ‘human beings whose lives are caught up in the
Environment, perception and skill
129
painful process of negotiation between these extremes’.6 Please
could you tell us what you mean by this.
Tim Ingold
I believe it is wrong to say that modern people live by clock time,
whereas pre-industrial, pre-modern people don’t – that they simply
live by the rhythms of their bodies and of the surrounding world.
Since we all inhabit a world, and all have (or rather are) bodies –
since we live under the sun, and in a world with seasonal or other
variations – the experience of a time linked to natural or bodily
rhythms is common to everyone. It’s not some sort of romantic myth
from pre-industrial times. The particular problem that modern
people face is not that they’re stuck in one temporal regime rather
than another. It is that they have somehow to accommodate their
experience of life to a regime that consistently denies it.
This happens again and again. It is very apparent, for example, in
health and medicine. People may feel well, sick or whatever, but if
something goes wrong, they are forced to confront a medical estab-
lishment that continues to regard the body as a kind of chemical
machine. Not only patients but doctors as well – if they are any
good – have somehow to negotiate between these two things, the
experience and the machinery. It’s the same for an industrial worker
whose labour is being timed by the clock, who has to clock in and
clock out. They have somehow to adjust their own inner experience
of time to the time of the clock. It’s not that they’re in clock time,
and the pre-industrial person is in body time; it is that, unlike their
pre-industrial predecessors, they have to reconcile the two.
I suppose this largely goes back to the constitution of the state,
and to its accompanying regime of industry, which at every point
seems intent on denying the reality of experience. This is at the
heart of the condition we call modernity. That’s why I find the
6 See Ingold (2000/2011b: 338).
130 Conversations with Tim Ingold
writings of medieval philosophers so fascinating; they are very
anthropological in their sensibilities. But since they were writing
before modernity began – because it hadn’t yet happened – they
didn’t have to explain their position by reacting against it. They’re
not caught up in this negotiation, and so their ideas come out very
differently.
Robert Gibb
Over the course of the chapters about skill in The Perception of the
Environment, you seek variously to ‘soften’ or ‘dissolve’ distinctions
that you claim are peculiar features of Western modernity. In
particular, you argue that the dichotomies between biology and
culture, on the one hand, and between evolution and history, on the
other, can be dispensed with. Why is it important to do this, in your
view, and how can we avoid using such dichotomies?
Tim Ingold
It’s important, I think, because these dichotomies – particularly the
one between biology and culture – are holding us back. As long as
we’re stuck with them, it seems impossible to move forward. We just
go around in circles. There have been endless attempts to show
how we can link the biological and the cultural, put them together,
reconcile them, integrate them, but we’re not actually getting
anywhere. Terms like ‘biology’ and ‘culture’ are like millstones around
our necks, making it impossible to get out of the rut we’ve been in
for many decades. That’s why I think it’s important to move beyond
them. But I admit that to avoid using them altogether is next to
impossible. We have to make do with the hand that language has
given us, so to speak, otherwise nobody will understand what we’re
talking about. It’s fair enough to say that just as geographers have
space and psychologists have mind, anthropologists have culture.
It’s their thing. For biologists, biology is their thing. It’s hard to
imagine a future biology that would never use the term ‘biology’, or
Environment, perception and skill
131
a future anthropology that would never use the term ‘culture’. We
are, to a degree, stuck with the terms we’ve got.
I think the way to go, where possible, is to treat these terms as
questions rather than answers. So we can keep culture as the name
of a question: that question is: ‘Why do humans do things differ-
ently?’ But it’s not the answer. The answer is inevitably much longer
and more complicated. That’s what we’re doing in anthropology,
finding the answer (or answers) to this question. It takes a lot of
effort and a lot of thinking and a lot of writing. It can’t be summed
up in one word. To say that humans do things differently ‘because
of their culture’ is not only circular; it also short-circuits the entirety
of what we do.
It’s just the same with biology. Biology was originally the name of a
subject of study: the study of living organisms. So fine, let’s go and
study living organisms! A great thing to do. But let’s not say that the
result of all that study is something called ‘biology’. What has
happened, I think, is akin to what the philosopher Alfred North
Whitehead called ‘the fallacy of misplaced concreteness’: words that
refer, in an abstract and general way, maybe to a field of inquiry, or
to an area that we’re interested in, are taken to signify entities that
have a real, concrete existence in the world, which are then taken to
explain everything else that goes on in it. This is the fallacy of
explaining this or that behaviour as ‘due to biology’ or ‘due to culture’.
It’s not so much a matter of abolishing the words, then, as of extri-
cating ourselves from this kind of fallacious thinking. The fallacy is
specifically to turn what are vague words to cover a terrain of interest
into objects that define how things within that terrain actually behave.
Robert Gibb
You have written that ‘The capabilities of action of both human
beings and non-human animals are neither innate nor acquired but
emergent properties of the total developmental system constituted
by the presence of the agent (human or non-human) in its
132 Conversations with Tim Ingold
environment’.7 How would you account, in these terms, for the devel-
opment of your own intellectual curiosity and of the way that you
read, as a skill comparable to speaking and writing?
Tim Ingold
Of my own thinking and writing, I would say it is always growing and
emerging. One feels constantly on the cusp; ideas never stand still.
Compare this with its opposite: the view that really gets me angry,
and which you often get from evolutionary psychologists, and even
occasionally from anthropologists who are into questions of cultural
evolution. It is that culture is an inventory of traits inherited as part
of a tradition. I say to them: ‘You’re a scientist, right? And as a
scientist, you’re saying that human beings live in cultures, and that
their ideas are passed on as inherited traits. But are you not a human
being as well as a scientist? If what you say about humans, in general,
were applied to you too, why on earth should I take anything of what
you say seriously? For it could only be an expression of your cultural
tradition.’ To which the scientist responds by declaring: ‘No, I am no
ordinary human being. I am a scientist. And that puts me and my
enlightened colleagues in a class of our own, above everyone else.
Ordinary people can only say what their culture tells them, but we
scientists speak the truth.’
This response is ethically unconscionable and politically obnoxious,
yet it is one that evolutionary scientists of a neo-Darwinian persua-
sion come up with time and again. From their point of view, you are
either gifted with the power of independent, rational thought or
else one of those benighted souls who are stuck in a culture, and
whose task in life is simply to reproduce their traits for the next
generation. For me, neither position is remotely acceptable. What,
then, is the alternative? It is to explain to scientists who would cast
us as one or the other, as either scientific colleague or cultural clone,
‘No, actually we are living people who create ourselves and others
7 See Ingold (2000/2011b: 366).
Environment, perception and skill
133
through our own ongoing activities in the world, which include imag-
ining, thinking and writing; that’s what we’re doing.’ This is equally
true of those who call themselves scientists or scholars as it is of
reindeer herders, fishers, farmers or factory workers. We don’t have
to discriminate along the lines of a divide between reason and
culture; indeed, it is quite abhorrent to do so.
That’s why it is time to move on from the innate versus acquired
dichotomy. By doing so, it becomes possible to understand how
what we think and write, our forms of curiosity, can have their own
integrity, while also admitting that this integrity is not just given but
has to develop, to be worked at, and is always subject to modifica-
tion, growth or revision. But this also implies that curiosity can be
cultivated rather than shut down. And that’s what we should be
doing as teachers. Some people are more curious than others, but
I don’t think there is anything innate about this. Curiosity and care
go together – they are intrinsic to the ways we are in the world – but
there are ways of allowing this curiosity to flourish and there are
ways of shutting it down. The worst of so much modern education
is that it is deliberately shutting down curiosity, while pretending
otherwise, and that’s terrible.
Robert Gibb
In reading and writing about skill, your own curiosity has led you to
range widely in time and space and across intellectual fields and
disciplines.
Tim Ingold
Well, you follow your nose; that’s what one does. One thing leads
to another. I’ve found that enjoyable. It’s fun, because you’re always
learning new things.
134 Conversations with Tim Ingold
Further Reading
Ingold first introduced his idea of the ‘the mycelial person’ in a
conference on ‘Nature Knowledge’, held in Venice in December
1997, but it did not appear in print until eight years later (Ingold
2005b). On the comparable idea of the rhizome, see the first,
introductory chapter of Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaus (2004, first published in 1980).
Influential works on the anthropology and archaeology of land-
scape, dating from the early 1990s, include Bender (1993), Tilley
(1994) and Hirsch and O’Hanlon (1995). Ingold’s article, ‘The
Temporality of Landscape’, was published in World Archaeology in
1993. Hicks’s critique was published as ‘The Temporality of the
Landscape Revisited’ in Volume 49 (1) of Norwegian
Archaeological Review in 2016. A response by Ingold, ‘Archaeology
with Its Back to the World’ (2016), appeared in the same issue of
the journal. In 2017 Ingold himself published a retrospective
review of the concept of taskscape, ‘Taking taskscape to task’
(Ingold 2017b), in a volume marking two decades of taskscapes in
archaeology (Rajala and Mills 2017).
Heidegger’s essay Building, Dwelling, Thinking was first published
in 1954 and is reprinted in Poetry, Language, Thought (2013).
Rubin’s essay, ‘Go for the skill’, is included in the collection edited
by Neisser and Winograd, Remembering Reconsidered (1988).
Bartlett’s classic study, Remembering, was first published in 1932
(Bartlett 1992).
Ingold’s 2007 article ‘Materials against materiality’ and Tilley’s
response ‘Materiality in materials’ both appear in Volume 14 (1) of
the journal Archaeological Dialogues. On the re-embedding of the
technical with the social, Ingold refers to the anthropological work
of Pfaffenberger (1988, 1992). On the question of skill, he refers
to Gibson’s The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979)
and to Bernstein’s essay, ‘On Dexterity and its Development’
(1996). Bernstein’s work dates from the 1940s but remained
Environment, perception and skill
135
unpublished until 1991 (in Russian) and 1996 (in English transla-
tion). Mauss’s classic essay on ‘Techniques of the body’ was first
published in French in 1934. An English translation appeared in
Volume 2(1) of Economy and Society (1973).
See Conversation 1 for Ingold’s introduction to anthropological
neo-Marxism, and relevant references. The two principal sources
for Marx’s early writings to which Ingold refers here are the note-
books from 1857–8, and The German Ideology, co-authored with
his collaborator, Friedrich Engels in 1845–6. Neither was published
during Marx’s lifetime. The notebooks, which had become lost
under unknown circumstances, were finally published in a German
edition in 1953, and in English, under the title Grundrisse, twenty
years later (Marx 1973). Part One of The German Ideology, with
selections from Parts Two and Three, was first published, in
English, in 1970 (Marx and Engels 1977).
The philosopher Alfred North Whithead introduced and explained
what he calls ‘the fallacy of misplaced concreteness’ in his Lowell
Lectures of 1925, Science and the Modern World (Whitehead
1926). Finally, Why Medieval Philosophy Matters, by Stephen
Boulter (2019), will introduce readers to the relevance of this rich
period of the history of philosophy.
Animals, lines and imagination
137
CONVERSATION 4:
Animals, lines and imagination
Summary: An interest in human–animal relations has been a
feature of Ingold’s work from The Skolt Lapps Today (1976) to
Imagining for Real: Essays on Creation, Attention and
Correspondence (2022). In the first part of this conversation,
Ingold reflects on the development of his thinking about this
issue, and explains what he means when he argues for an
‘anthropology beyond humanity’ (2013). This is followed by a
discussion of arguably one of Ingold’s most original works:
Lines (2007/2016). Ingold explains why he thinks we should
care about lines, and what the important difference is, in his
view, between ‘threads’ and ‘traces’. He then outlines what
he means by ‘correspondence’, a notion that has come to
occupy a prominent place in his recent work. The final section
is devoted to a discussion of some of the key themes in
Ingold’s most recent collection of essays, Imagining for Real.
Ingold explains how, by prioritising ‘creation’ over ‘creativity’,
he has tried to move beyond the distinction between imag-
ination and reality, before reflecting on his call for a ‘one
world anthropology’ and on some of the challenges facing
the discipline’s further development.The interview took place
on 13 May 2022.
138 Conversations with Tim Ingold
(A) HUMAN–ANIMAL RELATIONS
Robert Gibb
An interest in human–animal relations is a feature of your work from
The Skolt Lapps Today, published in 1976, through various other
publications, to the chapter ‘Animals are Us: on Living with Other
Beings’, in your book Imagining for Real, published in 2022. How
have your ideas about the relationships between humans and
animals, and the human and nonhuman in general, developed over
time, and what are some of the key influences that have shaped
your thinking on this topic?
Tim Ingold
I first became interested in human–animal relations because I was
working with people who, besides hunting, trapping and fishing, were
also herding reindeer. Thus, I was writing about relations between
humans and reindeer even for my doctoral thesis, and this became
the topic of one of my first published articles, ‘On reindeer and men’,
dating from 1974. My interest in the different ways humans relate to
reindeer (or caribou, as the same species is known in North America)
then grew into a wider, comparative exploration of hunting, pastoralism
and ranching as reindeer-based economies in the circumpolar North.
That’s the context in which I started thinking about these things. I
was initially thinking within a fairly conventional framework, namely,
that social relations are basically human relations, and that nonhuman
animals are part of the natural world. I was interested in the relation-
ship between social and ecological systems, so the assumption was
that social relations are confined to the human domain, whereas
ecologically, we have to look at the relationship between human and
animal populations. That was how I structured it.
And that’s indeed how I was thinking when I was writing my book on
hunters, pastoralists and ranchers. I did allow that certain animals
Animals, lines and imagination
139
could be included within the fold of human relations, but only as
quasi-humans themselves, through having been socialised into the
human group. These were tame animals. But relations of herding, I
argued, were more ecological than social, and to study them one had
to explore the dynamics of human and animal populations. My ideas
began to shift during the 1980s, partly because I had been asked to
convene a thematic series of sessions in the World Archaeological
Congress of 1986, on cultural attitudes to animals. The full title of the
theme – the brainchild of archaeologist and congress convenor Peter
Ucko – was ‘Cultural Attitudes to Animals, Including Birds, Fish and
Insects’. The title was deliberately provocative in its inclusion of animal
species of every conceivable kind, and not just the larger, more char-
ismatic creatures which tend first to come to mind when we in the
West think ‘animal’. And it forced me to examine this question of how
we understand animals rather more carefully, especially as I came to
write my chapter for the book that later became What is an Animal?
One major influence was the work of the philosopher Mary Midgley.
She was a redoubtable, fairly elderly lady at that time, who in her
later years produced an enormous body of work, specifically on the
question of animals. Her books Beast and Man and Animals and Why
They Matter, dating respectively from 1978 and 1983, were hugely
influential. Her argument, with which I found myself largely in agree-
ment, was that we shouldn’t reserve the study of animals for the
natural sciences alone. She didn’t dispute the boundary between
the humanities and the natural sciences, or that the humanistic
understanding of how social life is carried on has to deal with ques-
tions of subjectivity, morality and ethics. Her argument, however,
was that you could just as well study animals humanistically as study
humans scientifically. So, while she accepts the boundary between
the humanities and the natural sciences on the one hand, and
between humans and animals on the other, for her these boundaries
don’t align but cross-cut, so as to yield four quadrants: the human-
istic study of humans, the humanistic study of animals, the natural
scientific study of humans and the natural scientific study of animals.
And with the second quadrant, animals are admitted into the field
of discussions about morality, ethics, subjectivity and so on.
140 Conversations with Tim Ingold
I was very influenced by this, but I was also getting into the literature
on hunting and gathering societies. I had started off working with
what were supposed to be a pastoral people, the Sámi, only to
discover that for the most part, the animals weren’t really being
herded at all, but rather roamed free ‘in the wild’. I wasn’t sure if
they were being herded or hunted, and this is what got me into
discussions around hunting. I found that anthropologists engaged
in hunter-gatherer studies were much more invested in big ques-
tions like ‘What is the difference between human society and animal
society?’ and ‘How should we understand relations between humans
and animals?’ Anthropologists working on pastoralism, by contrast,
were preoccupied with issues to do with development, and with
transitions between nomadism and sedentism. I was more inter-
ested in the fundamental, philosophical questions. But I was equally
fascinated by the many anthropological studies, particularly of
northern Indigenous people, exploring relationships between human
beings and the animals they would hunt. This literature described
how hunters think of prey species as having societies of their own,
and of the hunt itself as a social transaction, in the nature of a gift
or sacrifice. A landmark in all of this was a classic study by A. Irving
Hallowell, entitled ‘Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior and World View’, first
published in 1960. Not only was this article incredibly prescient, it
was also marked out by the way Hallowell would treat his Ojibwa
interlocutors as philosophical equals. At least so far as they are
concerned, as he showed, social relations are in no wise confined to
humans; rather the animals they hunt are equally part of the social
field. This was a revelation for me.
So then – by the end of the 80s, and going into the 90s – I came
to the conclusion that the division between what I had seen as two
distinct domains, respectively of social and ecological relations, was
no longer sustainable. We would therefore have to rethink even the
human–animal relations of pastoralism, so as to understand them
not as ecological relations between human and animal populations,
but as social relations of a particular kind. The question was: ‘What
is particular to the kinds of social relations between humans and
animals we characterise as hunting, and how do they differ from the
Animals, lines and imagination
141
social relations we characterise as herding?’ This question led to my
1994 article, ‘From trust to domination’. The relationship between
the pastoralist and the animals of his herd is indeed a social one, I
argued, but it’s based on a relationship of domination, rather than
on one of trust. But both trust and domination are essentially social
relations. Only with modern commercial agriculture does the world
of nature come to be so objectified as to reduce animals to mere
commodities. This essay on trust and domination was, however, the
last serious thing I would write on human–animal relations for a long
while. For in the years that followed, I became disillusioned with the
whole topic.
What happened was that cultural theorists waded in, coming mostly
from literary studies. The majority of these theorists had no practical
experience of animals whatever, beyond the family pet, but all of a
sudden, human–animal relationships had become the topic du jour,
and these fashion-following scholars began churning out reams of
pretentious literature which completely ignored all the work that we
in anthropology, not to mention our colleagues in archaeology, had
been beavering away at for years. And I thought, ‘I’ve had enough
of this, I’m going to do something else.’ When I did eventually return
to the theme, in my 2013 article ‘Anthropology Beyond Humanity’
(first presented as a Westermarck Memorial Lecture at the University
of Helsinki), it was to deliver a kind of grumpy-old-man protest,
partly directed against the fashionistas of ‘multi-species ethnog-
raphy’ and the ‘more-than-human’, for having wilfully overlooked
generations of careful anthropological and archaeological work on
human–animal relations.
The fashion for more-than-human studies, I believe, is largely
founded on a myth, namely, that it does away with an entrenched
division between humans and nonhumans which, until then, had
persisted more or less unchallenged. According to this myth, on
which many students today are brought up, the social sciences have
always taken for granted the absolute dichotomy between humans
and animals, and have only recently begun to dismantle it. This is
entirely wrong. To see why, you have only to read Lewis Henry
142 Conversations with Tim Ingold
Morgan’s classic study of the American beaver, first published in
1868 and still regarded as authoritative today, in which he likens the
animal to a human engineer. And it wasn’t only Morgan. In fact, you
find lots of interesting observations about human–animal relations
in the writings of the founding fathers of anthropology and sociology.
Both Karl Marx and Max Weber deliberated at length on the theme.
From the late nineteenth century and through the first half of the
twentieth, scholars of the social sciences, including sociology, were
quite open-minded about the human–animal distinction. They would
certainly not have put their foot down and insisted that it was abso-
lute. I think the idea of an absolute division came later, around the
1930s, perhaps with the functionalist sociology of Talcott Parsons.
From then on, the division became ever more firmly entrenched,
but it’s a myth to pretend it was always there.
One other figure I should mention, whose work was a revelation to
me, is Jakob von Uexküll – Estonian aristocrat, theoretical biologist
and retrospectively acknowledged as the founding father of the
field now known as biosemiotics. Von Uexküll was writing in the
1930s, but his work was long ignored, and it wasn’t until the late
1980s that I first came across it, just at the time when I was trying
to figure out what it means to say of humans or other animals that
they inhabit an environment. I was equally convinced at the time of
two things: first, that humans are uniquely endowed with a capacity
for symbolic thought; but second, that not only humans but also
other animals inhabit meaningful environments. The question, then,
was: ‘How can meaning be constituted, for an animal, in the absence
of symbolism. What kind of environmental meaning can be non-
symbolic?’ Von Uexküll offered an answer, through his concept of
Umwelt, understood as an environment of signs, but not of symbols.
The Umwelt is the environment coloured by the sensorimotor capac-
ities of the animal whose environment it is. Recently, this idea has
been revisited in the work of anthropologist Eduardo Kohn, dating
from 2013. It has suddenly become very fashionable. But if I may
don my grumpy-old-man hat yet again, I was already on to this four
decades ago. No-one noticed then!
Animals, lines and imagination
143
Diego Maria Malara
At the start of your introduction to the 1988 edited collection What
Is an Animal?, you raised an important question. To quote you: ‘How
can we reach a comparative understanding of human, cultural atti-
tudes towards animals, if the very conception of what an animal
might be and, by implication, of what it means to be human, is itself
culturally relative?’ Could you summarise the answer you gave in
that seminal book, and explain how it would differ if you were to
answer it today?
Tim Ingold
It all comes down to language. At the time I was convinced that
language is a uniquely human faculty. I went along with the idea,
popularised by Noam Chomsky, that language is essentially a human
thing that allows us to reason symbolically – that it isn’t just a means
of communication, but a means to think, to exercise our faculty of
intellect. But I was also convinced that nonhuman animals are
conscious, intentional beings. It’s just that they don’t reflect through
language upon their existence in the world, as humans do. At the
same time, I was reading the work of philosopher John Searle, on
the question of intentionality. It is important, Searle argued, to distin-
guish between what he called ‘prior intentions’ and ‘intention in
action’. We do all sorts of things intentionally, consciously, purpose-
fully, without necessarily having a premeditated plan of what we’re
trying to achieve. The intentionality that infuses the action itself,
Searle argued, must therefore be distinguished from any plan or
representation we may have of it.
I linked this distinction to one that was being proposed, around much
the same time, by the sociologist Anthony Giddens, between ‘prac-
tical’ and ‘discursive’ consciousness. Practical consciousness is what
it says on the tin: it is the consciousness that infuses what we do
‘on purpose’. But discursive consciousness emerges only in our
representations or reflections, in words or equivalent media, on what
144 Conversations with Tim Ingold
we do. My argument was that humans are unique in their discursive
consciousness, and hence in setting up prior intentions. But this
doesn’t mean that animals lack consciousness, or that they’re not
intentional beings; it’s just that, for animals as indeed for humans
much of the time, intentionality is in the action rather than prior to
it and the corresponding consciousness is practical rather than
discursive. I thought that by making these distinctions we could find
common ground, as it were, between humans and animals, and then
examine how our specific form of cultural reflexivity can emerge
from this ground. That was the answer: that we can have a compara-
tive understanding of attitudes to animals, but only if that
understanding is grounded in a sense of the continuity between
animals and humans.
I still think that cultural attitudes towards animals are a sort of
spin-off from our fundamental being-in-the-world with animals. I
believe it was Michael Jackson who said that we can share an ex-
perience of being in the world, but that different people may render
it in different ways, according to their own cultural bent. Some talk
about it in this way, some talk about it that way, but the grounding
in shared experience is what makes cross-cultural communication
possible in the first place. I still believe this kind of grounding is the
condition for comparative anthropology, but I wouldn’t any longer
go back to Searle, nor would I want to couch the question in terms
of intentionality. That’s too cognitive for me, nowadays. My present
position is rather that we should understand every animal in terms
of what it does: every animal is not just a living thing; it is also a way
of being alive. And by the same token, I no longer accept the essen-
tialist idea of language as an exclusively human faculty. For me, now,
language itself is a process, it’s a conversation, it’s going on or
‘languaging’. It is not some special cognitive faculty that humans
carry in their heads. In this regard, I have completely shifted my
position from what I held before.
Animals, lines and imagination
145
Diego Maria Malara
Could I ask you to clarify what you were saying about language as
a ‘conversation’, rather than an embedded faculty in the head of
individuals? Could you give a concrete example?
Tim Ingold
My objection is to the essentialisation of language – to the idea
that it’s a particular thing or a structure located in the mind. What
exist in the world are people moving around, talking, gesticulating,
singing, telling stories, doing all that they do. Whether we can draw
any clear-cut boundaries between what humans do and what other
creatures do is a moot point. It is so contentious that I’m not sure
I could even take a stand on it. But instead of regarding language
as a structure, I would now regard ‘languaging’ as something we
do. This languaging is not, in the first place, a means of commu-
nicating information, but rather the way we humans have of making
our presence felt. A dog says ‘Here I am’ by barking, but a human
does it by talking. It’s through the voice that we establish our
presence in the world. Perhaps because of the structure of the
vocal cords, this form of presence may be peculiar to human beings.
Other creatures do it differently. But the shift is from thinking
about language as a cognitive structure, or a facility to assemble
smaller units of cognition into larger ones (like words into
sentences), to thinking about language primarily in terms of voice,
as a performative modality through which we present ourselves to
others.
Diego Maria Malara
Your research has paid particular attention to the process of domes-
tication, using this theme to call into question the universality of
Western assumptions about the boundary between the wild and
the cultural. Could you briefly outline your main argument about
146 Conversations with Tim Ingold
domestication and reflect on the differences between your line of
inquiry and the direction that human–animal studies have taken
recently?
Tim Ingold
Let me start by going back to what I said about this in my book
Hunters, Pastoralists and Ranchers, dating from 1980. I wanted to
break down the category of domestication into different dimensions.
The words I used were taming, herding and breeding. The argument
was that taming is a social relation, herding an ecological relation
and breeding a technical relation. Since these can occur inde-
pendently of one another, we have to deconstruct the idea of
domestication, which lumps them all together. In those days, I was
thinking of taming as what happens when you introduce a living
animal into your domestic group, as a member of the household.
That’s domestication in the most literal sense, since the animal
belongs to the domus, the house, and is treated accordingly. The
animal becomes a quasi-human member of the domestic group.
Herding, I thought, is not so personal, since it doesn’t require you
to know every animal individually. It’s more of a contractual relation-
ship, involving protection in exchange for food, between a human
population and an animal population. Breeding is simply a technique
of selection, which may or may not be carried out deliberately. I
wanted to separate these three dimensions.
But that was then. At the time, I still assumed a hard-and-fast divi-
sion between the sphere of social relations and the sphere of
ecological relations. Only with taming, I thought, when animals enter
into the human group as quasi-humans, do they cross the boundary
between nature and society. Apart from that, human–animal rela-
tions are ecological, not social. But once I came to question the
division between social and ecological relations, I had to rethink
domestication as well. That’s when the distinction between trust
and domination entered the equation. It is not, I thought, that the
relations of the pastoralist to the animals of his herd are ecological
Animals, lines and imagination
147
rather than social, but rather that they’re based on a certain principle
of sociality. This is the principle of domination, which I compared to
human slavery – which is also a social relation, and not an ecological
one. The hunter, by contrast, relates to his prey on the basis of a
principle of trust, which, in hunter-gatherer communities, is funda-
mental to relations among humans as well.
Quite a few colleagues have gone on to critique this ‘trust to dom-
ination’ argument on the perfectly reasonable grounds that in real
life, things are more complicated. They point out that trust and
domination are not mutually exclusive, and that in most kinds of
human–animal relations you find an element of both. Still, the grumpy
old man in me sometimes sees anthropology going around in circles,
with a new generation declaring that we have to rethink the concept
of domestication, apparently unaware of the fact that I was doing
this decades ago, as were generations before mine. These sorts of
issues come and go with changes of fashion. Domestication was
long out of fashion, but is now back in again. Looking over human-
animal studies at the present moment, however, there seem to be
rather few dealing specifically with pastoral societies. What’s new
about contemporary studies is that they are dealing with all sorts
of other contexts of human–animal encounters, under less traditional
circumstances and with a much broader sense of what an animal
can be, including, for example, malaria-carrying mosquitoes or
soil-transforming earthworms. So the field is changing. But the basic
issues, I think, remain much the same.
Robert Gibb
In your 2013 lecture, which you have revised and included in Imagining
for Real, you argued for an anthropology beyond humanity. Please
can you explain what you mean by this? In what ways do you think
your argument is similar to, or differs from, calls for a multi-species
ethnography or an anthropology beyond the human?
148 Conversations with Tim Ingold
Tim Ingold
This relates to the question of the posthuman, or what we under-
stand by posthumanism. What I mean by an anthropology beyond
humanity is one that is not defined in terms of the opposition
between animality and humanity of the kind that we’ve inherited
from the Enlightenment. I’m not, however, looking for a posthu-
manism that is opposed to humanism, but rather one that will go
beyond it. I want to find another way of imagining the human that
does not set up the human condition in direct opposition to what-
ever the nonhuman condition might be. So by ‘an anthropology
beyond humanity’ I don’t mean anthropology after the human; I
want to stay with the human, but I want to move beyond ‘humanity’
as it came to be defined in the Enlightenment, as a condition that
places humans on another level, apart from the rest of creation.
That’s why I’ve been particularly attracted to the idea of ‘humaning’,
where ‘to human’ is a verb, and ‘humaning’ is what we do. Humanness,
if you will, is not given or defined in advance; it is rather a task that
we have continually to work at and for which we bear a collective
responsibility. It is something we perform. As such, ‘humaning’ is
an ongoing project. It has no conclusion, and it’s not progressive;
but it carries on. This, then, is what I mean by an anthropology
beyond humanity. If anthropology is a speculative inquiry into the
conditions and possibilities of human life, then an anthropology
beyond humanity is one that would look for this in the ways we can
‘human’ in the world, rather than trying to specify the conditions
that set humanity apart.
I don’t much like the term multi-species ethnography, and am tired
of the fashion for it. That’s for two reasons: one, which we’ve already
discussed (in Conversation 2), has to do with my reservations about
ethnography; the other is that I think if we’re going to understand
living beings as undergoing continuous formation in and through
their relations with others, then this is simply incompatible with the
species concept – at least in the taxonomic sense that is conven-
tional in modern biology. This concept assumes that your
membership of this or that species is given from the start and
Animals, lines and imagination
149
unalterable. It already imposes a classification onto the world and
puts every living being within it. My view is that if we are to move
beyond humanity in its Enlightenment sense, then we also have to
move beyond the taxonomic idea of the species. We can’t simply
reproduce it.
So, when it comes to multi-species ethnography, I find myself both
for and against. I am against both ‘multi-species’ and ‘ethnography’,
but nevertheless for an anthropology that is not confined to the
human. This is not, however, such a new idea as its advocates make
out – in fact, we’ve been doing it in anthropology for generations.
There is a further risk, exemplified in the work of Kohn, to which I’ve
already referred, of dissolving the boundary between the human
and the nonhuman, only to erect a still more unassailable boundary
between the world of life and the world of non-life. To suggest that
the former is ruled by signs, and the latter only by material and
energetic exchange, is, I think, a big mistake. I’m very sceptical of a
semiotic approach that would divorce the world of meanings from
the world of matter. I think it’s a bad move. That’s why I eventually
came out against the semiotic approach which so attracted me back
in the late 1980s, when I was reading von Uexküll. Anyway, that’s
where I am.
(B) LINES AND CORRESPONDENCES
Diego Maria Malara
Lines represents one of your most original works. I remember reading
the book when I was a PhD student and thinking that it takes a very
different approach from those studies on similar topics that I had
encountered before. Why should anthropologists care about Lines?
Why do you think that an explicitly anthropological focus on this
topic has been somewhat rare?
150 Conversations with Tim Ingold
Tim Ingold
I am as puzzled by your second question as you are. As a book, Lines
almost wrote itself. It started off as a series of lectures, delivered
to an archaeological audience and tailored towards their interests.
It has nevertheless appealed to people from all sorts of disciplines
and, for me, this has been especially gratifying. Yet it seems that
the last discipline to have any interest in the book is my own, namely
anthropology. I have long wondered why this should be so. The book
seems to be on a different wavelength from that of most contem-
porary anthropology. One or two sympathetic colleagues have
suggested that the problem may lie in my rather antiquated way of
using ethnographic examples. Maybe that’s part of the problem –
that it is not based on one coherent ethnographic study of some
people somewhere, which is what you’re supposed to do these days.
What you are not supposed to do is pick up snippets from here,
there and everywhere, in the fashion of a Marcel Mauss or a James
Frazer.
That might be it. Many anthropologists, not unreasonably, are still
hung up about power and coloniality and, if you don’t explicitly
address these issues or take them as your point of departure, then
they don’t know how to situate your work. I suppose too, that the
book doesn’t engage explicitly with the main areas of theoretical
debate in the subject at the moment. Perhaps it is what you might
call ‘left field’. But even if it is somehow off the pitch and hard to
place, I still find that, when you mention lines or linearity to anthro-
pologists, the bells it rings are things like linear time, linear causation,
linear models of progress, lines of colonisation. At the very beginning
of the book, I try to explain that this is just one kind of line. There
are many other kinds of lines, which should not be left out. But this
is still a barrier for many anthropologists to overcome. They’re so
stuck with the idea that linearity is the defining feature of Western
modernity, imperialism, colonialism, temporality, progress, science
and all the rest of it that it takes a while for the point to sink in, that
lines can be such generative things.
Animals, lines and imagination
151
I’m not sure. I am still puzzled, but I think that’s what it is with anthro-
pological readers of Lines. They tend to respond that while it is all
very interesting, they just don’t know what to do with it.
Diego Maria Malara
This is certainly interesting. Why do you think anthropologists should
care about lines?
Tim Ingold
Because anthropologists are supposed to be interested in human
practices, and there is scarcely a human practice that does not
involve making a line of one kind or another: speech, writing, walking,
weaving, doing anything that involves movement, gesture and
rhythm. All of these are linear phenomena.
One of my main sources of inspiration in writing Lines was the work
of the French prehistorian André Leroi-Gourhan. His magnum opus
was entitled Le geste et la parole (‘Gesture and Speech’). The book,
first published in 1964–5, offered an all-embracing synthesis of
human evolution and prehistory, in which everything revolves around
the themes of technics and language, memory and rhythms. And
look what happened! Everyone still canonises Lévi-Strauss. Yet
Leroi-Gourhan, his contemporary, has been so completely forgotten
that his work was not even translated into English until the 1990s.
It’s true that it is more widely acknowledged in France, where many
regard both scholars, Lévi-Strauss and Leroi-Gourhan, as of equiva-
lent stature. This is in part due to Leroi-Gourhan’s special interest
in craftsmanship and techniques, drawn from his time spent in
Japan. Indeed, Leroi-Gourhan laid the foundations for the anthro-
pological study of techniques, which has remained strong in France
but never really took root in the Anglophone world. To be sure,
Gesture and Speech is a wild book, occasionally crazy, sometimes
visionary, often contradictory. But it is packed with ideas, many of
152 Conversations with Tim Ingold
them way ahead of their time. And many of these ideas found their
way into Lines.
Diego Maria Malara
In that book on lines, you make an important distinction between
thread and trace, just to clarify soon after that this distinction is not
an absolute one, and that these two types of line regularly morph
into each other. Could you give us some ethnographic examples of
threads and traces, as well as of the dynamics of their transforma-
tion?
Tim Ingold
I could recapitulate the ones I give in the book, starting with the
thread. I include some discussion of how people in many societies
talk about life and death, and about how the dead weave threads
in the underworld. There is of course the famous Cretan myth of
Ariadne’s thread, which was a lifeline for the hero Theseus. But I
also cite an example from the Chukchi of northeastern Siberia, who
believe that when you die you go to the underworld, where, at least
for a while, you are destined to wander through thread-like under-
ground channels or fissures. There is thus a clear distinction between
the paths that people inscribe in the surface of the land during their
life – these are traces – and the threads they wind as they move
around underground after they’ve died. At the moment of death,
traces are converted into threads. You move from the path into the
labyrinth. The only people who can return and report on the ex-
perience are shamans, who can go back and forth between the two
domains. That was one of my examples.
The argument is that traces are turned into threads in the dissolu-
tion of surfaces. When you die the surface of the earth dissolves,
and you find yourself in a world of threads. So that was about the
surface of the earth.
Animals, lines and imagination
153
I drew another example from the Abelam people of Papua New
Guinea, where the comparison is between making string bags out
of fibres and decorating the fronts of their houses with lines. The
names they give to these lines are the same as the names they give
to the threads of the string bag. Effectively, when you decorate the
front of your house with lines you dissolve its surface, turning it into
a weave of threads, as in the bag.
My third example was of the Kolam designs, which people in
parts of South India place before the entrances to their houses.
The tangled lines of the design are supposed to protect the
house against invasion by demonic spirits. Again, the argument
is that spirits, when they encounter these designs, no longer
perceive the door of the house as a surface but get tangled up
in the lines, so they never actually get through. These are some
examples.
In the other direction, from threads to traces, I concentrate on
weaving, knotting and embroidery. Weaving and knitting are the
most obvious examples, where you start with a hank of wool, which
is one very long line, and through the weaving or knitting you form
a surface which has a pattern in it. So the lines you see on the
surface are the lines of the pattern rather than the thread-lines
themselves. In that case the thread has turned into a trace. Thus,
threads turn to traces in the formation of surfaces; traces turn to
threads in their dissolution. I can think of lots of other examples,
and keep coming across new ones.
Diego Maria Malara
You propose that a history of writing ought to be encompassed
within a more inclusive history of notation. I’m sympathetic to this
claim, but I have two distinct questions. First, why do you think that
this kind of more generous perspective is necessary? And secondly,
I’m interested in a rather minor tradition of anthropological research
exploring writing and reading which sometimes goes under the label
154 Conversations with Tim Ingold
of the anthropology of literacy. How does your intellectual project
differ from that kind of tradition?
Tim Ingold
I think these two questions are connected. The answer to the first
question of why we need a more generous perspective is that
otherwise we’re in danger of falling for what is often called the
retrospective fallacy – namely, of retrojecting into the past distinc-
tions or categorisations that have only emerged in the course of
the very history we’re trying to explain. That would be circular. If,
for example, you focus on the distinction between writing and
drawing, or between writing and musical notation – but let’s just
take writing and drawing for now – for many of us today it’s an
obvious distinction, although it isn’t in practice as obvious as you
might think. But in fact, this particular distinction emerged histor-
ically, in quite a complicated story which began with alphabetical
writing and ended with the technology of print, perhaps even with
computing. The ways in which writing and drawing, or text and
image, have separated out have evolved along with that history.
We cannot then throw back the outcome of this process – the
distinction between writing and drawing as we understand it today
– as the framework within which that history is to be understood.
We have to come up with a way of defining our area of interest
which doesn’t presuppose precisely the emergence of that which
we want to explain.
I mentioned Leroi-Gourhan a moment ago, and one of his great
ideas was that if we’re talking about prehistoric people and
analysing their engravings, whether on rock or other material, then
we cannot prejudge them to be either writing or drawing. All we
can say is that they are inscriptions of some kind. He decided to
bring all such inscriptions under the label of ‘graphism’, on the
grounds that they are indeed inscriptions and have clearly been
made by hand, often with a tool. That, however, is all we can say
about them for sure. Only then can we begin to figure them out,
Animals, lines and imagination
155
interpret them, explain them, speculate on who made them and
why. I found this idea of graphism, as a place from which to under-
stand inscriptive practices of all kinds, very powerful. What
Leroi-Gourhan proposed, then, was an inclusive history not of
writing or of drawing, but of graphism.
In proposing an inclusive history of notation, I had much the same
idea in mind, and have Leroi-Gourhan to thank for it. I came to
notation because what I was really interested in, to begin with, was
how we have come to distinguish in the way we do today between
musical notation and writing. I found that in other societies, as in
Japan, distinctions have been drawn in a quite different way. We
therefore need a way of thinking about this that is more inclusive. I
think this answers your second question as well, in a way. The anthro-
pology of literacy is largely concerned with how people, in this
present day and age, or at least relatively recent times, have
managed to navigate the social and political systems in which they
live – systems in which there are schools and bureaucracies, in which
power is invested in certain kinds of inscription or documentation. The
field of the anthropology of literacy, as I understand it, is addressing
these very real issues that people face in recent or contemporary
societies, in coping with institutional structures often framed in terms
of various forms of literacy.
That’s an entirely reasonable thing to do, but my interests were,
in a sense, more evolutionary. With Leroi-Gourhan, I wanted to
envisage a prehistory and a history in which we could place human
practices of all sorts, in their evolutionary emergence. Rather than
starting with the world we’ve got, with all these institutions that
people have to cope with, we can go back to the beginning and ask,
‘How did all this evolve?’ I think that’s the difference. I’m still thinking
in these broad, rather evolutionary terms of a movement through
from prehistory into history. And this of course means that I’m not
so focused on the very real problems that ordinary people face in
our contemporary world.
156 Conversations with Tim Ingold
Diego Maria Malara
I think the next question is a hybrid one, to which both Philip and I
contributed. Philip, would you like to ask it?
Philip Tonner
Thank you, Diego. Tim, in your books on lines, Lines: A Brief History
and The Life of Lines, two sentences stand out to us. The first, from
the introduction to Lines, is ‘Life is lived . . . along paths, not just in
places.’ To me, this brief statement encapsulates an important part
of your argument. It is clearly reminiscent of your earlier work on
landscape and movement. I wonder what Lines adds to your earlier
theorising on these issues? The second sentence, from The Life of
Lines, is ‘To lead a life is to lay down a line.’1 Can you expand on
what you mean by this?
Tim Ingold
Thanks. I think these are really two versions of the same question.
I had already reached the idea, in The Perception of the Environment,
that when we speak of a way of life, we have to think of it not as a
fixed body of tradition, passed down from one generation to the
next, but as a path of movement through the world – a path that
you not only actively follow but also improvise as you go along.
Hence the focus on lifelines.
It is hardly a new idea to think of ways of life as lifelines. However,
once I had begun to imagine lives as movements along ways of life,
I kept finding resonances in ethnographic accounts from around the
world, even though their significance was not necessarily picked up
by the ethnographers themselves. They were simply there in what
they reported. For example, I was reading James Weiner’s book The
1 Ingold (2007a: 2; 2015: 118, original emphasis).
Animals, lines and imagination
157
Empty Place, on the Foi of Papua New Guinea, in which he describes
how people are always making paths through the rainforest, and
how these paths, too, have lives. If they’re not trodden repeatedly,
they soon grow over. I was also reading Claudio Aporta on the way
Inuit people find their way around in the Arctic landscape: they say
their paths of movement don’t go from A to B; they are rather paths
along which life is lived, children are born, disputes happen, animals
are hunted and so on and so forth. Then I was reading ethnography
on the Batek, who are hunter-gatherers of Penang in Malaysia, in
which the ethnographer, Lye Tuck-Po, explains that, for them, trees
can walk. They walk because they have roots which, as they grow,
push themselves through the soil in just the same way that people,
in their walking, lay down paths through the tropical rainforest. We
find the same idea over and over again – in the ethnography of
Aboriginal Australia as well, in the whole idea of song-lines. The
same idea kept popping up – so often, indeed, that you begin to
wonder why anthropologists haven’t cottoned onto it before. Why
haven’t they noticed that this idiom of the line as a way of life appears
in just about every society under the sun? ‘Why not go with this
idea,’ I thought, ‘and see where it takes us.’ Thinking about lines was
thus a perfectly natural development from the way I was thinking
about life as a movement.
This does raise a problem, however. The problem is: what happens
if you can’t actually see – or in any other way perceive – this line of
movement?
People have asked me this in terms of, say, the difference between
moving on land and over water. What happens, for example, as Sámi
people make their way in a landscape of forests and lakes? They
might at one moment be walking along a trail through the forest,
and at the next have to take a rowing boat across a lake, before
picking up the trail again from the other side. You can see the trail
in the woods but not in the lake, because the wake of the boat is
immediately dissolved. Yes, the trail is still there, I thought, but it
exists in memory rather than being physically present in the world.
This is still a really tricky problem, however. We can speak of lines
158 Conversations with Tim Ingold
of life, and of how as we move about we leave a trail, but just how
that trail is instantiated in the world can vary depending on the kinds
of surfaces and materials one has to deal with. Laying down the line
should perhaps not be interpreted too strictly, because otherwise
what do you do if you can’t see any line and nothing appears to
have been laid down? It just pushes the question to ‘What has been
laid down then, and where?’ The line becomes a question with no
ready-made answer. That’s what makes it so generative.
Philip Tonner
Now to my next question. You have referred to wayfarers as having
their being in movement, or more exactly, that wayfarers are contin-
ually on the move, they are their movement. Also, you have referred
to wayfinding as a feeling through a world, knowing one’s way thanks
to narratives of journeys previously made. On this view mapping
emerges as a kind of re-enactment. Can you explore the role of
stories and songs in this process, and how does this relate to your
account of sensory education? Finally, are wayfarers necessarily
travellers?
Tim Ingold
Stories and songs, I think, are forms of wayfaring. Telling a story is
similar to walking along a path. They often go on together, as when
the story is told as you walk along the path. Australian Aboriginal
people are famous for this. They tell stories of the exploits of their
ancestors, even as they walk through the very landscape that the
ancestors created in their activities. Here the singing, the storytelling,
the walking, all proceed at once.
But this does suggest something about how we should understand
stories. This might be clear to anthropologists, but it’s not often so
clear to people in the field of literary studies, for example, who tend
to think that a story, in order to qualify as narrative, has to have a
Animals, lines and imagination
159
beginning, a middle and an end. It needs to have some sort of plot.
The thing about stories as forms of wayfaring, however, is that they
don’t have a beginning, and they don’t have an end. There are places
you move through. But, just as in life, stories don’t start and they
don’t stop, they just carry on, beginning from nowhere in particular,
carrying on for a while, and then disappearing again. Nobody actu-
ally knows how they begin and how they end. That’s how it should
be. The way I think about the story is as a kind of loop. It’s as if you
take a thread, loop it back on itself, pick up a stitch and pull through.
You might say that at one end, what’s going on is life, and at the
other end, it’s story. But you can’t say where the story ends and life
begins, because life is simply carrying the story on. So, when it
comes to the story you have a looping back into the past and a
pulling through into the present. If the story is a loop, then it’s all
of the same yarn, of the same thread as life but, like life, ‘it doesn’t
have a starting point or an end point.
Importantly, then, the role of stories is not to pass on information
from one generation to the next. It is often supposed, even by
anthropologists, that stories are a means of education and that
cultural norms, cultural standards, core values, are encoded in them.
The stories are told; the children hear the stories, somehow manage
to decode them and pick up the information that’s been pre-
packaged inside. I think this is completely wrong. Stories don’t come
with meanings already coded into them; rather, the meaning of the
story, or of an incident related in it, is something that listeners
discover for themselves, often long after the telling, when they find
themselves in a situation which calls it to mind. Then, and only then,
as its meaning becomes clear from the situation at hand, does the
story offer guidance on how to proceed.
We would do better, then, to compare the passing on of stories to
handovers in a relay race, in which one story carries on from another,
and another from that, and so on along an unbroken line, so that
the story of stories continually unfolds. This is connected to the
question of sensory education, because it leads us to think of educa-
tion as a way of carrying on along this path of exploring the world,
160 Conversations with Tim Ingold
rather than as the acquisition of cultural models for interpreting it.
Sensory education is primarily about tuning the senses, or teaching
people to pay attention to this, that, or the other thing, which may
turn out to be important for keeping the story going.
Are wayfarers necessarily travellers? That’s a really interesting ques-
tion. It’s a question of whether you could fare in your imagination,
without actually having to go anywhere. Maybe. The philosopher
Immanuel Kant would not have approved of my way of thinking, but
he was nevertheless very proud of the fact that he could talk about
almost everywhere in the known world without once having to leave
his native Königsberg. So maybe he was a wayfarer who didn’t travel.
One can think of other examples like that. But for my part, I’ve
mostly thought of wayfaring and travelling as one and the same.
You might be right, however. It might be possible to be a wayfarer
but not to travel at all. You could read books instead, and travel in
your mind.
Philip Tonner
Thank you, Tim. Next question then. Most recently, you have begun
to write under the banner of ‘correspondences’. Here, you attempt
to correspond with things themselves in the very processes of
thought. Can you explain what you mean by this?
Tim Ingold
For me, correspondence means going along together with other
things or beings, and answering or responding to them as you go. I
could explain it, first, by contrasting it with the more familiar and
commonly used concept of interaction. Interaction is a back-and-
forth oscillation, like ping-pong. I say something to you. You say
something back to me. I say something back to you. We go back
and forth. We usually suppose, in archetypical situations of inter-
action, that we would be standing or seated face to face. It’s a tense
Animals, lines and imagination
161
and possibly threatening situation, since each party in an interaction
can see behind the other’s back.
But with correspondence, it’s as though we were walking along
side by side. Imagine two people walking down the street, having
a conversation. They are not looking directly at one another,
although each might tilt their head a little towards their companion.
As they walk and talk along together, they share the same view
ahead, while neither can see what lies behind their backs. This
going along together and responding to one another as you go is
correspondence. But suppose that these two friends, walking down
the street, suddenly start arguing. They stop in their tracks, and
each turns through a right angle to face the other. They can no
longer move forward because, if they did, they would bump into
each other. In interaction, the participants are stationary. Only the
words, or the goods, go back and forth between them. The people
themselves are stuck.
Whereas interaction, then, is the back-and-forth of words, or of
goods, between two people, each of whom occupies a position, in
correspondence the two people are lines which, as they unfold,
continually answer to one another. Another example which I’ve some-
times used is the fugue in musical counterpoint, in which the different
melodic lines carry along together and respond to one another. I
have found this helpful for thinking about how a world of things and
people can unfold over time.
Another word that many use, and which has become very fashion-
able, is ‘intra-action’. It comes from the work of the feminist science
scholar Karen Barad. Although she is getting at much the same thing
as I am, I don’t like the term so much. This is because intra-action
turns the ‘inter’ into an ‘intra’. Instead of going back and forth, it’s
going out and in, out and in. This is hard to enact gesturally but, in
effect, it’s the inverse of interaction. It involves a shift of 180 degrees.
But with correspondence, the shift is of only 90 degrees. It is from
the transverse to the longitudinal, from crossing between the banks
of the river to joining with the waters in their flow. ‘Intra-action’
162 Conversations with Tim Ingold
doesn’t capture this feeling of going along, nor does it convey the
sense of mutual responsiveness which, for me, is critical.
(C) IMAGINATION AND REALITY
Robert Gibb
As we discussed in the interview on ‘Environment, Perception and
Skill’ (Conversation 3), your work has often sought to dissolve the
distinctions or oppositions that are such a striking feature of western
modernity. In your most recent book, you tackle the opposition
between ‘imagination’ and ‘reality’, and set out to heal what you see
as the ‘rupture’ between them in modern thought. Please can you
tell us more about how you came to reflect more on imagination
and what you mean by ‘imagining for real’?
Tim Ingold
I came to reflect on this because readers, especially of The Perception
of the Environment, would often say to me: ‘I like your argument
about perception. And I like that you’ve found a way to talk about
perception that doesn’t reproduce an absolute divide between
humanity and non-humanity. But where in your theory do you put
imagination?’ That would be the question. And I didn’t know how to
answer. All I could do is promise to work on it! The question kept
forcing itself on my attention: how can I deal with imagination in
such a way that it doesn’t reproduce the very distinction between
humans and the non-human world that I had worked so hard to
overcome? The easy, but facile response would be to say that human
beings are uniquely endowed with a capacity to imagine, to reflect
upon their existence in the world, which is evident from the wealth
of symbolism, art and so on that no other creature has. To explain
imagination in those terms, however, would take me right back to
square one, to where I had started from.
Animals, lines and imagination
163
The problem was to find a more satisfactory way of answering this
question of imagination, which wouldn’t end up resorting to an
essentialist belief in human uniqueness, of the kind we’ve inherited
from the Enlightenment. I’m not sure I have found the answer yet.
I keep returning to the thought that perhaps there is something
peculiar about the way humans get along in the world. That’s prob-
ably true. But with Imagining for Real, I was looking for a vocabulary
that would take us beyond the opposition between the real and the
imaginary. Neither word is quite adequate – neither the word ‘reality’,
nor the word ‘imagination’ – particularly when we define them in
terms of their opposition. I’m really looking for something that is
neither of these, something that no longer requires us to oppose
these two domains to one another. I decided, as a kind of workaround,
to call it ‘imagining for real’. This doesn’t mean conjuring something
up in my head, and pretending that it physically exists ‘out there’.
What I’m getting at is neither imagined nor real, in the sense implied
by their opposition; it’s something else altogether, if only I could put
my finger on what it is! I admit, in the book, that ‘imagination’ is not
the best word to use. This is because it includes the word ‘image’,
and for most of us, an image is some kind of representation of
something else. And that is precisely what I do not intend with
‘imagining for real’. Nevertheless, we have no alternative but to work
with the vocabulary that our language has given us, and the word
‘imagination’ is no exception.
That, anyway, is why I found myself having to reflect more and more
on this question. I just couldn’t avoid it.
Robert Gibb
The first part of the book is called ‘Creating the World’. What do
you understand by ‘creation’, and how is this different from the very
commonly used notion of ‘creativity’?
164 Conversations with Tim Ingold
Tim Ingold
For me, creation is the process of the world’s becoming world, its
self-generation or autopoiesis. It is the cosmological idea of a world
that is continually becoming; everything in that world is becoming
as well; it’s part of the whole process. And this becoming is gener-
ative. It is the continual coming-into-being of the absolutely new,
by which I mean a newness that cannot be factored out as a combin-
ation of elements that went before. That’s how I understand crea-
tion. My argument is that the creation of the world is devalued,
almost trivialised, by its reduction to creativity – that is, to the
output of some kind of cognitive faculty located in the architecture
of the brain. This idea is very prominent in contemporary cognitive
psychology, in which the literature on creativity is massive. On closer
examination, it turns out that what cognitive psychologists mean
by creativity is a mental faculty to recombine elements of existing
knowledge into novel permutations and combinations. That’s all
there is to it. It’s not about bringing forth a world, it’s not about
the creation of the absolutely new, it’s not about becoming; it’s
simply a faculty of recombination. That’s why biologists, for example,
are so hooked on the idea of genetic recombination, as if that’s all
there was to the evolution of life. For psychologists it is just the
same, except the recombination is not of genes but of ideas.
I wanted to resurrect the other side of creation, the side that is not
captured by the combination and recombination of elements. I was
particularly struck by a remark of the Franciscan friar and philosopher
William of Ockham, writing in the fourteenth century. It is as ridic-
ulous, said Ockham, to attribute creation to creativity as it is to
attribute laughter to a faculty of risibility. Would you say, when
somebody laughs, that this just proves they are endowed with a
faculty of risibility, of which laughter is but an expression? As Ockham
pointed out, laughter exists only in the laughing. Likewise, if there’s
anything we could call creativity, it lies in the creation itself. It is not
a faculty that gives rise to things, but is inherent in the very process
of giving rise itself. Only by restoring this sense of creation can we
open up a future for coming generations that is truly generative. If
Animals, lines and imagination
165
anything has put the lid on future generations, and blighted their
prospects, it is this notion of creativity. It puts all the emphasis on
final products, on commodities, on novelties, and banishes the sense
of renewal, of life that can bring further life. To have any coherent
vision of sustainability, I believe, we need to recover this sense of
life-begetting-life.
Robert Gibb
I was just thinking there about the meaning of ‘the new’ and the
way in which, certainly in academia, much talk about ‘creativity’
amounts to reinventing the wheel, ignoring the work of predeces-
sors.
Tim Ingold
Yes, absolutely. There’s a key distinction, which I think goes back to
the philosophy of Henri Bergson, between ‘newness’ and ‘novelty’.
Novelty is about ends, but newness is about beginnings. The point
is that we need to re-establish the idea of life as a process of
continuous birth, continuous generation. It is not simply a sequence
of novelty projects. A baby, for example, is not a novelty to play with
like a toy, but a new life, born into the world.
Robert Gibb
Imagining for Real ends with a chapter entitled ‘One World
Anthropology’. What do you mean by ‘one world anthropology’, and
what do you think are some of the challenges facing its further
development?
166 Conversations with Tim Ingold
Tim Ingold
I’m rather against the fashion, in anthropology and other humanities
and social sciences, to multiply worlds all the time, to put everything
in the plural, to say that there are all these different cultural worlds:
I’m in my world, you’re in yours and everyone else is in theirs. It’s the
same when scholars bang on, in their inimitable jargon, about multiple
epistemologies. This came out in discussion during a recent education
conference I attended. Someone was saying ‘We have all these
students arriving, we need to recognise that everyone has their own
epistemology.’ Wait a moment! What sense does it make to say that
every single person, or every single cultural group, or every single
community, is enclosed in their own epistemological bubble? That
would be politically unconscionable, because it would take away the
responsibility to care for others and for how they’re living. It seems to
me that politically, morally, ethically, we have to start from the premise
that we’re all fellow inhabitants of this planet – ‘we all’ meaning not
just humans, of course, but everyone and everything else – and that
somehow or other we have to carry on a life together. That’s what we
have to do; it’s a life task. We’re born into this world someplace, some-
time, not through any choice of our own, and somehow or other we
have to keep everything going. This is a process for which we bear a
collective responsibility. Of course, we’re more responsible for people
who are close to us, but everybody’s in the same boat in that respect.
So, by ‘one world’, I mean that we all exist on this single planet. We
should never forget that. The challenge, then, is to explain precisely
what we mean by the one-ness of this world. It clearly is not the
one world of, say, British Airways, or telecommunications, or corpor-
ate industry, or the graticulate logo of the World Bank. We’re not
talking about a single unity, and I don’t think it helps to speak, for
example, of a single, hyperconnected global village. What I want to
say instead is that this is a one-world of manifold and ever-emerging
difference. The key point is that difference does not mean division.
Difference is the glue that holds relationships together. It is because
we are different that we can relate to one another, that we can have
conversations with one another, that we can move on. If we were all
Animals, lines and imagination
167
the same, then what would we have to talk about? We’d be stuck.
We can move on because we have different experiences of life, and
can exchange or share these in conversation. In this one world of
ever-emerging difference, we are not divided up into people of this
kind and of that. Rather, we are joined in relations of correspondence.
It is through these relations that difference continually emerges.
Thus, the one-ness of the world is in truth a multiplicity.
I’m not the only anthropologist saying this. Arturo Escobar, for
example, has been talking a lot about the idea of the ‘pluriverse’. It’s
an idea that has come down to us from the philosophy of William
James, who coined the term in the first decade of the twentieth
century. James was not saying that there are lots and lots of universes;
he was saying there is a singular pluriverse, meaning that this one
world we’re all in is continually extending, ravelling and unravelling
in limitless ways. There’s no end to it, yet it is still one – one tapestry
or weave, or whatever you prefer to call it. Pluriverse is not a bad
word for it; I’m quite happy to use it in this sense. What I’m not happy
with is a particular interpretation that is sometimes put on the plur-
iverse, epitomised by the call of the Zapatista movement in Mexico,
for ‘a world where many worlds fit’. Taken literally, this suggests that
there are lots of little worlds squashed into this one big one. Perhaps
we are not meant to take the formula quite so literally. But to me,
at least, it doesn’t sound quite right. The whole point about the one
world is that it is not a container, into which things must be made
to fit. On the contrary, the fabric of the pluriverse is an open weave.
Philip Tonner
I have two questions based on themes you cover in Imagining for
Real. First, given your discussion of creation and creativity, how might
you approach matters of religious belief (or, indeed, religious
believers) in something like the God of classical theism? Second,
you discuss several historical figures (Aquinas and Ockham, to name
just two), as well as history itself. How might historians influenced
by your work deploy it in their own investigations?
168 Conversations with Tim Ingold
Tim Ingold
Those are big questions! Having come from a thoroughly atheistic
or at least agnostic family background, and being a person of no
fixed faith, I’ve sometimes surprised myself by how often, particularly
recently, I’ve found that I am moving into waters that sound very
theological, and finding in the writings of some theologians, or some
philosophers of religion, echoes of what I think myself. This has been
a surprise. The echoes are usually with those, like Aquinas, who say
that what God created was existence itself, and that when we find
ourselves in the midst of a world that is undergoing creation all
around us, that, in itself, is an experience of God. I find myself entirely
in sympathy with this view. If a theologian were to explain to me:
‘Well, what we mean by God is really a kind of ever-emerging cosmos,
which is irreducible, in which we find ourselves; and when we marvel
at every moment at what it brings forth, that indeed is an experience
of God,’ I’d say: ‘I get that. I would be perfectly happy to translate
what you’re calling God into my terms’, and there wouldn’t really be
any disagreement. The only place where disagreement would creep
in would be if the theologian were to claim it all to be a matter of
belief. For me, belief is precisely where the problem lies. Because
with belief, it is no longer a matter of experience. It is rather some-
thing you hold in your head, some sort of knowledge, or even some
sort of hypothesis you might have about the world, to be put to the
test. And that is absolutely not what it’s about!
I think the word ‘faith’ comes closer to it. It’s not about adopting
some sort of propositional attitude towards the world; it’s about
being prepared to participate in worldly existence. This entails a
certain existential risk; you have to put your life on the line, so to
speak; you have in a sense to surrender to existence. If that’s what
God is, well then, you’re surrendering to God. But that, then, is a
question of faith, not one of belief. To render faith as belief is almost
to put that faith in question, to say: ‘Well, you believe it, but . . .’
Whereas faith, as I understand it, is about being ready to take that
existential risk of surrendering your own existence to existence writ
large, that is, to God. In this regard, I think what I’m saying about
Animals, lines and imagination
169
creation fits in very well with certain forms of practical theology, but
not so well with more doctrinal forms of Christianity or other religions.
I wouldn’t want to have any dealings with ‘the Church’, for example,
but I don’t mind having discussions about the existence and experi-
ence of God! That, I think, is my position. But it continually catches
me by surprise how theologians turn out to have been writing about
just the sorts of issues I’ve found myself having to address.
As for historians, I suppose it comes down to the question of what
we take history to be. History for historians is somewhat limited in
rather the same way anthropology is for anthropologists and philos-
ophy for philosophers: in all these disciplines, scholars are in some
sense bound by conventions which limit the scope of imagination.
I have certainly found this with anthropology, and I think philosophers
have a very similar problem. We need to find a different way of doing
history, which wouldn’t be so far from what I’ve been trying to do
in thinking of a different way of doing anthropology, or what some
philosophers are trying to do in finding a different way of doing
philosophy. I’m not quite sure what it is, and it doesn’t mean that
traditional history or traditional anthropology or traditional philos-
ophy is wrong or useless. We still need it in a way, but it would be
good if we weren’t limited to it. I am inclined to go back to Marx’s
famous statement in the Eighteenth Brumaire, of 1852, that ‘men
make their own history but not under circumstances of their own
choosing, but under circumstances given from the past’.2 Most of
history and anthropology and sociology, I think, is really just a foot-
note to this. But I do wonder what would happen if, instead of ‘men’
or ‘people’, we put ‘living beings’? What if we said, ‘living beings
make their own history, not under circumstances of their own
choosing, but under circumstances given from the past’? And what
if that history were actually the very same thing as what we’ve been
calling evolution? What if so-called history were just a special case
of an evolutionary process, not of a Darwinian kind, but of continual
world-creation? That would be truly exciting. If only we could
somehow get historians out of their history rut and get them to see
2 Marx (1963).
170 Conversations with Tim Ingold
things on a broader canvas. But it’s a tricky question. It is not for
me to tell historians what to do!
Robert Gibb
You have described Imagining for Real as the final volume of a trilogy,
along with The Perception of the Environment (2000) and Being
Alive (2011). In the ‘General Introduction’ to the book, you reiterate
a point you’ve also emphasised in your interviews with us: ‘I have
relished the freedom to go where the wind blows, without having
to be registered under any disciplinary flag, living the life of a bucca-
neer on the high seas of scholarship.’ Now, with the arguably greater
freedom that retirement brings (at least with respect to the ‘audit
culture’ of the contemporary university), where do you think the
wind is likely to blow you next?
Tim Ingold
I took a quick look at the REF3 results yesterday, and I thought to
myself: ‘Thank goodness I’m free of all that!’ In fact, I’d completely
forgotten about it, and then I remembered: ‘Oh yes, the REF.’ At the
end of it, after the time and energy wasted on this totally unproductive
effort, which yields nothing in terms of improved knowledge or under-
standing, we at the University of Aberdeen came out more or less
exactly where we were last time. What on earth was the point of it all?
I’m sure the great majority of our colleagues across Higher Education
in the UK have the same feeling. I’m really glad to be out of it – able
to write what I want to write, think what I want to think, publish what I
want to publish. I have finished this trilogy, and I don’t see myself doing
another book of essays on such a scale, so that’s it wrapped up.
3 REF stands for ‘Research Excellence Framework’, a UK-wide regime of research
assessment, carried out every few years, which covers all subject areas in every
institution of higher education in the country. The latest set of results was
published in 2022.
Animals, lines and imagination
171
There’s a short-term and a long-term answer to your question. The
short-term answer is that this year I’m going to write a very short
book, for Polity Press, called The Rise and Fall of Generation Now.
This will basically be about the way we think of the passage of
generations. I’ve become convinced that one of our big problems
in addressing issues of sustainability, climate change, artificial intel-
ligence, the future of the world and all of that, is that we’re still
thinking of generations as layers which supersede one another. I
want to ask: what happens if instead we think of generations as
winding around one another, like the strands of a rope, so that the
old and the young could collaborate in making a common future for
all? By ‘Generation Now’, I mean the generation of adults which has
forced its way in between children and old people, who hold all the
cards and claim to be the ones making history. To the generation
of children, Generation Now insists that they need to be socialised
into a future prepared for them, to old people, it says ‘You’ve had
your time, it’s time for you to jump off the bus.’ There are reasons
why this view of life has become established. It’s very heavily
enshrined in our institutions, in our educational systems and so forth.
In my view, it gets in the way of thinking creatively about the future.
Why do we always assume that the problem of the future is one
that calls for techno-scientific solutions? Why don’t we think of it
in terms of kinship and descent? These are the sorts of issues I’ll
address. Some of this will be a spin-off from Imagining for Real,
particularly the chapter called ‘The World in a Basket’.
Having done all that, what I’m really meaning to do is to cast all this
theoretical stuff aside, go back to Lapland and pick up on fieldwork
that I was doing in 1979–80 and never properly wrote up. I have all
the fieldnotes in boxes on my floor. I’ll need to go back to the
archives, talk to a few people, do a bit more fieldwork and write a
proper ethnography of the place. I owe it to the people to do that.
So that’s a long-term retirement project. Having said all these things
about ethnography – that we shouldn’t be reducing anthropology
to ethnography – I shall nevertheless reinvent myself as an ethnog-
rapher again!After all, why not?
172 Conversations with Tim Ingold
Further reading
Ingold’s writing on human–animal relations ranges from one of his
earliest publications, ‘On Reindeer and Men’ (1974), through his
Hunters, Pastoralists and Ranchers: Reindeer Economies and Their
Transformations (1980) and the edited volume What is an Animal?
(1988), to his influential article ‘From Trust to Domination: An
Alternative History of Human–animal Relations’ (1994). He revis-
ited the theme in his Westermarck Memorial Lecture,
‘Anthropology Beyond Humanity’ (2013). His early explorations of
the relations between social and ecological systems are contained
in his first essay collection The Appropriation of Nature: Essays on
Human Ecology and Social Relations (Ingold 1986b).
What is an Animal? (Ingold 1988a) was one of four volumes arising
from the theme ‘Cultural Attitudes to Animals, Including Birds,
Fish and Insects’ in the 1986 World Archaeological Congress. The
others were: The Walking Larder, edited by Juliet Clutton-Brock
(1989), on the topic of domestication; Signifying Animals, edited
by Roy Willis (1990), on the topic of animal symbolism, and
Animals into Art, edited by Howard Morphy (1989), on the topic of
representation. Ingold mentions the classic works on humans and
animals by philosopher Mary Midgley (1978, 1983), but readers
may wish to start with The Essential Mary Midgley (2005), edited
by David Midgley. Other landmark studies to which Ingold refers
include Lewis Henry Morgan’s The American Beaver and his Works
(1968) and A. Irving Hallowell’s ‘Ojibwa ontology, behavior and
world view’ (1960). He also refers to the work of Jakob von
Uexküll, whose essay A foray into the worlds of animals and
humans, dating from 1934, is republished, along with his 1940
essay A theory of meaning, in Uexküll (2010). Von Uexküll’s ideas
have been recently revisited in the work of Eduardo Kohn, How
Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human (2013).
On the questions of language, intentionality and consciousness in
humans and animals, Ingold refers to the works of linguist Noam
Chomsky, in Rules and Representations (1980), philosopher John
Animals, lines and imagination
173
Searle, including ‘The Intentionality of Intention and Action’ (1979)
and Minds, Brains and Science (1984), sociologist Anthony
Giddens, in Central Problems in Social Theory (1979), and anthro-
pologist Michael Jackson, in Paths Toward a Clearing: Radical
Empiricism and Ethnographic Inquiry (1989). A comprehensive
statement of Ingold’s own position, at this stage of his career, can
be found in his article ‘Social Relations, Human Ecology and the
Evolution of Culture: An Exploration of Concepts and Definitions’
(Ingold 1996c).
Ingold’s two books on lines are: Lines: A Brief History (2007a) and
The Life of Lines (2015). André Leroi-Gourhan’s Gesture and
Speech, dating from 1964–5, appeared in English translation in
1993. Ingold published a lengthy review of the work, ‘“Tools for
the Hand, Language for the Face”: An Appreciation of Leroi-
Gourhan’s Gesture and Speech’, in 1999. In his discussion of
lifelines, Ingold refers to studies by James Weiner, The Empty
Place: Poetry, Space and Being among the Foi of Papua New
Guinea (1991), Claudio Aporta, ‘Routes, trails and tracks: trail
breaking among the Inuit of Igloolik’ (2004), Tuck-Po Lye,
Knowledge, Forest and Hunter-Gatherer Movement: The Batek of
Pahang, Malaysia (1997) and Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines (1987).
Ingold first set out his position on correspondence in his essay
‘On human correspondence’ (Ingold 2017c). His essay collection
Imagining for Real: Essays on Creation, Attention and
Correspondence, was published in 2022 (Ingold 2022a). On the
concept of intra-action, see Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe
Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and
Meaning (Barad 2007). William James proposed his idea of the
pluriverse in a lecture delivered in 1908, and published as A
Pluralistic Universe (James [1909] 2012). Anthropologist Arturo
Escobar has recently taken up the same idea in his book, Designs
for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy and the
Making of Worlds (2018). Ingold’s latest book, The Rise and Fall of
Generation Now, was published in 2024.
Looking back and forward
175
CONVERSATION 5:
Looking back and forward
Summary: In this conversation, Ingold looks back over his
career to date and indicates the directions in which he intends
to pursue future work. Specifically, Ingold discusses his
attempts to integrate or synthesise different fields at different
stages in his career; his approach to teaching; the key chal-
lenges facing anthropology today; what he has learned from
colleagues and students; and what he plans to work on next.
The interview took place on 13 November 2020.
Robert Gibb
In a ‘Research Statement’ you kindly shared with us, you point out
that one recurrent feature of your career to date has been the
attempt to ‘integrate’ or ‘synthesise’ anthropology with a range of
different fields or disciplines: for example, evolutionary biology,
ecological psychology, art, architecture and design, education. How
would you explain this feature of your career?
Tim Ingold
I suppose it goes back to the reasons that led me into anthropology
in the first place. My recollection of what I was thinking when I decided
to give up natural sciences and move into anthropology could well
176 Conversations with Tim Ingold
be coloured by a degree of wishful thinking and retrospective
embellishment, so I might be burnishing the account a little. I do
nevertheless remember having been greatly troubled, even at that
time, by the division between the arts, humanities and social sciences,
on the one hand, and the natural sciences and engineering, on the
other. I belonged to a college in Cambridge, Churchill College, which
was heavily biased towards science and engineering, and in which
the humanities were in the minority. It was the time of the Vietnam
War and I was struck not just by science’s evident collusion with the
military–industrial complex, but also by its sheer hubris – its confi-
dence that it knew better than anyone else, and that it could be
relied upon to produce technical solutions to any problem, even
problems largely of its own making. Scientists and engineers, it
seemed, were simply not interested in the real experience of real
human beings. They weren’t listening.
I was seeking a discipline that would transcend this division between
the natural sciences and the humanities. I took a look at the possi-
bilities, and two options stood out: one was the history and
philosophy of science and the other was anthropology. I liked the
look of anthropology, because it not only seemed to build a bridge
between the sciences and the humanities; it also sought to do so
in a way that remained close to real lives.1 In this, I imagined, lay
anthropology’s very raison d’être. So that’s why I decided to take it
up. Having completed the first year of natural sciences at Cambridge,
I was allowed to do my first year all over again, in archaeology and
anthropology. Students in those days would start with courses in
social anthropology, physical anthropology and archaeology. Then,
from the second year on, you would decide in which of these three
fields you would proceed. Naturally, I chose social anthropology. But
I was fascinated by archaeology and physical anthropology as well.
And the fact that these latter fields were there in my formation from
the outset is one reason why I have continued to look for ways of
pulling them together.
1 See Conversation 1 for more on the choice of social anthropology as a subject
of study.
Looking back and forward
177
But the other thing is that anthropology, as I see it, is not a disci-
pline that can be pinned down within any orthodox academic
division of labour. We often think of each academic discipline as
occupying a particular segment in an imaginary Venn diagram, in
which it has its own slice of the cake and deals with its own particular
range of phenomena. But anthropology, I felt, isn’t like that. Rather
than taking a slice of the cake as its own, it offers a somewhat
eccentric, unorthodox angle on the entire cake. It seems to me,
therefore, that anthropology is constitutionally in-between all the
other disciplines. One of the reasons I’ve stayed with anthropology,
even though I have often felt that it has gone one way and I’ve
gone another, is because it allows this intellectual freedom to roam,
wholly unconstrained by disciplinary boundaries. When I talk with
colleagues from other disciplines – historians, psychologists, biolo-
gists, whatever – they often regard my position with some envy;
they say: ‘I wish we could do that! I wish we could allow ourselves
to wander off in directions we’d never anticipated. We’re not
allowed to do that in our discipline. We have to run on our particular
tramlines.’ The great thing about anthropology, I’ve always thought,
is that you can live the life of an intellectual buccaneer on the high
seas: basically, follow your nose and go anywhere you want. You’re
like a nomad scholar: you can pitch your tent anywhere, next to
whatever you’re interested in. You don’t have a castle to occupy
and defend. I’ve always valued that.
These are the reasons, I suppose. ‘Integration’ might not really be the
right word; ‘synthesis’, I think, is better. Integration sounds very rigid.
Synthesis carries the sense of fields being able to get along while
negotiating their differences, rather than being bolted together into
a grandiose structure that fixes everything in its place. Getting along
means dealing with problems of language, of potential misunder-
standing, allowing scholars, even when they differ, to converse with
one another and reach some mutual understanding of what they are
talking about.
178 Conversations with Tim Ingold
Diego Maria Malara
You’ve obviously had a very long career; you’ve been a very prolific
scholar and worked in different departments in a number of academic
institutions. Throughout this long journey, who were and are your
favourite anthropologists, and why?
Tim Ingold
I don’t really know. I don’t have any special favourites. In any case,
they have passed in and out of favour with the passage of time.
When I began, back when I was making up my mind whether to study
anthropology, my father fixed up a conversation with the anthro-
pologist Jean La Fontaine, who at the time was a colleague of his
at Birkbeck College London. I spoke to Jean, and she was very
helpful. She told me to read Fredrik Barth’s book Political Leadership
Among Swat Pathans. I read it and I was completely bowled over. I
said to myself: ‘Well, if that’s what anthropology is, I’m doing it!’ And
indeed, for a long time Fredrik Barth was definitely my favourite
anthropologist: he was a kind of guru for me, as he was for many
others of my generation, especially in his native Norway. When I
graduated and was deciding where to go for my doctoral research,
I wanted to follow a Barthian approach. I firmly believed that in this
approach, known as ‘transactionalism’, lay no less than the future of
anthropology, and for that reason, I resolved to spend a period of
time in Barth’s department in Bergen, to study at his feet. I was
proud to call myself a Barthian.
But by the time I returned from fieldwork, all that was over: trans-
actionalism was dead, and neo-Marxism was now the new thing. I
was very enthused by some neo-Marxist writings, the work of
Maurice Godelier in particular. I took this work very seriously, as I
thought it might offer a possible framework for integrating social
and ecological theory. That was in the late 1970s and early 1980s,
when the craze for neo-Marxism was at its height. But then it all fell
apart, like a house of cards. From then on, my favourite authors –
Looking back and forward
179
the authors that were really guiding lights for me – were not
anthropologists. They were writers like James Gibson in psychology
and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in philosophy, and later on, in the 1990s,
André Leroi-Gourhan, the French archaeologist and anthropologist
of techniques. They were important figures for me.
The biggest influences, thus, came from outside anthropology – or
at least, from outside social anthropology. I think this is revealing.
When I was starting out, it was widely assumed that social anthro-
pology had its own body of theory. Whether it came from a Barth
or a Godelier or anyone else, this was social anthropological theory,
and scholars from other disciplines would look to anthropology to
find it. Archaeologists, for example, would often admit that while
they were experts in the excavation and interpretation of prehistoric
sites, they were at a bit of a loss when it comes to theory. So they
would take their theory from social anthropology instead. But from
the mid-1980s onwards, anthropology began to turn in on itself. It
was all part of the debate on ‘writing culture’, initiated by James
Clifford and George Marcus in their eponymous volume, published
in 1986. Anthropology became very introverted. And the more intro-
verted it became, the more it assumed an ethnographic and
anti-theoretical posture. The theoretical self-confidence of previous
generations simply evaporated. Instead, it was anthropologists who
started going outside their discipline in search of theoretical inspir-
ation. Anthropology became a net importer rather than a net
exporter of theory. The really interesting, exciting theoretical devel-
opments always seemed to be coming from somewhere else. To an
extent, I think this is still the case.
But then there was Marshall Sahlins! Everyone has some sort of
relationship to Marshall Sahlins, or at least to his work. In fact, one
of the first essays I read on commencing my studies in anthropology
in 1967, had been authored by Sahlins, in a book co-edited with his
colleague, Elman Service, entitled Evolution and Culture, and dating
from 1960. I was hugely impressed by it, although my tutor at the
time – the archaeologist and Indianist Raymond Allchin – warned
me that I should never, ever read anything like that again! But later,
180 Conversations with Tim Ingold
I would be teaching Sahlins’s 1972 classic, Stone Age Economics to
my own students. And in 1975, when he came to visit the University
of Manchester, he was working on his Culture and Practical Reason,
published the following year. Like many others, I was in awe of the
man. ‘I wish I could write like Sahlins,’ I would say to myself. ‘He’s
such a great anthropologist, and his writing is so witty and ingenious.’
But then another voice in my head would say: ‘Thank goodness I
don’t write like Marshall Sahlins!’ There would always be these two
voices competing with one another. One would say: ‘It’s really exciting
and interesting and funny and captivating.’ But then the other would
counter: ‘Wow, does this man show off! Is there really any careful
thought and substance to all this, or is he just trying to be clever?’
Thus, my reaction to Sahlins and his work was always very ambiva-
lent.
However, you asked me which anthropologists were my favourites.
It is actually easier to answer on the opposite side: which anthro-
pologists are my least favourite? Here, the devil’s chair is occupied
by Clifford Geertz. I’ve always disliked Geertz’s kind of anthro-
pology. It’s wordy, it’s slippery, it’s pretentious. So, he’s the very
opposite of my hero. I used to present Geertz’s Agricultural
Involution, from 1963, as an example of how not to do ecological
anthropology.
Then, there are anthropologists who’ve been tremendously helpful:
maybe not inspirational, but wonderfully supportive. People like
James Woodburn, when I was getting into hunter-gatherer studies.
Such a warm, generous, kind person! Not someone whose ideas are
riveting, perhaps, but a really close, trustworthy colleague. After a
while, however, the colleagues to whom you owe a debt of one kind
or another simply become too numerous to name individually. If you
were to ask me who my favourite anthropologists have been, over
the last twenty or thirty years, my answer would have to be ‘all my
PhD students’. They are the people from whom I’ve learned the
most, and most enjoyed working with. So it’s a generational thing.
You start off looking up to all these people who are a lot more senior
than you – Barth, Godelier, Sahlins – but then, as you get older, the
Looking back and forward
181
balance tips and you find that, well, the older generation is passing,2
you’re a bit tired of colleagues of your own age, but the really inter-
esting and exciting people are in the next generation. But again,
they’re too numerous to list.
Robert Gibb
Could you tell us more about your approach to teaching more gener-
ally, and whether it’s changed over the course of your career?
Tim Ingold
I’m sure it has changed, yes. But probably in its fundamentals, it
hasn’t. It’s changed in the sense that one finds out through trial and
error, and experience, how to do things right and how things can go
wrong, what works and what doesn’t. That’s the same for everyone.
I know what I’m against: I’m against the standard teaching and
learning model, in which a teacher is simply there as a kind of oper-
ative to ensure the safe and easy transmission of knowledge from
an authoritative source into student minds. In this standard model,
you’re expected to make things as easy for the student as possible,
so that they will come out with the knowledge they’re supposed to
know, and not have to suffer too much. This is utterly absurd.
Nowadays, with so much technology, it virtually turns the lecturer
or the tutor into someone who presses the keys on the projection
machine; they’re simply there to mediate the transfer of knowledge
from the source to the recipient.
2 Fredrik Barth, Marshall Sahlins and James Woodburn have all sadly passed
away in the last few years. Barth passed in 2016 (see https://rai.onlinelibrary.
wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/1467-8322.12245); Sahlins in 2021 (see https://news.
uchicago.edu/story/marshall-d-sahlins-titan-anthropology-1930-2021); and
Woodburn in 2022 (see https://www.theasa.org/publications/obituaries/
woodburn).
182 Conversations with Tim Ingold
That is not what teaching is. To teach is to bring students along with
you, as fellow travellers, on a journey of intellectual discovery which
you undertake together, and which is transformative for everyone.
That to me is what teaching is. I’m not there to transfer the know-
ledge into the students’ heads; I’m rather there as some sort of
expedition guide, who knows the ropes, is able to offer advice and
is equipped to sort things out in case of emergency. As a teacher,
I can say to a student: ‘It’s probably better to go this way rather
than that, but we’ll see.’ I’m also quite traditional in that I think
lectures are really important. Every lecture is an occasion that brings
its audience together to witness a performance which, if it works,
can be truly inspirational. The purpose of the lecture is not to
transmit information, but to get students excited about the subject.
Nothing works better than a good lecture to inspire students to
think about a particular subject in new ways. It should not be packed
with information, but should convey something of the sheer excite-
ment of thinking of things for the first time.
That’s my approach to teaching. But when I began in the early 1990s
to read anthropological studies of learning, in the work of people
like Jean Lave – anthropological studies of how people actually learn
things in the ordinary course of life, in apprenticeship or at school
– I realised that there’s a huge disparity between the way teaching
and learning are set up in a formal institutional context, such as a
university, and what anthropologists are saying about how teaching
and learning happens in real life. For example, Lave distinguishes
between the teaching curriculum (this is in a school context), in
which the teacher has the knowledge, which is on the syllabus, and
has to make sure that it gets into the students’ heads, and the
learning curriculum, which is what is actually happening, the practical
activities that really go on, not only between teacher and students,
but also among the students themselves. This is about learning the
ropes, including such things as how to manage in a classroom situ-
ation. That’s what you learn in school, as well as the information.
I was teaching Jean Lave’s work to students, and some of the more
astute and critical of them were saying: ‘Wait a moment: what Lave
Looking back and forward
183
is saying is not what we’re doing here. There’s a contradiction
between what anthropologists are saying about how learning actu-
ally happens in life, and what you’re trying to do here, with your
lectures and tutorials, where everything is set out, with you standing
at the blackboard and writing things down, while we just have to sit
and listen.’ For me, the challenge was to restructure teaching in such
a way that it would be compatible with what we know from anthro-
pology about how learning actually works. That’s what I tried to do.
For example, in teaching the so-called 4As course (Anthropology,
Archaeology, Art and Architecture), I was experimenting with a way
of teaching that would get away from the top-down teacher-to-
student model, and replace it with a collaborative teaching-learning
exercise in which everyone, in a sense, is working at things together.
That’s my approach now. What then has teaching taught me about
anthropology? What it has really taught me is this: that teaching is
an essential part of doing anthropology. It’s not just a chore we have
to carry out in order to earn a living. Most anthropologists, in fact,
spend much more time with students than they ever do in the field.
But they project the practice of their discipline as if it were the other
way around: as if they spent most of their time in the field, and only
a bit of time in passing on the knowledge, derived from fieldwork,
to students. The fact is that working with students is the main part
of what we do, at least for those of us working in higher education.
What I’ve learned is that if we are going to study with people ‘out
there’, to study their experiments in living – which is, I think, what
we’re doing in anthropology – then we are under some sort of obli-
gation, if we have been transformed by what we’ve learned, to give
something back. How do we give things back? Not primarily through
publication, but through teaching. If you were to wipe out the
teaching and say: ‘No, anthropology is basically the research we do,
and the material we publish’, we would simply have a half-empty,
half-full discipline.
I feel really strongly about this. I think it is appalling that teaching
is so often regarded as the delivery of second-hand goods. In some
ways, it is the be-all-and-end-all of anthropology. That’s why I’ve
184 Conversations with Tim Ingold
found myself arguing, in recent years, that we should replace ethnog-
raphy with education as the principal objective of anthropology.
Anthropology is fundamentally a way of education. We should place
education front and centre, as the very purpose of anthropological
inquiry.
I’ve also learned always to treat students as human beings who are
just as intelligent as I am; they may not have read as much, and don’t
perhaps know as much about the discipline as I do, but that doesn’t
make them any less intelligent. You don’t have to talk down to students;
indeed, you really shouldn’t! Never suppose that you have to make
things simple for students so they’ll understand. This merely confirms
the idea that so many students have of themselves – because it has
been drummed into them since school – that they are ignorant, and
in need of knowledge from their elders to make up the deficit. This
assumption is so deep-seated that it really needs to be tackled head-
on. Real education begins not in ignorance but in not-knowing, and
these are completely different.
Robert Gibb
Have you encountered any resistance to your approach to teaching
and learning from the institutions you’ve worked in, or from
colleagues or students?
Tim Ingold
No, I haven’t really encountered much resistance. But I have come
up against a kind of apathy or indifference. For example, when you
want to put on a new course, you are required to make a formal
proposal which goes through various committees. When I began
with the 4As course, I felt sure that there would be objections. Yet,
in fact, it went through without any problems. It was enough to have
filled out the forms correctly and ticked all the boxes. For the bureau-
crats, that was all that mattered. There was no concerted opposition.
Looking back and forward
185
No-one really cared what I did! ‘It’s a bit weird, what you’re doing,’
they would say, ‘but it doesn’t bother us. ’There’s a kind of business-
as-usual mentality, where things just carry on under their own steam.
I figured out that the only way to bring about change is just to go
ahead and do it; maybe then some ripples will spread out to others.
That’s really what I’ve done. You sometimes have to trust yourself
and hope for the best that things will work out. They don’t always.
There’s a certain amount of risk, I suppose. But so long as you’re
prepared to take the risk, the students love it – or at least the inter-
esting students love it – because it makes a real difference.
Diego Maria Malara
To change the topic slightly: from the perspective that your achieve-
ments afford you, what advice would you give to your younger self?
(I don’t mean you’re not still young!)
Tim Ingold
Like most people, I guess, when I look back on my younger self I do
so with red-faced embarrassment. Goodness me, I had no inkling,
no understanding of such things as endemic racism; I had no under-
standing of colonial history; I had no understanding of gender inequality.
I had a very protected upbringing in an upper-middle-class academic
home. I went to a public school. I did get involved in some worthy
causes like Amnesty International. But when I look back on this
younger self, I see the product of a particular kind of very sheltered
upbringing. I think my parents, perhaps because of their experience
of raising my older sisters during the war, went to some lengths to
shelter me from aspects of social life and history that could be
unsettling. Although, being academic, they were unconventional in
their way, they were also extremely conventional in class terms, and
in attitudes to race and gender – all these things that are currently
topics of so much angst, shouting and politics. None of that was
known to me. It took a while to get my head around it all and to
186 Conversations with Tim Ingold
understand why other people could get so upset about things which
I had never really experienced myself. I mean, I had never even visited
the north of England, except for family holidays in the Lake District.
I spent most of my time in the south, and you know the difference
between the south and the north! When my wife and I first went to
live in Manchester, when I got my job there, it was like another country.
People were very friendly, very kind, but they would have to explain
to us: ‘This is how we do things here.’ It was almost like fieldwork,
landing in a place that was so completely unfamiliar in terms of culture
and history. And that was just Manchester!
So, when I look back, I see someone incredibly naïve and inexperi-
enced. And because I had done my fieldwork in Lapland, I had not
had to confront the more brutal aspects of colonialism or violence
on the scale you find in other parts of the world. Of course there
has been a history of colonialism in Lapland, of relations between
Indigenous Sámi people and mainly Finnish settlers, but it is one
that has unfolded over many centuries, involving symbiosis as well
as conflict. The experience of First Nations peoples in the Canadian
North, for example, has been entirely different.
If I was now talking to my younger self, I would be trying to explain
to this young man about all these aspects of history and society
about which I was so naïve, and I would try to say: ‘Look, you’ve got
to think again about some of these things.’ That, I suppose, would
have saved me quite a lot of time. It wouldn’t have taken me decades
to come to terms with them. So that’s one piece of advice. Other
things I think I learned anyway, about teaching and about research.
Having been brought up in an academic family, much of that was
already familiar.
Diego Maria Malara
Since we are quite interested in kinship and generational continuity
and discontinuity in anthropology, can I ask whether you sent your
own children to public school?
Looking back and forward
187
Tim Ingold
Good heavens, no! I would never have dreamed of doing that. Our
children went to state comprehensive schools. Let me explain. As you
will recall from our first conversation, my parents sent me to Leighton
Park School, a Quaker school near Reading. It’s now co-educational,
there are girls and boys. But at that time, it was just for boys. It was
not only a single-sex school but also a public school in the British
sense; you had to pay fees. But because it was a Quaker school it was
imbued with the liberal values of Quakerism, which are, on the whole,
pretty tolerable (and tolerant) compared with other variants of
Christianity. We would probably agree that the sorts of values incul-
cated there were good ones. It was a generous, open environment
– not in any sense oppressive. There was nothing like the atmosphere
of oppression associated with the classic model of the British public
school, and which you can read about from those who have gone
through it. But it was a public school nonetheless, and still a rather
exclusive community of very privileged young people.
We were very lucky, first in Manchester, where we brought up our
three sons, and then here in Aberdeen, where we brought up
our daughter. The local comprehensive school in Manchester – Parrs
Wood High School – was fantastic. One of the reasons why it was
fantastic, I suppose, was that it was in the middle of the area of the
city most popular with university people. So, it had lots of very
academically minded kids, as indeed ours were. Our children were
fortunate in that they fell in with the right crowd. This was pretty
much a happy accident. Others were not so fortunate, as the circu-
lation of drugs among youngsters had already become endemic.
Here in Aberdeen our daughter went to Aberdeen Grammar School,
which, despite its name, has been a comprehensive school since the
1970s. It is also a fabulous school. So we’ve been lucky. But I think
these schools absolutely prove the point that comprehensive educa-
tion is on another level in terms of what it can achieve. Public schools
might be good at getting their kids into top universities, but in purely
educational terms they’re failing by comparison with what good
comprehensive education can do.
188 Conversations with Tim Ingold
I think there were two reasons why I was sent to a public school. One
was that I would otherwise have likely ended up in the local grammar
school – these were the days before comprehensive education –
which actually doubled up as a public school, and was much more
traditional, rigid and authoritarian than the school I attended. The
other reason was that my dad was away a lot of the time, gallivanting
around Africa on university business. It was a bit like being the son
of a diplomat, you never knew exactly where your parents were.
Diego Maria Malara
Moving on again: what in your view are the biggest problems in
British and global anthropology today both in terms of theory and
at the institutional level?
Tim Ingold
Let’s start at the institutional level. As a small, slightly off-beam
subject, anthropology has always been vulnerable institutionally. It
is very easy for people who don’t know anything about anthropology
to query why we need it or what useful knowledge it has to contribute.
We all know that anthropology has not been very good at managing
its public image. We have made a pretty poor job of explaining to
everyone out there what the subject is really about and what it does,
why it’s important, what it contributes. Even those working inside
universities, particularly in administration and management, often
have little idea of what anthropology is, or of why we should need
it. The subject doesn’t have the kind of assured recognition enjoyed,
say, by history, geography, biology and so on. So if a situation arises
when it is necessary to make cuts, anthropology can be first in the
firing line. ‘If we cut anthropology,’ they say, ‘nobody is going to
notice. After all, what difference does it make?’
This has always been the case, and in times of contraction, such as
during the Thatcher cuts of the 1980s and during the cuts we’ve
Looking back and forward
189
been suffering in recent times, anthropology always seems to be at
the sharp end. A lot can depend on student numbers, because these
are the first beans that university administrators tend to count. And
again, we’re vulnerable to rather intense fluctuations in student
numbers. They go up and down, depending on all sorts of factors
which are completely outside our control: things to do with levels
of employment, where the opportunities are and so on. There’s
nothing much we can do about it. Student numbers will go up and
they will go down, and every time they go down, the position of
anthropology is placed in jeopardy yet again.
This goes back to the point that in order to strengthen the position
of anthropology, we really need to put more work into the effort of
showing to a general audience, to the public at large, why anthro-
pology is so important, why we cannot do without it. We have to be
able to explain this. So far, we have not been very successful. This
is not because we are bad communicators; it is because the kinds
of things we have to say often challenge popular preconceptions.
Popular science, like all good advertising, works by playing to its
audience’s preconceptions, spiced up with a twist of novelty. There
is some truly dreadful writing in popular anthropology that does the
same – I am thinking of bestselling authors like Jared Diamond and
Yuval Noah Harari – and it has made our task even more difficult.
But the problem is compounded, I think, by the fact that we have
been less than clear in our own minds about the purpose of anthro-
pology in today’s world, with its many interrelated crises, including
the current pandemic,3 a climate emergency, manifestly unsustain-
able levels of inequality and a collapsing global market economy.
The world’s in a mess. And where is anthropology? It is nowhere to
be seen.
Of course, many anthropologists are working hard on these problems
and making major contributions, but they are still in the corners
rather than the centre ground of public discussion. By and large, the
3 This interview took place on 13 November 2020, when the pandemic was at its
height.
190 Conversations with Tim Ingold
public doesn’t know what we’re doing, or why. It is undeniable that
we have a problem in putting ourselves across. In my own view –
which I know many colleagues would dispute – the problem lies in
the unfortunate contraction of anthropology into ethnography, which
began in earnest in the era of the ‘writing culture’ debate. Although
the debate is largely behind us now, it has never completely gone
away.
For example, I have just been reviewing a bunch of applications to
the British Academy, for postdoctoral research fellowships. It is an
interesting task, in so far as it conveys a sense of what the brightest
and best of the up-and-coming generation of scholars, having just
completed their doctorates, are most keen to do, and where they
see their future research heading. Yet it is a task that also fills me
with despair because so few of the projects proposed in these
applications have what I would consider a real anthropological flair.
I can’t help feeling that something about the spirit of the discipline
has been lost. It’s hard to put one’s finger on what it is, and of course
there’s always a gap between the kinds of things we write in research
proposals, and what we end up doing in practice. Perhaps the
problem actually lies in the research proposal format. Nonetheless,
what invariably comes across is that the researcher intends to collect
lots of ethnographic data on the people to be studied, to analyse
the results and then to convert them into publications for academic
journals, and perhaps a monograph. There is no sense in this that
every way of life is itself an experiment in how to live, and that we
can learn from these experiments. This means listening to, and
learning from, what people have to tell us. It doesn’t mean using
what they tell us as ethnographic evidence, for what it tells about
them.
I believe anthropology as a discipline draws on experiments in living,
carried on by people everywhere and at all times, to inquire into the
conditions and possibilities of human life in the world, both presently
and into the future. That’s what I think anthropology does, or at
least should do. That’s why it is so important. But I don’t find it in
the disciplinary formation of the current generation of doctoral
Looking back and forward
191
students. To recover this sense of anthropological inquiry, which
goes way beyond the particularities of ethnographic research, I think
we should devote rather more attention than we do to our anthro-
pological ancestors. Students nowadays have scarcely heard of Max
Gluckman, Edmund Leach or Meyer Fortes – and these just from
Britain – who were great names in their time, with frequent appear-
ance on the BBC, and articles in national newspapers. These were
people who had big things to say – about the unifying effects of
cross-cutting conflict, about the fundamental importance of human
connection, about love and kinship as the essence of social relations.
We need to have that same level of ambition, and that’s what I miss
at the moment. There must be more to anthropology than high-end
journalism. I think this is the biggest problem in anthropology today.
The worst that could happen would be if it were to contract into an
academic version of identity politics. Yet this often looks like the
way it’s going – especially in the United States, but elsewhere as
well.
Philip Tonner
Going back to something you said earlier: what have you learned
from your supervisees, your PhD students? Can you give us any
examples?
Tim Ingold
My goodness! I have learned everything from my supervisees – really.
I wouldn’t know where to start. I counted them up recently, I have
so far supervised 55 doctoral theses to completion.4 Perhaps, rather
than singling out specific individuals, I could just make a general
point about why I have learned so much from them. It’s not just
because of what they’re thinking, but also because of what they’re
4 The final number, as of January 2023, was 61. I am no longer supervising doctoral
students.
192 Conversations with Tim Ingold
reading. You get to know work in all sorts of areas that you would
otherwise have never encountered. And so, where to start? Well,
just to give one example, which happens to be at the top of my
head because I was writing about it only yesterday. One of my super-
visees has been working on post-earthquake reconstruction in
Northern Italy. He was reading literature on how people in late Roman
and medieval times were building in the region, in such a way as to
incorporate seismic protection into their constructions. This litera-
ture, on traditional building knowledge, was in fact written by
architects and engineers. I found it fascinating because of the way
it changes our assumptions about the very earth on which we build.
Instead of seeing the surface of the earth as a solid platform, it
appears fluid and unstable, more like the ocean. I would never have
come to think of this had I not been supervising this work, and yet
it has gone on to influence my thinking, quite profoundly, on issues
of solidity and fluidity.
Probably my most brilliant PhD supervisee was working on perspec-
tivism in Viking Iceland, among Shetland fishermen and in Amazonia.
Had it not been for his work, I would never have come to think
of the parallels between Indigenous Amerindian and medieval
European philosophy. But there are just so many examples like this;
I don’t know where to begin! It’s just that when you work with a
student, you’re not just reading what they write; you’re actually
having to delve into material in great depth. The job is to figure out
what the argument behind it is, to bring a certain clarity to it and
find the right words to express it, helping the student to articulate
it in the best possible way. To do that you really have to get into
the work, as if you were thinking and breathing it yourself, and to
understand it from the inside.
So that’s what I’ve learned. Really, it’s about learning how to edit
text, because the most important work of a supervisor is actually
editorial. As a supervisor, you are an editor of a student’s work in
the full sense of the term – not just telling them where to put
commas and full stops, but showing actually how to take an idea
that is still half-formed and find the words to fill it out. And that’s
Looking back and forward
193
how you learn. It’s impossible for me to summarise. I don’t really
want to give examples because that would mean picking on particular
individuals and leaving out others.
Robert Gibb
Let’s now move on to the question of writing. Do you think the way
you write, and the way you go about writing, has changed over the
course of your career?
Tim Ingold
Yes, it has. Writing is a very mysterious business. I suppose if I look
back at things I wrote a long time ago, I can say: ‘Oh yes, that looks
like me’; I can see myself in it. But I had no particular competence
in writing to begin with. You get an idea of how you should write
from reading the work of much more senior people, but at first you
lack any secure sense of your own way of writing. It took a long time
for me to reach the point where I could say: ‘This is actually me
writing; it’s not me pretending to be somebody else, or me trying
to write in the way I’m supposed to write, or me following the model
of this or that scholar. No, this is me and the writing is as distinctive
to me as is my handwriting, or my voice.’ It took me at least twenty
years to get there. Then when I found what I thought was my voice,
I would say: ‘Right, that’s me. I’m now going to try and build on it.’
I definitely remember, at the start of all this, being advised to write
in an almost novelistic way. I said: ‘Well, I can’t do that. I’m not a
writer. I’m not a novelist. I can’t do that kind of thing. I’m just an
anthropologist, and I can only write in a matter-of-fact kind of way,
as I’ve done in my fieldnotes. This is how it is.’
So I didn’t feel that writing was a thing I was particularly cut out to
do, least of all any better than anybody else, and at that stage I
don’t think I felt it was especially important either. But now I would
take the opposite view: that writing is more important than anything
194 Conversations with Tim Ingold
else. I’ve realised that it’s a process of discovery in itself. It’s a process
of self-discovery, as well as a discovery of the ideas that come over
me as I write. I find it enormously satisfying to write beautifully. And
that’s what I try to do now. But the more I try, the more difficult it
becomes. To write well is incredibly hard.
But things have changed in a practical way too. I hung on to writing
by hand for as long as I possibly could. My doctoral thesis, of course,
was entirely written by hand. I then had to type it all up on a manual
typewriter. Later on, during those first years in Manchester, for the
first decade or so, if you were writing a paper, you would first write it
by hand and then pass it on to the faculty typing pool. This was a
large room, filled with rows of small tables, on each of which was placed
a typewriter. Seated at each table was a typist, invariably female, dili-
gently clattering away on the keys, under the imperious supervision
of the formidable but matronly woman in charge of the whole outfit.
You would present your handwritten manuscript to the matron, who
would then assign it to one or other of her ladies. When she’d finished,
you would get it back and would have to check it through, correcting
any errors with white correcting fluid, known as Tippex.
Then word processors came in, but I did my best to avoid them. I
pretended to be outraged by the whole idea that writing could be
a matter of processing words. But the real reason was that I had
never learned to type properly. Indeed, I am still a two-finger typist.
But the trend was irresistible, and I eventually found myself working
on a keyboard like everyone else. But I hate myself for doing so,
and for having become so keyboard-dependent. To my mind, the
computer is nothing more than a box of shortcuts, and I do not
believe we should take shortcuts in writing. We do it only because
we are pressed for time, and always in a hurry. But that’s not how
it should be, and I still feel much happier writing by hand. Over the
past couple of decades, I have developed a way of moving back and
forth between pencil-and-notebook and keyboard. So, instead of
writing longhand with pen on file-paper as I used to do, I now write
with a pencil in a notepad and then go from sketches in the notepad
to a more worked-out version on the keyboard.
Looking back and forward
195
There have been these very prosaic, practical changes in writing,
because I started when even electronic typewriters had yet to be
invented – there were only manual typewriters. Now, with laptop
computers, the internet and all the rest, there have been massive
changes in the whole process of writing. The one thing that hasn’t
changed, however, is my concern with the way writing sounds when
you read it. I have always imagined that what I’m writing is something
that will eventually be read out loud, as in telling a story. The sound
matters and, in this, it’s important to bring the reader along with
you. That concern, I think, has always been there. But yes, writing
has otherwise changed a lot.
Diego Maria Malara
Looking back on your career today, do you have any regrets?
Tim Ingold
Yes, lots. I was just thinking about this, and the main one is that I
wish I could go back and do my first fieldwork again, perhaps with
the Skolt Sámi people in northeastern Finland, among whom I
carried out the fieldwork for my doctorate. At the time, I did what
I thought I was supposed to do: concentrating on relations of kin-
ship and neighbourhood, economic life, local-level politics. And I
produced what in those days was regarded simply as a study in
social organisation. People didn’t call it ethnography then; it was
merely a study of the organisation of a community. But to accom-
plish this I didn’t need to learn the Skolt Sámi language properly. I
picked the language up a bit, but only haphazardly. I never sat down
with people to listen to all their stories. I didn’t attend carefully to
things like place names, or aspects of the landscape. These are
topics in which I became interested much later on: language, land-
scape, perception, storytelling. But looking back, I realise that none
of these topics was on my radar when I was doing my first fieldwork.
It never occurred to me to sit down and work intensively with
196 Conversations with Tim Ingold
particular people from whom I could have learned about these
things. And I really regret this, not least because many of those
who were then elders in the community have now passed away.
Much of what they knew has been lost. If only I had had a bit more
foresight, I could have done something about it. I think that’s my
biggest regret. I was trained to do a certain kind of anthropological
study and I simply did it without knowing what I could have done
otherwise.
Other regrets have more to do with the fact that, basically, you can’t
have your cake and eat it too. Because I spent so much time doing
X, I couldn’t do Y. I sometimes think it’s a pity I got so distracted by
theory, when I could have been doing more fieldwork. I am by no
measure a field anthropologist. I have done rather little fieldwork
– perhaps three years of my life in total – and I cannot speak as
many colleagues do who have devoted the best part of their lives
to it. I didn’t really sit down to decide on the way I wanted to go; I
just found myself drifting in one way rather than the other. Perhaps
that was all to the good, as I achieved things I would otherwise not
have done. But it meant that other things got left on the sidelines,
most particularly the follow-up fieldwork I carried out, again in
Lapland, but with people of Finnish settler heritage. That was in
1979–80. I never wrote it up properly because I got sidetracked onto
other things. It’s another regret I have, as I feel I’ve let down the
people with whom I was working. That’s why I have this ambition to
return there in a year or two, once the pandemic situation has stabi-
lised, so I can pick up from where I left off. At least, the possibility
is still there for me to make amends.
Philip Tonner
What are the anthropological theories and problems you find most
exciting today and which are the ones that you’re not so fond of,
and why?
Looking back and forward
197
Tim Ingold
Oh, that’s difficult to say! I mentioned earlier how hard I find it to
get really interested in most of the proposals I was reading for the
British Academy, in connection with their competition for postdoc-
toral fellowships. The same thing happens whenever I pick up the
latest issue of Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute and flick
through the contents. I wonder, ‘Is there anything of interest here?’
Occasionally there is, but usually not. But then I ask myself: ‘Why
am I not interested? What’s the matter?’ And I don’t really know.
Part of the difficulty is that it has become increasingly difficult to
pin theories to disciplines. If you think about the most exciting
theoretical discussions going on just now, some do indeed start in
anthropology and then filter through to other areas of the human-
ities and social sciences; others start in other disciplines and filter
into ours. Let me give you an example. Currently, there is a lot of
excitement around the ontological turn, new materialism and post-
humanism. Like the points of a triangle, all three are connected. The
ontological turn started off in anthropology, but has now spread all
over the place. New materialism started in critical theory, feminism
and literary studies, but it’s spread into anthropology. Posthuman-
ism likewise started beyond anthropology, mainly as a movement in
philosophy, but has crept into anthropology too. These theoretical
currents run in different directions, but they all converge and end
up getting bundled together.
When I think about my own work, I suppose that in some respects,
I have contributed to this particular bundle. From the late 1990s, I
have been rethinking the idea of animism, arguing that we can no
longer dismiss it as primitive belief. We should treat it, rather, as a
sophisticated ontology in its own right. Today, this enterprise has
been overtaken by the ontological turn. At the same time, I’ve been
arguing that in the study of material culture, we should stop talking
about objects all the time and instead take seriously the materials
of which they are made. This has since become the mantra of new
materialism. And yes, I’ve been thinking for a long time about the
duplicity of received notions of humanity, and about how we might
198 Conversations with Tim Ingold
think the human otherwise, as a way of becoming rather than being.
This kind of rethinking now comes under the fashionable moniker
of posthumanism. I’ve been involved with all these developments,
and have perhaps advanced them here and there. You would think,
then, that these would be theoretical developments I find exciting,
and indeed they are.
But when I read the literature emerging from these developments,
especially perhaps when it is not produced by anthropologists
(because anthropological work tends at least to be grounded in
something), I find much of it utterly tendentious. It has largely lost
touch with any of the grounded realities it claims to be addressing.
Instead, it has become entirely self-referential, waffling on in a lazily
metaphorical language which sounds very deep, and very clever,
until you stop to ask what any of it actually means. Everything is
‘embodied’, forgetting that any living body breathes out as well as
taking in; everything is ‘entangled’, forgetting that a tangle is of lines
that are knotted together but don’t connect; everything is ‘imbri-
cated’, forgetting that imbrication is the way tiles overlap on a roof.
Partly as a result of this, the verb ‘to theorise’ has almost become
a term of abuse. Literally, to theorise is to think: it is a way of thinking
with the world, in the world. But in much scholarly literature, you
have the feeling that this is the last thing its authors are doing.
Rather, they are hiding behind their computer screens. ‘Be phenom-
enological!’ say these authors. ‘Be with the world; be in the world.’
It is all about being and becoming in the world, they say, or about
‘worlding’ – as it is now fashionably known. But you only have to
read what they write to discover that it is about as far removed from
the worlding world as you could possibly imagine. These scholars
don’t even try to practise what they preach, and it’s very irritating.
So if you ask me what I’m not particularly fond of, it’s precisely this
– the endless recycling of metaphors that have already lost touch
with the ground from which they were originally derived, leading to
writing that is not just impenetrable, but incomprehensible. It is bad
writing, plain and simple, and there’s a lot of it about.
Looking back and forward
199
Where things get exciting is when there is a vivid sense of direct
encounter with real people, real organisms, real things, a real world.
It’s still theorising, but it’s theorising in and with the world, not just
about it. It is a theorising – a thinking – that arises from the encounter
itself, not exclusively from the head of the theorist. That’s why a lot
of the work that I find most stimulating at the moment is on the
boundary between anthropology and art, or performance, or archi-
tecture. These all offer ways of theorising the world from the very
crucible of our existence as active and sentient beings within it.
The thing about art, as I put it in the ‘invitation’ to my book Corres-
pondences, from 2021, is that rather than taking literal truths meta-
phorically, it takes metaphorical truths literally. Your typical academic
theorist starts with some data, facts on the ground, but immediately
lifts them off into the realm of metaphor, where everything is
embodied, entangled or imbricated with everything else. But the
poet starts from a metaphor and then digs down in search of the
truth inside it. In my book I refer to a famous poem by Seamus
Heaney, ‘Digging’, in which he compares his digging the pen into
the surface of the paper as he writes with his father’s digging for
peat. He is likening his pen to his father’s spade. He looks at his
father bent over the spade, and he looks at himself bent over the
words. That’s a powerful metaphor for what it means to write, and
for the effort, thought and care that go into it.
We know there’s a truth buried in the metaphor. That’s why the poem
speaks to us. How, then, do we find that truth? We should go into
the fields and dig! What do we learn from digging? What does digging
tell us? Or: what does the earth tell us through the spade? That’s
the way to theorise – to ask questions like these, of the very earth
we inhabit. I mentioned the word ‘imbrication’, which means the
overlapping of tiles on a roof. But would any of the theorists who
write earnestly about how things are imbricated be even prepared
to learn from the experience of tiling a roof? Do they even care
what the word actually means? The theoretical literature is full of
metaphors that have completely lost touch with the ground from
which they were originally drawn, at which point they lose all
200 Conversations with Tim Ingold
meaning. So, the question is not so much one of which theories am
I most fond of, as of what kind of theorising am I most fond of? It’s
a theorising that thinks directly through things, through activity,
through performance, in the world.
Philip Tonner
You’ve already hinted at this in a couple of your answers, but what
are your plans for the future?
Tim Ingold
My immediate plans are that I have got two books to complete. One
is a third book of longer essays, which will be called Imagining for
Real: Essays on Creation, Attention and Correspondence. When it is
finished, it will form a trilogy alongside Being Alive and The Perception
of the Environment. Then I have to put together an edited volume
to be called Knowing from the Inside, based on the project we had
by that name.5 Once I’ve got those things out of the way, and a lot
of other bits and pieces, then I want to draw a line under all this art
and architecture stuff, and plan my return to Lapland, as I told you
at the end of our previous conversation. It all depends, I suppose,
on the pandemic and other contingencies, but that’s the plan.
Further Reading
In his article ‘In Praise of Amateurs’ (2021c), Ingold reflects on
anthropology as a practice of nomadic scholarship, while his essay
‘From Science to Art and Back Again: The Pendulum of an
Anthropologist’ (2018c) gives a broader view of his career. The
anthropologist Fredrik Barth, whose influence Ingold discusses
5 The project, Knowing from the Inside: Anthropology, Art, Architecture and Design,
was funded by the European Research Council and ran from 2013 to 2018.
Looking back and forward
201
near the start of the interview, is the subject of an intellectual
biography by Thomas Hylland Eriksen (2015). Ingold also talks
about the influence of Marshall Sahlins, including the early essay
‘Evolution: Specific and General’ (1960) and the books Stone Age
Economics (1972) and Culture and Practical Reason (1976).
In his remarks on teaching and learning, Ingold refers to the work
of Jean Lave, whose key publications include Cognition in Practice
(1988) and, with Etienne Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate
Peripheral Participation (1991). The course on the 4As
(Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture), which Ingold
taught at the University of Aberdeen, is discussed in Ingold with
Lucas (2007). Ingold drew on his experience of teaching the
course for his 2013 book Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art
and Architecture (Ingold 2013a).
Ingold refers, inter alia, to the work of two of his doctoral
students: Cesar Giraldo Herrera, on Viking and Amazonian
perspectivism, and Enrico Marcore on post-earthquake recon-
struction in northern Italy. He has developed his ideas on solidity
and fluidity in collaboration with another of his former doctoral
students, Cristian Simonetti, in a special issue of the journal
Theory, Culture & Society, Volume 39 (2), 2022, entitled Solid
Fluids, for which he co-authored the introduction (Ingold and
Simonetti 2022).
On Ingold’s contributions to the ontological turn, new materialism
and posthumanism, see especially his essays ‘Rethinking the Animate,
Re-animating Thought’ (2006) and ‘A Circumpolar Night’s Dream’
(reproduced as Chapter 6 of The Perception of the Environment,
2011b/2000); ‘Materials Against Materiality’ (2007b) and ‘In the
Gathering Shadows of Material Things’ (reproduced as Chapter 17
of Imagining For Real, 2022a); and Part III, ‘Humaning’ of The Life
of Lines (2015) and ‘Posthuman Prehistory’ (reproduced as Chapter
20 of Imagining for Real, 2022a).
202 Conversations with Tim Ingold
In his discussion of metaphor, Ingold refers to Seamus Heaney’s
poem ‘Digging’, dating from 1966 (Heaney 1990). The poem,
along with Ingold’s idea of taking metaphorical truths literally,
features in the ‘Invitation’ to his 2022 collection, Correspondences
(Ingold 2021b). In another essay in the collection, ‘In defence of
handwriting’, he describes his own practice of writing and how it
has evolved. Since this interview was conducted, both Imagining
for Real: Essays on Creation, Attention and Correspondence
(Ingold 2022a) and Knowing from the Inside: Cross-Disciplinary
Experiments with Matters of Pedagogy (Ingold 2022b) have been
published.
Afterword 203
AFTERWORD
Tim Ingold
Let me begin with a question raised in the introduction to this
volume. Why, throughout a career of writing, have I remained so
reluctant to refer to material I have gathered through my own field-
work? The majority of social anthropologists, surely, have been
inclined to veer to the other extreme, returning obsessively to the
people and places they know best from lengthy spells of field
research. It is a legitimate question, and one that I have often asked
of myself. In your reading of the foregoing conversations, you will
doubtless have picked up many clues to possible answers. I would
be the first to admit that the reasons are several, and that they are
neither entirely consistent with one another nor derived from a
coherent position that I could defend. Moreover, their salience has
varied over time, such that the answers I might give now are not
those I might have offered fifty years ago. Let me begin at the
beginning, however, at the moment when my own doctoral research,
with the Skolt Sámi of northeastern Finland, was on the point of
completion.
It had long been conventional in anthropology to divide the world
into so-called ‘ethnographic regions’. Each region had its own body
of literature, and would often be credited with having introduced a
particular thematic focus or conceptual orientation into the anthro-
pological mainstream. ‘Central Africa’, for example, was dear to the
204 Conversations with Tim Ingold
heart of the Manchester School, though when I joined the Department
there, my new-found colleagues included specialists in ‘East Africa’,
‘South Asia’ and ‘Europe’, and subsequently ‘Melanesia’ and ‘Latin
America’. But my own region, known as ‘the circumpolar North’, was
virtually unrecognised in British anthropology. Returning from the
field, I thus found myself ethnographically homeless. An indication
of my predicament came at the point when the authorities at the
University of Cambridge had to select examiners for my doctoral
dissertation. My external examiner, Ian Cunnison, had worked in the
Sudan, with people who herded camels. My internal examiner,
Caroline Humphrey, had worked in Mongolia, with herders of horses.
The committee presumably imagined that by crossing camels with
horses, and their respective regimes of herding, it might be possible
to come up with something resembling Sámi reindeer pastoralism!
The shame and isolation, for a young researcher, of having no ethno-
graphic home would be hard to exaggerate. It cut deep. It was
certainly one reason why, in those early years, I felt almost embar-
rassed to talk about my material – a feeling of inadequacy only
compounded by the cringeworthy title of my first book, based on
my dissertation, The Skolt Lapps Today (1976). It came about because
Cambridge University Press had decided to launch a new book series,
all with the title The [name of people] Today. Thrilled to be offered
a contract when the ink was not even dry on my thesis, I fell for it. I
would have done better to wait. The series soon folded, whilst my
book was forever tainted by my having called the people ‘Lapps’,
just at the time when the worldwide campaign to replace exogenous
ethnonyms with Indigenous designations was gathering steam. Sámi
intellectuals, with good reason, were asking why anthropologists from
abroad would invariably arrive in their countries to study people of
their own kind rather than the majority of settler heritage. Could it
be because the Sámi were assumed to be more exotically ‘primitive’?
As it dawned on me that the motivations underlying my choice to
study the Skolts were scarcely more honourable, I resolved to make
amends by carrying out my next fieldwork in a Finnish community.
This I did, in 1979–80, with a year’s fieldwork in Salla, in eastern
Afterword 205
Lapland, among people who combined reindeer herding with farming
and forestry work. Both the Skolt Sámi and the people of Salla had
experienced land loss and resettlement in the wake of the Second
World War, and my plan was to compare the long-term consequences
of this disruption to their lives in the two communities. As before, I
gathered a lot of material, and resolved to work on it over the coming
years. This resulted in a handful of articles – on the estimation of
work and forms of cooperation in herding, farming and forestry, on
questions of land, labour and livelihood, and on the problem of depopu-
lation in marginal regions. For a while, I dallied with rural sociology,
and in 1986 I convened an international symposium on ‘The Social
Implications of Agrarian Change in Northern and Eastern Finland’,
resulting in an eponymous volume (Ingold 1988c).
This volume was more widely reviewed than anything else I’ve written,
simply because I personally posted a copy to all the journals I could
think of. But the reviews, though positive, did nothing to save the
volume from the oblivion into which it would fall. The few articles I
had managed to write likewise languished unread. They had been
intended as no more than preliminary sketches for the monograph I
eventually planned to write, Farmers of the Northern Forest. But it
was all to no avail. My heart just wasn’t in it. My Salla research felt
like an offshoot that was withering on the branch, even as I was
irresistibly lured by the lofty spires of so-called ‘grand theory’. I would
get back to it in the end, I thought, but never imagined at the time
that it would not be for another forty-odd years. Why did I not refer
back to my observations from Salla in the meantime? To anyone who
asked, I explained that I did not want to present material that was
still, as it were, half-baked. ‘Let me first write it up properly,’ I would
say. But of course, I never did. It remains my next project.
But I had another ambition too. It was to secure proper recognition
for anthropological research in the circumpolar North.1 This was
1 This circumpolar sense of North-ness should not be confused with the sense
implied by what many scholars call ‘the Global North’, in reference to the over-
whelming concentration of wealth and power in the world’s northern hemisphere.
206 Conversations with Tim Ingold
not quite the same, however, as placing the North on a par with
other so-called ‘ethnographic regions’. There was, I felt, something
about the North, some sensibility, that upends the very idea of
regionality, and even of the ethnographic as conventionally under-
stood. The same is true, of course, of the West. But whereas the
idea of the West is founded on principles of universality, progress
and human ascendancy over nature, it seemed to me that a
northern sensibility rests on precisely the opposite principles: of
manifold difference or pluriversality, the continuity of life and
human co-becoming with other inhabitants of a more-than-human
world. Far from adding another ethnographic region, this sensibility,
I thought, could offer a way of doing anthropology otherwise than
by regional comparison: a way that would foster conversations
among scholars and Indigenous peoples from around the world, in
a spirit of conviviality. And so indeed it has turned out, in many
exemplary collaborations involving researchers and inhabitants of
lands ranging from northeastern Siberia to Alaska and everywhere
in between, until cruelly cut short by the Russian invasion of
Ukraine.
Many of these collaborations have been initiated and led by the
University of the Arctic, a consortium of higher education institu-
tions from around the circumpolar North. In 2007, I was invited to
present a keynote address to the UArctic conference, held in
Rovaniemi, the capital city of Finnish Lapland. The full and rather
cumbersome title of my address was: ‘Conversations from the
North: scholars of many disciplines and inhabitants of many places
in dialogue with one another, with animals and plants, and with the
land’. This is what the North meant, and still means, to me. It is
fundamentally a conversation, or rather a nexus of many conver-
sations, embracing everyone and everything. These are literally
conversations from, not about. They grow from the land, in places
and along paths, just as plants and animals do. The North, then, is
their breeding ground, not a platform for their enactment. It was
for the same reason that in the design of the BOREAS programme
– the first comprehensive, international and multidisciplinary
programme in the humanities and social sciences for research
Afterword 207
among northern circumpolar peoples – we chose the title Histories
from the North.2
When, in 1999, I moved to the University of Aberdeen to set up a
programme focused on the Anthropology of the North, my aim was
to place these conversations at the heart of our approach to teaching
and research. In presenting the subject to students, our courses
would reflect the principles of pluriversality, continuity and co-
becoming on which they rest. As our graduate programme devel-
oped, I wanted to ensure that no research student ever faced the
isolation that I did on returning from fieldwork in Lapland – not,
however, by providing them with a regional identity to wear on their
sleeve, but by introducing them to the very conversations in which
North-ness consists. Our location, in the city of Aberdeen, played
into this. Considered remote from the perspective of the so-called
‘golden triangle’ of Oxford, Cambridge and London, Aberdeen is
itself a northern city, with long historic connections to circumpolar
lands both to the east and to the west. And the University of
Aberdeen, drawing on these connections, has a peculiarly northern
complexion. Its history, too, is from the North, as is its scholarship.
That’s why, in 2012, the University selected ‘The North’ as one of
its flagship themes for multidisciplinary research. The theme, which
I led for its first five years, brought together scholars from across
the disciplinary spectrum, ranging from art history, through archae-
ology and anthropology, to geoscience. Around that time, investing
in strategic research themes had become the latest fashion among
university administrators, and plenty of other universities were doing
the same. But our theme on ‘The North’ was unique. Once again,
my overriding aim was to avoid closing off the North as a region, in
favour of open-ended conversation. As I put it in the title of an
essay first drafted for a conference at the Max Planck Institute,
2 The BOREAS programme, funded by the European Science Foundation, was led
by Piers Vitebsky, of the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of
Cambridge, and ran from 2006 to 2009. See http://archives.esf.org/coordinating-
research/euroc ores/programmes/boreas.html.
208 Conversations with Tim Ingold
Halle, in 2014, ‘The North is Everywhere’. Unlike the everywhere of
the West, usually imagined as a featureless globe upon the surface
of which all life and history is enacted, the everywhere of North-
ness, I argued, lies in the extended web of paths woven by living
creatures as they thread their ways through an ever-unfolding envir-
onment. Five years later, and after much revision, the essay was
published in a volume, Knowing from the Indigenous North, which
included several Sámi scholars among its contributors (Ingold
2019).
A couple of years previously, I had presented a draft of this essay
to the anthropology seminar at the London School of Economics.
The response was sceptical. My critics, suspicious of the parallels
between my characterisation of the North and the approach I had
already set out in books like The Perception of the Environment and
Being Alive, accused me of using the North as a surrogate for a
philosophy that was essentially my own. ‘What do you expect?’ I
retorted. ‘Had it not been for my own immersion in northern ways,
I wouldn’t be thinking along these lines in the first place.’ And this
is precisely the point. Like any novice anthropologist, I had begun
by going over my fieldnotes, again and again. I was a stickler for
detail, and found it hard to tell the wood from the trees. So long as
we think of anthropological analysis as a process of sifting out
generalities from the mass of specificities, holding to the middle
ground is always a challenge. That’s why anthropologists have so
commonly found refuge in the ethnographic region, a kind of halfway
house between particulars and universals, and why, initially, I had
felt left out in the cold.
But discovering what I had really learned during my sojourns in
Lapland took much longer, and it did not come from any analysis of
the ‘ethnographic facts’. Quite to the contrary, it came in the form
of a radical reassessment of my whole way of doing anthropology,
as a way of knowing that grows from the inside of our experience
of doing things, of inhabiting a world – or, in a word, of being. The
truth we seek, I realised, is neither particular nor general, nor halfway
between the two, but has a certain resonant depth. You can feel it.
Afterword 209
It is like the truth in music, or in art. Only as this realisation dawned
did I begin to see that as a species of knowing from the inside,
anthropology shares common cause not so much with science as
we know it, but with fields of art, architecture and design. This would
eventually culminate in the last big project I would undertake before
my retirement. What was known as KFI – an acronym for ‘Knowing
from the Inside: Anthropology, Art, Architecture and Design’ – ran
from 2013 to 2018, with generous funding from the European
Research Council.
In all of this, however, I never left the North. It was rather the North
that had taught me that as an exploration of knowing in being,
anthropology is not, in the first place, an ethnographic enterprise.
Nor is it a generalising science. The motion for the first debate of
GDAT held in Manchester in 1988, ‘Social anthropology is a gener-
alising science or it is nothing’, had caught the tension between the
alternatives of ethnographic specificity and scientific generality. But
it also caught a turning point in my own intellectual life. For it was
at that moment that I began to see another way for anthropology,
namely, as the very web of conversations in which I was discovering
the essence of North-ness. Whereas generalising from particulars
is a characteristically Western gambit, the way of the North allows
knowledge to grow from our vital and visceral involvements with
fellow inhabitants of the lands and waters of a shared planet. For
me, this turnaround was wonderfully liberating. The ethnographic
homelessness I had experienced on first returning from the field
could finally give way to the nomadic scholarship I have enjoyed
ever since. I can now pitch my tent wherever I like!
References 211
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Index 221
INDEX
Aberdeen, University of 10, 50,
207
‘Anthropology of the North’
programme at 54, 207
Department of Anthropology
7, 50–9, 73, 170
‘Reclaiming Our University’
Movement 11, 95–9
supervision of doctoral
students at 53–4
undergraduate teaching at 53
see also circumpolar North,
anthropological research in
academia, colonial legacy in 4,
11, 70–2
academic career
see Aberdeen, University of;
Manchester, University of
animals
see human–animal relations
anthropocentrism 7, 115–17
and environmental sustaina-
bility 117
anthropology
challenges facing 4, 73, 166,
188–91, 208
colonial legacies and 4, 70–
2
decolonising of 72–3
distinctiveness of 5, 94–5,
103
as education 5–6, 9, 72,
88–93, 183–4
and ‘ethnographic regions’
44, 203–6
history of 4, 43, 55, 169
beyond humanity 7, 141–2,
147–9
importance of 190–1
for one world 7, 165–7
professionalisation of 12, 70,
84
public profile of 4, 11–12,
78–80, 188–90
as subject to study 24–5,
93–4
synthesis of with other
fields
57, 102–3, 175–7
see also
archae
o
log
y; archi-
tecture; art;
ethnography; fieldwork;
4As course; participant
observation; sociology;
social sciences;
teaching; theory; writing
222 Conversations with Tim Ingold
Anthropology and/as Education
(2018) 5–6, 90–2
Anthropology: Why it Matters
(2018) 5–6, 93
Appropriation of Nature (1986),
The 9, 44–5 archaeology
and anthropology 7, 25, 58,
176, 183, 207
and landscape 105
and taskscape
1
08
architecture 54, 57, 59, 183,
199
art 22, 54, 57–9, 162, 183, 199
history 105–6, 108, 118, 207
Barnes, John 12, 27–8, 36–7
Barth, Fredrik 8, 26, 28–9,
178–81
see also transactionalism
Being Alive (2011) 58, 170, 200,
208
belief, religious 7, 167–9
and faith 168
Bergson, Henri 8, 45, 47, 89,
105, 165
Biesta, Gert 90–1
biodiversity 74–5
biology 44, 45–6, 102, 130–1,
148–9
and culture 3, 45, 130–31
Darwinian and neo-Darwinian
11, 45, 67, 102, 132–3, 169
developmental 57, 103
evolutionary 9, 45–7, 89
and sociobiology 46
BOREAS programme, see
circumpolar North, anthro-
pological research in
Cambridge, University of 28,
39, 207
Department of Social
Anthropology 25–7, 50
doctoral research at 26,
27–30, 204
undergraduate studies at
23–6, 74, 90, 176
see also Barnes, John; field-
work; Hart, Keith; Leach,
Edmund; writing
childhood experiences and
influences 18–22
secondary education 19–20
father’s work as mycologist
20–2
first trip to Finland 23
circumpolar North, anthropo-
logical research in 43–4,
55, 80, 138, 204–7
BOREAS programme 206–7
climate crisis 116–17
colonialism 37, 72, 150, 185,
186
correspondence 160–2, 167
versus interaction 161
versus intra-action 161
meaning of 160
creation 163–5
versus creativity 164
and generations 164–5
meaning of 164
culture
and biology 3, 45, 130–1
Index 223
and diversity 73–4
and skill 130–1
see also material culture
democracy 68
and education, Dewey on 98
Dewey, John 9, 68, 88–90, 98
diversity
biodiversity 74–5
cultural 73–4
and difference 73
doctoral research
see Cambridge, University of
dwelling
versus habitation 108–9
Heidegger on 48, 109
meaning of 109, 128
poetics of 110
and producing 128
dwelling perspective 7, 105–8
and landscape 106–7
and taskscape 107–8
ecology 45, 46, 106
and anthropology 44–5, 48
see also Appropriation of
Nature (1986), The
education
and curiosity 133
rather than ethnography, as
purpose of anthropology
91, 183–4
and fieldwork 33–4, 71, 91, 183
meaning of 90–1
sensory 158–60
and teaching 6–7, 9, 92,
159–60, 181–4
transmission model of 90
as a way of leading life 90,
159
see also Anthropology and/
as Education (2018);
Biesta, Gert; Dewey,
John; higher educa-
tion; learning;
Masschelein, Jan;
teaching
environment
and anthropocentrism 116–17
concept of 104
versus landscape 105–8
see also Appropriation of
Nature (1986), The;
Manchester, University
of, undergraduate
teaching at; Perception
of the Environment
(2000), The; Uexküll,
Jakob von
ESRC (Economic and Social
Research Council) 27
ethnography 14, 157, 171, 195
versus anthropology 4, 11–12,
72–2, 75–88, 190
and colonial legacy 72
versus education 91, 183–4
multi-species 141, 147–9
see also anthropology; field-
notes; fieldwork;
p
articipa
nt observation;
writing
evolution 44–7, 151, 164
versus history 3, 45, 130, 169
see also biology
224 Conversations with Tim Ingold
Evolution and Social Life (1986)
9, 44–7, 127
fieldnotes 76–7, 82, 171, 193, 208
importance of 86–8
writing of 12, 36–7, 87
fieldwork, anthropological 26,
29–30, 71–2, 82, 86–8,
203–9
doctoral research with Skolt
Sámi (northeastern
Finland) 12–13, 27, 31–6, 41,
195
versus ethnography 75–8
importance of 34, 91
language learning and 12,
30–1
plans for future 14, 171
research in Salla (eastern
Lapland) 14, 44, 52, 171
and teaching 83, 183
transformative nature of 33,
91
see also ethnography; field-
notes; research; writing
Finland 12, 23, 26–7, 32–6, 195,
203
4As course (Anthropology,
Archaeology, Art and
Architecture) 183–4
fungi 18, 20–2, 1
04
see also the mycelial person,
concept of
GDAT (Group for Debates in
Anthropological Theory)
63–4, 209
generations, entwinement of 14,
171
see also Rise and Fall of
Generation Now (2024),
The
Gibson, James 8, 9, 47–8, 124,
179
Godelier, Maurice 45, 127, 178–80
Hart, Keith 8, 25, 40–3
Heidegger, Martin 48, 109, 128
Hicks, Dan 113–14
higher education
and neoliberalism 98
purpose of 97–8
‘Reclaiming Our University’
Movement 11, 95–9
REF (Research Excellence
Framework) 170
history 44–5, 124, 167–70
cultural 51–2
versus evolution 45, 130, 169
of notation 153–5
human–animal relations 7, 43,
138–49
domestication 145–7
multi-species ethnography
141, 147–9
as social relations 138, 140–1
trust vs domination 140–1,
146–7
see also anthropology,
beyond humanity;
language; Midgley, Mary
humaning 148
humanities 93, 99, 106, 166, 197,
206
Index 225
see also natural sciences,
versus humanities
humanity 162, 197–8
concept of 119
and nature 119, 120
unsliced 4, 95, 103
see also anthropology,
beyond humanity
hunter-gatherer studies 45, 59,
140, 147, 180
imagination, versus reality 3, 7,
162–3
Imagining for Real (2022) 2,
1
38, 147, 162–70
Ingold, Anna 27, 30, 186
interviews 17–18
landscape 22, 156, 158, 195–6
anthropological approach to
105–8
meaning of 106
northern 13, 31–2, 33–5,
157–8
perception of 110–12
versus taskscape 106–8
temporality of 106, 113–14
language 130,
143–
5, 1
6
3
and academic writing 67,
118–19, 198
languaging, concept of 144–5
see also fieldwork, language
learning and
Lave, Jean 182–3
Leach, Edmund 25–6, 74, 90,
191
learning
anthropological studies of
182
and education 5
and fieldwork 33–4, 52, 71,
82, 91, 183
from PhD students 9, 180–1,
191–3
and skill 66, 111–12, 126
and wisdom 5–6, 93, 98
see also fieldwork, language
learning and; Lave, Jean;
teaching
Leroi-Gourhan, André 8,
89–90,
15
1–2, 154–5, 179
life
education as a way of
leading 90, 159
and generations 1, 117, 164, 171
as movement 115, 151, 156–60
social 70, 73–4, 107, 139
see also lines
lines 8–9, 13, 21–2, 34, 58–9,
104
history and anthropology of
149–52, 156–60
lifelines 156
and anthropology of literacy
153–5
and history of notation 153–5
threads vs traces 152–3
Lines: A Brief History (2007) 9,
58, 156
Manchester, University of
Department of Social
Anthropology 38–42, 46,
49–50, 55, 194, 203–4
226 Conversations with Tim Ingold
supervision of doctoral
students at 40–1, 43, 57
undergraduate teaching at
43–4, 45–6, 10
6
–7, 123, 127
Marx, Karl 8, 70, 126–8, 142, 169
Masschelein, Jan 90–1
material culture 81, 119–21,
197–8
see also culture
materialism, new 118–19, 197–8
materiality 7, 117–23
versus materials 10, 118–23
Mauss, Marcel 43, 89, 150
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 8,
48–9, 89, 179
Midgley, Mary 139–40
modernity, Western 129–30, 150
dissolving dichotomies of 3,
11, 130–1
the mycelial person, concept of
7, 8, 103–4
and lines 104
influenced by father’s work
as mycologist 8, 20–2, 104
see also fungi
mycology
see fungi; the mycelial
person, concept of
natural sciences, versus human-
ities 4, 106, 139, 175
neoliberalism 11
and higher education 98
ontogeny 89
ontological turn 197–8
Oyama, Susan 8, 89
participant observation
and ethnography 11–12,
78–9
and method 83–5
as ontological commitment
83–4
and teaching 83
see also anthropology;
ethnography; fieldnotes;
fieldwork
perception
ecological approach to 89,
126
environmental 54
Gibson on 47–8, 89
and imagination 162–3
Merleau-Ponty on 48–9,
89
see also skill
Perception of the Environment
(2000), The 57–8, 101–3,
126–33, 156, 162, 208
phenomenology 47–9, 57, 89,
102–3
see also Merleau-Ponty,
Maurice
philosophy 94, 102, 118, 165–9,
192
politics 10–11, 22, 66–8, 195
as dialogue 65, 68
democratic 68
meaning of 65, 68
and theory 65
and the act of writing 10–11,
65, 66–7
posthumanism 148, 197–8
psychology 71, 102
Index 227
ecological 2, 47–8,
5
7, 103,
124–5, 179
cognitive 111–12, 164
see also Gibson, James
REF (Research Excellence
Framework), see higher
education
religion, see belief, religious
research
funding 27, 67, 85, 209
and method 83–5
training 12,
29
–
30
, 38, 83
see also circumpolar North,
anthropological research
in; fieldwork; participant
observation
Rise and Fall of Generation Now
(2024), The 2, 14, 171
Rubin, David 111–12
skill 66, 111–12, 123–33
as coordination of perception
and action 124–6
ecological approach to
125–6
and knowledge 125
see also techniques; tech-
nology
Skolt Lapps Today (1976), The
13, 138, 204
Skolt Sámi 12–13, 27, 30–6,
1
38,
195, 203–5
social anthropology, see
anthropology
social sciences 93, 99, 103–4,
141–2, 197, 206
sociology 4, 28, 51, 53–5, 94–5,
142, 169
storytelling 31, 158, 195
as a form of wayfaring
158–60
Strathern, Marilyn 44, 49–50
structural-functionalism 25–6, 69
structuralism 25
teaching
approach to 6–7, 9, 92, 181–5,
207
as essential part of doing
anthropology 6, 183–4
and cultivation of curiosity
133
practice of 83–4
standard model of 181
see also Aberdeen, University
of; anthropology;
learning; Manchester,
University of
techniques
1
24, 126
anthropological approaches
to 151, 179
technology 124, 151, 181
anthropological approaches
to 43–4, 89, 123–4
see also skill
theory 63–5, 67, 69–70, 104–5,
178, 196, 205
in anthropology 90, 102, 179
as political 65
as thinking 64
see also GDAT
Tilley, Christopher 120–3
transactionalism 26, 29, 178
228 Conversations with Tim Ingold
Uexküll, Jakob von 142, 149
universities, see Aberdeen,
University of; academia;
Cambridge, University of;
higher education;
Manchester, University of
Werbner, Pnina 40–1
Whitehead, Alfred North 45, 47,
131
writing
approaches to 11, 193–5
fieldnotes 86–8
history of 153–5
as political 10–11, 65, 66–7
types of writing 76–8, 81–2, 198
writing up after fieldwork
33–4, 39
see also ethnography; field-
notes; lines
This book o ers a comprehensive and accessible account of
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 signifi cant infl uences shaping
his life and career, and addresses some of the criticisms that
have been made of his ideas.
Over the past fi ve decades, Tim Ingold has advanced thinking
and research within the discipline of anthropology, and also
made signifi cant contributions to a wide range of debates
in both the arts and humanities and the natural sciences.
This book covers the entirety of Ingold’s career, including his
observations of human-animal relations in the circumpolar
regions, his perspectives on the perception of the environment,
and his meditations on lived experience in the material world.
In tracing his career, this volume also gauges the evolving state
of the fi eld of social anthropology during this period, which has
grappled with its complicated historical involvement in projects
of colonialism as well as environmental and social activism.
Tim Ingold CBE, FBA, FRSE is Professor Emeritus of Social Anthropology
at the University of Aberdeen
Robert Gibb is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Social and Political Sciences
at the University of Glasgow
Philip Tonner is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at the University
of Glasgow
Diego Maria Malara is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the
University of Glasgow
SCOTTISH
UNIVERSITIES
PRESS