KU LEUVEN

FACULTEIT PSYCHOLOGIE EN
PEDAGOGISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

Laboratory for Education and Society

Reading with Ingold

An analysis of Tim Ingold’s anthropology and its educational
line

Master’s thesis submitted for the

degree of Master of Science in de
pedagogische wetenschappen by
Hans Schildermans

Supervisor: Prof. dr. Jan Masschelein

Co-supervisor: Mathias Decuypere

2013-2014
 KU LEUVEN

FACULTEIT PSYCHOLOGIE EN
PEDAGOGISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

Laboratory for Education and Society

Reading with Ingold

An analysis of Tim Ingold’s anthropology and its educational
line

Master’s thesis submitted for the

degree of Master of Science in de
pedagogische wetenschappen by
Hans Schildermans

Supervisor: Prof. dr. Jan Masschelein

Co-supervisor: Mathias Decuypere

2013-2014
Hans, Schildermans, Reading with Ingold. An analysis of Tim Ingold’s anthropology and its educational line.
Master thesis presented to obtain the degree of: Master in de Pedagogische Wetenschappen
Examination period: June 2014
Supervisor: Prof. dr. Jan Masschelein
Co-supervisor: Mathias Decuypere

The central question of this master’s thesis is: In what way does the
anthropologist Tim Ingold’s work (especially from The Perception of the
Environment, published in 2000, onwards) in-form, in the double meaning of on
the one hand giving sense to and on the other hand giving shape to, our relation
to the world. The main thesis I will bring to the fore is that Ingold’s work is
educational in itself, not because he uses educational concepts or because he
describes educational situations, but instead because his education of attention
allows for a certain way of seeing and being, a certain relation - or, attending -
to the world, one that is attentive.
In the introductory chapter I will clarify the central questions and issues
addressed in this thesis and how I want to structure my argument.
In the first chapter I will try to make the reader acquainted with the
anthropologist Tim Ingold by giving an overview of his life and major works. I will
present his main aim - reversing the logic of inversion - and his vision on what
anthropology should be - a comparative, generous, open-ended yet critical
inquiry into the conditions and potentials of human life.
The second chapter’s aim is to give an overview of five theoretical influences
on Ingold’s work: Bateson, Gibson, von Uexküll, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty.
In the third chapter I will discuss Ingold’s relation to Deleuze and Guattari’s A
Thousand Plateaus. This is the run-up to Ingold’s conception of the world and its
inhabitants, and their correspondence.
The fourth chapter is about Ingold’s notion of education of attention. I will
trace its conceptual development and describe walking as an education of
attention. I will assert why Ingold’s work itself is an education of attention.
In the conclusion I will argue that Ingold’s work in-forms our relation to the
world because it is an education of attention. It makes us attentive to the world’s
formation of itself.
I believe that this structure will allow me to argue for my thesis in a clear
way. I hope that this master’s thesis will invite the reader not only to read about
Ingold, but also to read with Ingold.
Preface and acknowledgements

Before I set out with my dissertation I want to make some time to thank a few people without
whom this master’s thesis wouldn’t be what it is now.

In the first place I want to thank prof. dr. Jan Masschelein and Mathias Decuypere, my
supervisors, for their confidence and the fact that they have let me go my own way, at my
own pace. It took a long time of wandering around through the literature on walking and
through Tim Ingold’s work before I got some idea of what this master’s thesis could become.
Nevertheless, they never gave up their willingness to support me, to listen to my experiences
during these explorations and to ask me some questions that allowed me to put my own
thinking on the line. I thank them for their time. As educators they are very well aware of the
importance and relevance of time and what it means to make time.

Furthermore I want to thank my parents for giving me the possibility to follow the interesting
path I have now been following for five years. I thank them for the moments we share along
the road and their invitations to go out for a walk.

I thank my friends and fellow students for the nice time, the walks and talks we had and we
will continue to have.

This thesis is written in loving memory of my grandmother in whose backyard I put my first
steps.
Since this master’s thesis is a study of an author, Tim Ingold, including an overview of his life
and major works, a discussion of different theoretical influences upon his thought and a
presentation of the educational line in his work, my own input concerns reading and analysing
his work. My aim was to come to a clear and concise synthesis of Tim Ingold’s anthropology
with a specific interest in his conception of education. Therefore I have read following books
written by Ingold: The Skollt Lapps Today; Hunters, Pastoralists and Ranchers; The
Appropriation of Nature; Evolution and Social Life; The Perception of the Environment;
Lines; Being Alive; and Making. Besides I have read some of his references including inter
alia Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind; Gibson’s An Ecological Approach to Visual
Perception; and Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. Limo, the library service of the
Association KULeuven, and the on-line webshop Amazon helped me to get access to these
works. My supervisor prof. dr. Jan Masschelein delivered me Ingold’s unpublished article The
Maze and the Labyrinth: Walking and the Education of Attention, giving me an insight in
Ingold’s ideas about education at present.
Table of contents

Summary
Preface and acknowledgements
Approach
Table of contents

Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 1
I. Life, work, anthropology ........................................................................................................ 5
1. Life and major works.................................................................................................. 5
2. Against Descartes, for being alive: General aim and vision on anthropology ......... 17
II. Inversion in reverse ............................................................................................................. 23
1. Five movements against inversion ........................................................................... 23
i. First movement: Bateson and the ecology of mind ....................................... 24
ii. Second movement: Gibson and the ecological approach to visual perception27
iii. Third movement: Uexküll and Umwelt ....................................................... 30
iv. Fourth movement: Heidegger, dwelling and being-in-the-world ................ 32
v. Fifth movement: Merleau-Ponty and the experience of light ....................... 36
2. Five movements within inversion ............................................................................ 38
III. The meshwork and its rhizomatic roots ............................................................................. 41
1. Deleuze and Guattari and the rhizome ..................................................................... 41
2. Cogito ergo sum: Reinterpreting the Cartesian precept ........................................... 49
IV. Education of attention ........................................................................................................ 55
1. What is the education of attention? .......................................................................... 55
2. Wayfaring as an education of attention .................................................................... 59
3. Reading with Ingold, an education of attention ........................................................ 65
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 69
References ................................................................................................................................ 75
Introduction

We do not have to think the world in order to live

in it, but we do have to live in the world in order
to think it (Ingold, 1996, p. 118).

La critique commence par l’attention, la présence

et la générosité (Foucault, 1971, p. 762)

This master’s thesis started out from a profound interest in walking and the educational
experience of being on the way. After a broad introduction into the theories about walking
provided by Frédéric Gros’ Marcher, une Philosophie, which was like a map for me -
designating different regions and paths between them -, I chose one, rather small and new -
not quite one of the beaten tracks - path. This path was not yet on the map but I already heard
about its existence in a course I followed a few years ago on ecophilosophy. I was quite
excited when my supervisors prof. dr. Jan Masschelein and Mathias Decuypere suggested to
make a small exploration of this path that was still quite untrodden but becoming more and
more known, especially among anthropologists. This path was Tim Ingold and now I am
already following it for two years.

Walking this path comprised reading all of Ingold’s major works, i.e. all the books he has
written himself and some important articles he wrote after the publication of Making in 2013.
Besides I also followed some small arrows I encountered on my way, pointing to the works of
among others Gregory Bateson, James Gibson, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. To map
these paths and sidetracks was the most important endeavour of this master’s thesis. It helped
me in a certain way to grasp Tim Ingold’s work, his vision on anthropology, his idea about the
world and its inhabitants and his conception of education. In short, the aim of my master’s
thesis was to make a study of Tim Ingold’s work, disentangling the different lines it is made
of, with a specific interest in the educational line centred around the notion of education of
attention.

This master’s thesis is a testimony of my experiences along the way. My journey started from
the question in what way Ingold’s work in-forms, in the double meaning of on the one hand

1
giving sense to and on the other hand giving shape to, our relation to the world. Walking
along the path Ingold laid out, becoming more and more acquainted with his ideas each time I
encountered the same or similar vista’s, I discovered that Ingold’s work is educational in
itself, not because he uses educational concepts or because he describes educational
situations, but instead because his education of attention allows for a certain way of seeing
and being, a certain relation - or, attending - to the world, one that is attentive.

After this small introductory chapter, this master’s thesis starts with a general overview of
Ingold’s life and major works. My aim is to make the reader acquainted with Ingold’s work
on a very general level. This will make it easier to understand the analysis brought in the
subsequent chapters. Chapter I will end with a clear statement of Ingold’s aim, reversing the
logic of inversion, and his vision on what anthropology should be, namely a comparative,
generous, open-ended yet critical inquiry into the conditions and potentials of human life. At
the end of chapter I, I hope the reader will have a general idea about Tim Ingold’s
anthropology. At this point I will narrow my scope to Ingold’s work published from The
Perception of the Environment onwards. With this book he reverses his own perspective and
instead of trying to glue the biological and the social, the organism and the person, nature and
culture together as he did in his previous books, he begins to think about the world and its
inhabitants in a way in which the two are still indistinguishable.
In chapter II I will investigate how Ingold tries to reverse the logic of inversion. I distinguish
five theoretical movements Ingold makes in his attempt to put the logic of inversion in
reverse. These are [1] the anthropologist Gregory Bateson and his idea of the ecology of
mind, underscoring the interrelatedness of the different parts of the world; [2] the
psychologist James Gibson and his theorising about the ecological approach to visual
perception, subverting classical cognitivist ideas assuming the existence of a mind closed off
from the world; [3] the biologist Jakob von Uexküll and his concept of Umwelt, uniting the
animals’ environments of perception and action; [4] the metaphysician Martin Heidegger and
his ideas about what it means to build and to dwell and how these two are factually
indistinguishable and [5] the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty and what he calls the
experience of light, allowing Ingold to conceive of the world as sentient. It is, however, only
after reading A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze and Guattari that Ingold succeeds in his
attempts to reverse the logic of inversion to a sufficient extent.
Therefore, I will give a rather long exposition of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought, especially of
some of their notions such as rhizome, haecceity and smooth space, in chapter III. Deleuze
2
and Guattari have not really influenced Ingold but with their concept of rhizome they
provided Ingold with a framework to bring some of his philosophical and ethnographic
explorations together. This is the preamble to my presentation of Ingold’s conception of the
world and its inhabitants at the end of the chapter. Consecutively I will first deal with his
concept of meshwork as a metaphor to think about the world, secondly his acronym of
SPIDER, standing for Skilled Practice Involves Developmentally Embodied Responsiveness,
and thirdly correspondence, the way we relate to the world and each other. The idea of
correspondence helps Ingold to definitively reverse the logic of inversion.
Having acquired an insight in Ingold’s aim and his conception of the world and its inhabitants
in chapters I, II and III, chapter IV will deal with the educational line that is woven
throughout Ingold’s anthropological meshwork, namely in the notion of education of
attention. In this chapter I will retrace the origins of this notion in the work of Gibson and
inquire how Ingold’s ideas about the education of attention differ from Gibson’s. I will
elaborate this along his theory about walking as wayfaring. At the end of the chapter I will try
to conceive of Ingold’s work itself as an education of attention.
At the end of this master’s thesis I will summarize my argument in some conclusions and I
will try to make some comments on his ideas about education.

My interest in Tim Ingold’s work concerns especially its educational line. To come to a
deeper understanding of his work I read it several times. The last time I read it I made
summaries to grasp the different distinctions he calls into being and how he situates himself
within these polarities, for instance nature and culture or building and dwelling. Sometimes he
transcends the distinction, for instance the distinction between mind and world. Sometimes he
takes a very radical position, for instance his plea for the meshwork instead of the network.
This gave me some insights in his own theoretical position. While reading Ingold’s work, I
have never tried to judge it or to check if his interpretations of for instance Gibson or
Heidegger were correct. I never wanted to put his ideas to the test of my preconceptions and
opinions, although I have to admit that this is a difficult, if not impossible, task. I was always
more interested in being carried away by Ingold’s work, to follow his sentences and see where
they would lead. As such this reading of Ingold may seem uncritical and maybe naïve, but in
an age where we as students are so often requested to take up a critical perspective, to reflect
upon our own position, to elaborate an opinion, etc. it seemed interesting to me to just submit
to an author and see where this would bring me. As a good 21th century student I will

3
nevertheless make a small comment on Ingold’s ideas concerning education that came to my
mind after writing this master’s thesis.

Tim Ingold writes about many things, ranging from hunting and dreaming to weaving a basket
and playing the cello. If you are interested in reading about the world, you should better not
read Ingold, for what Ingold offers us is not some information about the world but a way of
seeing the world and being in the world, a way of attending to the world in which we can
learn from the world, not from Ingold. According to Ingold we can’t live, think or write
outside the world, for our life, thought and writing always takes place inside the world. More,
these are ways of relating to the world. Inspired by Jan Masschelein’s ideas concerning e-
ducating the gaze, Ingold offers us an understanding of how we can relate to the world in a
way that is attentive, present and generous. It is a relating to the world that is always a waiting
for the world - attendre in French means waiting -, it is a way of being in the world, attending
to the world that allows us to see the world, not to see our preconceptions or opinions
reflected upon its surface, because it puts us in a position of ex-position. When exposed the ‘I’
as a centre of perception and action dissolves into ‘a’, undefined and undestined, forever on
the way. Reading Ingold, or better reading with Ingold, is such a waiting for the world, during
which the truth of the world is revealed.

4
I. Life, work, anthropology

I.1. Life and major works

In this first part of the first chapter I want to present the reader a chronological overview of
Ingold’s major works. I will focus on the books Ingold has written himself. I will try to bring
to the fore the main thesis of each book together with some conclusions. Books he (co-)edited
will only be mentioned. I will tie the descriptions of these books together with some
information about Ingold’s life such as courses he taught, conferences he organised, etc. This
will allow us to come to a better understanding of Ingold’s intellectual development and the
unfolding of his thoughts up to the publication of Making, the last book I will discuss. I
appeal to his biographical information to be found on the website of the University of
Aberdeen1 and his books. In the next part of this first chapter I will try to come to a more
general understanding of Ingold’s aims and his vision on what anthropology is or should be.

Tim Ingold was born in 1948. In secondary school he excels in mathematics and becomes
interested in physics. He decides to study natural sciences at the University of Cambridge.
This turned out to be a big disappointment:

Like so many of my contemporaries I was appalled by the extent to which science had
reneged both on its sense of democratic responsibility and on its original commitment
to enlarge the scope of human knowledge, and had allowed itself to become
subservient to the demands of the military-industrial complex (Ingold, 2000, p. 1).

After his first year at the university he had a discussion with his tutor whom he told that he
lost his passion for natural sciences and was looking for a subject with somewhat more room
for improvisation. “It would be exciting, I thought, to join in a subject still on the make - one,
perhaps, that was in the same formative stage that physics was in at the time of Galileo”
(Ingold, 2000, p. 1). His tutor recommended him to study anthropology. In the introduction to
The Perception of the Environment, Ingold writes that he has abandoned his ambition to
become the Galileo of anthropology, but that the reasons to study anthropology are still the
same as at the time when he chose for this subject:

1
http://www.abdn.ac.uk/anthropology/staff/details.php?id=tim.ingold
5
 Concerned about the widening gap between the arts and the humanities on the one
hand, and the natural sciences on the other, I was looking for a discipline that would
somehow close the gap, or enable us to rise above it, while remaining close to the
realities of lived experience. Anthropology, for me, has been that discipline, and since
embarking on it, I have never looked back (Ingold, 2000, p. 1).

In 1976, Tim Ingold received his PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge
with a dissertation on the Skolt Saami living in North-East Finland. In the period between
1971 and 1974 Ingold lived for a total of eighteen months amongst the Skolt Saami. During
the academic year 1973-1974, Ingold was employed at the University of Helsinki. From his
fieldwork he distilled the book The Skolt Lapps Today, published in 1976. The work is rooted
within the British structural-functionalist tradition. Ingold focuses on aspects of adaptation to
the environment, social organisation and relations to the wider social world. He enriches a
purely structural-functionalist approach with a historical perspective, allowing him to come to
more comprehensive understanding of the social life of the Skolt Lapps. The first introductory
chapter tells the story of the shifting of the borders in the aftermath of World War II involving
an evacuation of the Skolts. Three big chapters follow dealing with respectively the economy,
the social structure and the relations with the wider social environment. In the first part,
Ingold describes the shift from an intensive form of pastoralism to a more extensive one. The
second part is about social relations between individuals and groups within the Saami
community. In this part, Ingold indicates some problems resulting from the housing policies,
for instance the restrictions on the acquisition of a dwelling after a marriage. Besides Ingold
analyses the role of the snow mobile within Saami culture, a status symbol for the youth, an
economical device for the elderly, financing the snow mobile. The relation of the Skolts as
minority with the wider society is the subject of the third chapter of the book. Small scale
problems of the Skolts are regularly dealt with on a higher political level causing often
inconsistent solutions. Tim Ingold’s interest in different forms of subsistence of circumpolar
people will continue to play a role in his later work, for instance in his concern with human-
animal relations and his conceptualisation of the human-animal interface (Ingold, 1976).

A few years later Tim Ingold is appointed as lector in Social Anthropology at the University
of Manchester. Here he continues his research on circumpolar people with a specific focus on
hunting, pastoralism and ranching as forms of subsistence. In 1980, Ingold publishes his
6
second book: Hunters, Pastoralists and Ranchers. Ingold came up with the idea for this book
during his fieldwork amongst the Skolt Lapps. In the book he compares different
ethnographic resources concerning circumpolar peoples. He tries to establish a theory about
hunting, pastoralism and ranching. He calls it an ‘ideas book’, no ‘facts book’.
The main issue in the book is: Under what circumstances does a social group evolve from a
hunting economy to a pastoral economy to a ranching economy. These three modes of
production can be distinguished one from another along the lines of one ecological and two
social contrapositions. The ecological contraposition contrasts predation with preservation.
Predation aims at catching a prey and eating it, while preservation is about the appropriation
of prey and to close it off from other enemies. The contrast between sharing and accumulation
constitutes the first social contraposition, respectively a collective and a divided access to
means of subsistence. If the access is collective, the animal is to be seen as nobody’s. If the
access is divided, the animal is private property. The second social contraposition exists
between production for subsistence and production for the market. Ingold situates hunting,
pastoralism and ranching within these three contrapositions. Hunting is characterized by
predation, sharing and subsistence; pastoralism by preservation, accumulation and
subsistence; and ranching, at last, by predation, accumulation and market. Ingold remarks that
within some pastoralist economies food is also produced for the market, not only for
subsistence. At last, Ingold dwells upon the role of the land and notices that hunters and
pastoralists have a shared access to land while ranchers appropriate parts of the land.
Within this book, Ingold’s main objective is to build a theory concerning the economical role
of animals in human societies. His approach is inductive. He starts from some ethnographic
descriptions and builds up an anthropological theory. Ingold concludes the book with an
epilogue on the influence of the economy on social organisation, politics and ideology
(Ingold, 1980).

Due to his research on circumpolar hunting and pastoralist economies, Ingold develops a
broader interest in the relation between human and animal, the conceptualization of the
human-animal interface and a comparative anthropology of hunter-gatherer economies vis-à-
vis pastoralist economies. These themes were often the main topics of his courses on
economical and ecological anthropology at the University of Manchester. In 1986, Ingold
elaborates his ideas in two books: The Appropriation of Nature and Evolution and Social Life.

7
In The Appropriation of Nature, comprising nine different essays, Ingold dives into the
differences between man and animal. The Leitmotiv is the domination of man over nature, the
appropriation of nature by man. As organisms humans relate to an environment; as persons
they relate to other people. The interplay between ecological and social relations is a recurring
theme within the book. Ingold starts with an interpretation of four concepts that are, according
to him, being used too often and too inaccurate, namely environment, society, technology and
culture.
Ingold distinguishes the environment from the world. He states in line with Gibson that every
organism needs an environment to be an organism; and that every environment needs an
organism to be an environment. Organism and environment are mutually constitutive. Man
and animal differ because animals only live in an environment whereas humans live in a
world. Man sees things as they are, not only what they afford (i.e. how they are useful for a
specific organism). Man sees a cave, plants and air, where the animal only sees shelter, food
and oxygen.
As organisms, human beings are not alone. Congeners form a part of their environment. The
sum of these congeners are the society. Ingold scrutinizes the concept of social relation. If the
environment of an animal comprises also his congeners, how can we distinguish social
relations from ecological relations? Ingold explains that other hunters for instance, are not
only objects from the environment, but that they, like the hunter himself, are intentional
subjects. The effectiveness of their collaboration depends on their effort for a shared goal.
Ingold retains the distinction between social and ecological relations as respectively
intraspecific and interspecific relations. As persons, people are immersed within social
relations; as organisms within ecological relations. Furthermore, objects and technologies also
play a part in the shaping of these relations.
Ingold states that technology is more than only the use of objects. It also comprises
knowledge of how, when and where these objects can be used and the skills involved to use
these objects effectively. The use of tools requires a specific technology, a way of relating to
and applying these tools usefully.
The use of tools is culturally determined and is transmitted from one generation to the other
through initiation and practice. Ingold underscores the importance of consciousness. Human
beings can only adapt to their environment because they are conscious of that environment
and in relation to that environment retain or release certain aspects of their culture. In order to
make these patterns of adaptation comprehensible it is important to consider the specific
objectives and aims people have. These originate in the intersubjective domain, the social
8
relations, and transcend the field of ecological relations. Ingold thus conceives of culture from
the perspective of skill, instead of focusing on for instance, religion, language and rituals.
In the course of the different essays, Ingold scrutinizes the dichotomy between social and
ecological relations and their interplay. Ingold states that construction, extraction and
cooperation are animal behaviours towards lifeless objects, plants and congeners, whereas
making, appropriating and sharing are activities typical of intentional subjects. The
domination of the human being lies in the subjugation of mere reaction for the benefit of
purposive control. This domination doesn’t only take place towards man’s environment, but
also towards his own nature. Throughout the nine essays Ingold tests these hypotheses by
means of comparisons between man and animal and the role of animals in a variety of human
economies (Ingold, 1986a). Ingold’s stance towards the human-animal interface will change
throughout his further work.

In Evolution and Social Life Ingold investigates the concept of evolution. He calls it his first
‘disembodied theory’ because he doesn’t draw firstly on his own fieldwork or ethnographic
research. The conviction that within fieldwork some premises are adopted a priori without
questioning them, drove Ingold to write this book. He wants to focus on some truths that in
the normal course of events are seen as self-evident.
In the preface Ingold expresses his wish to bridge the abyss between natural sciences and
humanities. According to him, anthropology is the discipline par excellence to undertake this
mission. In contrast to philosophy, which tries to close the gap through - hence in - thinking,
anthropology can bridge it in real life because it starts form the understanding of everyday
people within everyday life.
With this book Ingold wants to propagate an evolutionary approach to culture and society,
albeit that anthropology rejects this kind of reasoning. Anthropology rejects the evolutionary
study of cultures and societies because it would be racist. Ingold objects that there is a very
specific notion of evolution at play here. He attempts to discover what this very specific
notion tells us about anthropology as a science. He proclaims that if anthropology is the study
of particular cultures instead of humanity in general, the anthropologist would disappear from
the world and would no longer take responsibility for it. Indifference towards the fate of
others grounded in an attempt at avoiding ethnocentrism or preserving objectivity is,
according to Ingold, nor scientifically credible, nor ethically acceptable. In line with Kroeber
Ingold wants to unite within anthropology the study of man as a biological organism with the
study of man as a social and historical person.
9
This book offers an overview of the different meanings attributed to the concept of evolution
within anthropology throughout the years. The main objective is to come to a synthesis
between biology, history and anthropology by comparing their vision on and understanding of
evolution (Ingold, 1986b).

Furthermore, the year 1986 was important for Ingold’s academic career for some other
reasons too. There were two conferences on topics he brought under attention. In
Southampton the World Archaeological Congress was organised. Ingold prepared a few
sessions concerning cultural attitudes towards animals. He co-organised the Fourth
International Conference on Hunting and Gathering in London. He edited three bundles of
papers presented at these conferences. In 1988, What is an Animal?, the outcome of the
congress in Southampton, was published. The same year saw the publication of the two parts
of Hunters and Gatherers, consisting of the papers of the conference in London.
Two years later, in 1990, Ingold organises together with Kathleen Gibson an international
conference on the manufacture of tools and speech, or more general, technology and
language, as criteria to distinguish man from animal. In 1993, Tools, Language and Cognition
in Human Evolution appeared, co-edited by Gibson and Ingold, a bundle of papers presented
at the congress of 1990. From that moment onwards Ingold continues to search for ways to
connect the anthropology of art with the anthropology of technology. This led him to the
concept of skilled practice, an important notion in his work up to the present day. Meanwhile
he continued his research and education in the field of ecological anthropology, inspired by
the work of the psychologist James Gibson on perceptual systems.
In 1990, Ingold was appointed to a Chair at the University of Manchester. In 1995, he became
Max Gluckman Professor of Social Anthropology. He edited Man, the journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute, from 1990 until 1992. The year 1994 saw the publication of The
Routledge Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology, edited by Ingold. Two years later, in
1996, the book Key Debates in Anthropology appeared, a collection of reports of the annual
discussions taking place since 1988 with the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory.
From 1997 onwards, Tim Ingold is member of the Fellowship of the British Academy and
from 2000 onwards also of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 1999 Ingold was President of
the Anthropology and Archaeology Section of the British Association for the Advancement of
Science.

10
In his more recent work, which will be the central focus of this dissertation, Tim Ingold
searches for the relation between environmental perception and skilled practice. He tries to
replace traditional models of genetic and cultural transmission, based on neo-Darwinist
biology and cognitive sciences, by a relational-developmental approach to the growth of
embodied skills and perception and action within social and natural environments. He
develops these ideas in The Perception of the Environment, a collection of 23 essays, written
throughout the preceding decennium, about livelihood, dwelling and skill. The book was
published in 2000. Ingold understands this book as the completion of his attempts from the
past to install a conception of anthropology focusing on the biological as well as the social
aspects of being human. In the introduction he states that his attempt in Evolution and Social
Life was incomplete because it springs from a shattered vision on what it means to be human.
The book assumed the interplay of on the one hand man as a biological organism in an
environment, on the other hand man as social person in a society. In Evolution and Social Life
Ingold tried to glue these two images of the human together.
In The Perception of the Environment, however, Ingold realises that he limited himself in his
search to mainly anthropological and biological literature. Ingold agrees with his critics that
the abolition of the opposition between organism and person, biology and anthropology, can
only be achieved by introducing a third term, namely the human and the scientific discipline
studying the human mind, psychology. Friends and colleagues persuade Ingold to read James
Gibson’s The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, which will have a rather great
influence on his later works. The main issue of the book is how people perceive their
environment. Gibson rejects the traditional scheme of psychology of the human mind as a
computer, analysing and framing perceptual input. Gibson’s thesis is that this conception goes
back to the Cartesian distinction between res cogitans and res extensa, leaving us with a
distorted conception of perception. Gibson argues that perception is not a process of a mind
within a body, but of an organism as a whole, immersed within an environment. Perception is
the vivid movement of that organism in the world. Ingold relates Gibson’s work to Bateson’s
thesis that the mind is not confined by the human skin. After his reading of The Ecological
Approach to Visual Perception Ingold explores how this ecological approach to perception
can conceive of both biological and cultural life. The breakthrough comes unexpectedly:

I vividly remember one Saturday morning in April 1988 – an entirely ordinary one for
Manchester at that time of the year, with grey skies and a little rain – when, on my
way to catch a bus, it suddenly dawned on me that the organism and the person could
11
 be one and the same. Instead of trying to reconstruct the complete human being from
two separate but complementary components, respectively biophysical and
sociocultural, held together with a film of psychological cement, it struck me that we
should be trying to find a way of talking about human life that eliminates the need to
slice it up into these different layers. Everything I have written since has been driven
by this agenda (Ingold, 2000, p. 3).

Ingold conceives of the human being not as a composition of separate but complementary
parts such as body, mind and culture but as a singular locus of creative growth within an
unfolding field of relations. This conception of the human being will play throughout all his
works up to the present day. It is of an utmost importance in understanding his work.
The Perception of the Environment comprises three parts. In the first part on livelihood,
Ingold tries to grasp the way people relate to their environment, avoiding the polarity between
the ecological domain of the human relation to a non-human nature and the cognitive domain
of the cultural construction of nature. In the second part on dwelling, Ingold explores the
implications of the assumption that consciousness and activity are rooted in an engagement of
the human being with the world for our understanding of perception, cognition, architecture,
map-making, sensuousness, etc. In the third part on skill, Ingold shows how his approach of
skill as the embodiment of capacities of attention and responsitivity by an actor situated in an
environment, could help to close the gaps between works of human and non-human animals,
and, for human animals, between art and technology (Ingold, 2000).
The Perception of the Environment can be considered as Tim Ingold’s breakthrough as a
leading scholar in anthropology. Therefore I shall shortly treat its reception in academia.
Reviewers were very positive about this work. Charest (2002), Munz (2002) and Uchiyamada
(2004) all praise the intellectual breadth of the work. They present Ingold as a very erudite
author who seamlessly navigates through ethnographic, psychological, philosophical,
biological, sociological, linguistic and archaeological literature in elaborating his
anthropological thought. According to Uchiyamada (2004) the repetitive character of his
work, the fact that he elaborates similar themes throughout a variety of examples, is
enlightening but also frustrating. Other comments on his work include the lack of a political
perspective. What Ingold offers us is a kind of metaphysics but he doesn’t investigate its
political assumptions and implications it is argued (Uchiyamada, 2004). In line with this
critique we can also read the philosopher of social sciences Peter Munz’ comment based on
neuroscientific research that indigenous peoples’ specific way of relating to their environment
12
is often based on an urge to create a sense of community by sharing the same language and
interlocutors. According to Munz, the way for instance Ojibwa speak to the Thunder Bird is
also a way of excluding others who can’t hear or understand the Thunder Bird. This sensitive
relation to the environment is thus also an excluding relation to other people (Munz, 2002). At
last, Munz criticised the way in which Ingold puts the project of modern science in a bad
light. Ingold asserts that modern sciences have alienated mankind from its genuine relation to
the world, one that is intense and sensitive. Munz, on the contrary, argues that “modern
science is itself the result of a sensitive human adaptation to the environment and not an alien
imposition on the environment” (Munz, 2002, p. 442).

A year before the publication of The Perception of the Environment, Ingold went to the
University of Aberdeen to take up the new Chair of Social Anthropology. He was co-founder
of the youngest Department of Anthropology in the United Kingdom, its completion taking
place in 2002. In the preceding decennium Ingold further developed his interest in three topics
springing from his work on perception. The first topic is the dynamics of walking, the second
is the creativity of working and the third is the linearity of writing. The topics come together
in his three-year project titled Explorations in the Comparative Anthropology of the Line. At
the same time Ingold investigates and teaches about the relations between anthropology,
archaeology, art and architecture, the ‘4 As’. According to him, this is a way to grasp the
relation between human beings and the environments they inhabit. He tries to get rid of the
conventional anthropology ‘of’ art and ‘of’ architecture, treating art and architecture as mere
objects of analysis, but instead he attempts to weave the 4 As together at the level of practices,
as mutual reinforcing ways to go about in an environment.

The books he publishes in this period are Lines, Being Alive and Making. Lines, published in
2007, is Ingold’s attempt to lay the foundations for what he calls a comparative anthropology
of the line. His point of departure is that walking, weaving, observing, singing, storytelling,
drawing and writing all proceed along lines. He distinguishes different kind of lines and how
these lines relate to one another, intersect, cross, change, etc. He writes for instance about the
transformation of threads into traces in forming surfaces.
Ingold’s first concern is how the distinction between speech and song has come into being. He
links this with the distinction between writing and drawing and traces these distinctions back
to the distinction between art and technology. He investigates these issues on the basis of

13
resources from anthropology but also from musicology, linguistics, biology, etc. (Ingold,
2007).
In this book, Ingold presents and defends his thesis that the world consists of lines instead of
humans and things. In this conception, a human being is a thing, a bundle of lines, paths of
growth and development. “Originally, ‘thing’, meant a gathering of people, and a place where
they would meet to resolve their affairs. As the derivation of the word suggests, every thing is
a parliament of lines” (Ingold, 2007, p. 5).

Ingold explains his personal vision of what anthropology should be in Being Alive, published
in 2011. Even before he sets out, he anticipates the potential critique that his anthropology is
in fact a philosophy. He states that if his anthropology is indeed a philosophy, it is one which
is expelled from its turrets and takes place among the people in the world it tries to describe.
Anthropology is an investigation into the conditions and potentials of human life.
The objective of these essays is to enrich our reading of the world, become responsive to what
the world tells us. He introduces the concept of the meshwork as a texture (< Lat.: texere: to
weave) of lines. Movevement, knowledge and description aren’t separate activities
succeeding each other within anthropological research but are parallel aspects of the same
process, namely life itself. “A being that moves, knows and describes must be observant.
Being observant means being alive to the world. This book is a collection of studies in being
alive” (Ingold, 2011, p. xii).
In the prologue of the book Ingold sketches the theoretical line he has followed up to that
moment using four notions, namely production, history, dwelling and the line. The prologue is
followed by five different parts. The aim of the first part is to situate the main issues of the
book and to introduce some notions such as substance, medium and skill. In the second part,
Ingold introduces the concept of the meshwork. The third part deals with experiencing the
earth and the way people relate to the world. Ingold uses the concept of weather-world to
corroborate his thesis that the earth and life upon the earth are continually in formation. The
fourth part is about the notion of story and how the story as line resists against classification.
In the fifth and last part, Ingold writes about line-making by drawing, making and writing.
Ingold concludes the book with an epilogue about the differences between anthropology and
ethnography (Ingold, 2011).

In 2013, Ingold publishes Making, which can be considered as an outcome of his 4 As course.
During this course, he tries together with his students to tie the disciplines of anthropology,
14
archaeology, art and architecture together. Or better, he discovers that the different disciplines
are more connected than one would expect. The design of the course is not so much
interdisciplinary, as it is anti-disciplinary. “Instead of a territorial surface segmented into
domains or fields of study, we have something more like a rope, wound from corresponding
strands or lines of interest” (Ingold, 2013b, p. 12).
The book is an argumentation against the hylomorphic model of making which assumes that
making is always imposing some form or model on matter or substance. Within this model the
painter, for instance, is someone who has a model of a painting in his head and who uses
materials such as paint and brushes in order to make this model as accurately in real life, on
canvas. Ingold believes instead that the painting grows while the painter is working on it. It
comes into being within a morphogenetic field of forces in which flows of materials
correspond with physical forces. Other examples are for instance pottery and flying a kite.
Practitioners correspond with materials. They draw out or bring forth potentials immanent in a
world of becoming. It is not so much a dance of agency, in which objects, persons, etc.
interact, as it is a dance of animacy upon the tightrope between the pull of hopes and dreams
and the drag of material constraint, a correspondence with a world of becoming, in which
form emerges. Anthropology itself, is also considered as such a practice, an art of inquiry -
thus belonging to the field of τέχνη and crafmanship in which knowledge, just as form,
emerges through correspondence with the world and its inhabitants (Ingold, 2013b).

In general, Tim Ingold’s main research interest is the way human beings relate to the world
and its inhabitants and contribute to the world’s formation of itself through skilled practice.
The variety of topics coming to the fore within his work from his doctoral research among the
Saami in Finland, situated in the more classical British structural-functionalist tradition, up to
the establishment of his new anthropology of the line, can be drawn back to this overall
theme. Up to the publication of The Perception of the Environment in 2000, Ingold tried to tie
the biological and the social aspect of anthropology, the human being as organism and as
person, together to come to a comprehensive understanding of what it means to be human.
With The Perception of the Environment, he leaves his project to reunite different aspects of
human being and takes, instead of the shattered image of the human to be reassembled, the
being-in-an-environment as his starting point. He refers to the works of inter alia Gregory
Bateson, James Gibson, Jacob von Uexküll, Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to
affirm his point of departure. Inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, he develops an
anthropology of the line centred around concepts such as meshwork, correspondence, etc.
15
Ingold refers to a variety of sources to underpin his theoretical position, such as the work of
Mary Carruthers on monastic writing and spirituality, the notebooks of Paul Klee, the
ethnographic material on Ojibwa dreams by Alfred Hallowell, the paintings of Wassily
Kandinsky, the architecture of Chartres cathedral, the social learning theory of Jean Lave and
his own fieldwork among the Saami. Within this dissertation, I will focus on his work from
The Perception of the Environment onwards. I hope this introductory part has given a clear
overview of the whole of Tim Ingold’s work. From now on, I will limit myself to his post-
2000 works. In the second chapter I will clarify the different theoretical influences from for
instance Gibson and Heidegger on Ingold’s work. First, I will try to grasp his main objective,
what is at stake in his conception of anthropology and how he interprets the tasks of
anthropology. These will be the topics of the second part of this first chapter.

16
I.2. Against Descartes, for being alive: General aim and vision on anthropology

In this second part of the first chapter I will discuss Tim Ingold’s general aim and his vision
on what anthropology can and should be. I will first explain what Ingold calls the logic of
inversion, a logic which he tries to subvert, and from which he situates the roots in Cartesian
dualism, the mind-body problem. Meanwhile, I will already shortly hint at how Ingold
conceives of the world and its inhabitants in contrast to this logic, a conception I will further
elaborate and analyse in the second and third chapter. I will conclude this chapter with a
summary of what Ingold considers as anthropology.

Ingold uses the term inversion to refer to the operation “that wraps lines of flight into bounded
points” (Ingold, 2011, p. 63). It is a ‘logic’ of inversion because it is a way of seeing and
attending to the world by which phenomena present themselves to us. Ingold assumes that the
world is constituted by lines of flight (or simply lines) which contribute to and are part of the
world’s continuous formation of itself. These lines are lines of life, growth and development,
for instance the roots of a tree, the pencil line on a sheet of paper, the trail of the snail on the
sidewalk, etc. Together with Klee he calls them lines that go out for a walk. Always and
everywhere these lines interweave. Ingold contrasts these lines of flight or becoming with
geometrical lines. Two lines, A and B, intersect. Their intersection defines the point P. The
lines, A and B, are converted into a geometrical point, P, which can be connected with a
manifold of other geometrical points by geometrical, straight lines, connectors. This operation
however, which shifts the focus from the line to the point, puts life on the inside of the point
as if it is contained within the dot. The line becomes a mere connector in a network of
interacting dots. Nothing grows along these connectors, they’re dead. They only connect the
containers of life. The dots, connected by geometrical lines, are bounded entities surrounded
by an environment whereas, the knots, the interweavings of lines of flight, are unbounded
entanglements of lines in an ever-unfolding world. Instead of focusing on the agency of
interacting persons and objects as nodes in a network, Ingold focuses on the animated
meshwork of interweaving lines in which “life is not an emanation but a generation of being
and the world is not preordained but incipient, forever on the verge of the actual” (Ingold,
2011, p. 69).
Due to the logic of inversion, beings that are originally open to the world are closed in upon
themselves. They are no longer their lines of becoming but become agents. Because they are
closed in upon themselves, they are regarded as beings from which the inner constitution is
17
securely closed off from the world they inhabit. After the logic of inversion, the world
presents itself as something outside the being it inhabits. For Ingold, however, the world is not
something over against being, for instance the human being looking out upon the world as if
he or she is closed off from it, but world and being are part of the same process which is life
itself.
Put simply, one could say that the logic of inversion draws a boundary, creates an inside and
an outside, an organism ‘in here’ and an environment ‘out there’ with which the organism, as
a node in a network, interacts according to his mental states and capabilities. The relations are
between one organism or object and another. The world is liveless but furnished with lively
objects and persons. Instead, the organism could be understood as a trail of movement and
growth, along which life is lived, within a meshwork of interwoven lines. There is no world
nor being outside life. After inversion life is contained within dots, before inversion life is
spread out among lines and knots (Ingold, 2011).

I hope an example will clarify this rather abstract logic of inversion: the conversion of
inhabited world into space and its implications for movement. Ingold argues against a
conception of space that is two-dimensional or flat. The logic of inversion has it that space is
filled with places. Space is seen as a big whole in which different places exist. These places
within space are connected with lines: roads, sidewalks, etc. Space is filled with existing
objects connected by lines. This implies that movement takes persons from one place to
another. One moves from home to school, from the hospital to the swimming pool, etc. across
the surface of the earth. The lines which one follows are connectors between places,
constituting a network of transport. The time between these transportations has to be reduced
as much as possible because life is not lived between the places. Ingold contrasts this
networked conception of space with a meshworked conception of the inhabited world. He is
inspired by Doreen Massey’s plea For Space, in which she tries to grasp space as just as
lively, open-ended and dynamic as time. According to Ingold the world is inhabited, which
means that people live in the world, not on its surface. The world is thus not filled with
existing objects but is woven from the strands of the coming-into-being of things, gatherings
of lines. Life doesn’t unfold in places but along paths. Ingold calls the meshworked mode of
movement, the one before the logic of inversion, wayfaring. Transport, the networked mode
of movement, is destination-oriented. A person is moved and goes across the world. Transport
is networked in point-to-point connectors. The wayfarer is continually on the move. He is his
movement and threads his way through the world. Wayfaring is meshworked within traces of
18
movement (Ingold, 2011). I hope this small example has made things a bit more clear. In
Chapter III I will deal more extensively with these questions and I will analyse where Ingold
got his inspiration from, which will hopefully contribute to a better understanding of his own
theoretical position.

I want to stress that the moment Ingold refers to with the term of the logic of inversion is not
so much an historical as it is a conceptual moment. It is not as if at a certain point in history
the shape and view of the earth have radically changed, as if we have lost something
somewhere in the course of history, an ‘original’ way of being and seeing. It is more a
difference in looking at the earth or the world, a shift in attention. Ingold compares our way of
looking at the world with for instance Aboriginal cosmologies or hunting practices of the Cree
people to bring to the fore some differences in how we experience ourselves for instance
when we walk - such as the case above of wayfaring versus transport exemplifies - or how we
relate to the world and its inhabitants.
Still, it is true that throughout the history of our thinking there was an important moment
which made this logic of inversion theoretically possible. This moment, the Cartesian
moment, splitted the human mind, the res cogitans, from the body and its environment, the
res extensa. The human being is conceived of as a “self-contained individual confronting a
world ‘out there’” (Ingold, 2000, p. 4). The Cartesian ontology divorces the activity of the
mind from that of the body in the world. The Cartesian precept Cogito ergo sum - I think
therefore I am -, installs an I, a mental, thinking being, closed in upon itself within the head of
the human being, closed off from the material world outside over against which it acts. This
divide causes a lot of other divisions such as nature versus society, ecological relations versus
social relations, evolution versus history, natural sciences versus humanities, organism versus
person, etc. Ingold gives an example of the mind-body divide from Descartes’ Optics,
published in 1637. For Descartes, the act of perception is naturally divided into two stages.
The first stage is the one from the physical encounter with an object in the world ‘out there’ to
a pattern of nervous excitation in the brain. In the second stage these nervous impulses are
converted into mental awareness ‘in here’ of the object perceived. The eyes are the medium
between mind and world, inside and outside, the human and the natural.
For Tim Ingold however, the process of vision is not one of incident radiation followed by a
mental image but it is a “two-way process of engagement between the perceiver and his or her
environment” (Ingold, 2000, p. 258). Ingold conceives of the human being as immersed in
and part of the currents of life. Being alive means being responsive to and engaged in the
19
world’s worlding, the world’s formation of itself by itself and its inhabitants. Life is lived
along the lines of the meshwork. We are not entangled in relations but are ourselves
entanglements (Ingold, 2011). Perception of and action in the world are indistinguishable.
Moving is observing is participating is describing is knowing is being alive to the world
(Ingold, 2000; Ingold, 2011).

Following quote summarizes the argument hitherto and makes a connection to Ingold’s vision
on what anthropology should be, the next topic of this part:

In this distinction between the linear connector that goes across from point to point,
and the line of flight that runs along, pulling away at points on either side as it sweeps
by, I found a precise parallel to my original distinction between transitive and
intransitive senses of production. The point-to-point connector is transitive; it takes us
from a starting point, such as an image of what is to be made, to an end point in the
form of the completed object, or vice versa, from the ready-made object to a final
image in the mind of a spectator or consumer. The line of flight, to the contrary is
intransitive: it carries on. Here, finally, lies the key to my project of restoring life to
anthropology. We have, in fact, been concentrating on the banks while losing sight of
the river. Yet were it not for the flow of the river there would be no banks, and no
relation between them. To regain the river, we need to shift our perspective from the
transverse relation between objects and images to the longitudinal trajectories of
materials and awareness (Ingold, 2011, p. 14).

According to Tim Ingold anthropology is the scientific discipline par excellence to overcome
the divisions dating back to Descartes’ mind-body problem and resulting into transitivity and
inversion, a focus on the banks instead of the river. Anthropology itself however is also
influenced by this divide. The subdisciplines of social and cultural anthropology belong to the
side of society and mind, while biological and archaeological anthropology belong to the side
of nature and body. Ingold’s aim is to draw these four subdisciplines together within an
overall anthropological theory, not an all-including explanatory theory but a new way of
being and seeing, questioning the distinction between the four subdisplines in particular and
the mind-body problem in general.

20
Tim Ingold defines anthropology as a generous, open-ended, comparative and yet critical
inquiry into the conditions and potentials of human life. Life is at the heart of anthropological
concern. It is a movement of opening, not of closure. It has the capacity to continually
overtake the destinations that are thrown up in its course. Life doesn’t begin here or there, or
connects a point of origin with a final destination. It rather “keeps on going, finding a way
through the myriad of things that form, persist and break up in its currents” (Ingold, 2011, p.
4). Anthropology as the study of human life has to be generous, open-ended, comparative and
critical. It is generous because it makes time to listen to and live with others and to respond to
what they have to tell. It is open-ended because it is always looking for new and different
perspectives. It doesn’t aim at final solutions which would bring life to a close but rather
embarks upon the currents of life in their unfolding. It is comparative because it is well-aware
of the fact that the own way of living is not the only one and that for every way of living other
possibilities open up. At last, it is critical because we cannot satisfy ourselves with the things
as they are (Ingold, 2013b).
To define anthropology, Ingold compares it with on the one hand ethnography and on the
other hand philosophy. Anthropology is not ethnography because ethnography’s aim is to
accurately and sensitively describe other peoples’ lives through detailed observation and first-
hand experiences (Ingold, 2011). “Ethnography is a study of and learning about, its enduring
products are recollective accounts which serve a documentary purpose” (Ingold, 2013b, p. 3).
Anthropology, on the contrary, is a study with people interested in learning from them. It is
carried forward in a process of life and has transformational effects. Ingold clarifies this
distinction with a hypothetical example. As he is a passionate cellist, he used to dream to
study with Mstislav Rostropovich. He imagines himself sitting at Rostropovich’s feet,
observing how he plays, listening to the subtleties of his music, practise and be corrected time
and again. After some years of study and exercise, he would have returned with an enriched
understanding of the cello as an instrument and its musical potentials, of the depths and
details of the music and of himself as a person. It would have been a study with Rostropovich,
learning from him, transforming the anthropologist Tim Ingold himself, moving forward to
new playing experiences. If the ethnographer Tim Ingold would have chosen to study
Rostropovich, he would have made a study of Rostropovich, learning about him, documenting
his life and works by looking back over the collected information. He would have used his
cello as an entry ticket to gain access to Rostropovich and his circle in order to get some
relevant information for his study through everyday small talk or formal interviews.

21
Furthermore, Ingold distinghuises anthropology from philosophy. If his anthropology is a
kind of philosophy, he responds to his critics, it is one that “has been pitched out of its
traditional academic turrets and forced to do its thinking both in and with the very world of
which it writes” (Ingold, 2011, p. xi). The anthropologist does his thinking in the open, not in
the armchair, among the people with whom he studies and from whom he learns. Being and
knowing are indistinguishable, as are data collection and theory building, empirical and
theoretical research. Participant observation is therefore at the heart of anthropological
research.

Anthropology is an art of inquiry, a τέχνη. Just as the craftsman, the anthropologist “allows
knowledge to grow from the crucible of our practical and observational engagements with the
beings and things around us” (Ingold, 2013b, p. 6). Anthropological research is experimental,
not in the sense that it confronts ideas ‘in the head’ with facts ‘on the ground’ but in the sense
that it creates an opening and follows where it leads. The anthropologist tries things out and
sees what happens. Doing anthropological research is to open up our perception of what is
going on so we can respond to it (Ingold, 2013b).

Whether our concern is to inhabit this world or to study it - and at root these are the
same, since all inhabitants are students and all students inhabitants - our task is not to
take stock of its contents but to follow what is going on, tracing the multiple trails of
becoming, wherever they lead. To trace these paths is to bring anthropology back to
life (Ingold, 2011, p. 14).

And in fact, this is what according to Tim Ingold anthropology is all about, namely being
alive. A being that moves, knows, describes is observant. Being observant means being alive
to the world. Being alive bridges the abyss between being and knowing. Anthropology as the
art of inquiry is an art, a τέχνη, in the sense that it is a skilled practice. It is the art of being
alive and of corresponding with the world (Ingold, 2011; Ingold, 2013b). In the next chapters
I will explain how Ingold tries to bring anthropology back to life.

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II. Inversion in reverse

II.1. Five movements against inversion

In this second chapter I want to disentangle five theoretical threads making up Tim Ingold’s
anthropological meshwork. As I have already argued in the previous chapter Tim Ingold’s
aim is to overcome the logic of inversion, to put this logic of inversion in reverse, in order to
come to a more lively experience of the world and its inhabitants and to establish
anthropology as the art or τέχνη of being alive. The objective of this chapter is to become
acquainted with five major theoretical influences on Tim Ingold’s work. I will deal
consecutively with Gregory Bateson, James Gibson, Jacob von Uexküll, Martin Heidegger
and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. For each of these authors, I will elaborate how Ingold relates to
their work. What was inspiring in their work while writing his books from The Perception of
the Environment onwards? On which points does he have a different perspective? My aim is
thus to come to a better understanding of Ingold’s position I already hinted at at the end of the
first chapter. My aim is in no way to evaluate Ingold’s interpretation of these authors but
rather to read and discuss these authors through Ingold’s eyes. I don’t believe, however, that it
is possible to represent this Ingoldian interpretation of for instance the work of James Gibson
but my attempt is more to grasp why exactly these authors are so important to understand Tim
Ingold’s work. I believe that reading these authors helps at coming to a better understanding
of Ingold’s idea of the world and its inhabitants.
I will first write on Bateson because his work is for Ingold a stepping stone to think in an
ecological way, emphasising the interrelatedness of the different parts of the earth as a whole,
and thus also to his ecological approach to perception he elaborates in the ‘90s. Subsequently
I will discuss the influence of Gibson because his work is rather important to understand
Ingold’s The Perception of the Environment. Later on in his life, the distance between Ingold
and Gibson will increase but around 2000 Gibson was without doubt the biggest influence on
Ingold’s thought. His theory about perception helps Ingold to conceive of the relation between
organism and environment in a different way, one that emphasises their relation. My
discussion of von Uexküll, the third author, has a somewhat peculiar position in this sequence
of influential authors. His work was not so influential on Ingold - certainly not in comparison
to Gibson’s or Heidegger’s work -, still I want to discuss some of his ideas because they also
have a place in Heidegger’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy. Von Uexküll is thus in an

23
indirect way important to Ingold’s theoretical position. In the fourth section on Heidegger,
some of von Uexküll’s ideas come back. Heidegger’s influence on Ingold runs from the parts
on dwelling and skill in The Perception of the Environment to the chapter on earth and sky in
Being Alive. The fifth and last author is Merleau-Ponty. His influence plays in the background
of The Perception of the Environment and Being Alive. These five authors are just a selection
based on their contribution to what in my opinion is the core issue of Ingold’s work, namely
the relation between the world and its inhabitants. Other authors such as for instance Mary
Carruthers and André Leroi-Gourhan were also very influential but they don’t influence
Ingold in his thinking about the world and its inhabitants to the same extent as the five authors
discussed here do. Nevertheless, their influence on other topics such as tool-use or writing is
bigger than for instance Gibson’s.

In the next chapter I will discuss the influence of the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari on Ingold’s conception of anthropology because it is even more crucial than the
works of the following five authors. Influence is maybe a wrong word to describe Ingold’s
relation to Deleuze and Guattari. They have not influenced Ingold in a direct way but their
work helps Ingold to tie the different movements he makes in The Perception of the
Environment and the different explorations he undertakes in Lines together. What Deleuze
and Guattari offer Ingold is a language to articulate his conception of the world and its
inhabitants. Therefore, these five authors are presented as movements in a certain direction,
which is until Being Alive still quite obscure. From Being Alive onwards, however, - in the
meantime Ingold has read Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus - the direction
becomes clear: a reversion of the logic of inversion leading to an anthropology of being alive
centred around notions such as line, meshwork and skilled practice.

II.1.i. First movement: Bateson and the ecology of mind

The anthropologist Gregory Bateson extended the ideas of cybernetics, systems theory,
information theory and communication theory to the social sciences. These ideas about what
information, a system, a pattern, etc. is, helped him to conceive of his ecology of mind,
elaborated in his book Steps to an Ecology of Mind. According to Bateson information is “a
difference which makes a difference” (Bateson, 1972, p. 459). The world as a system is thus
made up of differences that make differences that change and shape the world. Another two
24
important concepts are feedback and redundancy. Feedback is the way in which information
informs and thus changes the system towards an equilibrium. Redundancy is the formation of
patterns by repeated information. The cybernetic approach offers a way of understanding the
relation between mind and body:

The individual mind is immanent but not only in the body. It is immanent also in
pathways and messages outside the body; and there is a larger Mind of which the
individual mind is only a subsystem. This larger Mind is comparable to God and it is
perhaps what some people mean by ‘God,’ but it is still immanent in the total
interconnected social system and planetary ecology (Bateson, 1972, p. 467).

Ecological or cybernetic thinking underscores the interrelatedness of different parts making

up a functioning whole. The different parts communicate through information and feedback.
This makes an equilibrium possible. There is no object closed off from the world. It is always
communicating with the other objects in the world. Mind is spread out and flows through the
communicating whole, the world. For Tim Ingold, especially Bateson’s quote about
cybernetics and ecology, delivered in a lecture in 1970, that “The mental world - the mind -
the world of information processing is not limited by the skin” (Bateson, 1972, p. 460) is
inspirational (Ingold, 2000; Ingold, 2011). Bateson exemplifies his thesis that no boundary
can be drawn around mind with an example of a blind man with a cane. Where would the
mind of the blind man be? In his head? In his hand holding the cane? In the cane? At the tip
where the cane hits the pavement? Ingold, in line with Bateson, states that mind is not
enclosed within a head, a body or an object, but that it rather extends outwards into the
environment along different sensory pathways, for instance the cane of the blind man. “Mind,
as Gregory Bateson, always insisted, is not ‘in the head’ rather than ‘out there in the world’,
but immanent in the active, perceptual engagement of organism and environment” (Ingold,
2000, p. 171). This implies that movement is a precondition for perception. At this point,
Ingold contrasts Bateson’s position with Levi-Strauss’s. Both share the notion of mind as a
processor of information. But whereas Levi-Strauss seems to suppose that the world is
sending coded messages to the brain that are being interpreted by decoding them, Bateson
emphasises that one needs to move in order to reveal stable features of the world that
otherwise would stay imperceptible. It is by moving through the world that one extends one’s
mind into the environment and opens up to what the world reveals. One perceives, which

25
means that one sees, hears, feels, etc. the world through this active engagement, movement, in
the world (Ingold, 2000).
In the part on skill of The Perception of the Environment, Ingold refers to Bateson’s example
of the woodsman who is felling a tree in order to reinforce his argument that to study skill one
needs to consider the total system within which the skill is being practised. “Skill is a property
not of the individual human body as biophysical entity, a thing-in-itself, but of the total field
of relations constituted by the presence of the organism-person, indissolubly body and mind,
in a richly structured environment” (Ingold, 2000, p. 353). In the case of the woodsman the
entire man-axe-tree system needs to be considered. Ingold will elaborate this notion of skill in
Being Alive with his SPIDER-model: Skilled Practice Involves Developmentally Embodied
Responsiveness. Although he no longer refers to the work of Bateson in developing this
notion, the influence is unmistakable. The spider (as an example of the SPIDER-model) can’t
be studied in itself but needs to be studied in relation to the spider web in which it moves, the
sticks and braches to which the web is attached, etc. The spider’s skill of making a web
always takes place within an environment that the spider is always already inhabiting, and
which it forms through its skilled practice (Ingold, 2011).

On one point, Ingold criticizes Bateson’s position. According to Ingold, Bateson’s theory
doesn’t allow to shake off the opposition between form and substance. Ingold states that
Bateson’s conception of the ecosystem is two-faced: “One face presents a field of matter and
energy, the other presents a field of pattern and information; the first is all substance without
form, the second is all form detached from substance” (Ingold, 2000, p. 16). In fact, there are
consequently two ecologies: an ecology of energy and material exchanges and an ecology of
ideas. The second one, the ecology of ideas constituted by patterns and information, is what
Bateson calls the ecology of mind. The ecology of substance is neglected. Ingold, however,
wants to include also material forces and flows into his ecology. Ingold thus agrees with
Bateson’s idea of the ecology of mind but he finds it too narrow and wants to include also
life-processes. Therefore Ingold calls his ecology an ecology of life instead of an ecology of
mind (Ingold, 2000).

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II.1.ii. Second movement: Gibson and the ecological approach to visual perception

James Gibson, the second author who inspired Ingold to a rather great extent, was an
American psychologist and is most famous for his ecological approach to visual perception.
He developed this approach as an alternative for cognitivist approaches assuming that the
human mind, enclosed within the head, processes information coming in from the surrounding
world. In The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, published in 1979, a book where
Ingold often refers to, he tries to embed the insights of systems theory and environmentalism
in psychology.

Generally Ingold gets two major ideas from the work of Gibson. The first concerns the
relation between the organism and its environment. The second concerns his conception of the
world and the media, substances and surfaces it is made of. The first and most important
insight that Gibson delivers Ingold is that:

Perception is not the achievement of a mind in a body, but of the whole organism as it
moves about in its environment, and that what it perceives are not things as such but
what they afford for the pursuance of its current activity (Ingold, 2011, p. 11).

Gibson distinguishes the physical world from the animal environment. The physical world
exists in itself, without the need for anyone to perceive it or behave in it. The environment, on
the contrary, needs an organism to be an environment. The organism, at its turn, also needs an
environment to be an organism. Gibson calls this the mutuality of animal and environment
(Gibson, 1979, p. 8). He introduces the concept of affordance to clarify this mediation
between organism and environment. An affordance is what something within the environment
affords. A cave, for instance, affords shelter, a fish affords food, etc. Affordances are neither
in the organism, nor in the environment. They are relative depending on the perceiver. A tree
for instance, affords shelter for the bird and wood for a human being. “An affordance cuts
across the dichotomy of subjective-objective and helps us to understand its inadequacy. It is
equally a fact of the environment and a fact of behaviour” (Gibson, 1979, p. 129). Organism
and environment are mutually constitutive. Their relation is being mediated by affordances.
From this point of departure Gibson elaborates his theory of perception.

27
For Gibson perception, for instance vision, is direct, rather than indirect. Perception is not a
computational activity of a mind within a body but an exploratory activity of the organism
within its environment. One can clearly see how Gibson sets cognitivism and Cartesian
dualism aside in favour of an ecological approach centred around the idea of the mutuality of
organism and environment. Perception and locomotion presuppose each other: “What we see
is inseparable from how we see, and how we see is always a function of the practical activity
in which we are currently engaged” (Ingold, 2000, p. 260). Organisms perceive their
environment by means of perceptual systems. Gibson introduces this term to transcend the
divisions between the different senses. According to Gibson hearing, seeing and feeling are
not separate perceptual senses, but are activities of one and the same perceptual system. The
ear, the eye and the skin are not separate organs with receptor cells transmitting signals to the
brain but are “integral parts of a body that is continually on the move, actively exploring the
environment in the practical pursuit of its life in the world” (Ingold, 2000, p. 261). Hearing,
seeing and feeling are facets of the same activity, the activity of the organism that moves
within its environment. Gibson underscores the importance of movement and locomotion for
perception with his notion of a path of observation. Vision - Gibson focuses on vision but the
argument could be extended to hearing and feeling as well - takes place along a path of
observation. The organism doesn’t see the environment from one point of view but because it
moves through the environment and sees new things with every step it takes. According to
Gibson the environment doesn’t change when the organism moves through it, it is just the
perception of the environment that changes: “what one perceives is an environment that
surrounds one, that is everywhere equally clear, that is in-the-round or solid, and that is all-of-
a-piece” (Gibson, 1979, 195). Ingold summarizes Gibsons’ theory of perceptual systems and
paths of observations as follows:

Proceeding on our way things fall in and out of sight, as new vistas open up and others
are closed off. By the way of these modulations in the array of reflected light reaching
the eyes, the structure of our environment is progressively disclosed. It is not different,
in principle, with the senses of touch and hearing, for together with vision these are
but aspects of a total system of bodily orientation (Ingold, 2007, p. 87).

In Being Alive, Ingold renounces some of the presuppositions underlying Gibson’s theory.
Gibson assumes that the world, the environment perceived, is a hard surface furnished with
inert objects upon and between which the organism moves. For Ingold, however, the world
28
itself is constantly being renewed in its formation of itself to which its inhabitants contribute.
As such, the world is never the same and can never be perceived in a similar way. Gibson’s
world, on the contrary, is more like a stage upon which organisms move but not something
that itself is moving or being moved (Ingold, 2011). A corollary of this view on perception as
something that takes place by reflection of light upon the surface of the earth and the objects
with which it is furnished (such as rocks, chairs, trees, buildings, etc.), is that one never sees
light as such but only what is reflected by light:

The only way we see illumination, I believe, is by way of that what is illuminated, the
surface on which the beam falls, the cloud or the particles that are lighted. We do not
see the light that is in the air, or that fills the air (Gibson, 1979, p. 55).

Ingold objects that for instance a lamp, a fire, a rainbow, the sun, etc. are sources of light that
we perceive directly but according to Gibson these are only manifestations of light. Light,
Gibson asserts, carries the information for perception but is never perceived as such (Gibson,
1979). At this point Ingold shifts to Merleau-Ponty’s perspective on perception and light
which will be discussed in the last section of this part. A last point Ingold draws from
Gibson’s theory of perception is the notion of education of attention which will be the main
topic of chapter IV. Therefore I won’t discuss the education of attention in this chapter.

Beside his ecological approach to visual perception, also Gibson’s conception of the earth and
the sky, springing from his ideas about perception, inspired Tim Ingold. The environment the
organism perceives alongside his path of observation is one of media, substances and
surfaces. These are the three components of the inhabited environment. The medium is
normally air. It affords movement and perception because it has little resistance and transmits
radiant energy and mechanical vibration (allowing for seeing and hearing). Substances are
more or less solid stuff such as rocks, sand, soil, mud, concrete and wood. They don’t afford
movement or perception but one needs them to stand on. One cannot move through them.
Surfaces separate substances from media. They reflect radiant energy and are thus what we
perceive, what we see, what we touch. Gibson summarizes: “We live in an environment
consisting of substances that are more or less substantial; of a medium, the gaseous
atmosphere; and of the surfaces that separate the substances from the medium. We do not live
in ‘space’” (Gibson, 1979, p. 32). A surface that is especially important is the ground. The
ground is the interface between the two hemispheres of perception, the sky above and the
29
earth below. It is the line of separation between the substances of the earth and the media in
which organisms are immersed. The Gibsonian inhabitant is the centre of its own spherical
world. The Gibsonian environment is an unbounded spherical field made up of the two
hemispheres already mentioned. “The environment consists of the earth and the sky with
objects on the earth and in the sky, of mountains and clouds, fires and sunsets, pebbles and
stars” (Gibson, 1979, p. 66). The ground is the surface upon which the inhabitants of the earth
move. At this point Ingold moves away from the Gibsonian position. He agrees with Gibson
that the perceptual environment consists of earth and sky. For Ingold, however, earth and sky
are not two inert spheres furnished with inert objects, but are continually intermingling.
Ingold introduces the notion of the weather-world to conceptualize this intermingling. It is the
wind that blows the sand up into the air and into our eyes, the rain falling down from the sky,
wetting our skin, the thunderclap that we hear, etc.:

Thus, far from inhabiting a sealed ground furnished with objects, the animal lives and
breathes in a world of earth and sky - or becoming earth and becoming sky - where to
perceive is to align one’s movements in counterpoint to the modulations of day and
night, sunlight and shade, wind and weather. It is to feel the currents of air as it infuses
the body, and the textures of the earth beneath one’s feet (Ingold, 2011, pp. 87-88).

As inhabitants of the earth we swim in an ocean of materials. Both Heidegger and Deleuze
and Guattari will help Ingold to develop a more lively conception of the earth and the sky, the
weather-world.

II.1.iii. Third movement: Uexküll and Umwelt

The third author I will present had, among the five authors discussed in this part, the least
influence on the work of Tim Ingold. Still, there are some notions in his work that help to
rethink Cartesian dualism. Jakob von Uexküll, an Estonian biologist is mostly known for his
concept of Umwelt which also plays a role in the works of among others Martin Heidegger
and Giorgio Agamben. I will shortly discuss his work because his ideas concerning the animal
environment and Umwelt are also refered to in the works of Heidegger and Deleuze and
Guattari. These authors are quite important to understand Ingold’s thought.

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With the concept of Umwelt, von Uexküll reacts against the mechanistic biology of his
contemporaries which treats animals as just assemblages of sensory and motor organs. This,
according to von Uexküll, leaves out the subject who uses these organs as tools of
respectively perception and action. Perception and action are inseparable: “All that a subject
perceives becomes his perceptual world and all that he does, his effector world. Perceptual
and effector worlds together form a closed unit, the Umwelt” (von Uexküll, 1957, p. 6). The
Umwelt is not the same as the environment. For von Uexküll the Umwelt is the environment
as it is perceived by a specific animal. The Umwelt of the thick, for instance, is limited to
three characteristics or what he calls qualities: the odor of sweat of mammals, the blood
temperature of mammals and the texture of the skin of mammals. The environment by
contrast is a kind of meta-Umwelt. It is the world within which these Umwelten are possible
and it only appears to the indifferent human observer. Von Uexküll gives the example of the
inhabitants of an oak tree. There is the fox who has built its lair between the roots, the owl
who is resting on a branch, the squirrel who jumps from one limb to another, the ant who
forages through the furrows and crags of the bark, and hundreds of other animals. Each
creature confers on the tree a particular quality or functional tone: shelter for the fox, support
for the owl, a thoroughfare for the squirrel, etc. The same tree has another face and function
for its various inhabitants. But for none of them the tree exists as a tree. “Whereas the non-
human animal perceives these objects as immediately available for use, to human beings they
appear initially as occurrent phenomena to which potential uses must be affixed, prior to any
attempt at engagement” (Ingold, 2000, p. 177). The human being is, in contrast to the animal,
an intentional actor who uses aforethought in his engagement with the world. The Umwelten
within which animals live are thus bubbles of reality, only accessible to the animal itself and
the human being who studies them.
For von Uexküll (as for Gibson), there is meaning in the animal’s world. Not because the
animal is capable of making an internal representation of an external state of affairs but
because its perception of the world is interwoven with its action in the world. Von Uexküll
differs from Gibson because for Gibson the niche as a set of affordances is on the side of the
environment and points towards the organism, whereas von Uexküll’s Umwelt is on the side
of the organism and points towards the environment (Gibson, 1979; Ingold, 2011; von
Uexküll, 1957). A point in von Uexküll’s theory that is problematic for Ingold is the threshold
von Uexküll installs between the animal and the human concerning their perception of the
environment and the aspect of intentionality that von Uexküll preserves for human beings. For
Ingold, human beings still have a more or less particular status among other living beings, but
31
he would never draw the boundary between human beings and animals as clear as von
Uexküll does.

At last, von Uexküll’s metaphor for the world as polyphonic music, in which the life of every
creature is equivalent to a melody in counterpoint, is also interesting. The line of the melody
doesn’t lie in the connection between the player and the instrument, for instance the violin,
but “issues forth from that place, in the midst of things, where the fiddler and the violin are
conjoined in a passionate embrace” (Ingold, 2011, p. 83). The lifelines of organisms too are
not connectors from one organism to the other but issue forth in between, as the river flows
between its banks instead of from one bank to the other. The lives of creatures proceed
contrapuntally (Ingold, 2011; Ingold, 2013b).

II.1.iv. Fourth movement: Heidegger, dwelling and being-in-the-world

The fourth author I will discuss is Martin Heidegger. In his essay Building, Dwelling,
Thinking, Heidegger elaborates what it means to build and what it means to dwell and what
the relation is between building and dwelling. Heidegger explores the etymological origins of
the verb ‘to build’, in the German bauen. Bauen comes from the High German buan which
means ‘to dwell’. Building is thus always already a way of dwelling. Because man dwells -
because he already inhabits a place - he is capable of building. Building is not the
precondition to dwelling. “We do not dwell because we have built, but we build and have
built because we dwell, that is, because we are dwellers” (Heidegger, 1971, p. 148). Since
man dwells, self and world merge. The world emerges alongside the emergence of the being-
in-the-world, in his perception of and action in the world. “Since the person is a being-in-the-
world, the coming-into-being of the person is part and parcel of the process of coming-into-
being of the world” (Ingold, 2000, 168). It follows that world and being-in-the-world are
mutually constitutive. It is in the emergence of the world that being-in-the-world emerges, in
the emergence of being-in-the-world that the world emerges.
In The Perception of the Environment Ingold develops his dwelling perspective, that he
contrasts to the logic of inversion’s building perspective, in line with Heidegger’s ideas about
dwelling and being-in-the-world. Ingold further elaborates this perspective in Being Alive,
introducing notions from Heidegger such as the open and earth and sky. From the perspective
of dwelling, perception of the world and action in the world are indistinguishable. To live in
32
the world is always already contributing to the formation of the world. Ingold contrasts his
dwelling perspective with the building perspective made possible by the logic of inversion.
The building perspective, which is quite dominant in anthropology according to Ingold, starts
from the idea that before people can act in the world, they have to construct the world. First
people have to attach form and meaning to the substance of the world, only thereafter they
will be able to engage with that world. The building perspective assumes that there is an idea
of what the world ‘out there’ is within the mind ‘in here’ of the human being. Furthermore, to
deal with the world ‘out there’, one has to make up an image of how one wants to change the
world inside one’s mind before setting out into the real world. According to the building
perspective, world-formation is the imposition of a mental image upon the material world.
From the dwelling perspective on the contrary, “the world continually comes into being
around the inhabitant, and its manifold constituents take on significance through their
incorporation into a regular pattern of life activity” (Ingold, 2000, p. 153).
In the third part of The Perception of the Environment, on skill, Ingold extends this dwelling
perspective to the domain of craft. Ingold contrasts making with weaving. Whereas making
regards the object as an expression of an idea, weaving regards the thing as the embodiment
of a rhythmic movement. According to Ingold, the forms of objects are not imposed from
above but grow from the mutual engagement of people and materials in an environment. The
craftsman works from within the world, not upon it:

The world of our experience is, indeed, continually and endlessly coming into being
around us as we weave. If it has a surface, it is like the surface of the basket: it has no
‘inside’ or ‘outside’. Mind is not above, nor nature below; rather, if we ask where
mind is, it is in the weave of the surface itself. And it is within this weave that our
projects of making, whatever they may be, are formulated and come to fruition. Only
if we are capable of weaving, only then can we make (Ingold, 2000, p. 348).

In shifting the attention from building to dwelling and from making to weaving, Tim Ingold
prioritises process over product. The transitivity of means and ends is being replaced by the
intransitivity of being alive, the attentiveness of environmental engagement (Ingold, 2011).

Another part of Heidegger’s philosophy, closely related to dwelling, which is both

inspirational and problematic for Ingold is his thinking about the open and space. For
Heidegger, man doesn’t occupy a world already built as one would occupy a building, he
33
rather inhabits the earth. Life is thus lived in the open, rather than being contained within the
structures of the built environment. “Raum means a place cleared or freed for settlement and
lodging. A space is something that has been made room for, something that is cleared and
free, namely within a boundary, Greek peras” (Heidegger, 1971, p. 154). This boundary is not
something at which something stops, but rather, as the Greeks already knew, it is something
from which something begins its presencing. It is an horizon. Room is not an enclosure but an
opening affording growth and movement. It is the world of earth and sky. According to
Heidegger, on the earth already means under the sky. Earth and sky aren’t two separate
hemispheres put together, but the one enfolds the other in its own becoming. “The earth is the
sky in becoming earth; the sky is the earth in becoming sky” (Ingold, 2011, pp. 112-113).
Ingold is attracted by Heidegger’s lively descriptions of earth and sky:

Earth is the serving bearer, blossoming and fruiting, spreading out in rock and water,
rising up into plant and animal […]. The sky is the vaulting path of the sun, the course
of the changing moon, the wandering glitter of the stars, the year’s seasons and their
changes, the light and dusk of the day, the gloom and glow of the night, the clemency
and inclemency of the weather, the drifting clouds and blue depth of the ether
(Heidegger, 1971, p. 149).

Heidegger underscores the relatedness of earth and sky, how the one can’t be thought of
without the other. He also provides descriptions of the other two constituents of what he calls
the fourfold, namely mortals and divinities. These, however, have been left out by Ingold.
These lively descriptions of earth and sky, emphasizing growth and development, help Ingold
to overcome Gibson’s inert surface of the earth furnished with objects and to attend to the
world’s worlding, the ever-growing and gathering of the world (Ingold, 2011; Ingold, 2013b).

However, from the moment onwards that Heidegger distinguishes man’s relation to the
environment from the relation of the animal to the environment, his position becomes
problematic for Ingold. In his lecture course delivered in 1929-1930, The Fundamental
Concepts of Metaphysics. World, Finitude, Solitude, Heidegger discusses the work of von
Uexküll. Heidegger argued that the animal in its environment may be open to its environment
but is closed to the world. Man is unique because he inhabits the world of the open. Heidegger
sets out from three theses: “[1.] the stone (material object) is worldless; [2.] the animal is poor
in world; [3.] man is world-forming” (Heidegger, 1995, p. 177). The stone has no world
34
because it has no perceptual apparatus. The stone lies upon the earth but does not see, hear or
touch it. Although the stone can be in the midst of other stones, these other stones remain
inaccessible to the stone. There is no reality for the stone. The animal is poor in world because
it is captivated. It is encircled by a disinhibiting ring. The animal is surrounded by
disinhibitors that release its instinctual drives. As such, the animal is open to its disinhibiting
ring but closed off from the manifestness of being, the world. The distinction between human
and animal becomes more clear, related to the distinction between occurrentness and
availableness. When involved with and in the environment things are available or ready to
hand. As long as the activity runs smoothly, for instance the carpenter who uses the saw to cut
wood, the thing is available. Its use isn’t questioned. But, “when the instrument fails to
respond to the demands of the moment does the practitioner run hard up against it, in its brute
facticity. The thing, at this point, is no longer available but occurrent” (Ingold, 2011, p. 81).
Only for man, things can become occurrent. At this moment of occurrentness, the thing as
thing, the world as world, is disclosed. Therefore, only man, according to Heidegger, has
world and can be world-forming. Man and animal are different because:

There is no apprehending [Vernehmen], but only a behaving [Benehmen] here, a

driven activity which we must grasp in this way because the possibility of
apprehending something as something is withheld [genommen] from the animal. And
it is withheld from it not merely here and now, but withheld in the sense that such a
possibility is ‘not given at all’. This possibility is taken away [benommen] from the
animal, and that is why the animal is not simply unrelated to anything else but rather
taken [hingenommen], taken and captivated [benommen] by things (Heidegger, 1995,
p. 247).

The relation towards world is fundamentally different between man and animal according to
Heidegger: “Man’s being open is a being held toward …, whereas the animal’s being open is
a being taken by … and thereby a being absorbed in its encircling ring” (Heidegger, 1995,
343).

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II.1.v. Fifth movement: Merleau-Ponty and the experience of light

The last author to be discussed in this first part of the third chapter is Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
In The Perception of the Environment, Ingold further elaborates his dwelling perspective,
initiated by the work of Heidegger, with some concepts and thoughts of Merleau-Ponty.
Merleau-Ponty refutes the Cartesian divide between a world ‘out there’ and a mind ‘in here’
with his statement that the world is “the homeland of our thoughts”, instead of the object of
our thoughts (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 24). The world is not something we look at but
something in which we stand in taking up a point of view on our surroundings. The organism,
for instance the human being, is an embodied presence. Our total bodily immersion within an
environment is our existential condition, pre-objective and pre-conscious. “The body is
neither object nor instrument, it is rather the subject of perception” (Ingold, 2000, p. 169).
One cannot think about perception without thinking about the body. “The body is the vehicle
of being in the world, and having a body is, for a living creature, to be involved in a definite
environment, to identify oneself with certain projects and be continually committed to them”
(Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 82).

For Merleau-Ponty, just as for Gibson, the senses are not distinct registers whose impressions
are combined within the head of the perceiver but are aspects of the whole of the body,
moving, acting, perceiving, within the environment. Vision is not of things, but happens
among them. It is constitutive of the whole perceptual field, drawn around the organism at its
centre. Seeing is ontologically prior to seeing things. “Before ‘I see things’, must come ‘I can
see’” (Ingold, 2000, p. 263). Seeing is not seeing out, it is being out:

As I contemplate the blue of the sky I am not set over against it as an acosmic subject;
I do not possess it in thought, or spread out towards it some idea of blue such as might
reveal the secret of it … I am the sky itself as it is drawn together and unified, and as it
begins to exist for itself; my consciousness is saturated with this limitless blue
(Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 214).

The boundary between inside and outside, between self and world, is dissolved. Vision
surrounds and passes through us. Our perception of the world is no more, and no less, than the
world’s perception of itself - in and through us. The inhabited world is sentient. “Bathed in
light, submerged in sound and rapt in feeling, the sentient body, at once both perceiver and
36
producer, traces the paths of the world’s becoming in the very course of contributing to its
ongoing renewal” (Ingold, 2011, p. 12). Light is the ground of being out. We do not so much
see light as see in light. Vision is an experience of light. Sight and light are not parallel to
mind and world. Light is an experience of being in the world, ontologically prior to seeing in
the world. “To see the sky is to be the sky, since the sky is luminosity and the visual
perception of the sky is an experience of light” (Ingold, 2011, p. 129). Ingold extends
Merleau-Ponty’s argument concerning vision as an experience of light to hearing and touch as
respectively experiences of sound and feeling. Merleau-Ponty invites us to experience
ourselves as immersed with the whole of our body and being in the currents of a world-in-
formation. “Participation is not opposed to observation but is a condition for it, just as light is
a condition for seeing things, sound for hearing them and feeling for touching them” (Ingold,
2011, p. 129). In the next part I will argue why these five movements are not sufficient for
Ingold to reverse the logic of inversion. This will be the transition to chapter III in which I
will discuss how Ingold relates to the work of Deleuze and Guattari and which concepts he
himself introduces against the logic of inversion.

37
II.2. Five movements within inversion

In this second part of the second chapter I want to elucidate why these authors, Gregory
Bateson, James Gibson, Jakob von Uexküll, Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
help Ingold to reverse the logic of inversion and why they fail in doing so to a - for Ingold -
sufficient extent.

Bateson’s idea of ecology is a good start in elaborating an alternative for the logic of inversion
because it makes it possible to think about the world in a holistic and comprehensive way that
acknowledges the mutual influences of different parts of that world upon one another.
Cybernetic notions such as feedback and redundancy allow to grasp the world as an
interrelated whole. Bateson, however, sticks to two ecologies. On the one hand he writes
about the ecology of ideas, on the other hand about the ecology of energy and material
exchange. He retains a divide between an ecology of mind and an ecology of substance. It is
as if human beings have spread out a layer of meaning upon the material world. The division
between nature and culture is thus conserved.
Some points of Gibson’s theory help to overcome the logic of inversion. For instance the
mutuality of organism and environment and his ideas about direct instead of indirect
(assuming a mediation between world ‘out there’ and mind ‘in here’) perception help to put
into words our relation to the world in a way that dissolves the separation between mind and
world to a certain extent. His thesis about the interrelatedness of perception and action is
highly inspirational and necessary to understand Ingold’s work. However, Gibson conceives
of the world as an inert surface furnished with objects upon and among which the organism
roams. There is still a kind of division between a lively organism, subject of perception and
action, and a death world, object of perception and action.
The concept of Umwelt of von Uexküll helps to conceive the relation between organism and
environment as an indistinguishable whole. There is no organism without an environment, no
environment without an organism. Furthermore, the body of the organism is not an
assemblage of sensory and motor organs. The perceptual world and the effector world are one
and the same, an Umwelt. A problematic point in von Uexküll’s theory is the somewhat
elevated position he ascribes to man. According to von Uexküll, the animal only has access to
its own environment, whereas the human being can achieve insight into the environments of
other animals. Moreover, man’s relation to the world is characterized by intentionality, a
quality that von Uexküll denies to animals.
38
Heidegger’s conceptualization of Dasein as being-in-the-world, the inseparableness of being
and world emphasized by the hyphens, is also an idea that helped Ingold to propagate his
holistic and comprehensive worldview. Heidegger’s writings on dwelling influenced Ingold in
establishing what he in The Perception of the Environment called the dwelling perspective.
From the perspective of dwelling, man’s inhabitation of world is not an imposition of a mental
image upon a material world, but is instead an always already living in this world, even before
it is built. Building and dwelling occur at the same time. It is only because man dwells, that he
is capable of building. The clear-cut distinction Heidegger draws between man and animal is
problematic for Ingold. Besides, to a certain extent a separation between being and world is
still being conserved in placing being over against world:

A more radical alternative, however, would be to reverse Heidegger’s priorities: that

is, to celebrate the openness inherent in the animal’s very captivation by its
environment. This is the openness of a life that will not be contained, that overflows
any boundaries that might be thrown around it, threading its way like the roots and
runners of a rhizome through whatever clefts and fissures leave room for growth and
movement (Ingold, 2011, p. 83).

At this point already, we hear Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of the rhizome coming in to
radicalise Heidegger’s argument.
Merleau-Ponty’s ideas about the body help Ingold to further elaborate his theory about
perception as a bodily affair. To conceive of the world as a sentient world dissolves the
distinction between the perceiver and the world. Our perception of the world is the world’s
perception of itself through our bodies. Seeing is an experience of light, as hearing is an
experience of sound and feeling is an experience of touch. These are experiences of being in
the world, prior to seeing, hearing or feeling some-thing. I see, I hear, I feel. There is not
really a point on which Ingold disagrees with Merleau-Ponty but reading Deleuze and
Guattari helped him to go further than only a theory about perception.

With these five authors Ingold already moves closer towards the abolition of the logic of
inversion. As I have argued however, these five movements are still insufficient to really
reverse the logic of inversion. All these authors, except for Merleau-Ponty, remain to some
extent within the logic of inversion. Bateson, for instance, holds on to the distinction between
the natural and the social. Gibson assumes the existence of lively organism perceiving a death
39
environment. Von Uexküll and Heidegger draw a rather clear boundary between the human
world and the animal environment. In the next chapter I will argue why Ingold only succeeds
in his attempts to bring anthropology back to life after reading Deleuze and Guattari.

40
III. The meshwork and its rhizomatic roots

III.1. Deleuze and Guattari and the rhizome

In the previous chapter I discussed five theoretical influences upon Ingold’s thought. I
presented how Ingold has read their work in order to reverse the logic of inversion and why he
didn’t succeed to a sufficient extent. In this chapter I will try to give an insight in how
Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas concerning the rhizome, the line of becoming, haecceity, smooth
space, etc. induced Ingold to elaborate his notions of line, meshwork and weather-world
which allowed him to elaborate a solid alternative to the logic of inversion. Deleuze and
Guattari’s influence consists not so much in that they offered Ingold some ready-made ideas
he took over and applied to anthropology, but more in that they offered a language that
allowed Ingold to tie the various theoretical and philosophical movements he made in The
Perception of the Environment and his different ethnographic, archaeological, musicological,
etc. explorations in Lines together. In the next part of this chapter I will elaborate Ingold’s
conception of the world and its inhabitants. This discussion of Deleuze and Guattari can thus
be read as a long preamble to my presentation of Ingold’s concepts of meshwork, SPIDER
and correspondence. I hope this approach will help the reader to come to a better
understanding of Ingold’s thought.

Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, the second part of Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, is of the utmost importance to understand Ingold’s work. Already in The
Perception of the Environment Ingold refers to it to elaborate a critique of what he called the
genealogical model and how within this model ancestry, generation, substance, memory and
land are represented, assuming:

that original ancestry lies at the point where history rises from an ahistorical substrate
of ‘nature’; that the generation of persons involves the transmission of biogenetic
substance prior to their life in the world; that ancestral experience can be passed on as
the stuff of cultural memory, enshrined in language and tradition; and that the land is
merely a surface to be occupied, serving to support its inhabitants rather than bring
them into being (Ingold, 2000, p. 13).

41
Inspired by the idea of rhizome of Deleuze and Guattari, Ingold develops a relational
approach and reinterprets these terms through a relational lens emphasizing the ongoing
engagement of people with the world and with the other beings that dwell therein. Ingold is
attracted by the connotations of movement, growth, unfolding, etc. of the concept of rhizome
(Ingold, 2000). However, one may not overestimate the influence of Deleuze and Guattari on
Ingold at the moment he wrote The Perception of the Environment. Only in one of the 23
chapters, he refers to A Thousand Plateaus. Also Lines, the book Ingold published in 2007,
seems to contain some Deleuzian elements. However, Ingold doesn’t refer to Deleuze and
Guattari in this book. It seems as if Deleuze and Guattari played a role behind the scenes.
There are a lot of ideas lining up with their ideas in Lines but Ingold only refers to other
sources - ethnographic, historical, architectural, artistic, etc. In the Prologue of Being Alive
we seem to get some insight why their thought was so similar to Ingold’s and why these
parallels were so less acknowledged by him up to the publication of Being Alive:

Admittedly, my initial attempts to read Deleuze, prompted by the recommendations of

many friends and colleagues, led nowhere. Finding the work all but incomprehensible,
I abandoned these attempts in sheer frustration. As so often with philosophers, I had to
wait until my own thinking had caught up with his before I could make any sense at all
of what he was saying. But starting afresh, prepared by what I had vainly supposed to
be my new vision of life as a phenomenon of lines, I was astonished to discover that it
had already been forcefully enunciated by Deleuze, along with his collaborator, the
psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, as long as 1980, in their book A Thousand Plateaus
(Ingold, 2011, pp. 13-14).

Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas about lines, rhizome and smooth space help Ingold to tie the
strands from the different disciplines - ethnography, history, architecture, art, etc. - explored
in Lines together and to develop his anthropology of the line.

I already used Ingold’s image of the bridge and the river to explain the logic of inversion and
the alternative Ingold puts forward. I will shortly resume this example because it helps to see
how Deleuze and Guattari offer an alternative to the logic of inversion, a shift in attention.
Thereafter I will elaborate how Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas play a role in Ingold’s
anthropology. I will deal consecutively with the lines of becoming, haecceity, rhizome,

42
smooth space and its implications for perception as haptic engagement, and materials and
forces. I hope this order allows to present their ideas in a somewhat logical way.

Whereas the bridge is the paradigm of transitivity and the logic of inversion, the river is the
paradigm of intransitivity and Ingold’s anthropology. The bridge connects two points and
allows to go from one side to the other. Life is contained on the banks. The bridge is a lifeless
connector between the banks. The river on the other hand is always changing. It is in
continual flux and movement. It is a flow one can only follow, not use to go from one side to
the other without being changed oneself. The river doesn’t connect. It has no start nor finish,
only coming and going. The river is always in the middle, between things, where things pick
up speed. Between things is not the third dot right in the middle of the line connecting two
other dots. It is not a going from one thing to the other and back again, “but a perpendicular
direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other way, a stream without
beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle” (Deleuze &
Guattari, 2004, p. 28).

The first concept of Deleuze and Guattari I will discuss is the line of becoming. Deleuze and
Guattari develop a register of concepts to indicate the differences between lines. They write
about abstract lines, lines of flight, lines of becoming, molar or rigid lines of segmentarity,
lines of molecular or supple segmentation, break lines, crack lines, rupture lines, etc. To
define all these lines would bring us to far. What is important is that Deleuze and Guattari
believe that life is lived along lines. They initiate their argument with a discussion of three
novella’s from the assumption that despite the specificity of the novella, it also treats some
more universal matter:

For we are made of lines. We are not only referring to lines of writing. Lines of
writing conjugate with other lines, life lines, lines of luck or misfortune, lines
productive of the variation of the line of writing itself, lines that are between the lines
of writing (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004, p. 215).

An important type of line is the line of flight or the line of becoming because these lines prise
an opening. Life is lived along these lines. A line of becoming isn’t composed of points or
connects points. It passes between points, runs transversally to the connections between
points. A point is always an origin but a line of becoming has neither beginning nor end. It
43
has only a middle. A middle is not an average or mean. It is the absolute speed of movement.
“A becoming is neither one nor two, nor the relation of the two; it is the in-between, the
border or line of flight or descent running perpendicular to both” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004,
p. 323). Lines of flight are lifelines. They go their own way transversally to points and
connectors. Ingold exemplifies this point with a work of the German artist Klaus Weber.
Weber had a small allotment in Berlin and persuaded the Roads Department to coat it in a
thick layer of motorway-grade asphalt. However, before they set out, Weber sprinkled the
area with the spores of fungus. The area with the fungus was coated with asphalt and Weber
built a little shed to see what would happen. After some time the asphalt began to crack and
fungi broke trough it in great white blobs. Ingold concludes that “the creeping entanglements
of life will always and inevitably triumph over our attempts to box them in” (Ingold, 2011, p.
125). This example makes clear how the line of becoming or the line of flight, in Ingold’s
interpretation as a line of life, resists the pressure of other, more coercive lines. Life is open-
ended.

Different lines make up an haecceity, a second important concept coined by Deleuze and
Guattari. An haecceity is the interweaving of different lines, a bundle of lines. It is the “entire
assemblage in its individuated aggregate” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004, p. 289). For Ingold it is
a way of conceptualizing what he formerly called organism-in-an-environment or being-in-
the-world. The concept of haecceity does justice to the event-character of being:

It is the wolf itself, and the horse, and the child, that cease to be subjects to become
events, in assemblages that are inseparable from an hour, a season, an atmosphere, an
air, a life. The street enters into composition with the horse, just as the dying rat enters
into composition with the air, and the beast and the full moon enter into composition
with each other (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004, p. 289).

The concept of haecceity draws our attention to the ever-changing context in which beings
occur. It is to see beings as events. It allows us to see the cat-running-away-through-the-
bushes-in-the-pouring-rain, instead of just the cat an sich as if she is closed off from the world
in which she is immersed. This notion helps Ingold to understand the world as earth and sky,
or becoming-earth and becoming-sky, a weather-world. Haecceities are not what is perceived,
but what is perceived with. It is in the continual flux of rain, snow, wind, etc. that we
perceive. “Climate, wind, season, hour are not of another nature than the things, animals, or
44
people that populate them, follow them, sleep and awaken within them” (Deleuze & Guattari,
2004, p. 290). To perceive the environment is not just perceiving the objects to be found
within the environment but it is to “join with them in the material flows and movements
contributing to their - and our - ongoing formation” (Ingold, 2011, p. 88). The notion of
haecceity allows us to see the world as a world of becoming, a world that is always occurring,
not just existing as a fixed and inert entity, an ongoing event.

Following quote links the concept of haecceity to on the one hand the line of becoming and on
the other hand the rhizome, the next concept I will discuss: “A haecceity has neither
beginning nor end, origin nor destination; it is always in the middle. It is not made of points,
only of lines. It is a rhizome” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004, p. 290). The idea of rhizome already
inspired Ingold in his critique of the genealogical interpretation of ancestry, generation,
substance, memory and land in The Perception of the Environment (Ingold, 2000). In Being
Alive and Making he doesn’t really refer explicitly to the idea of rhizome, although it is clear
that his concept of meshwork, which he contrasts to the concept of network, is heavily
inspired by it. According to Deleuze and Guattari any line of the rhizome can and must be
connected to any other line. The rhizome is spread out and continually unfolding.
Furthermore, it is characterized by connections between different parts of the rhizome. The
rhizome is always different and differing and can’t be represented in one single image. There
are no points or positions as in a tree or root structure, only lines and their interweaving.
Furthermore, every time a rhizome breaks or shatters at a given spot, it will start up again on
one of its old lines or on new lines. It is the continual entangling of lines, forming patterns
which are sometimes disturbed by the germinating of new lines of becoming, making new
connections, forming new patters which in their turn are disturbed, etc.
It is important to note that for Deleuze and Guattari the rhizome is not directly opposed to the
tree or root. Both models continually intermingle with each other in real life: “There are knots
of arborescence in rhizomes, and rhizomatic offshoots in roots” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004, p.
22). Ingold, however, draws a clear-cut distinction between the meshwork, the rhizomatic,
and the network, the arborescent. All life is sucked out of the connectors of the network and is
contained within the points, whereas the lines of the meshwork are lively lines, always
moving, growing and entangling (Ingold, 2011).

The next concept by Deleuze and Guattari that inspired Ingold is that of smooth space, the
contrary of striated space. Striated space is homogenous and volumetric. Diverse things or
45
objects are laid out in striated space, each in its assigned location. Smooth space, on the
contrary, has no layout. It is a patchwork of continuous variation, extending in all directions
without limit. For Ingold, the sea is an exemplary case of smooth space and how to think
about space as smooth. During an experiment with his students he tried to sea the land.
“Rather than being opposed, sea and land, along with the littoral that marks their perpetual
dialogue, appear to be engulfed in the wider sphere of forces and relations comprising the
weather-world, together subsumed under the great dome of the sky” (Ingold, 2011, p. 132).
Sea-ing the land means that one perceives the land not as some inert surface furnished with
inert objects but instead that one becomes attentive to the continual flux and flows of the
weather-world. The distinction between smooth space and striated space thus also has
implications for perception:

The Smooth is both the object of a close vision par excellence and the element of a
haptic space (which may be as much visual or auditory as tactile). The Striated, on the
contrary, relates to a more distant vision, and a more optical space - although the eye
in turn is not the only organ to have this capacity (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004, p. 544).

The perceptual mode of striated space is optical vision. It is to look at things, as to throw an
arrow at on object. In smooth space, however, the eye doesn’t look at things but roams among
them, “finding a way through, rather than aiming for a fixed target” (Ingold, 2011, p. 132). In
line with Deleuze and Guattari, Ingold makes a distinction between optical vision and haptic
engagement:

Haptic engagement is close range and hands on. It is the engagement of a mindful
body at work with materials and with the land, ‘sewing itself in’ to the textures of the
world along the pathways of sensory involvement. An optical relation between mind
and world, by contrast, is founded on distance and detachment (Ingold, 2011, p. 133).

Deleuze and Guattari parallel the haptic/optical distinction with the smooth/striated
distinction. According to Ingold however the division between the haptic and the optical is a
division within the striated. Both the farmer and the painter live in a striated space, the one
working on the land with his hands in the earth, the other contemplating the landscape from a
distance. Ingold uses the examples of waves, wind and sky to elaborate his alternative to
haptic engagement and optical vision. This alternative is the atmospheric experience. In the
46
atmosphere as smooth space - or as Ingold calls it, the weather-world - perceivers are not set
over against the atmosphere but the atmosphere commingles with them, saturating their
consciousness, generating their capacity to perceive. “The breaking waves were their sound,
not objects that make a sound; the wind was its feel, not an object touched; the sky was light,
not something seen in the light” (Ingold, 2011, p. 134). According to Ingold, light, sound and
feeling are the experiences of smooth space - or as he calls it, the weather-world. “It is an
atmospheric space of movement and flux, stirred up by wind and weather, and suffused with
light, sound and feeling” (Ingold, 2011, p. 132). The weather-world is the ever-changing
world in which we live. It is the wind blowing dust into our eyes and the rain wetting our feet.
It is the world that is continually differing, the world as event.

A last element of the work of Deleuze and Guattari that inspires Ingold is their critique of the
hylomorphic model of making and the alternative they postulate. According to Aristotle
creation is a bringing together of form, μορφή, and matter, ΰλή, the imposition of a certain
form, conceived in the head ‘in here’, upon matter, found in the world ‘out there’. The
hylomorphic model is thus closely linked to the logic of inversion and Cartesian dualism. It is
deeply embedded within the history of western thought and common sense. Ingold tries to
replace this product-approach focusing on matter-states by a process-approach concerning
matter-flows. For Ingold, making is not an assembly but a procession, not a building up of
different and distinct parts but a carrying on, “a passage along a path in which every step
grows from the one before and into the one following, on an itinerary that always overshoots
its destinations” (Ingold, 2013b, p. 45). To make is not to impose a preconceived form upon
an inert matter but it is to intervene in a field of forces and dive into currents of materials.
Form comes into being while the practitioner is working on the material. Therefore Ingold
writes about the textility of making. In Latin, texere means ‘to weave’. Ingold compares
making to weaving, the generation of form through a continuous and sustained engagement of
practitioner with materials. “Practitioners, I contend, are wanderers, wayfarers, whose skill
lies in their ability to find the grain of the world’s becoming and to follow its course while
bending it to their evolving purpose” (Ingold, 2011, p. 211). While cutting wood, for instance,
the carpenter continuously makes small adaptations in his movements. The potter, in a similar
way, follows the clay while he molds it. He explores the material while he exerts force over it.
It is in this process, this dialogue between the material and the practitioner that form emerges.
Making concerns materials and forces, not only matter and form (Ingold, 2011; Ingold,
2013b).
47
I will conclude part with a short summary of the different distinctions Ingold calls into being
to situate his own position and to create a distance to logic of inversion and its underlying
Cartesian dualism. Ingold contrasts the geometrical and organic line with the line of becoming
or the abstract line. The Deleuzian haecceity is opposed to the Gibsonian organism-in-its-
environment and the Heideggerian being-in-the-world. Ingold replaces the genealogical
model centred around the root and the tree with a relational model growing from the image of
the rhizome. Smooth space is the alternative for striated space and atmospheric experience is
Ingold’s own alternative for the haptic engagement and optical vision specific to striated
space. At last, Ingold replaces the hylomorphic model of matter and form with an ontogenesis
of materials and forces. In the next part, I will present Ingold’s cosmology, the way he
conceives of the world and its inhabitants.

48
III.2. Cogito ergo sum: Reinterpreting the Cartesian precept

At the end of chapter I I presented Ingold’s main aim of reversing the logic of inversion,
rooted in Cartesian dualism, and his vision on what anthropology is or should be. The
objective of the second chapter was to disentangle different theoretical strands constituting
Ingold’s anthropological weave to come to a better understanding of his work after The
Perception of the Environment as a whole and how for instance Gibson and Heidegger
inspired him in elaborating his alternative for inversion, transitivity and the mind-body
problem. In the previous part I discussed Ingold’s relation to Deleuze and Guattari’s A
Thousand Plateaus. This part can be read a rather long run-up to this second part of the this
chapter in which I will present how Ingold conceives of being and becoming, the world and
its inhabitants. The key to dismantle the machine of inversion is an alternative interpretation
of Cogito ergo sum, Descartes’ precept. In footnote six to chapter seven, Bodies on the Run,
of Making Ingold explains:

César Giraldo Herrera (personal communication) reminds me that the word cogito, in
Latin, is a compound of co- (implying togetherness and mutuality) and -agito (to stir
up, guide, lead or care about). Thus cogito would literally mean to co-agitate, to lead
and be led, stir up and be stirred, care and be cared for; and the phrase cogito ergo
sum, which is much older than Descartes, could well be translated as ‘I correspond,
therefore I am’ (Ingold, 2013b, p. 146).

Ingold reinterprets the Cartesian cogito, which is a subject closed in upon itself, within its
own mind, one and indivisible, a doubting and thus thinking being, as a corresponding being,
a being that is, acts thus perceives, perceives thus acts, always already in the world and can’t
be conceived of without the world it inhabits. I will explain this notion of correspondence at
the end of this part but first I will elaborate Ingold’s vision on the world and its inhabitants as
presented in Being Alive and Making. The Perception of the Environment and Lines can be
considered as preliminary work for the cosmology or metaphysics Ingold develops in Being
Alive. As already argued in the previous part, the work of Deleuze and Guattari helped Ingold
to perfect the different theoretical movements he already made in The Perception of the
Environment such as his dwelling perspective and the organism-in-its-environment. Besides it
assisted him to tie the different approaches to the line together he explored in Lines.

49
Consecutively I will deal with the concepts of meshwork, SPIDER - Skilled Practice Involves
Developmentally Embodied Responsiveness -, and correspondence.

Ingold introduces the concept of meshwork as an alternative to the logic of inversion’s

network. Inversion is the operation that wraps lines of becoming into closed off points. These
points are connected to each other in a network. Life, however, is contained within the points,
the connectors are dead. The meshwork, on the contrary, is a “meshwork of entangled lines of
life, growth and movement” (Ingold, 2011, p. 63). The world we inhabit is a meshwork of
interwoven lines, not a network of connected points. Animism, as a way of being in the world,
not a mode of knowledge about the world, helps Ingold to conceive of life and/along lines.
Animism presupposes that life is immanent in the world’s formation of itself, its continual
coming-into-being. Ingold writes about “the relational constitution of being” (Ingold, 2011, p.
69). He develops his argument starting from a small exercise. He first draws an organism as a
circle. This is the way the logic of inversion understands the organism: the organism is closed
in upon itself, closed off from its environment with which it can, however, interact. The
organism - and life - is ‘in here’, while the environment is ‘out there’. Another way of
drawing an organism would be to draw a line. A line has no inside or outside, no boundary
separating the organism from its environment. It is a trail of growth and movement, along
which life is lived. Different such trails together interweave into the fabric of the world.

Every such trail discloses a relation. But the relation is not between one thing and
another - between the organism ‘here’ and the environment ‘there’. It is rather a trail
along which life is lived. Neither beginning here and ending there, nor vice versa, the
trail winds through or amidst like the root of a plant or a stream between its banks.
Each such trail is but one strand in a tissue of trails that together comprise the texture
of the lifeworld. This texture is what I mean when I speak of organisms being
constituted within a relational field. It is a field not of interconnected points but of
interwoven lines; not a network but a meshwork (Ingold, 2011, pp. 69-70).

The relational constitution of being doesn’t take place within a network of interconnected
points, but within a meshwork of interwoven lines. Things are their relations, things are their
movements, things are their becomings. We do not occupy the world, being spread out in a
network across its surface, but we inhabit the world, moving along the lines that we are
through its ever-unfolding weave (Ingold, 2011; Ingold, 2013b).
50
At the end of the second part of Being Alive, Ingold writes a little fable about an ant and a
spider having a discussion about life and their place within the world. It is a way to make
clear how his concept of meshwork differs from Bruno Latour’s concept of network. I will
present here how Ingold, according to himself, differs from Latour. I won’t try to compare
both theoretical positions. This fable will help us to come to a better understanding of
Ingold’s meshwork and SPIDER, Skilled Practice Involves Developmentally Embodied
Responsiveness.
According to ANT the activities taking places within its colony can’t be traced back either to
a collective super-organism, either to the plurality of individuals. Tracing the lines of activity
is describing a network in which each and every individual is a particular node. Every ant in
the colony is part of the action taking place and carries it forward in its own way. It is an act-
ant. Agency is thus distributed throughout the network. SPIDER asks whether also non-ants
can be part of the network. ANT explains that the world he inhabits includes both act-ants and
non-ants, for instance larvae, pine needles and aphids. These objects are not passive, but
rather bound up in relations with ANT, as he is bound up in relations with other ants. ANT
claims that these objects are caught up in his network, as the fly is caught up in SPIDER’s
web. SPIDER protests. She can’t see the resemblance between ANT’s network and her web.
According to SPIDER, the lines of ANT’s network are just connections between one thing
and another. ANT’s world is made up of bits and pieces that are assembled in order to make
things happen. The lines of SPIDER’s web, on the contrary, are spun from materials exuded
from her own body and are laid down as she moves about. They are not connections between
things but are the lines along which she lives. They conduct her perception of and action in
the world. ANT tries to convince SPIDER of his worldview by describing her web as a
spider-web, a conjunction, a hybrid entity. Even the twigs to which the web is attached are
part of the network. SPIDER formulates her uneasiness with ANT’s conception of the world
as an assemblage of entities - spider, web, twig, etc.:

My point however, is that the web is not an entity. That is to say, it is not a closed-in,
self-contained object that is set over against other objects with which it may then be
juxtaposed or conjoined. It is rather a bundle or tissue of strands, tightly drawn
together here but trailing loose ends there, which tangle with other strands from other
bundles (Ingold, 2011, p. 91).

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For SPIDER, the world is not an assemblage but a tangle of threads and pathways. She calls it
a meshwork. Action, for her, is not the result of an agency distributed around the network but
emerges from the interplay of materials and forces issuing forth along the lines of the
meshwork. ANT and SPIDER are discussing about the network and the meshwork, when
suddenly a pair of butterflies crosses above their heads. ANT interprets the interaction of the
butterflies as a dance of agency. The butterflies respond to each other’s movements. SPIDER,
however, immediately reminds ANT of the air, the medium in which the butterflies as well as
ANT and SPIDER themselves, are immersed. Just as the fish needs water to swim, the
butterflies need air to fly. Water and air, however, are not entities that act according to
SPIDER. She makes a comparison to her own situation and her relation to her web:

I may dance the tarantella with the fly that alights on my web, but the web itself is not
a dancing partner. It is not an object that I interact with, but the ground upon which the
possibility of interaction is based. The web, in short, is the very condition of my
agency. But it is not, in itself, an agent (Ingold, 2011, p. 93).

ANT refutes SPIDER’s argument because it is arachnocentric according to him. He asks her
how many legs someone needs to have to be considered an agent. ANT asserts, in opposition
to SPIDER, that also the web, the twigs, etc. have agency. Agency is indeed distributed
throughout the network formed by ants as well as non-ants. ANT establishes a principle of
symmetry in order to stop privileging either side of the ant/non-ant dichotomy over the other.
SPIDER asserts that she does not want to privilege ants or spiders. Still, she cannot accept
ANT’s principle of symmetry. According to SPIDER the category of non-ant is just too big
because it includes everything from grains of sand and drops of dew to butterflies and aphids.
SPIDER compares herself when she is sitting at the edge of her web, silently waiting for a fly
to land upon it, with a leaf in a tree, in order to make clear why the principle of symmetry
cannot be upheld. Every movement SPIDER makes, is, in contrast to the movements of the
leaf, also a movement of her attention. The essence of action, she asserts, lies in the close
coupling of bodily movement and perception. This means that all action is, to a greater or
lesser extent, skilled. “The skilled practitioner is one who can continually attune his or her
movements to perturbations in the perceived environment without ever interrupting the flow
of action” (Ingold, 2011, p. 94). Skill develops alongside the organism’s growth and
development in an environment. It is an essential element of the way SPIDER relates to the

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world. With these last words the ways of ANT and SPIDER split and each goes its own way
again (Ingold, 2011).

Tim Ingold conceptualises the way SPIDER relates to the world as correspondence. In
contrast to the dance of agency, it is a dance of animacy. He gives the example of flying a
kite:

In this dance, flyer and air do not so much interact as correspond. The kite, in effect,
sets up a correspondence between the animate movements of the flyer and the currents
of the aerial medium in which he or she is immersed. It is not that you need air to
interact with a kite; rather, you need a kite to correspond with the air (Ingold, 2013b,
p. 101).

The distinction between interaction and correspondence runs along the same lines as the
distinction between the dance of agency and the dance of animacy. Interaction’s prefix inter-
implies the existence of two separate parties, closed to one another. A bridge is needed to
connect them. Such a bridging operation, however, cuts across the paths of becoming and
movement. In correspondence, on the contrary, there are no points but only lines, wrapping
around one another like melodies in counterpoint. Correspondence is a skill, a τέχνη. The
craftsman does not impose some preconceived form upon matter but through his skilled
practice, immersed in a field of forces and materials - bending twigs to make a basket,
molding clay to make a pot -, he corresponds with the world. “Making is a process of
correspondence: not the imposition of preconceived form on raw material substance, but the
drawing out or bringing forth of potentials immanent in a world of becoming” (Ingold, 2013b,
p. 31). Anthropology, as the art of inquiry, the τέχνη of being alive to the world, is a way of
corresponding with the world. Its aim is “not to describe the world, or to represent it, but to
open up our perception to what is going on there so that we, in turn, can respond to it”
(Ingold, 2013b, p. 7). Doing anthropology, being alive, corresponding is to do our thinking,
talking and writing in and with the world (Ingold, 2011; Ingold, 2013b).

After having disentangled the different theoretical lines making up Tim Ingold’s anthropology
in the second chapter, I tried to clarify how Ingold relates to the work of Deleuze and
Guattari, especially their concepts of line of becoming, haecceity, rhizome, smooth space, etc.
Their work offered Ingold a language to think the world as a lively world of becoming. I have
53
ended this chapter with an attempt to explain Ingold’s concepts of meshwork, SPIDER and
correspondence. In the next chapter I will focus on one line within Ingold’s work, namely the
educational line.

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IV. Education of attention

IV.1. What is the education of attention?

After having introduced Tim Ingold, his work and vision on anthropology in chapter I, the
different theoretical influences on his thought in chapter II, and his conception of the world
and its inhabitants in chapter III I will bring the focus in this chapter on the educational line
within Ingold’s work. I start from the assumption that Ingold has a genuine conception of
what education is. What follows is not a projection of my conception of education onto
Ingold’s work or an attempt to draw an educational line in his work but to lay bare the
educational thread that is already woven into his anthropological meshwork. A key word in
this thinking about education is the notion of education of attention. In this first part of this
chapter I will uncover the origin of this notion in Gibson’s work and how Ingold makes sense
of it. In the second part I will write about walking as a practice of education of attention. Here
will become clear how Ingold’s interpretation of education of attention differs from Gibson’s.
I could also have chosen for the example of making as such a practice but for me, as I started
my master’s thesis from an interest in walking, the example of walking is more appealing. To
compensate I will give a small example of making, weaving a basket, as an education of
attention in the first part. In the last part I want to argue how and why Ingold’s work itself can
be considered as an education of attention.

In The Perception of the Environment Ingold introduces the notion of education of attention
to conceptualise how the world is being disclosed for young children and novices by their
parents or other people. He tells us about his father who was a mycologist and how he took
little Tim to the countryside for walks pointing out all the plants and fungi on their way:

Sometimes he would get me to smell them, or to try out their distinctive tastes. His
manner of teaching was to show me things, literally to point them out. If I would but
notice the things to which he directed my attention, and recognise the sights, smells
and tastes that he wanted me to experience because they were so dear to him, then I
would discover for myself much of what he already knew (Ingold, 2000, p. 20).

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Ingold distinguishes knowledge from information. Information can be coded and decoded. It
can be handed down from one generation to another. Knowledge, on the contrary, consists in
the capacity to situate information, to understand what it means. It develops through a
perceptual engagement with the world in which information about the world is not transmitted
but in which the world itself is shown. To show something, Ingold explains, is to let it be
perceived and experienced - be it by touch, taste, hearing or smell - by another person. It is to
unveil or disclose the world or some aspect of it. The truth of the world is being revealed in
our attentional relation to it. The revelation of the truth of the world by one generation to
another, or by one person to another, is what Ingold calls the education of attention: “Truths
that are inherent in the world are, bit by bit, revealed or disclosed to the novice. What each
generation contributes to the next, in this process, is an education of attention” (Ingold, 2000,
p. 22). Also skills are developed through an education of attention. Observation and imitation,
two important activities of enskilment, are not activities of having information copied inside
one’s head and afterwards mechanically executing the received instructions. “Rather, to
observe is actively to attend to the movements of others; to imitate is to align that attention to
the movement of one’s own practical orientation towards the environment” (Ingold, 2000, p.
37). Knowledge and skill are not transmitted but are grown. It is in doing and seeing things,
having the world revealed to oneself, that knowledge and skill grow into oneself as they grow
into the world. Knowledge and skills are generated through a series of encounters with the
world, when someone points our attention to things in the world and we are invited to
experience them - whether it be the sound of the birds in the sky or how to weave a basket.
Growth is a movement along a way of life, “not the enactment of a corpus of rules and
principles (or a ‘culture’) received from predecessors, but the negotiation of a path through
the world” (Ingold, 2000, p. 146). People learn, skills and knowledge grow, as they inhabit the
world and search their way through it. One cannot be prepared for life, but it is while living
and trying things out that one learns. In his later works, Ingold will make sometimes
abstraction of the older generation or the other who invites to be attentive to the world.
In short and in its most pure form, the education of attention is about how one attends to the
world, how in the close coupling of perception and action the truth of the world is being
revealed. Truth needs to be understood here as an experience of the world that cannot be
summarized in some information to be transmitted to other people. It is what shows itself
when we do not try to explain or understand the world but when we accept our experience of
the world. It is in our attentive engagement with the world, skilled practice, that we come to

56
experience the world. Every movement we make is also a movement of our attention during
which the world is disclosed.

Ingold discovers this notion of education of attention in Gibson’s work The Ecological
Approach to Visual Perception. According to Gibson, attention pervades the whole input-
output loop of the perceptual system. According to Gibson, cognitive and physiological
psychology, on the contrary, treat attention as a process occurring at centres within the
nervous system, as an awareness that can be focused. It is a filtering of nervous impulses or
the shifting of impulses from one path to another. From Gibson’s ecological approach it is a
resonating, extracting and optimizing, involving acts of attention such as exploring, adjusting,
investigating and orienting. Gibson doesn’t write extensively on this notion. He just
introduces it in a few words, makes a contrast with the cognitive and physiological approach
and relates it to some other concepts, such as resonating, adjusting, etc. which he doesn’t
explain. Ingold thus has a lot of freedom to give meaning to this notion. Ingold does not
continually refer to Gibson or the education of attention, however, as I will try to show, a lot
of things he touches upon can be understood as an education of attention (Gibson, 1979;
Ingold, 2000).

There are a lot of examples of what could be called an education of attention within Ingold’s
work. Besides the one already given about Ingold’s walks with his father and the one I will
elaborate in the next part on walking, I will give another two examples. Hopefully this allows
us to better grasp the notion. The first example comes from an ethnographic account of
MacKenzie. It is about weaving a bilum, a string bag, among the Telefol people of central
New Guinea. The Telefol people liken the movements of the hands while making a bilum to
the flowing water of a river. To weave a basket is to be immersed within this flow.
Experienced bilum-makers don’t transmit their skill to the younger generation. They rather
provide the contexts within which novices can discover for themselves and gradually grow
into the skills of looping and spinning, to become one with the flow. “Progress from
clumsiness to dexterity in the craft of bilum-making is brought about not by way of an
internalisation of rules and representations, but through the gradual attunement of movement
and perception” (Ingold, 2000, p. 357). Skilled practice is always an attentive practice in
which maker and material become one in an ontogenetic force field. It is a way of attending to
the world and being part of its formation of itself.

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A second example comes from a study of the Koyukon of Alaska by Nelson. It is about how
through practices of storytelling one attends to the world. Ingold uses the example of the
Koyukon to give an alternative for our own practices of classificatory naming in which
everything is singled out as a more or less distinct proper noun with some specific
characteristics. Koyukon, on the contrary, have three different ways of naming animals. First,
there are descriptions of the observed behaviour of the animal. Second, there are Distant
Times tales, stories from the era of the creation of the world. Most of the time these stories
offer some practical or moral guidance, remembered with every encounter with such an
animal. Third, there are metaphorical riddles. These are introduced by the phrase tla-dzor-
karas’ana, translated by Nelson as ‘Wait, I see something’. A beaver, for instance, as a
metaphorical riddle is ‘I drag my shovel along the trail’, salmon is ‘we come upstream in red
canoes’. To name animals as the Koyukon do, is to attend to a world of movement and
growth, an environment in which we dwell and in which animals occur, instead of a surface
we occupy by giving names to the animals that exist upon it. It is to attend to the event-
character of a world of becoming in which there is no cat as cat but only the cat-running-
away-through-the-bushes-in-the-pouring-rain, the cat-stretching-out-on-a-hot-summer’s-day,
etc. “Animals happen, they carry on, they are their stories, and their names - to repeat - are
not nouns but verbs” (Ingold, 2011, p. 175).

In the next part of this chapter I will try to make the education of attention more clear by
giving the example of wayfaring - or roving, wandering, etc. - as an education of attention.
Here will also become clear how Ingold relates other Gibsonian concepts such as the path of
observation to the education of attention to let it make more sense. It will also become clear
how Ingold’s idea about attention differs from Gibson’s. He has elaborated the ideas about
wayfaring in Lines and Being Alive and contrasts his ideas about the education of attention
with Gibson’s in an article still unpublished on walking.

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IV.2. Walking as an education of attention

In this part I will discuss walking as an education of attention. Ingold writes several times
about walking. In The Perception of the Environment he relates it to Gibson’s path of
observation. In Lines, Being Alive and Making he writes about the lines of wayfaring. In an
unpublished article, The Maze and the Labyrinth: Walking and the Education of Attention, at
last, he writes explicitly about the relation between walking and the education of attention. I
believe that distinguishing between these three approaches to walking - path of observation,
wayfaring and education of attention - will allow us to grasp the difference that unfolds
throughout his work.

In The Perception of the Environment, Ingold asserts in line with Gibson that perception takes
place along a path of observation. Gibson argues that the concept of the path of observation is
a better one to grasp perception than the concept of a point of observation. One cannot see the
world from a point of observation. One has to move around in order to perceive. During these
movements the underlying invariant structure of the world emerges from the changing
perspective structure. A path of observation is not an accumulation of points of observation:
“A path does not have to be treated as an infinite set of adjacent points at an infinite set of
successive instants; it can be thought of as a unitary movement, an excursion, a trip, or a
voyage” (Gibson, 1979, p. 197). Vision is ambulatory. While walking, surfaces of the
environment come into or pass out of sight. Walking is an opening up and closing off of vistas
or semienclosures, sets of unhidden surfaces. While walking, the environment is progressively
disclosed. Perception and action, in this case walking, are closely coupled. Here the education
of attention thus needs to be understood as the disclosing of the world to perception while
walking through it.

Gibson’s concept of a path of observation and its implications for perception and wayfinding
induce Ingold to elaborate his theory of walking as wayfaring. In the second part of the first
chapter I already used the example of transport versus wayfaring to clarify the logic of
inversion. I will shortly resume this argument because it makes clear what Ingold understands
as wayfaring. Whereas transport is destination-oriented, wayfaring is continually on the move.
Transport tries to bridge the space between place A and place B as quickly as possible - it
desires its own abolition. In wayfaring, on the contrary, we don’t know yet where we go or
where we shall pass. It is an improvisation upon the conditions as they emerge in the world
59
during wayfaring. Whereas the person who is transported, is moved, the wayfarer is his
movement. The wayfarer is indistinguishable from his movement. The lines of wayfaring
coincide with the lines of becoming of the wayfarer. The wayfarer knows as he goes.
Transport is networked and is composed of point-to-point connectors. Wayfaring, on the
contrary, is meshworked and leaves traces of movement. The wayfarer threads his way
through the world.

Indeed the wayfarer or seafarer has no final destination, for wherever he is, and as long
as life goes on, there is somewhere further he can go. For the transported traveller and
his baggage, by contrast, every destination is a terminus, every port a point of entry
into a world from which he has been temporarily exiled whilst in transit (Ingold, 2007,
p. 77).

The wayfarer moves through the world, not across its surface. The paradigmatic case of
wayfaring is walking. Instead of being place-bound, walking is place-binding. It unfolds along
paths, not in places. Threading a way through the world, every inhabitant lays a trail.
Whenever inhabitants meet, trails become entwined and lives become bound up with one
another. “Every entwining is a knot, and the more that lifelines are entwined, the greater the
density of the knot. Places, then, are like knots, and the threads from which they are tied are
lines of wayfaring” (Ingold, 2011, pp. 148-149). While walking through the world, attending
to the world, people get to know the world. At the end of Making Ingold distinguishes
knowledge from information along the lines the poet T. S. Eliot has sketched in Choruses
from the Rock: “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge, where is the knowledge we
have lost in information?” (as cited in Ingold, 2013b, p. 141). Information is developed in a
straight-lined, networked world in which there is no need to really see the world because it is
already known in information. Information learns us something about the world, knowledge,
on the contrary, is learned from the world, during our wayfaring - in the metaphorical sense -
through the world. According to Ingold, never before in history has so much information
engendered so little wisdom. The reason is that wisdom for Ingold does not run in straight
lines but along the ways of the donkey. His description of the donkey - again in the
metaphorical sense - will shed some light on what wisdom is and how it comes into being:

This humble beast, slow but nimble, cross-eyed but big-eared, capable of traversing
the most rugged ground without mishap, without need of road or trail, or fossil fuel,
60
 has served mankind for many thousand years. Whereas the automobile, once it has
reached the end of the road, can go no further, the donkey just keeps on going. Non-
human as it may be, but should we not pay heed to what it has to tell us? (Ingold,
2013b, p. 141).

The wayfaring lines of the donkey reach to paths never travelled before, inaccessible for cars
used to straight, asphalted roads constructed to minimize the time on the road. Transport lines
do not allow for attention, only for intention - why else are their sides overgrown with
directions of where to go? When transported, one is not in the world but always already where
one wants or has to be. When wayfaring, on the other hand, - and I think the contrast between
the passive ‘transported’ and the active ‘wayfaring’ is telling - one attends to the world. The
wayfarer is at once captivated and astonished by the world she attends to. As such, walking as
wayfaring is an education of attention. It has to be clear that Ingold uses the notion of
wayfaring on two levels. On the one hand it is a description of how people thread their way
through the world. This is the descriptive level. On the other hand it is also a metaphor for a
way of engaging with the world, one that is not destination-oriented but continually on the
move. This is the metaphorical level. It allows us to think of our relation to the world in a way
that is open-ended. This means that we do not see the world as a network of interconnected
points in which we go from one point to another as fast as possible, but as a meshwork in
which we ourselves are lines, interweaving with other lines and continually changing,
overshooting our destinations.

Ingold elaborates and radicalizes the distinction between wayfaring and transport in an article
still unpublished called The Maze and the Labyrinth: Walking and the Education of Attention.
I will take this article as the expression of Ingold’s definitive idea, at least for now, about the
relation between walking and the education of attention. However, since it is an unpublished
draft containing some ambiguities, it is difficult to make an estimation of the significance of
the article. Nevertheless I will use it to grasp Ingold’s current ideas about education. We will
have to wait until the publication of The Life of Lines in 2015 in which he will elaborate these
ideas, to have these ambiguities resolved. In the article Ingold sets off with a phrase borrowed
from a book of Andrew Greig, At the Loch of the Green Corrie, about Greig’s mentor
Norman MacCaig:

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 He could name the commonest birds and that was about it. I think he didn’t want to
know more, believing that knowledge of their Latin names, habitat, feeding and
mating patterns, moulting season would obscure their reality. Sometimes the more you
know the less you see. What you encounter is your knowledge, not the thing itself (as
cited in Ingold, n.d., p. 1).

Inspired by Jan Masschelein’s idea of e-ducating the gaze and the invitation to go walking as
an educational practice, Ingold starts to reflect upon what education is and can be and how
knowing relates to being. He presents two different etymological derivations of the word
education. The first goes back to the Latin verb educare. This is the meaning where we are
most familiar with. It means to rear or bring up, to initiate in a pattern of conduct. The second
derivation goes back to the Latin educere, from e(x), out, and ducere, to lead. “In this sense,
education is a matter of leading novices out into the world rather than - as it is conventionally
taken to be today - instilling knowledge in to their minds” (Ingold, n.d., p. 2). Education as e-
ducation is an invitation to go out for a walk.
Ingold elaborates this distinction along similar lines as the distinction between transport and
wayfaring. He introduces the maze and the labyrinth as metaphors. Before I elaborate this
distinction I want to make clear how the maze differs from the labyrinth. A maze has many
branches or paths and only one way out which the walker needs to find. Its purpose is to
confuse. It is a puzzle to be solved. The labyrinth, on the contrary, has a more spiritual
significance. A labyrinth has no branches and leads ultimately to one point. Often it has the
shape of a spiral. Its purpose is to engender thought and introspection. In the maze, all the
emphasis is on the traveller’s intentions. He has a clear aim in mind which he wants to reach.
It is about the destination. His walking is intentional. He has an idea in his mind about his
goal and how to reach it in the real world. Intention is cause, action effect. In the labyrinth, on
the contrary, the path leads. The walker follows. The path, however, is not always easy to
follow. The walker has to keep an eye for signs, such as footprints or piles of stones, that
indicate the way ahead. Her walking is a kind of wayfaring, a search for which way to go. Her
engagement with the world is attentional instead of intentional. This distinction between
intention and attention has also implications for one’s being in the world. The intentional
traveller is always already at the place where he wants to go. He has no need to pay attention
to the path he follows. He just has to decide where to go and then walk. The movement goes
from inside, the mind, to outside, the world. He first thinks about where and how to go and
then finally goes. As such, he is absent in the world. He is already at the place where he wants
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to go. The path-follower in the labyrinth, on the contrary, is an attentional traveller. She has
no objective but to carry on. Her perception of the world and her action in it are closely
coupled, in fact indistinguishable. Walking as wayfaring is a way of attending to the world,
“to be present in the present” (Masschelein, 2010a, p. 48). To see the world, listen to it and
feel it. Attending to the world is thinking about what one sees, hears and feels instead of
seeing, hearing and feeling what one thinks. One is only able to think about the world while
walking through it, attending to the ever-becoming world, of which the ever-becoming self is
always already part. The lines of thought coincide with the lines of wayfaring coincide with
the lines of becoming.
According to Ingold the two conceptions of education run parallel to wayfaring and transport,
to attention and intention, and to presence and absence:

On the one hand, the induction (drawing in) of the learner into the rules and
representations, or the ‘intentional worlds’ of a culture; on the other the ex-duction
(drawing out) of the learner into the world itself, as it is given to experience (Ingold,
n.d., p. 7).

In line with Jan Masschelein he asks how we can make the world present, to go beyond self-
reflections and interpretations, standpoints and opinions and turn the world into something
real. The answer is exposure. This means to leave the mirror palace of the self and to wander
around in the world again, to walk the labyrinth. It is not about gaining a critical distance or
taking up a perspective, arriving at a point of view. On the contrary, there is no final
destination. Walking pulls us continually away from any standpoint. “Walking is about
putting this position at stake; it is about ex-position, about being out-of-position”
(Masschelein, 2010b, p. 276).

At first sight, there seem to be some parallels between the ideas of Gibson and Masschelein.
Nevertheless, the differences are bigger than the similarities. Gibson also asserted that we
don’t see from a point of view but that perception proceeds along a path of observation. While
walking through the world new vistas open up, while others are closed off. Things disclose
themselves for what they are, what they afford. For Masschelein, on the contrary, the world is
not waiting for humankind to be perceived as an affordance. It is rather the walker who waits
upon the world. Attention and to attend are related to the French attendre, which means ‘to
wait’:
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 In short, whereas for Gibson, the world waits for the observer, for Masschelein the
walker waits upon the world. As the path beckons the walker submits, and is at the
mercy of what transpires. To walk, as Masschelein puts it, is to be commanded by
what is not yet given but on the way to being given (Ingold, n.d., p. 9).

The concept of education of attention thus gets another sense. It is no longer a leading in into
a world already there, but a leading out into a world of becoming, a world that is not yet given
but always incipient, on the verge of continual emergence. This world asks for our attention
and presence, our being-with and waiting-for. The walker in the labyrinths is always on her
way, keeps on going, without beginning or end. She is present. Her presence and exposure,
however, make her vulnerable. She opens up to the new and unforeseen, an immediate and
unimaginable experience. Her understanding of the world is an understanding on the way to
truth. Because she knows so little about the world, she is in a position to see the world. As
such, her experience of the world is not an affirmation or a refutation of her preconceptions,
but an opening up to the revelation of the truth of the world.

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IV.3. Reading with Ingold, an education of attention

In this last part I will try to argue why reading the work of Ingold is itself an education of
attention. Shortly resuming, the education of attention, in this article about the maze and the
labyrinth strongly in line with Masschelein’s idea of e-ducating the gaze, is a leading out into
the world, to come in a position of exposition, in which the world can show itself and we can
be touched by the truth of the world. Walking, for instance, as an education of attention, a
technique, art or τέχνη of being alive, allows for attending to the world. It means to be
present, attentive and generous.
It is clear that other notions Ingold has introduced such as being alive and correspondence are
closely related to the concept of education of attention. Both concepts involve an
understanding of how things - whether it be persons, skills, objects, etc. - come into being
through a certain way of relating to them. When the potter corresponds with the clay, or the
basket maker with the twigs, form emerges, comes into being in a force field and a flow of
materials. The craftsman does not impose some preconceived form upon matter but forgets
himself in his engagement with the material. Mind, body, material, force become
indistinguishable in the attentive relation of the craftsman with the world. It is a way of being
alive to the world. Being alive is a τέχνη, an art or craft. Ingold models his conception of what
anthropology is to the skills of the craftsman. Anthropology as the art of being alive is an
attentive engagement with the world and its inhabitants. The notion of skill, τέχνη, is for
Ingold the ground scheme to think about making, walking and anthropology. Skill is the
bedrock of our humanity. It is our fundamental way of being in the world. Skilled practice,
whether it be in weaving a basket, molding clay, threading a way through the weather-world,
etc., makes us attentive to a world of becoming. Anthropology as a skilled practice, a τέχνη of
being alive, is a research into the conditions and potentials of human life. It is done with the
people in the world, instead of about the people of the world. In a recent article, Dreaming of
Dragons: On the Imagination of Real Life, Ingold gives us an example of an Ojibwa boy who
has seen pinési, the Thunder Bird, and how he experienced this as something real. This
example is inspiring for how to conceive of the relation between experience and truth,
knowing and being:

In this quest for knowledge through experience, the powerful more-than-human beings
that inhabit the Ojibwa cosmos, including Thunder Birds, are not analogical resources
but vital interlocutors. This cosmos is polyglot, a medley of voices by which different
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 beings, in their several tongues, announce their presence, make themselves felt, and
have effects. To carry on your life as an Ojibwa person you have to tune with these
voices, and to listen and respond to what they are telling you (Ingold, 2013a, p. 739).

Being alive to the world, corresponding with the world is in this example a precondition for
knowledge about the world. It is an opening up to the different voices with which the world
speaks to us. Due to the logic of inversion and Cartesianism we are inclined to first think and
only afterwards do, to first make up some ideas inside our heads we can - or cannot -
transpose to the world. All too often we think that we can and have to base our action in the
world upon some ideas or ideals. Ingold reverses this logic and shows how in a certain way of
relating to the world, an attentive one, made possible by different techniques of being alive
such as walking, truth is being revealed to us, enabling us to correspond with the world with
care, judgement and dexterity. Ingold shows that to think always means to see, even that we
can only think because we see, because we move through this world of eternal becoming.
According to Ingold, our knowledge of the world is not prior to the way we deal with the
world but instead comes into being in our very engagement with the world and its inhabitants.
“Our knowledge is not built up as an external accretion but grows and unfolds from the very
inside of our earthly being. We grow into the world, as the world grows in us” (Ingold, 2013a,
pp. 745-746).

What Ingold offers us is an education of attention. He makes us attentive to the world and its
inhabitants in their mutual eternal becoming. His work opens up new ways of seeing and
being. Reading Ingold - or better, reading the world with Ingold - is to dream like an Ojibwa,
to see the world and be in the world from another point of view, or better a path of
observation. Ingold makes us attentive to the multiplicity of voices with which the world
speaks to us, to the wind that blows the dust into the air, to the traces the donkey leaves in the
sand as he fares his way, and to the clap of pinési, the Thunder Bird, on the wing.
At the end of the introductory chapter of Making, Ingold explains that his books are not for
reading about the world, but are books to read the world with. His books put us on our way to
inquire the world. They don’t explain the world or humankind to us, but make us attentive to
the world and its inhabitants. They are not fact books informing us about the state of the
world, but they are invitations to go out and see the world, thus in-forming our relation to a
world of becoming to which we contribute. His books are themselves an education of
attention. And reading with Ingold is to become attentive to a world of becoming. They put us
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in position of exposition, in which we can start to correspond with the world and its
inhabitants. What they offer us is not some knowledge or information but a way of being and
seeing in which the world can reveal its truth to us. His books make us attentive, present and
generous to the world and its inhabitants. These are the preconditions for anthropological
research - an investigation into the conditions and potentials of human life.

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68
Conclusion

As we are nearing the end of our journey, it is good to look back upon the things we’ve
encountered on the way. I will shortly summarize some major argumentations developed
within this master’s thesis. This concluding chapter, however, is not so much the end point of
our journey as it is a point of view on the way, some point on the road from which we can see
different passages we’ve walked together. Besides it is also a point from which we can start to
ask some questions about Tim Ingold’s ideas concerning education. We’ve started out from
the following question: In what way does the anthropologist Tim Ingold’s work (especially
from The Perception of the Environment, published in 2000, onwards) in-form, in the double
meaning of on the one hand giving sense to and on the other hand giving shape to, our relation
to the world. I will first summarize the argument I have developed throughout this master’s
thesis, at the end I will try to make a comment on Ingold’s ideas about education.

In order to answer this question I gave an overview of Tim Ingold’s life and major works and
a clear statement of Ingold’s objective and vision on anthropology. We’ve seen that from the
publication of Ingold’s first book The Skolt Lapps Today in 1976 until the publication of
Making in 2013, his last, the level of abstraction in his books increases. Whereas his doctoral
dissertation was a classical ethnographic study of an indigenous population focusing on social
and economical relation, his latest books, Being alive and Making, are more theoretical works
about what it means to live, to move, to know, to make, to weave, etc., although they are still
stuffed with a lot of examples from ethnography but also from archaeology, architecture, etc.
Ingold’s early works are specifically about hunter-gatherer societies. In 1986, he publishes
two more theoretical books on the relation between man and animal, culture and nature. These
are attempts to glue the socio-cultural and the biological approaches of anthropology together.
In The Perception of the Environment, however, he leaves his attempts at reunion behind and
tries to conceive of the world and its inhabitants in such a way that the distinction between the
socio-cultural and biological becomes meaningless. This will be the starting point of his
anthropology of the line for which he did some explorations in Lines. Being alive can be read
as a successful attempt to tie the different theories and approaches explored in The Perception
of the Environment and Lines together in an anthropology centred around notions such as
lines and life. In Making, his latest publication, Ingold investigates the implications of his
conception of the world and its inhabitants for practices of making and the interaction - or

69
better, correspondence - between human beings and the world as exemplified in for instance
weaving a basket or flying a kite.
At the end of the first chapter I gave an insight in Ingold’s aim and his vision on
anthropology. In short, his aim is to reverse the logic of inversion, rooted in Cartesian
dualism, the mind-body problem. The logic of inversion draws a boundary, creates an inside
and an outside, an organism ‘in here’ and an environment ‘out there’ - compare with
Descartes’ res cogitans, the thinking subject, the mind versus the body and the world, res
extensa - with which the organism, as a node in a network, interacts according to his mental
states and capabilities. The relations are between one organism or object and another. The
world is liveless but furnished with lively objects and persons. Ingold will reverse this logic
by conceiving of the world and its inhabitants as a lively ever-unfolding meshwork in which
the organism is understood as a trail of movement and growth, along which life is lived.
Anthropology, then, is a generous, open-ended, comparative and yet critical inquiry into the
conditions and potentials of human life. Ingold calls it the art of inquiry. It is an art, a τέχνη, in
the sense that it is a skilled practice. It is the art of being alive and of corresponding with the
world. It is a study with people in the world, learning from them and having transformational
effects upon the anthropologist. It is open to what the world and its inhabitants have to tell us.

In the second chapter I distinguished five different theoretical influences upon Ingold’s work,
Bateson, Gibson, von Uexküll, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, in order to come to a better
understanding of his own cosmology, his conception of the world and its inhabitants. In short,
especially Bateson’s idea of ecology, Gibson’s theory of direct perception of the organism-in-
its-environment, von Uexküll’s concept of Umwelt as the unification of the worlds of
perception and action, Heidegger’s theorizing about the relation between building and
dwelling and his conception of being-in-the-world and Merleau-Ponty’s thoughts about the
experience of light help Ingold to reverse the logic of inversion.

Still, it is only after reading Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus that he writes down
his ideas about the meshwork, SPIDER and correspondence. It is not so much that Deleuze
and Guattari really influenced Ingold - Ingold did his thinking through explorations in
musicology, architecture, archaeology, etc. in Lines - but they provided him with an
appropriate way of thinking and speaking about what he wants to put in words, namely the
experience of the world as a becoming whole and a skilful relating to the world as a way of
corresponding. Ingold’s reading of Deleuze and Guattari was the topic of the third chapter. I
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summarized Ingold’s worldview at the end of this chapter using his concepts of meshwork,
SPIDER - Skilled Practice Involves Developmentally Embodied Responsiveness -, and
correspondence. It is with these concepts that Ingold succeeds in reversing the logic of
inversion. He offers us an alternative interpretation of the Cartesian precept Cogito ergo sum,
in which cogito is not understood as ‘I think’ but as ‘I correspond’, for etymologically cogito
comes from co, implying togetherness and mutuality, and agere, meaning to stir up, guide,
lead or care about. It is thus in his attentive engagement with the world that man is alive to the
world. I correspond, therefore I am. Anthropology, as the art of inquiry, the τέχνη of being
alive to the world, is a way of corresponding with the world. Its aim is “not to describe the
world, or to represent it, but to open up our perception to what is going on there so that we, in
turn, can respond to it” (Ingold, 2013b, p. 7). Doing anthropology, being alive, corresponding,
is to do our thinking, talking and writing in and with the world.

In the fourth chapter I narrowed my focus to the educational line in Ingold’s work. I traced the
concept of education of attention back to Gibson’s ecological approach to visual perception
and used the case of walking to exemplify the difference between Ingold’s understanding of
the concept of education of attention and Gibson’s. I concluded this chapter with an
argumentation for my main thesis, an answer to the question in what way Ingold’s work in-
forms our relation to the world. I argued that Ingold’s work is educational in itself, not
because he uses educational concepts or because he describes educational situations, but
instead because his education of attention allows for a certain way of seeing and being, a
certain relation - or, attending - to the world. The way of relating to the world to which Ingold
inspires us is an attentive one. It is to put ourselves in a position of ex-position, in which we
wait for the world - attendre in French means ‘to wait’ -, for the world’s becoming world. His
work e-ducates our ways of being and seeing. It is itself an education of attention.

To conclude this master’s thesis I want to ask Tim Ingold a question concerning his ideas
about education. Throughout his work Ingold stresses on the one hand notions such as growth
and on the other hand notions such as skill. He asserts that both are related and that in the way
people skilfully deal with the world, they contribute to the ongoing formation of the world by
itself of which they are an indistinguishable part. By forming the world, for instance by
molding clay, weaving a basket or leaving a trace in the sand as one walks, they also form
themselves. Because people inhabit the world and do not stand over against it, this process of
formation can be understood as the world’s formation of itself through itself and its
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inhabitants. Ingold’s notion of SPIDER is exemplary. Skilled Practice Involves
Developmentally Embodied Responsiveness brings to the fore and ties together lines of skill
and growth. For Ingold, τέχνη, whether it be the technique of making, walking or doing
anthropology, is always a way of growing in one’s relation to the world in which the world
grows into oneself by the improvement of skills. In his unpublished article on walking and the
education of attention Ingold tries to pin down Jan Masschelein’s idea of e-ducating the gaze
on his anthropology of life and growth. I think, however, that there are two different
conceptions of education and attention at play here. For Ingold, attention flows along the lines
of the meshwork in the skilled engagement of people with the world. Education is still a
matter of learning, of improving the ways in which one deals with the world. For
Masschelein, attention would be the blade that cuts through the swarming entanglements of
the meshwork, that puts its growth to a stop. Not the moment of improvement by skill, but of
exposure to world. Education is no longer a matter of learning but of ex-position, being out of
position, a state - not a skill - of attention. My question to Tim Ingold: How can we think
about the education of attention in a way that is not related to growth? For me, this means to
think about attention in a way that is truly e-ducational by which I mean that it does justice to
its indeterminacy and its disruptive character. Attention allows for some-thing or some-world
outside myself. It breaches processes of growth and development, learning, and opens up to a
moment of attention, in which the world can become interesting in itself, and in which it can
be renewed. In Being Alive, Ingold writes:

“One man from among the Wemindji Cree, native hunters of northern Canada, offered
the following meaning to the ethnographer Colin Scott. Life, he said, is ‘continuous
birth’. I want to nail that to my door! It goes to the heart of the matter” (Ingold, 2011,
p. 69).

Here Ingold severely underestimates the radicality and potentiality of birth if understood e-
ducationally; for birth can never be continuous. It is always the becoming present of the new
and unforeseen which disrupts the already existing order. If birth would be continuous we
wouldn’t call it birth but growth. Hopefully Ingold will elucidate these issues in his upcoming
book The Life of Lines.

When looking back upon the path we have followed, we can conclude that we had an
interesting journey. I hope that the defence of my thesis concerning the educational value of
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Tim Ingold’s work was clear and convincing. We may, however, not forget about one thing:
Ingold always stresses that you shouldn’t read him to learn about the world but that his books
are works to read the world with. This master’s thesis fails in reading the world with Ingold
because it is only on Ingold and doesn’t have any relation to the world. Nevertheless, I hope
this master’s thesis can be read as an invitation not only to read Ingold, but also to read the
world with Ingold.

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Charest, P. (2002). Review of the book The perception of the environment, by T. Ingold.

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Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2004). A thousand plateaus. Capitalism and schizophrenia. (B.

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