Full Description
Anthropology is a disciplined inquiry into the conditions and potentials of human life. Generations of theorists, however, have expunged life from their accounts, treating it as the mere output of patterns, codes, structures or systems variously defined as genetic or cultural, natural or social. Building on his classic work The Perception of the Environment, Tim Ingold sets out to restore life to where it should belong, at the heart of anthropological concern.
Being Alive
ranges over such themes as the vitality of materials; what it means to make things; the perception and formation of the ground; the mingling of earth and sky in the weather-world; the experiences of light, sound and feeling; the role of storytelling in the integration of knowledge; and the potential of drawing to unite observation and description.Our humanity, Ingold argues, does not come ready-made but is continually fashioned in our movements along ways of life. Starting from the idea of life as a process of wayfaring, Ingold presents a radically new understanding of movement, knowledge and description as dimensions not just of being in the world, but of being alive to what is going on there.
This edition includes a new preface by the author.
Contents
Prologue: Anthropology comes to Life Part I: Clearing the Ground 2. Materials against Materiality 3. Culture on the Ground: The World Perceived Through the Feet 4. Walking the Plank: Meditations on a Process of Skill Part II: The Meshwork 5. Rethinking the animate, Reanimating Thought 6. Point, Line, Counterpoint: From Environment to Fluid Space 7. When ANT meets SPIDER: Social Theory for Arthropods Part III: Earth and Sky 8. The Shape of the Earth 9. Earth, Sky, Wind and Weather 10. Landscape or Weather-world? 11. Four Objections to the Concept of Soundscape Part IV: A Storied World 12. Against Space, Place, Movement, Knowledge 13. Stories Against Classification: Transport, Wayfaring and the Integration of Knowledge 14. Naming as Storytelling: speaking of animals among the Koyukon of Alaska Part V: Drawing Making Writing 15. Seven Variations on the Letter A 16. Ways of Mind-Walking: reading, writing, painting 17. The Textility of Making 18. Drawing Together: Doing, Observing, Describing Epilogue: Anthropology is not ethnography
