Lines: A Brief History

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Lines: A Brief History

Lines: A Brief History

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Nowadays the hand crafts of spinning and weaving, once ubiquitous, are largely confined to hobbyists. Even handwriting is endangered as most of us tap our lines on keyboards. What kind of lines are these? Every letter is of a predetermined shape, not traced out but instantly delivered. And the line is but a sequence of letter-shapes, each complete in itself, and detached from its predecessors and successors. It is like the dotted line: a connected sequence of points rather than the trace of a movement. Today, when we speak of lines, it is most often to such a sequence that we refer. Linear thinking, we say, goes from point to point; linear transport from location to location; linear time from moment to moment. Of thinking, travel or time that wanders off course, or loops around, we are inclined to say that it is non-linear'. Yet did you not just draw a line with your pencil? Does the winding path not follow a line, as does the story with its twists and turns? Indeed, what we witness today is not the birth but the death of the line. To reduce a linear movement to a rigid sequence of fixed points is to drain it of vitality, of everything that gives it life and growth. For the living world, in truth, is not connected like a net, but a writhing mesh of lines. Knotted in the midst, their loose ends never cease to root for other lines to tangle with.

Het vergelijken van het denken in de pre-moderne tijd met het bewandelen van een pad ('wayfaring') zonder dat er echt een einde aan het pad is, is een toevoeging van Ingold - en het grootste deel van het boek gaat ook hierover - en het is wellicht zijn wens om dit weer terug te krijgen (zowel in het denken als het doen), als een 'topisch' denken van Olwig dus, en dat is m.i. de meerwaarde van het boek. Helaas zit er veel vaags en wat mij betreft onnodigs omheen gedrapeerd, waardoor deze boodschap teveel ondergesneeuwd raakt. For the contrast between painting and drawing and for its anthropological correlates, see Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays in Movement, Knowledge and Description, (Routledge: Abingdon, 2011), pp. 220-222.TI: We have inherited this word – ‘ethnography’ –as a sort of historical sediment. We should not interpret it too literally, as ‘a description of the people’. But I still dislike the term precisely because of its ‘ethno-’ component. In a time of populist nationalism and ethnic conflict, it lays us wide open to misunderstanding of what we do. This is the real reason why I think it is so critical that we change it. For many people, the word ‘anthropology’ sounds very theoretical and even colonial. It has problems too. But there’s a long history of separating out the academic ‘-ology’ disciplines – the study of this or that – from those that have more to do with creating a world than studying it. Traditionally art and architecture are understood to be speculative, to be proposing things that do not yet exist. By contrast, archeology is the study of the past, and anthropology is the study of societies: it is supposed to be studying what is there, not proposing things that are not there. But this distinction is actually incoherent. You cannot speculate or propose without a deep understanding of the lived world, and deeply understanding the lived world would be completely pointless if it wasn’t linked to some sort of proposition or speculation about how life might be. What’s the point of studying how life is if you’re not interested in thinking about how life might be? All of these disciplines are pointing both to the future and to the past. Once we’ve shown that this division is really an imaginary one, then we don’t have any further problems. Throughout the years of the 4A’s course we felt that we were actually establishing a new discipline, which wasn’t interdisciplinary in any sense, but a discipline in its own right that doesn’t yet have a name. MK: For all of these reasons the word ethnography is still problematic. Although the ‘ethno-’ in ethnography means ‘people’, it carries with it quite a narrow understanding. Likewise, architecture can sometimes be very narrow and rigid, but what we are interested in, is how it makes spaces for people. Drawing on a multitude of disciplines including archaeology, classical studies, art history, linguistics, psychology, musicology, philosophy and many others, and including more than seventy illustrations, this book takes us on an exhilarating intellectual journey that will change the way we look at the world and how we go about in it. Mijn houding tegenover dit boek is nogal ambivalent. Zoals de meeste moderne antropologische werken die zich met meer abstracte concepten bezighouden, is ook dit boek op veel plaatsen vaag, springt van de hak op de tak en is het lastig uit te maken waar het heen wil. Dat laatste is de schrijver te vergeven omdat één van de 'problemen' van de modernistische rechte lijn volgens Ingold juist dat doelmatige is. Bij menig hoofdstuk twijfelde ik aan mijn eigen intelligentie (= ik snapte het niet), maar op andere plaatsen kwam Ingold met scherpe, nieuwe observaties en ideeën. En dan waren er nog observaties en ideeën die ik te ver gezocht (m.n. waar het analogieën betrof) of gewoon onjuist vond. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2021-09-30 12:12:48 Bookplateleaf 0004 Boxid IA40248203 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier

To read a book or article by Tim Ingold is to take an intellectual journey; one is presented with an intellectual problem and via the medium of Ingold’s intellect, one is taken upon a route with many twists and turns, until that problem, if not resolved, is illuminated from a completely different perspective. Journeying and wayfaring have been dominant motifs in Ingold’s work, and in this book one senses that, more than ever, we are taking an intellectual amble through undiscovered terrain, terra incognita. The word ‘anthropography’ was actually coined by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the late eighteenth-century to refer to a description of the different ways of mankind. [1] But I didn’t know that when I first came up with the word! I thought of ‘anthropography’ as a way of pursuing a speculative inquiry through a method that leaves traces of one sort or another. I have also used the word ‘linealogy’ – albeit not really seriously: if one is going to study lines, well, that’s what you would call it. Thinking about lines is linked to a process perspective, to the idea of a world in becoming, because the line is something that doesn’t just trace out how things have been, but also points to possible ways in which things will go. There is something inherently speculative and experimental about tracing lines. That’s what I wanted to bring out with both words, ‘linealogy’ and ‘anthropography’: I wanted to describe a sense of a movement that is not closed, but open-ended, moving, and becoming. His two previous collections, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill andBeing Alive: Essays in Movement, Knowledge and Description , will also be published by Routledge in new editions. MK: Yes, they are all lines. Thinking about lines allows us to expand our idea of using drawings as tools of observation. You refer to this as ‘anthropography’. Sometimes you also use the word ‘linealogy’. How did you arrive at these terms? Again, movement is seen as a primary element in perception and cognition so that we see along a path of perception rather than a single still point of view and our knowledge of our surroundings comes from our moving through them. In fact our movement and the lines we leave and follow are so bound up with us that the traveller and their lines can be said to be one and the same thing. The story of this journey does not tell of objects, or things discovered but rather different topics, which are in themselves further bundles and entanglements of lines. Just as we are equivalent to our lines so the story walks just like a human or animal.TI: I am by training and temperament an anthropologist, but many anthropologists call themselves ethnographers. I have had long debates with my colleagues about whether anthropology and ethnography are the same thing or not. I have been arguing that they are quite different, in so far as ethnography is fundamentally a descriptive endeavor. You take the world as you find it and you try to render it in great depth. For that, drawing can be a wonderful tool. We should be teaching ethnographers to draw because drawing is a fundamental method of observation. The beauty of it is that it links observation and inscription. Anthropology, on the other hand, asks questions about the conditions and possibilities of human life. That’s the reason why I think anthropology and ethnography should be distinguished. Because if you’re doing ethnography, descriptive accuracy is very important. You have to be faithful to what you’re describing, but that makes it very difficult to be experimental, or to be speculative. This project, funded by a Professorial Fellowship from the Economic and Social Research Council, pursues the implications of treating the human being not as a self-contained entity but as growing along a way of life. Every such way is a line of some kind. Through a comparative and historical anthropology of the line, the research will forge a new approach to understanding the relation, in human life and experience, between movement, knowledge and description. As a work of intellectual synthesis, the research will be library- based, spanning literatures in several disciplines within and beyond the social sciences. It will lead to the production of two major books. 'Life on the line' will explore how, in the transition from the trace to the connector, the growing line was shorn of the movement that gave rise to it. 'The 4 As' will examine the relations between anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture as disciplinary paths along which environments are perceived, shaped and understood.



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