Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description
by Tim Ingold (Author)
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 25 ratings
4.2 on Goodreads
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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.
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May 24, 2011
Editorial Reviews
Review
"For three decades, Tim Ingold’s has been one of the most consistently exploratory and provocative voices in contemporary scholarship. This book leads us, in prose that is exactingly lucid and charged with poetic eloquence, on a journey through, amongst other things, Chinese calligraphy, line drawing, carpentry, kite flying, Australian Aboriginal painting, native Alaskan storytelling, web-spinning arachnids, the art of walking and, not least, the history of anthropology, none of which will ever look quite the same again! The work is at once a meditation on questions central to anthropology, art practice, human ecology and philosophy, a passionate rebuttal of reductionisms of all kinds, a celebration of creativity understood in the broadest possible sense and a humane and generous manual for living in a world of becoming."
- Stuart McLean, University of Minnesota, USA
"Simultaneously intimate and all-encompassing, Tim Ingold’s second landmark collection of essays explains how it feels to craft an existence between earth and sky, among plants and animals, across childhood and old age. A master of the form, Ingold shows how aliveness is the essential resource for an affirmative philosophy of life."
- Hayden Lorimer, University of Glasgow, UK
"In these iconoclastic essays, Ingold breaks the dichotomies of likeness and difference to show that anthropology’s subject, and with it that of the human sciences more generally, is not constituted by polarities like that of space contra place, but by a movement along paths that compose a being that is as alive to the sentient world as this world is to its human inhabitants."
- Kenneth Olwig, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
About the Author
Tim Ingold is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen, UK. He is the author of The Perception of the Environment and Lines.
Product details
Publisher : Routledge (May 24, 2011)
Language : English
Paperback : 288 pages
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 25 ratings
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Mikio Miyaki
VINE VOICE
5.0 out of 5 stars study of human becomingsReviewed in the United States on July 6, 2022
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My recent favorite is Tim Ingold. The first book I read was “Lines.” Making full use of the concept of lines, he has immediately drawn me to his unique style of discussing, the origins of human actions, history, knowledge, art , and culture. Although what he wrote was plain, he meant a lot, profoundly, and I couldn’t easily follow his implication by just reading it. And at once, I had been captivated by his idiosyncratic writing style. What prompted Ingold to write “Being Alive” was his strong desire to let anthropology get out of the predicament it was in at the time, and to regain the right way for anthropology. What does it mean for humans to be “alive?” Ingold aims to replace the traditionally fixed “static” prejudice with a new “dynamic” becoming view of humanity. Ingold asserts anthropology’s task is to follow what is going on, tracing the multiple trails of becoming, wherever human lead. He declares anthropology is the study of human becomings as they unfold within the weave of the world.
In Chapter 2, “The Meshwork,” Ingold revisits the relationship between humans and the environment. In the light of past views such as James Gibson’s affordance theory and Jacob von Wexkull’s Umwelt, Ingold continues his unique discussion of the dynamic relationship between humans and the environment. He insists on our understanding of human as an unbounded entanglement of lines in fluid space. The conversation between Ant and Spider in Chapter 7, is an allegorical summary of Ingold’s previous claims and becomes of great help in organizing the issue so far. The most noticeable part is “A Storied World.” I never imagined, of all the terms we used to describe the world we inhabit, it is the most abstract, the most empty, the most detached from the realities of life and experience. I also read the contrast between “drawing” and “painting” with great interest. Drawing becomes rather a ‘reserve,’ a kind of insurance against finality and closure, while painting being affected by the ’the law of the all-over,’ a relic of the last century. Anthropology is an inquiry into the conditions and possibilities of human life in the world. Anthropologists, Ingold concludes, should do their thinking, talking and writing in and with the world, with fully utilizing this drawing technique.
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WZW
5.0 out of 5 stars Insights of an original and profound thinkerReviewed in the United States on January 24, 2017
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Although a little outside the philosophical and anthropological mainstream, this book is a must for anyone interested in the developments in the field of philosophical anthropology (or anthropological philosophy). Others may be interested to learn the insights of an original and profound thinker. His writing is accessible, as each piece is honed into shape after being orally presented to an audience of his peers, and illuminated with simple drawings and other relevant illustrations. At the same time the thinking is deep and will stay with the reader for a long time and potentially change one's view of the world.
2 people found this helpful
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Nathan Daley, MD, MPH
5.0 out of 5 stars The Galileo of Anthropology... of ModernityReviewed in the United States on March 9, 2012
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More brilliant Ingold. There should be an international holiday for reading this man's work!
Tim Ingold is a true transdisciplinarian. While the specialization of scientific discourse has allowed many to simply ignore the complexities of whole systems, and the human experience of being within and of these systems, Ingold brilliantly departs from these fragmented "views" and charges directly toward that experience of being.
"Being Alive" is the next step for those trying to understand what it means to be human.
10 people found this helpful
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Ingibjörg E. Björnsdottir
5.0 out of 5 stars Five StarsReviewed in the United States on August 20, 2015
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Excellent reading.
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robert france
5.0 out of 5 stars Important lessons offered on conjoining literature and landscape, places and pacesReviewed in the United States on November 5, 2020
I used this book as an inspiration for examining 16 American scholars who conceptually accompanied me during a recent project of narrative scholarship: “Waymarking Italy's Influence on the American Environmental Imagination While on Pilgrimage to Assisi” (2020). Ingold's message about what might be called "mind walking" or "deep travel" is an important one for all interested in narrative scholarship. I found his insights extremely useful in this regard, and used a quote from this work as an epigraph: “For the wayfarer in the landscape, as in the…text, particular sites marked by recognizable features would serve as place holders for…characters and stories… By visiting these sites one would recall the stories and meet the characters as though they were alive and present, harnessing their wisdom and power to the task of crafting one’s own thought and experience, and of giving it sense and direction.”
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Janet
5.0 out of 5 stars Five StarsReviewed in the United States on July 8, 2014
terrific
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Ides Dehaene
5.0 out of 5 stars Anthropology meets cognitive neurosciencesReviewed in the United Kingdom on October 17, 2012
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I read this books as a neurologist. It was introduced to me by my son who is an architect. Imgold's main theme is movement as the basic conditions for knowledge. Classical science needs objectivation, a position out of the world that it describes, and so doing loses the link with body and movement. In Ingold's anthropology knowledge is wayfaring along a path; life is a meshwork of paths not a network; life is made of stories not of classifications, beings live in their environment not in space.
Similar approaches are used in cognitive neurosciences, often inspired by phenomenology Mind in Life : the concept of affordances, introduced by Gibson, and discussed by Imgold is used in the functional analysis of the motor system The Physiology and Phenomenology of Action and the motor cortex Mirrors in the Brain: How our minds share actions and emotions: How Our Minds Share Actions, Emotions, and Experience . The primacy of gesture is also an important topic in language research.
The common interest underlines the necessity of a common interdisciplinary language,or at least an introduction in different disciplines. Ingold's essayistic approach and vivid style is very inviting.
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Lionel R. Playford
5.0 out of 5 stars BrilliantReviewed in the United Kingdom on June 25, 2013
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Changes your view of what it is to inhabit the earth. Ingold argues his case thoroughly and mostly in a very readable way (not too much academic jargon in other words). He does not pull his punches against the views of land and landscape held by some academic researchers past and present and is clear in his support of a more wholistic and interactive way of experiencing and representing the land as a land-sky interface referring to cultures that view land and the Earth in a very different way from ours. This book will be of great interest to artists, writers, geographers, climatologists, outdoor activity sports people (rock climbers etc) and anyone with an interest in questioning conventional Western ways of engaging with, using and representing the landscape which we inhabit. A book for our times.
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Ms. E. A. Roe
5.0 out of 5 stars Exciting and mind-alteringReviewed in the United Kingdom on February 20, 2013
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I keep diving into this extraordinary book as though I have an addiction, because it invites deep re-thinking about many commonly held perceptions of our world. You can read each essay as a separate exploration or weave a path backward and forwards, as the author suggests. It might transform your mind...if you feel so inclined!
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shoprec
1.0 out of 5 stars Missing Contents and first chapterReviewed in the United Kingdom on December 29, 2018
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Due to wrong bindings, the Contents and the first pages of the book are from a sport management book!
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V krishnappa
1.0 out of 5 stars Damaged book.Reviewed in India on January 10, 2019
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The book was stained, the cover page damage and the corners folded.
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