How Shall we Live? with anthropologist and lineologist Tim Ingold

Life is not built by blocks but by lines woven together according to Tim Ingold, emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Aberdeen and a leading thinker in anthropology and philosophy. Tim Ingold and Andrea Hiott explore key themes from Tim's influential works, such as 'Anthropology: Why It Matters' and 'Lines,' discussing how life is a continuous journey along interwoven threads and traces shaped by our every action. Building on Gibson, Deleuze,  Hallowell, Merleau-Ponty, and others, Ingold's idea of 'wayfaring' as our fundamental mode of being challenges traditional distinctions between nature and culture, mind and body, and forces us out of block-mind and into traces and threads of life interwoven. This enriching dialogue touches on the importance of awareness, attention, and responsibility, offering insights into how these ideas can help us navigate toward a world where love and respect for life are central. Whether it's through storytelling, music, or everyday actions, learn how our paths shape our humanity and influence the futures we create. This episode is an opportunity to reflect on how we should live together in a world full of possibility, a world we love enough to take responsibility for together.

00:00 Introduction to Love and Philosophy
00:05 Introducing Tim Ingold and His Work
00:43 The Concept of Lines in Life
01:43 Wayfaring and Life as a Process
02:54 The Importance of Awareness and Responsibility
04:18 Tim Ingold's Influences and Philosophical Approach
10:28 Tim Ingold's Early Life and Inspirations
17:26 Fieldwork and Anthropology
25:16 Challenging Traditional Divisions in Science and Humanities
32:07 The Evolution of Tim Ingold's Thought
48:47 Revisiting Nature and Culture
51:48 Anthropology as a Conversation
54:46 The Anthropological Conversation
56:12 Subject and Object in Anthropology
57:58 The Middle Voice of the Verb
59:39 Crafting and Teaching
01:06:38 The Concept of Lines
01:13:24 Embodiment and Attention
01:27:42 The Future of Technology and Education
01:39:52 Hope for the Future

https://www.timingold.com/

Lines, the book

Anthropology, why it matters

‘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.’

— Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

A great interview with Tim Ingold by Juan Loaiza for ENSO.

Transcript

Paths and Lines of Love with Tim Ingold Full Conversation

Tim Ingold: [00:00:00] There's an epidemic 

of, of, of thoughtlessness at the moment. And. The opposite is being thoughtful and, but, but thought being thoughtful is being attentive. 

we really need to have a concept of nature, we need to have a concept of culture, but not in the way they were understood by modern thought.​It's obvious that reindeer, for example, they're doing a lot of stuff with reindeer and if you're working out with Sámi people, you get reindeer on the brain, so to speak, you live and you think reindeer, they're like that.

And you realize that these reindeer are intelligent animals. They have memories, they have quite complicated systems of social relations, they know the landscape like the back of their hand, they can find their way about, and they also have devious ways of trying to manage to live alongside human beings, who are also equally devious, and each is learning from the other. 

The point is that both nature and [00:01:00] culture are very old words, and nature nascere, meaning to be born, culture from colere, meaning to cultivate, And I think we should go back to nature in its original sense that you find, for example, in Lucretius De rerum natura um, a power distributed throughout the cosmos to give birth to new life.

That's very Bergsonian. 

and culture, meaning the task, the human task of looking after this newborn life. So that it can flourish 

that there is a potential at large in the world to give birth to life.

And they all have this idea that human beings have a responsibility to look after it.

I had struck gold with this lines thing because it just seemed to be inexhaustible. 

lines and, and so it all started from there in a way, that particular question, but it took root, I think because I think there are three things. One is going [00:02:00] back to my dad and the ology in fungi, a very linear in that way, the fungal mycelium is a mesh of lines, so that's one thing.

The second thing. It's again, my experience of doing field work with Sami people where one of the most remarkable things is that everybody has their own footpath. It's a footpath connecting their winter dwelling to their summer place where they fish. 

So everybody has their own particular footpath.

The people may use it, but they'll recognize it as so-and-so's footpath, and so it's fairly well established in Sammi thinking that people are, their paths, people are their footpaths, and when you like a person, you travel their paths.

it's very obvious in no way. then the third thing was, was playing the cello. Which has affected, I think, the way I think and the way I write in all sorts of ways. And I've been playing the cello since I was 12. so I think, I think these three [00:03:00] things together had something to do with it.

It's, it's a very gestural instrument. You learn a piece of music gesturally rather than as a sequence of notes. And you have the feeling when you play that you are pulling this line outta the instrument.

It's like a, it pulling trickle out of the jar. It sort of drag it out and that, that's just the way, the way it is.  

I'm a bit tired, although I've used it a lot and now I wish I hadn't. I'm, I'm a bit fed up with the concept of embodiment.

Tim Ingold: it's a very specific reason and the same reason why I'm bit fed up with agency. It's obvious, for example, that playing a cello is a bodily activity that's obvious, goes without saying. But to say that it's embodied is another matter altogether.

And what I'm bothered about is the extent to which people confuse bodily with embodied. And the thing is that the M of embodiment implies a sort of wrapping [00:04:00] up, a sinking as it is as though the body was a sink. The skill sinks into it, and I think that's wrong. I mean, for example, if you said the breathing was embodied, you would suffocate.

I don't think that digital technology is the future. I don't think it's gonna last more than another century at most, and I think therefore we have to take care of the skills that humans have, have found useful for, or even tens of thousands of years, and make sure that they're there for

generations to come. And it, it seems to me sort of fairly obvious, but to try and get that across to people is really hard and, and, just seems to get harder by the day. 

Hello everyone. Welcome to Love and Philosophy. How Shall We Live? That's the beginning of a book called Anthropology. Why It Matters. From this week's guest, Tim Ingold. Tim is the Emeritus professor of Anthropology at the [00:05:00] University of Aberdeen. He's a fellow of the British Academy. The Royal Society of Edinburgh, and he's one of the most influential anthropologists working today, and he's one of the writers people have most suggested that I should read because we have a lot of themes in common.

He's often considered a philosopher as well because he does address these big issues, and his whole approach to anthropology is rather philosophical, as you'll hear, unfold a bit today. Although he is also written very directly about that, he's written many books. One is called Making. One is called Lines, L-I-N-E-S.

There's another called Perception of the Environment. There's many more, but as you can probably tell just from those, it's very intriguing for me for someone who's thinking about re-imagining what we mean by mind and movement, there are two main ideas to this conversation. The first one really is this idea of how shall we live, which is [00:06:00] obviously a very important question right now.

And a question that's at the heart of Tim's work. He's constantly thinking about that question. And the other idea is that of the line of what I might call a string of affordances or the way we make, and I just wanna read the first sentence of Tim's book called Lines, because I think it expresses something about this idea and this conversation.

So here it is. What do walking, weaving, observing, singing, storytelling, drawing, and writing have in common? The answer is that they all proceed along lines of one kind or another. So that's the beginning of the book. I highly suggest you read it. It's, it's very fascinating and you've probably heard me talk about this before of this line, that we're traced tracing as our life from the moment we're born to the moment we.

Die. There's an unbroken line that [00:07:00] is us in the world and it's many, many layers. It's all the books we read and the conversations we have, all the steps we take. Everything is part of our line and we can look at other lines too, our family as a sort of line or society or nation. So we are paths and our lives extend paths as we go.

They carry the lines on from others. We make lines for those who will come. Just think of all the books that you've read. Those are lines that people made for you that you picked up and extended in your own way. So then comes the question, what lines are we making together now? What lines are we extending and continuing each day with our choices, with our words?

With the ways we treat one another, with the habits we form and what we read and what we create in the paths we build. Do we know where those lines are coming from and do we know where they're heading? if we imagine life has lived along lines.

We are making our humanity as we go along. [00:08:00] That's Tim's idea. That's a primary idea in his work and in this conversation, he's a scholar who brought forward many of the ideas or the lines that we now take for granted. I did not know Tim Ing Gold's work when I first came up with this notion of way making, which is itself a word that comes from Taoism. but it is, that is an idea of of the way we move through the world, being our, our mind and our path and our life in a similar way to what Tim is, is saying, although also very different.

So I have to say that he's been a very big influence on me now that I have read him. Over this past year, uh, it's been almost an emotional experience to read some of his work because it does resonate so much and it adds a lot. And I want to publicly say thank you here. He's a wonderful writer. He really cares about the writing.

He cares about what he's giving to the world. And as we talk about here, if we're gonna have a world where love remains possible, then it's going to be because we [00:09:00] made and extended that line, and because we chose to be responsible for one another. And because we thought the world was worth it. in this conversation.

Tim brings up this quote from Hannah Arendt, which is exactly that. She says that education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it. And that word, education and what she means by it becomes especially potent. I think if we consider it in terms of the lines.

We are following and extending right now when it comes to information and what we understand as knowledge, what we provide and acknowledge as knowledge in these times. So what lines are we extending and why does it matter? It matters because love is possible and we can make more of it together.

I mean, just think about that, that we, I, we actually can do that. We can make meaning and we can make love together. That's what we do. But we have to choose to do it. We have to choose those lines. We have to choose to hold those lines. We have to choose to realize [00:10:00] meaning and love are made as much as they are given.

It is both. But it is a choice. It is a responsibility. As Tim says, knowledge is forged along the way of life. It's up to us, and as you'll hear here, he had a lot of radical ideas back in his youth and opened up a lot of dichotomies, and he's still questioning those, even going back and questioning his own ideas from back then, he's constantly questioning, even sometimes a bit grumpy as he says.

But always with, real kindness and with awareness, a constant practice of being aware of attention, of bringing something into attention and questioning it as a sign of respect and also I think as a choice of love. So it does matter what we're extending out of ourselves and what we're picking up to extend.

It matters in every conversation we have and everything we do. Even with people we may never see again, all of that is extending little lines and making things possible. And the same for us. People are doing that for us [00:11:00] all the time. Tim's done that He likes to call himself a lineologist which is kind of funny, but I guess we're all line in a way if we start to look at our lives and trace where the ideas and feelings and thoughts and actions have come from and where we want them to go, which seems like a good idea right now as you're here with Tim.

It started with mycelium. When then he learned a lot from the Saami people in Finland about paths. And then of course Gibson, Berks and Whitehead, so many others. 

It's interesting to put our attention on those lines and notice those lines and continue them. A lot of this conversation is the story of how Tim came to think differently and how he came into a practice of caring for thought and.

It's a demonstration of his thinking process actually. And you can see how he's constantly turning things over and re scrutinizing certain words and what they really mean. And as I said, I really see that as a sign of respect and love for life itself and for the mystery of it, for the beauty of it, for being responsible for it.

So thanks for being here. [00:12:00] Thanks for your support. I hope you're doing well wherever you are in the world, and I wish you very beautiful lines today.  

Andrea Hiott: Okay. Hello, Tim. Hello, Tim. Wonderful to see you. I'm, I'm so, happy that you're here today. Thank you for doing this. 

Tim Ingold: It's a pleasure, 

Andrea Hiott: there's so much I want to talk to you about that I don't know how I'll get to it all, but I thought I'd start with asking about walking, um, your early memories of walking, if you might have any, what comes to mind, maybe early childhood or I don't know, youth of, of walking.

Tim Ingold: Well, my earliest memories are, are going for walks with my, mostly my father. Um, my father was a mycologist and loved to walk in the woods and fields around where we lived, which was in the South Downs, in the county of Kent, south of London, so he, he would go looking for fungi, and so I would go [00:13:00] walking with him, and he was a great walker, and, and, and my elder sisters would sometimes be along too, and then later on I would be walking him.

on my own. Um, I was very interested in, in, I was a model maker when I was small. I loved making models of things. So I would observe buildings and photograph, well, I had a, I was eventually given a Kodak camera and I could photograph them and then draw them and make models of them and do that kind of thing.

That was by, by the time I was more like 10, 11, 12. 

Andrea Hiott: I was going to ask you about that if you were already drawing. By chance, you know, making lines. 

Tim Ingold: Well, I, I kind of was not very, not very well. I, I, I'm, I'm not an artist and I, I don't really have drawing in my blood, but, um, but I suppose I was to some extent, but I did love, um, miniature things.

Making, making models of things. Um, I really liked the [00:14:00] idea that you could make a model of a, of a buildings or a village or a railway station and, and then set your eyes at the level of the baseboard and imagine sort of look, look into it.

Um, I always want, I like doing that. 

Andrea Hiott: That's a change of perspective. 

Tim Ingold: It's a long time ago now. But we've always walked a lot, because we didn't have a car or anything like that back then, so one had to walk. 

to get going to school I would have to, like when I went to school as a child I would have to walk about a mile, along a footpath that adjoined a road and then to the station, then take a train, it's about ten minutes, and then a little bit of walk the other end, not so far, so you were 

Andrea Hiott: very immersed in your environment from the beginning, without Thinking about it, just 

Tim Ingold: Without thinking about it, yes.

Yeah. 

Andrea Hiott: But your father was a scientist? 

Tim Ingold: Yes, he was a botanist and his [00:15:00] special field was mycology and within mycology he was particularly interested in certain kinds of microscopic fungi that live in streams, in rivers. That was his, that was his specialism. 

Andrea Hiott: of course now everyone's talking about that, but I suppose it wasn't quite like that back then.

Tim Ingold: No, it wasn't. And, and I always try to explain to him when he was trying to, couldn't quite understand what this anthropology was that I was doing, that, that anthropology is to the social sciences what mycology is to the biosciences. Because Fungi don't behave as organisms are supposed to behave, and in the classical view, an organism is a nice self contained being with a body and an inside and an outside, and it interacts with its environment.

But fungi just aren't like that. They don't have a clear inside and an outside, and they're fluid, and what you see are the fruiting bodies, but the real fungus is spreading around or under the ground. And so [00:16:00] I tried to explain to him that in anthropology, That's how we think about people, too. We don't think about them as sort of bounded entities.

We think of them as these ever extending pathways of of, of relationships that go through the world. So I think maybe, um, maybe I felt myself as a kind of mycologist in the, in the social sciences. 

Andrea Hiott: Even anthropology itself, I was wondering if you perhaps made it into, in some way, maybe not consciously, a way of exploring or connecting other so called disciplines as well, in a similar sense to what you just explained?

Tim Ingold: I first went into anthropology after doing a year of natural sciences at university, um, because, um, I was looking for something that would transcend the division between humanities. and the natural sciences in a way that still [00:17:00] stayed somehow close to people's experience. And anthropology seemed to be the one subject that could do that.

I mean, philosophy was also trying to, to, to overcome that boundary, which I, I, in a naive kind of way, I, I already sort of felt that there was something very wrong about this division between the humanities and the natural sciences, that it was some kind of intellectual disaster and needed to be, to be resolved.

And, um, so I, I was looking for something that would, would transcend it. Yeah, and, um, and anthropology was, I thought that anthropology is, and I still think that anthropology is at a kind of crossroads between two, um, oppositions. One is between the natural sciences and humanities, and the other is between, um, life as it is, as it, Life as it could be, or, or, or speculations about what life might be like, and what life [00:18:00] actually is like.

People at particular places in particular times, and, and if you think of those two, like, two axes, well, where those two axes cross, that's, for me, where anthropology is. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, we could almost think of it multidimensional too because you've touched a lot of lives by this point in art, in architecture, in design, in anthropology, in archaeology, in cognitive science, in philosophy.

it's not even just one intersection of two roads. It kind of depends 

Tim Ingold: where you're coming from. Yes. I mean, now my problem is that I'm all over the place. To pin myself down, um, that, that has its advantages and disadvantages. it, it's great actually to, to be all over the place, but from time to time, it's a bit difficult, to find an anchor.

So hard to hold. Yes, yes. 

Andrea Hiott: I wonder, you said you were already interested in these questions, that you felt something was wrong with this division [00:19:00] of humanities and science, or even the division of mind and body in a way, that you kind of set up. But was this before you had done your original, your early fieldwork, when you went to Lapland and you wrote your PhD, which I think became the first Long before.

Tim Ingold: I mean it Okay, so you already had that. So I think that's the point where I'm trying to decide what subject to study. And I've done a year of natural sciences, because I would, without really thinking about it, I've done science at school and done well in it, and it was just assumed that that's what I would do.

And after a year of science in Cambridge, I decided I wasn't against science, but I just couldn't imagine myself as a scientist. So I was looking around for something else. So, so at that point, I hadn't even begun studying anthropology, so I really didn't know exactly what to expect. but it looked promising.

Andrea Hiott: So that's interesting because were you considering you were going to learn about them to use that kind of terminology?

Were you still thinking [00:20:00] of were you thinking you're going to be observing and watching and this is sort of yeah 

Tim Ingold: When I went to do fieldwork with the zombie you mean? 

Andrea Hiott: Yes 

Tim Ingold: Yes, um, I think that by that, at that point, I wasn't really thinking in these sort of big grandiose terms at all. the, the, I mean, well, the first thing that, that, that happens when you go to do field work is that, um you, you go in, you, maybe you start with your head full of all kind of grand theories, but, but, but very soon you forget them all.

and, and you're really you're, you're really completely immersed in, in just day to day things. That just, just the sort of things that affect people in their everyday life. And, and so you completely forget about all this, these, these big issues and simply get, get stuck into that. I'd been drawn to work in the North, which at that, at that time was rather unusual in British anthropology.

Most, most of my colleagues, my [00:21:00] peers were going to work in former British colonies, and that's what you did in those days, the early 1970s. You go to work in, in Africa, or South or Southeast Asia, or somewhere, which was a former colonial country, and there was no tradition, then, of going to work, work in a place like Saab Sabmi, and, and But, um, I mean, the story is that I, I, I had a, I had a Finnish girlfriend who's now my wife of 50, 50 plus years.

And, um, so when I announced to my professor, Maya Fortis, that I wanted to do field work in Lapland, and the main reason was that she was studying in the South of Finland at the time. And so she could join me for, during university vacations when we're in the field. I wanted to be in the same country, at least, as she was.

Um, and Maya Forte said his first comment was, I suppose you have a sleeping dictionary. It [00:22:00] was not a particularly nice thing to say, but I only, I only realized, I was told much, much later on that this was a term used by, by um, colonial administrators to refer to their native concubines. So there you go.

Oh my goodness. That was the attitude of, of the time. But I, I was also sort of had Just got very hooked on, on the north, on the far north. I just sort of had a, I was just kind of hooked on it. And, and so I want that, that's what I wanted to, to do. And, and that's what drew me there rather than any kind of big issues of.

Andrea Hiott: I guess what I'm trying to get at is, is what I, and when I don't quite understand, or I want to try to set up because it's changed so much since those, that moment in time for you. Is this what you were talking about in your first book? it seems like you were trying to reconcile something environmental with something, personal or internal.

I think you talk about it in terms of [00:23:00] person and organism sometimes. I guess, I know at the time you weren't thinking in those terms, but I wonder if you can remember waking up or coming into a different understanding of that. I know you wrote that first book sort of structured in a certain way, so I'm trying to understand.

where you were and how that was changing for you in those early years. 

Tim Ingold: Well, yes, my very first book was, was, um, simply an ethnography of the Sami I'd worked with and I'd, I wrote it in a pretty conventional way and, and, and It's not very good.

I'm not satisfied with it, but, and, and I did feel when I was writing it that, that somehow, what, what the, the real sense of what it meant to live there amongst those people gone through the cracks. It's like going through a sieve, you know, that, that I, what, what I'd retained was a whole lot of rather boring, very factual stuff about how people were making a living, about household [00:24:00] economics, about politics and so on.

But somehow the, the, the meaning of life for Sámi people had, had, had somehow fallen through. And, and, so I was trying to recover what That was, and, um, and now if I look back, I think that, and ask myself, you know, why I got interested in particular ways of looking at the world, um, say why it was that when I picked up Bergson's Creative Evolution, it blew my mind and said, this is everything I've been trying to say, or why it is I got in lines, and all these things, actually, Um, part of it lies in that early experience of fieldwork, but it took 10, 20 years for it to kind of filter through, um, me to get a handle on, on what it actually was.

Because at the time you're still growing up, I mean, it's only, what, 20, 24, [00:25:00] I mean, you're still, you're still growing up and, and, and learning about life and finding out who you are. So, so it took a long time. for that to, to show through, um, and I started off with a, again, with a fairly conventional understanding.

I think, well, um, particularly my teaching. I started, I got my first job in Manchester and I was teaching a course on ecological anthropology. Which was a fairly new field in those days for British anthropology. And I, I started off from the premise, which seemed obvious that, that every human being participates in two systems, a system of, of ecological relations.

They're an organism. They have to feed, they eat to live and so on. But also, they're a person there, right? So they, so they're involved in a system of ecological relations. Um. And they're involved in a system of social relations on the one hand as an organism, on the other as a person. And the [00:26:00] problem for anthropology is to try and understand how those two systems relate to one another, they interplay between them.

Um, I carried on along with that for quite a while, and, and again in my teaching, every year I teach it, I, I, I felt that there's something really wrong with this. And it went on until 1988. And I remember finding my notes from the lecture course. I've written out all my lectures and I'd said, well, you know, every human being is.

a participant in two systems of relations, ecological and social, but of course it's more complicated than that, and my notes fizzled out.

I couldn't go on because I realized it didn't work. So that was in 1988, and I figured I'd have to start all over again. 

Andrea Hiott: What was that block there for people, because this is a kind of a general audience, and I [00:27:00] mean, maybe it even relates to what you were saying about the actual experience of being in the community of the Sami and that, that that wasn't coming through either, and also that your very early inclinations that there was something wrong with this dividing going on between something like humanities and science.

What was that? Can you, can you help me understand what that? Why didn't it work? Why did it fizzle out? What do you 

Tim Ingold: think? It's obvious that reindeer, for example, they're doing a lot of stuff with reindeer and if you're working out with Sámi people, you get reindeer on the brain, so to speak, you live and you think reindeer, they're like that.

And you realize that these reindeer are intelligent animals. They have memories, they have quite complicated systems of social relations, they know the landscape like the back of their hand, they can find their way about, and they also have devious ways of trying to [00:28:00] manage to live alongside human beings, who are also equally devious, and each is learning from the other.

And so far as the Sami are concerned, it would never occur to them to think that Humans are somehow living on a different plane, on a different level. Um, that's a function of our Enlightenment thinkings, putting all the emphasis on, on the intellect, or something like that, as some distinguishing mark of, of humanity.

But for some of you that The intellect, as some kind of reasoning capacity, that's not terribly important. What's important is, um, is an ability to notice things, to respond appropriately to whatever's going on around you. And so far as they could tell, you know, people need to do that. Reindeer are doing that too.

So there wouldn't be, it would never occur to them to put these on a different plane. So I think I was just thinking already then that, that you can't you can't put the, the humans and the non humans in, in, in different [00:29:00] worlds. My, one of my very first published articles in 1974 was called On Reindeer and Men, in which I, I, um, started from the proposition that, that actually reindeer are intelligent, decision making animals that are making decisions, among other things, about what to do with humans.

Just as humans are making decisions about what to do with reindeer, and that you have to understand the, the herding situation as a kind of dialogue between the two. And it was completely rubbish. They did get published. But, um, but people were saying, this is, this is, this is completely ridiculous. I mean, reindeer making decisions?

I mean, what are you talking about? So, and now, of course, that's all fashionable and and people have all discovered these non humans, which I was talking, so I sometimes feel a bit grumpy because I was actually talking about that back in the 1970s. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, I can understand that. You might feel grumpy about a lot of things because when [00:30:00] one looks back at your work, there's a lot of things that you.

We're doing a long time ago that are now becoming, becoming normal. But in that same note too, even that title of reindeer and men reminds me of, Tolman and cognitive maps and rats and men or something. This, it's a similar theme and it makes me want to know what your experience with animals was before you went there.

And if you had your own sort of experience of realizing the directness of knowledge in that sense. you know, that's why I said, did you go there to learn about? Because in your work later, you talk about the difference between about and with or from, in terms of thinking of anthropology as educational.

Tim Ingold: Um, I mean, when I originally went to the field, I, I thought that I was going to be interested in, in Sámi ethno politics.

I was working with a, with a minority group among the Sámi, a rather, A rather stigmatized minority, actually, within the Sami people themselves, so they were a bit stigmatized by other Sami who [00:31:00] considered them a bit, sort of, not, not real people, and, and, and so I was interested in the politics of all of that, and I very soon discovered that, um, nobody else was really very interested in that.

What they were really interested in was all these issues about reindeer. So you, you, I sort of forgot, well, put the politics rather to one side and got on with, um, with other things. But, living in that kind of environment, you, you, you, you have to develop a certain kind of a sensibility, it's a sort of atmosphere that you breathe.

And if you'll talk about Sámi culture as though culture was some kind of thing, but it's not really a thing. It's a, it's an atmosphere. It's very hard to put your finger on exactly, what it is. But when I try to think how I've got interested in this or that. It often comes out of living and breathing that particular atmosphere.

Andrea Hiott: I guess you started living and [00:32:00] breathing that too. It's, almost an example of this. I was in Mongolia for the Peace Corps and there's reindeer herders there too. And I have a little sense of, of what you mean. It's, and it does relate to a lot of things you've written about. In terms of thinking of movement through, the line itself that you're living and the embodied interaction.  

I guess you were learning that physically, that 

Tim Ingold: what you 

Andrea Hiott: would later try to understand in your writing? There 

Tim Ingold: were many difficulties. You couldn't live there and not be affected by these kinds of things. It's just, it would be impossible. So, so yes, but it, again, it took me a long, long time before I realized what I really learned.

Or I could, or at least before I could put it into any kind of words or, or explain it to anybody else. What it was starts off just being part of who you are and the way you look about, look on things, but it's not something you can easily, easily articulate, whereas it's easy to write about, the, to write a chapter about, um, about [00:33:00] techniques of reindeer herding, or about local kinship, or about how people are managing their household economies.

You can, you can write about that in a fairly matter of fact sort of way. But this, this other stuff is very hard to get a handle on. 

Andrea Hiott: Which is the real stuff, as you were saying, it's kind of what feels, So how did you, because you've brought that in, but, so that moment where you, you realized you were writing the text and it sort of fizzled out because it seems like you had these two things you were trying to put together as if they were separate and you had to think of it in a different way, is this around the time when you started to read Hallowell and Gibson and those sort of writers?

Tim Ingold: It was, it was, It was 1988. I remember quite distinctively, distinctively, and I had read Gibson Roundabout 85, 86. but also, um, Bergson Whitehead, a lot of these people, because I was also, I was writing this book, it's called Evolution and Social Life. Nobody ever reads it, but I was writing it, which is [00:34:00] gonna be this great magnum office.

about the history of idea thinking about evolution in biology, anthropology and history. It was all about the difference between history and evolution. It's, it's a huge book. And for that, I did a lot of reading in the philosophical literature. and, um, and people who looked at this said that I'd left psychology out and they said that's when they said I should really read Gibson, and that will give me an alternative approach.

So I was, I was, it it was during that time in the, in the middle 1980s. But I was doing all this stuff, reading them. And how 

Andrea Hiott: would you left psychology out, just for people who don't know? what was that? That was trying to, the environment and the sociality, and somehow you were missing the psychology?

Tim Ingold: It's because I've been writing and teaching in this, in this area of ecological anthropology. And and the [00:35:00] challenge there had been to try and connect what anthropology was saying about people and social relations with what biology was saying above all about evolution. Um, the sort of biology that comes into anthropology is largely evolutionary, not developmental.

So I was trying to find a bridge. between those two. And I started from the premise that, that what we say in anthropology about people and their relationships must at least be compatible with what biologists are saying about human evolution. I thought, humans have evolved, we know how they've evolved, and it's not asked for us to question that.

So at least what we're saying about social Life must be compatible with what we know about human evolution. That was, that was my premise at that time. So that was simply linking anthropology and biology and and I had, I mean part of my excuse was simply that was hard, a big enough job in itself. [00:36:00] I mean just managing, managing those two without having to cope with psychology as well, but then obviously that was a thing that was missing and the problem then was to find the right kind of psychology and that's where Gibson really did help.

When I first read Gibson, I couldn't quite see it. I mean, I read it and I thought, hmm, not sure. but then it began to grow on me. I was reading Von Dexkell as well. And then I think in 1992, I wrote a paper. Comparing, um, Gibsonian and von Exküllian approaches and what their implications would be for the anthropological understanding of culture, and I think that was the first article in anthropology, barring Hallowell, who was writing in the mid 1960s, that introduced Gibson into anthropology.

Andrea Hiott: And you were already reading Bergson and Whitehead too, so you were already thinking in terms of process at that [00:37:00] time? Yes, 

Tim Ingold: yeah, I, I, when I was writing this big book on evolution, um, and I was looking for a book, I don't know what book I was looking for, I was looking for a book on, in the evolution section of the, of the shelf of the library, in the John Rylands University Library at Manchester, I was going through, I was looking for something, and and as my eye was going along the, the, the shelf, I, I found this thing, it said Creative Evolution, by Henri Bergson, so I thought, hmm, I wonder what this is, and pulled it out opened it up, noticed that nobody had taken it out of the library since around 1950, and it was so full of dust that I began to sneeze, and I, so I thought, this is interesting, I took it home, I checked it out, and took it home, and opened it up, and was completely blown away.

I mean, I said, this is everything I'm trying to say. So then Bergson became a kind of philosophical hero for me, but of course he was deeply unfashionable at that time. And I remember, um, I remember a little [00:38:00] sort of philosophy workshop that was held in, in Manchester. I was based there and, and just, just a small group.

um, I'd just been reading Bergson and I was full of enthusiasm. I'd just been reading this Bergson, it's looking at all these wonderful things, all these wonderful ideas. and, you know, the, my, my, my fellow philosophers went a bit white in their face and, and said, Um, it's all very well for you as an anthropologist, but we have our careers to think about.

And, and, and, and you just don't mention Bergson. And that was mid 1980s. So we're about 1985, 1986. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. Now Bergson's coming back, suddenly 

Tim Ingold: bergson's back. Thanks. Like Dilu 

Andrea Hiott: and Dilu Whitehead process. 

Tim Ingold: Whitehead is, is in fashion too. And, and I, I was writing, I was reading, um, yeah, process and reality. Um. I was reading around the same time as I was writing this, this evolution book.

That's much more difficult. 

Andrea Hiott: I had a similar thing when I read [00:39:00] Creative Evolution, but for you, what, what was it, you said it's everything you'd been trying to say. Was it, how would you, I know it's hard to put it into words, it's a whole book, but what, what do you think was the light bulb going off there when you read that?

Tim Ingold: On the process philosophy, um, the, the idea that, that life, um, is not something that is simply expended in the life cycle of an organism. I mean, in a Darwinian approach, an organism is born, lives its life, and that's it. End of story. Um, the only thing that it passes on is its, what we would now call its genes.

Of course, Darwin didn't know, but some, some factors of heredity. What Bergson showed was that life is a process that carries on through. And as he would put it, every organism is a thoroughfare. And that just spoke to me. That's it. That's it. That will, that will give me a, I [00:40:00] was stuck with, um, an opposition, well established in the literature, between Two approaches to evolution.

One was the sort of adaptation model, which is multilinear, where things go off in all sorts of different directions depending on what the conditions of adaptation are. And the other was the standard enlightenment progress view. Evolution is a one way advance. And all the debates were between these two positions.

Reflected in different kinds of ways, but, but basically that's what it was. Um, and the whole debate had got stuck between these alternatives and Bergson offered a release from that. It offered a third way, um, which was founded on a an understanding of life that the Darwinists regarded as simply mystical, fantastical [00:41:00] nonsense, but actually was coherent.

And, and, um, I think it's, I think that's what it was. 

Andrea Hiott: I wonder if you were learning, because a lot of this, people saying you can't read Bergson or you can't read this or a lot of this is feeling like we always have to make some, some decision between this or this or this.

And when I read Whitehead and Bergson and, um, Bateson and a lot of these other people that inspire me and I think also inspire you, it seems like a practice more that allows you to hold different, perspectives and understand that they might make sense in different situations rather than constantly sort of being this pendulum that has to go between.

I don't know if that makes any sense to you, but even in terms of the organism or the person is that really a cho a choice or did you start to think about the entire process a bit differently, as a process, I guess, as something different? 

Tim Ingold: I started thinking about [00:42:00] it quite, quite differently, um, so that, so, so that although in the literature psychology is often presented as a bridge.

Between the biological and the social with a sort of layer of mind in between. It's like the glue that holds the two sides together Um, I called that the complementar complementarity thesis. It's a thesis that that a human and it goes back to Durkheim That the human being is one part organism one part person.

There's a biological bit and there's a social bit And the, and the bit that, the glue that holds the two sides together is the mind, and that's the province of psychology. That, that was the, the Let's call it the standard model. I called that the complementary complementarity thesis and I Ended up with what I called the front is a bad word, but I called it the obviation thesis which meant I was I was getting rid of eliminating this opposition this idea of complementarity by finding a way of showing how [00:43:00] actually It's not that a human being is one part organism and one part person, but actually that organism and person are one and the same thing.

And, and then I realized in order to do that, I'd need a different biology, a different ecology, a different psychology. And all of that work that I did in the 1990s was to try and put together a different synthesis, an alternative synthesis to the dominant neo Darwinian sociobiological cognitive psychological one, which would be, and I was looking for the, what the components of that synthesis would be.

And it was not evolutionary, but developmental biology, um, ecological psychology, the anthropological theory of practice. And, um, and a mixture of phenomenology and, and pragmatic pragmatism in, in philosophy put, put, put those things together. [00:44:00] And of course, I've got a personal language that is more Wittgensteinian than, than, than, than Chomskyan, let's say.

Andrea Hiott: It seems from our position today that makes a lot more sense, but in part that's because You opened up ways for people to understand it because I guess that's what I was trying to get at is you almost had to Redescribe the landscape in a sense or and I yeah, 

Tim Ingold: did I did have the feeling that well, I I I had the feeling of having to start all over again and And I had these inspirational works that I read, Bergson, Nibson, Merleau Ponty, those three particularly, that gave me something to to build on.

It was exciting, it really was. And you feel that, um, that something was coming together there. 

Andrea Hiott: I think it is exciting. [00:45:00] There's a feeling of enthusiasm in the writing and in the way that it's presented. I wonder what it was like though because you did introduce Gibson into this world and that's not an easy thing to introduce and, did it just come naturally for you in the same way as what you're describing when you just kind of go into working with Sami and you're just doing it It 

Tim Ingold: was a bit like fieldwork in a way that what happened was that um, one of the big upcoming names in ecological psychology at the time, um, Ed Reed, wrote me a letter. Sometime he'd happened to have read something I published in an anthropological journal. It was an article called The Architect and the Bee.

was published I think in 1983 and, and Ed happened to read this. And Ed was a great champion of Gibsonian ecological psychology, but sadly passed away, um, very prematurely. Um, but he wrote a letter to me and said that I really had to read Gibson that Gibson would give me, would get me out, get, get me out of the, some of the [00:46:00] holes that I got into.

Um, so eventually. I did. And at first, like I mentioned, I wasn't quite sure how this would fit. And then I, it dawned on me that actually this work held the clue to the solution to a problem in which my own field of ecological anthropology had got stuck. And the problem was what to do about culture. Were we going to think of culture as something that mediates, gets in the middle between organisms and their environment, culture as a kind of means of adaptation?

Or were we going to think of culture as the very world that people are adapting to? And we got the, the, the, the ecological anthropology got stuck in this and it wasn't moving anywhere. And, and I realized that Gibson offered an alternative way to approach this issue [00:47:00] because of his theory of direct perception.

That is, that we can perceive the world in ways that are not mediated by anything. But, but trying to get this across, and still even today, when I try to get this across, to my anthropological colleagues. They think, oh, direct perception is just sort of a magical idea that the world simply imprints itself on the perceiver.

And I say, no, that's not, it's not, not that at all. But, but, um, but it was very difficult. And, and mostly, I mean, anthropology, there's, there's been a sort of choice between, between Gibsonian ecological psychology or Peircean semiotics. And, and most anthropologists Rather like semiotics and they go that way rather than some try to have it both ways I don't think you can but I do think there's a choice between the two But it's very hard to get my anthropological [00:48:00] colleagues out of the way of thinking all perception involves interpretation 

and anyway, I, I mean, Gibson was a necessary stepping stone for me. I've now kind of moved beyond Gibson. There are lots of aspects of his work that, that I find problematic, but I wouldn't have to where I've got to now without His help so yeah, I think 

Andrea Hiott: that's what I'm trying to get out with the other writers too is that there was a shift It's almost as if you picked up the structure and and shifted it a bit So but I don't know how to explain that exactly to people who don't know So for example with the nature versus nurture or culture in nature was there a way that these kinds of writings, the ecological perception or the process, was a way to look at that differently in that sense of, I just 

Tim Ingold: thought that, I mean, anthropology have been stuck with these terms, nature and culture for a long time.

And particularly through structuralism and all this stuff. Um, and, [00:49:00] um, and I wasn't the only one in the 1990s who was saying that perhaps we need to move beyond these terms, that they're not being terribly helpful. And, and I found the best way forward. was to talk about, um, in environment and perception rather than nature and culture.

And so hence the perception of the environment was, was, was, I think that's the issue, not nature and culture. And, and we have to understand how this perception works. And, but I wasn't the only one. It soon became, I think maybe I was writing some of the first things about this in the early, early 1990s, but, but after a while, you know, the nature culture dichotomy became one of these things that everybody wants to, to say, oh, you know, this ridiculous nature culture dichotomy, [00:50:00] nobody has it outside the West, blah, blah, blah.

And it gets a bit tiresome after a while, you think, oh no. has had enough of it. And, um, and now, strangely enough, I keep changing my mind about things, and, and now I actually think we need to have these words back. And I've been arguing that we really need to have a concept of nature, we need to have a concept of culture, but not in the way they were understood by modern thought.

The point is that both nature and culture are very old words, and nature nascere, meaning to be born, culture from colere, meaning to cultivate, and And I think we should go back to nature in its original sense that you find, for example, in Lucretius De rerum natura um, a power distributed throughout the cosmos to give birth to new life.

That's very Bergsonian 

Andrea Hiott: Oh, yeah. 

Tim Ingold: And, and culture, meaning the task, the human [00:51:00] task of looking after this newborn life. So that it can flourish and, and in those senses, I think you could find equivalence of the words nature and culture in just about every indigenous group you would look at. They will have this idea that there is a potential at large in the world to give birth to life.

And they all have this idea that human beings have a responsibility to look after it. And that's it. And we must have these words. And, and I think it's necessary to bring them, bring them back. So that's where I am now. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, it's like TS Elliott, coming back to where you started, but knowing it for the first time because they're not, they're not stuck in the way they were at the beginning in the way that you're using them there, but it seems like you would have had to go through all of this.

Tim Ingold: I had to go through all of that to get to 

Andrea Hiott: get to that. Yeah. that reminds me, well, I want to talk about the way you think about anthropology and that sort of goes towards it of, not as some people might be [00:52:00] thinking of it as just going and observing people. the way you talk about ethnography, for example but maybe you want to help people understand the way you think about anthropology now, and I know you've written a whole many books about it, so I'm not expecting you to go into all that, but for someone who doesn't think about these terms, is it are you thinking of it as It's a way that we participate in building the future together or educating one another.

Tim Ingold: I think of it as a conversation and, if we think of every life lived as an experiment in living, if you think that what all of us are trying to do is to figure out how on earth to live in this world, and, and That's what we, our life is actually the process of trying to figure this out. Of course we never find the answer and, but this is also a collective thing that we're doing it together and learning from one [00:53:00] another as we go.

Then, um, anthropology is that one discipline that is prepared to take these experiments seriously. wherever they're being carried out, by whomever, and to learn from them, in this collective task of figuring out how should we live? I mean, that's an ethical question, and I think anthropology is a fundamentally ethical discipline in that sense.

It's a, it's a discipline that addresses the question, how should we live in this world? And it does so by listening to and learning from all the millions of experiments that people have made. around the world, throughout time, and say what can we, what can we learn from these? Not what we learn about them, but what we can learn from them.

So that means that, and of course in a way that's a [00:54:00] philosophical problem, and my argument always is that anthropology can do better philosophy than the philosophers do, because rather than simply engaging with literary works in the, in the philosophical canon, from Aristotle onwards, you're actually engaging with real lives as they're lived.

Um, I think that means that we can, we can do much better, much better philosophy. and that the key characteristics of that philosophy are four things. One is generosity, which means we actually listen to what people are telling us, rather than treating them as data to be analyzed or case studies, that it is comparative, which means that whenever we look at.

One way of doing things, we realize that there are other ways of doing them. It's open ended in that it doesn't aim for final solutions, but for ways to keep going. And it's critical, in the sense that we can never be content with things as they are. And those four qualities are what, to me, to my mind, make up the [00:55:00] anthropological conversation.

And it's only different from ethnography because Ethnography has different objectives, the objective of an ethnographer is to study and get to understand and write sensitively about how people are experiencing their life as it is lived, wherever, whoever they are and wherever it is, and that's a different objective from the objective of asking questions about what the possible conditions and possibilities of life might be.

And I think we've, in anthropology, because we've tended to muddle these two things up, that's one reason why anthropology has not had the kind of public impact that I think it should have. And that's the reason why I think we need to be, to make, to really have a public impact, we in anthropology have to be very, very clear.

about what we do and why it [00:56:00] matters. And I think that confounding anthropological and ethnographic objectives has made it more, more difficult rather than less to explain that. 

Andrea Hiott: Thank you. That's very well said. I, how do you see the relationship of subject and object there though, as being different? I'm trying to relate it to, to what we were talking about with the immediacy and the, this sense that.

We're moving past the idea that there's this, and there's this, and then we bridge it, or, and instead that there's something participatory, and coupling, and processual that's always going on. So as it, as the role of the anthropologist, how does that relate? 

Tim Ingold: I want to get beyond, like, like many others, I want to get beyond the division between subject and object, and the way to do that is to focus on the verb.

And I find this happening over and over again. I get stuck in a subject object thing. [00:57:00] The way to get unstuck is to say, right, let's go for the verb in, in the middle and let's bring the subject and the object into the verb. We, we, we are a bit stuck working in English or other standard European languages in that we have this subject verb object grammatical structure, but lots of, um, urbative languages.

Such as, um, many Amerindian languages, what we would call the subject and the object are enveloped within, within the verb, um, so that if you, if you had the, the boy kick the ball, no, both the boy and the ball will be inside the verb of kicking. And and the boy is not, it exists only, the, the subject and the object exist only in the process of what they're doing.

So the boy is, is, is the boys kicking. It's not as though there's a boy and the boy kicks. The, the, the, the boy is, is, is present in the world because there's kicking [00:58:00] going on. And it's like that. So, so, and, and I found a great inspiration in, in what linguists call the middle voice of the verb, which apparently for reasons I don't understand disappeared from, um, most English usage and in other European languages.

Sometime between the ancient Greeks and now because the ancient Greeks had it, but we don't and and the middle voice is Achieving something that is achieved in you in the middle voice of the verb the closest to it is something like um, I fell asleep or I fell in love or something like that where it is something that happens to you You're inside it, but it's not passive.

It's active so that's the middle voice of the verb and I think that that's sort of that that Just that little thing, um, solves a lot of puzzles for me. 

Andrea Hiott: Yes, it, a lot of your writing, humaning, you talk about [00:59:00] humify, humifying, or humaning, and wayfaring, and there's a part in one of your books where you're talking about weaving and making, and I think that, maybe I'll get this upside down, but, that the weaving, the making is a modality of the weaving rather than the other way around.

have these been ways that have helped you express this different approach that we've been trying to talk about here that's quite hard to talk about, but by, by exploring these these ways of talking about art or being or architecture or whatever the subject may be, is that, has that been, What's helped you to do this?

It 

Tim Ingold: has, it definitely has. And that, that, um, you can get through that, that simply by, by doing something. Particularly in a teaching situation, if I'm working with students and we do something like make a basket together. And then [01:00:00] you can start having a discussion about, well, what were we doing actually? Um, what's going on in this activity that we call making and are you in, what does it mean to be inside that activity?

It's very hard to discuss these sorts of questions sort of up in the air, but if you're actually in the middle of making a basket. Then people say, oh, it's obvious, isn't it? Here I am, making this basket. What's going on? Well, I'm weaving these sticks. And it all becomes very, very clear. 

Andrea Hiott: It seems there's a continuity.

When we try to talk about these things, or put them into categories and disciplines, We seem to lose the continuity, which reminds me a bit of what you said at the beginning about after you'd put everything into the book, you seem to have lost the essence of it. And I feel like with your writing, and you actually do it in the writing, it's almost as if, the writing feels like a practice, and then therefore when someone is reading it, They can experience it, so [01:01:00] that it's more alive and there's a continuity, do you think of it in that way? I, I, 

Tim Ingold: I, when, when I, I, I like to think that when I'm writing, I'm, it's like writing a letter. When you're writing a letter, you're writing to somebody. Talking about whatever you're talking about, but you're addressing this person, so you, you imagine that the reader is there with you, and it, but, um, but because you're writing it, they're somewhere else, but it's as if you were having a conversation, and the reader, reader was right there, and you're holding them by the hand, and say, look, I'm, You know, come along and, and, and let me show you things.

And, and so without being sort of paternalistic or sort of imagining one's talking down to people and not talking down to people, but, but, but, but there is a sense of companionship. And. 

Andrea Hiott: This word correspondence comes up and also [01:02:00] transducing and there's something happening there. 

Tim Ingold: Correspondence is, is in there because I was thinking of correspondence in, in the sense that we used to use when.

We'd simply be sending letters to one another. You would send a letter to me, I'd send a letter to you, and go backwards and forwards, and that's an ongoing conversation. And I think of writing like that rather than the typical academic text where the author stands on a pedestal and proclaims Because I'm an academic and I've studied these things, I know how it is.

And here I'm telling you, and I'll tell you, and because you are a bit stupid, I'll tell it in a sort of simplified language so that your, your little brain will understand and that if, if you want, that, that, that's, that's the very opposite. . That's the kind of writing, I, I, I can't stand and I want to try and do it differently.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, and you do do it differently. I think it's, your writing is very beautiful and [01:03:00] I wonder if it. if it just came naturally for you at some point, once, it seems like it must be connected to the different realizations you had about all of the things we've been talking about in terms of process, because there's a kind of flow to it 

Tim Ingold: Yeah, it is a craft, um, but like any craft, it's incredibly difficult.

It's, it's, it's really, really hard. You know, people think, oh, that must have been easy to write. It reads so well, or something. And you say, it only reads well because, because an enormous amount of effort goes into it. It's, it's, so I'm finding, I'm finding writing every, every year it becomes more and more difficult.

It's, it's really hard work. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. the easier it is to read often, the harder it, it was to write, which is very strange. 

Tim Ingold: It's really hard work and it, you have to put an awful lot of thought into it and whenever I'm really getting stuck, it usually means that [01:04:00] there's something, a, a kind of glitch in, in whatever it is that I haven't properly thought out yet and you have to go back, think it out properly and then it resolves itself.

Andrea Hiott: Have you found walking helpful? Or do you? 

Tim Ingold: Yes, I, I, I'm not, not, not big grand walks. I just, I just do a, a half hour walk before breakfast every day. it's the same, same walk every day. Um, I got into that habit a few years ago, and it just clears my head. Usually, you know, the day before, I've been working on something, whatever it is, and you can go so far and then you get stuck, and things are going nowhere, so you get on with something else, sleep on it, wake up the next morning, you go for a walk, and the sentences begin to flow again, so you get home, get that down, and that gives you a springboard for the next So, [01:05:00] so that's necessary and there's something that, I mean, many people, I don't know how many, over and over again, people have remarked on the fact that walking helps to loosen up one's thinking.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. What connects to this movement and this process and this verb. It's, it's, it's 

Tim Ingold: very well attested. 

Andrea Hiott: And also changing your place, does that help? Because I feel like in a few of the books you went to this place in, was it Finland? 

Tim Ingold: Yeah, but that's a place, but that's a place that I know intimately and, and I can only really write if I'm so completely at home in a place that I'm not having to.

Andrea Hiott: in a place where I'm not having to waste, waste mental energy, trying to sort out where I am and what I'm supposed to do. So if it's, if you're in a place where you can just feel entirely comfortable, then I can write, but I'm not much good at writing if I'm [01:06:00] traveling somewhere or conference or some hotel or something like that.

Mm-hmm. It's not, not so good. You have to put your attention on it. Yes. Yeah. So if I'm, so, I, I have the right here in this study that you can see where I'm surrounded by my stuff, my book. That's wonderful. Yeah. Or in, or in this place in Finland, which we've been going to for, for, for over 30 years now. 

So we haven't talked about the lineal and this, we're talking about place now, but you often.

Talk about life happening in the lines. Um, how, how would you introduce that to someone who's never really thought about it before? Are you still the only line in the world, or are there many now? I, I maybe 

Tim Ingold: not. Mm-hmm. Other people are picking it up. Um, but maybe not calling themselves line. And that's perhaps just as well, I don't really think I, the, the idea of line was sort of a joke, [01:07:00] but, um, I.

But to explain to people, um, I would simply start with the question that I think I start the book on lines with. You know, what does, what does now I can't remember them all. Um, what does walking, singing, drawing, storytelling, weaving, 

Andrea Hiott: writing, and so forth, 

Tim Ingold: they will have in common? Well, they all take place along lines of one sort and another.

And as soon as you explain that to people. Um, they say, I suppose that's, I suppose that's the case. And then, then after a while they start coming up with things you'd never, I'd never have thought of, um, had you ever thought about this? They say, I thought, no. I, so, so it was like it was like hitting on a, a gold a gold scene.

You know, if you are a gold prospect and you suddenly hit on a seam and you're, I, I had struck gold with this lines thing because it just seemed to be inexhaustible. [01:08:00] And so I'm still reaping the benefits of that. 

Andrea Hiott: Do you remember how that came about? Because I, I also find that it's, well, there's two things.

I mean, it is just, it's an easy way to understand all these things we've been talking about without having to say them directly. So that bridge, that doesn't need to be a bridge, you, you can sort of flow between these, what, what once seemed like. Separate categories that couldn't be put together.

And you can also have that feeling of immediacy, even if, if you try to explain it, people might say they don't agree with it, but it's in, it's in that. So do you remember when that came to you? I know you, you thought it was your own idea and then you kind of realized maybe others had had similar ideas, but no one had really written about it in this exact way before.

So do you remember when that. 

Tim Ingold: Was that an 

Andrea Hiott: epiphany or it just came slowly over time? 

Tim Ingold: All it came slowly over time. So, so the immediate stimulus for it was that I'd been working with [01:09:00] a Japanese PhD student, um, who came back from the field having studied folk mu the studied slut playing in. Traditional playing the traditional Japanese fruit.

Came back with musical notation of a kind that I'd never seen before, and we started working on that and finding some parallels between this notation and the thought that was used in Gregorian chant in medieval times. And it got me thinking about. How we make the distinction between writing and musical notation.

And I realized that you couldn't have a history of writing that wasn't a history of musical notation as well, and that that all had to do with the particular way in which in Europe we distinguished between speech and song, which is not the way it's done in Japan. And, and this was a matter of trying to understand this.

Writing notation, they're all done in lines and, and [01:10:00] so it all started from there in a way, that particular question, but it, it took root, I think because I think there are three things. One is going back to my dad and the ology in fungi, a very linear in that way, the fungal mycelium is a mesh of lines, so that's one thing.

The second thing. It's again, my experience of doing field work with Sami people where one of the most remarkable things is that everybody has their own footpath. It's a footpath connecting their winter dwelling to their summer place where they fish. 

So everybody has their own particular footpath.

The people may use it, but they'll recognize it as so-and-so's footpath, and there are all sorts of signs that indicate. They've been going up and down for a while. And so, so it's fairly well established in Sammi thinking that people are, their paths, [01:11:00] people are their footpaths, and when you like a person, you travel their paths.

I mean, it's, it's, it's very obvious in no way. And then the third thing was, um, was playing the cello. Which has affected, I think, the way I think and the way I write in all sorts of ways. And I've been playing the cello since I was 12. So, so I think, I think these three things together have had something to do with it.

Andrea Hiott: And what is it about the cello, because that does seem a big inspiration in the background. Is it? And I think the practice 

Tim Ingold: it's, it's a very gestural instrument. You learn a piece of music gesturally rather than as a sequence of notes. And you have the feeling when you play that you are pulling this line outta the instrument.

It's like a, it pulling trickle out of the jar. It sort of drag it out and it, [01:12:00] it, that, that's just the way, the way it is. And it's, it's, you know, the instrument is of, of one's own, well, it's a bit smaller than a human body, but it's not a comparable size. And, and, and, um, it makes it a very special kind of instrument in that way.

And the funny thing is that when I get into correspondence with people who, um, maybe through email or whatever, and, and. You get the feeling that they really get it sort of intuitively. It always turns out later on in the correspondence that they're cello players as well. So there's something about 

Andrea Hiott: Wow, 

Tim Ingold: that does, that's a certain sensibility that all cello players seem to have.

Um, it's very different from it being a violinist or something. 

Andrea Hiott: I don't know how to make the connection, but is there a connection there in [01:13:00] terms of the embodiment and the Well, there is, I don't, I'm, 

Tim Ingold: I'm, I'm a bit tired, although I've used it a lot and now I wish I hadn't. I'm, I'm a bit fed up with the concept of embodiment.

Um, 

why is that because everybody's using it now, or 

No, it's a very specific reason and the same reason why I'm bit fed up with agency. Um, the thing is that the, the. It's obvious, for example, that playing a cello is a bodily activity that's obvious, goes without saying. But to say that it's embodied is another matter altogether.

And what I'm bothered about is the extent to which people confuse bodily with embodied. And the thing is that the M of embodiment implies a sort of wrapping up, um, a sinking as it is as though the body was a sink. The skill sinks into it, and I think that's wrong. Um, [01:14:00] I mean, for example, if you said the breathing was embodied, you would suffocate.

So, so I, I think, um, I've, and I'm not alone in this philosophies have said, said the same thing, particularly, um, Maxine, Maxine Sheets Johnson, who's a philosopher of dance, and she hates the concept of embodiment and. And since we should use the word words, like animate instead. So, pointing to the liveliness of, of activity.

So the problem is just with the MM bit, the front of the embodied, but 

Andrea Hiott: no, I can see that. I can see what you mean. It does sound like a, it's closed, which is. 

Tim Ingold: And then some, you get, you find some writers actually falling into the trap of thinking. That's how it actually is. Um, particularly in, in, in sociology, lots of sociologists who, who write about embodied skill as, so it was close to automatism, something that's simply sedimented in, into the body.

Like changing, changing the gear on your car with brushing your teeth, you know, it's your body that you, you [01:15:00] don't even think about it. It just mm-hmm. Just does it. And, um, that doesn't work. Um, if you are talking about playing a musical instrument or, um, climbing a rock face or doing one, some of these things, that requires intense concentration.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. I think if you're coming at it from neuroscience or from a certain field that's studying mine, then it can be, it can feel like a revelation to go into the body and use that term. But if you're coming at it from. Playing cello or, or walking. It's, it seems almost, yeah, someone's doing the opposite.

Tim Ingold: I've had had some arguments with the, with the new, the new cognitive science, the, the four E people with their embodiment and, um, extension and embeddedness and whatever the fourth one is, and, and I don't really go with that. It's still, yeah. What is 

Andrea Hiott: it about that that bothers you? It's just the, I think, [01:16:00] categorization of all that stuff in the same way.

I think 

Tim Ingold: there's, there's still, um, it, it's still too cognitive for me. It's still treating the, the thinker, the doer has engaged in exercises of problem solving, coming up with solutions that are then enacted in the world. So that's in, in activism in. In, 

Andrea Hiott: embedded in kind 

Tim Ingold: of extension, extended mind theory, I think again.

Mm-hmm. It's, um, come to double-edged because the thinker is, um, the thinker is supposed to be enrolling aspects of the world, um, to help in their thinking, to solve problems which they will then enact in the world. Um. So it's a, it portrays the mind as a couple kind of double agent. Mm-hmm. And, and, 

Andrea Hiott: but you would still agree with the sort of Bateson origins [01:17:00] of that, of, you know, the walking stick or, or whatever as being Yes, 

Tim Ingold: yes, yes, yes.

But I would go out, go in a much, in a, in a more phenomenological direction, I think. So I, I, I'm not myself satisfied with the. Mean, I know that co cognitive science is, is, is not what it used to be and that, and that the, and it's, it's getting somewhere. Well, how do you, 

Andrea Hiott: how do you see it all, Tim? Do you, do you think of thinking and all the stuff we mean by cognition, which a lot of people mean different things by that term, but do you think of it as continuous with moving?

I mean, is wayfaring. Also mind in process. I mean, at some point, I think you might even say that, but you say it's the fundamental mode, right? Of our being. So 

Tim Ingold: pretty much, I, I think, yeah. Um, I sometimes it seems to me that, that everything's fine as long as people simply talk about thinking or think about thinking, but something goes wrong as soon as this word cognition comes in.

It's a very, yeah. Why [01:18:00] is 

Andrea Hiott: that? I 

Tim Ingold: know it's a mm-hmm. I mean, I, I, I, I find that it's, it's a word I if, if I can help it, I, I just don't want to use, and, and it's partly like, I think you mentioned this, um, opposition between cognition and locomotion doesn't really make sense in terms of the way I think about it.

And, and yet I think when people, when scholars resort to the idea of cognition. Even if they don't explicitly oppose it to locomotion, that opposition is still there, um, at the back of their, between the lines, so to speak, or the back of their minds. Mm-hmm. It's just the idea that you can, you can separate out cognition per se, as something you are trying to study.

That's distinct from other things, and I don't really, is that similar to saying you could study just a [01:19:00] person or just an organism? I mean, because some of it, sometimes you flip, you know, the, like the way IDN movement might be used and there's some part of me that thinks that's what we have to do with this word cognition, that we have to understand it the other way around.

Andrea Hiott: It's. Much more radical that what we think of as cognition is the tip of what begins with, you know, any movement walking or learning how to walk or anything like that. Thinking a lot about attention and, um, and thinking that this is actually in the, it the, a lot of what we're calling thinking or even cognition is actually about attention, and attention is a kind of skilled perception.

Tim Ingold: Um, I. And, um, and so I would, I think probably once, if we're going to talk about cognition, let's put it inside it, bracket it [01:20:00] inside attention. Um. Rather than treat attention, that's the subsidiary thing. I mean, you know, on, in, in classical writings, attention tends to get sort of second place given, second place.

You, you think you do your cognition though, and then you, you have to attend to things. But I think it, I would put it, put it the other way around. Start with attention, modes of attention because then. You, you, you're always attending to something. The, the world is always there, already there in in what you're doing.

You don't have to establish some sort of contact with it. And so you've done all this cognition and now you need to connect up with the world with, with the tension. The world is already there right from the start. 

Andrea Hiott: Mm-hmm. 

Tim Ingold: And yeah, 

Andrea Hiott: to me, I mean, it makes me think of more recent. Ideas, for example, instead of these layers that you talk about when we're talking more about the way we think of generations and, and, and the future that you, you say, we often think about layers and again, there's that kind of [01:21:00] separate thing being put on top of another separate thing and starting over beginnings and ends.

And you talk about it more like a rope, or I might even think of it like what the way you've been describing the mycelium or. And, and if we really understood these ideas, would we, we wouldn't be able to separate cognition from all these other movements and processes, would we? I mean, they would be part of really, 

Tim Ingold: you, you, you then faced the criticism that I sometimes got sometimes called conflation, which is, which is you can't separate anything from anything else.

Everything's entangled. And, and a lot of my, my scientist friends. People from cognitive psychology or, or that those sorts of areas say, of course we agree with everything you say, but we can't proceed on that basis. I mean, we know everything's entangled with everything else, but, and you say everything's, everything's entangled with everything else.

But that, but, but, but if we're gonna do our science, they say we're gonna find out anything out, out. Well, we [01:22:00] just have to make some cuts somewhere. Say, look, I'm gonna deal with this and that. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, I think that's a trap. And I think your work is trying to show a way out of that trap because then we just keep swinging those pendulums again, like what we were talking about at the beginning, rather than, you know, I mean, you say somewhere, art and technology, I'm not sure what words you use, but you say that they're only words and so are nature and culture, and those are important words and they refer to important things in context.

But can we get to a point where we have enough nuance to understand? That we are talking about those things as words in context, and at the same time, everything is connected in a process. And, and like, why, why do we have to choose between those? You know, why, why do we have to choose between those two things that you just laid out?

Tim Ingold: It's just a matter of priorities. So with, with the building dwelling thing or the, the making weaving, it's not that [01:23:00] it's. Um, that it's all one thing or rather than the other, or, or, or, um, that one is denying that if, if you put, if you put dwelling before building, it doesn't, isn't to say that people don't build things, but simply that the building is inside the dwelling rather than the other way around.

It's just a matter of, of giving some things ontological priority and, and usually it turns out to be priority of process over outcome. So we dwelling and building and dwelling is a process. Term building is an outcome term. And, and it, and I've found that mostly that's what I've been wanting to do is to, is to get the process in first.

Andrea Hiott: Well, I think these have very big consequences or I'm not sure what the word is, but it's very meaningful, um, in. For example, I, when you were talking about the baskets that you made with your [01:24:00] class, when I was reading that part in, in the book, I, I wonder, you know, what, what's happening in those moments when you're, you're teaching because you're teaching, you're learning.

Um, where I feel like this is very meaningful and it has to do with that question of how should we live? And I know it's very hard to talk about, but you know, after all these years of teaching and writing and what's been. What's been the place that you've been able to notice that meaning? Um, because all of this really does matter in the way we talk about it and the way we think of it, but I wonder how you've been able to get a grasp on that for yourself or, or what parts have sort of stood out over time or recurred in terms of understanding why this is meaningful or, or what, or the motivation, I guess, for you?

Tim Ingold: Well, well, one thing is that. I've realized that, um, that teaching or, or [01:25:00] education more generally, um, is, is not a byproduct of what we do in our disciplines. It's essential to them. So that, um, so that if, if I am supposed to be teaching anthropology to students. It's not as, so anthropology as the separate thing.

And I'm simply, we got anthropology anyway. And then I'm simply conveying the content of anthropological knowledge to students. Actually, the teaching is an essential part of doing anthropology. It's not, it's not an add-on to a process of research that's done somewhere else with other people. And that's something that I've.

Found very insistent on, um, because I think that then anthropology actually opens up an alternative way of understanding what education is, which has been rather fundamental. Um, but that's on a general philosophical level. I mean, on a practical level, if you're, but [01:26:00] you're out with students making baskets and or, or, um, doing some other thing like that.

Most of the time you are preoccupied with a practical question of just keeping the whole thing the whole thing going. You've got got a whole lot of students to look after who are getting stuck with one thing and another. And you've gotta make sure that they start on time and end on time and everybody goes home happy and well.

I mean, you 

Andrea Hiott: laugh and that's, that's great, but that's actually very connected to your work, I think, and to these bigger themes of if we really took that seriously, you know, if we really took education. In that way rather than these disciplines that we do in order to get a job and so on. And also just what you described in the, in the class, I mean, that's a task and a responsibility.

And I think you've talked about how life can be approached in that way, and that doesn't feel like the way we're really learning how to do it right now. Um, I don't know. 

Tim Ingold: It doesn't, and and it's all a bit distressing right now. I, I don't [01:27:00] know quite. What to do, and I mean, that everything just seems to be going in completely the wrong direction.

Everybody's shouting about that it is in the wrong direction and hoping that, but, but nobody seems to be able to, to turn it around. And, um, I don't know quite how we're going to, how we're going to manage this. Um, I, I'm a bit of a technophobe and I. Don't think that digital technology is the future. Um, I don't think it's gonna last more than another century at most, and I think therefore we have to take care of the skills that humans have, have, have, have found useful for, or even tens of thousands of years, and make sure that they're there for.

Generations to come. And it, it seems to me sort of fairly [01:28:00] obvious, but to try and get that across to people is really hard and, and, um, just seems to get harder by the day. 

Andrea Hiott: Well, there's something very rich and important in what you just said, so, but you think that we won't have technology, you think there'll be some sort of crash or something and we have to Oh, 

Tim Ingold: yeah, I do.

I don't think we'll have. We'll have some sort of, we'll have obviously have tools, um, instruments that we can use. But the digital technology that we have now, and if it's going to expand the way the profits of AI hope and expect, the demands it will place on the environment are wildly unsustainable. I mean, we're, we, we're already now reading about rare Earth.

These odd minerals that are used in every mobile phone and every device, and every missile system and, and ev and, and all of these, um, [01:29:00] that the reason why they're rare is not because they're actually uncommon, but because actually extracting them is so difficult that that it causes enormous environmental impacts.

Um, that can't go on. I mean, either, either will destroy the world or they, they'll, I don't know. I mean, I know that I'm going to die, but I dunno when or how. And I, and I think it's the same about digital technology, it's not gonna last. I don't know how it will end, whether in a big crash or gradually, but I'm think to presume that somehow it's going to magically self su sustain itself forever is, is completely absurd.

And it. That seems to be what most people think at the moment. Um, 

Andrea Hiott: I think most people don't understand that. every little thing takes a lot of resources. We haven't really made the connection yet. It feels all like it's for free. There's a kind of awakening that's gonna have to come there and and so on. But I think this relates a lot to your work and this wayfaring or, um, the, the, the lineal [01:30:00] moving the lines of our life. We all have a line that we've been on since we were born moving and we can't get off it. It is us and that.

Connection to the kinetics and the movement and that being what is the knowledge that's carried on? That's what I read in your work. Like that's what we're carrying on. And if we look right now at how are we moving, you know, how, what is the, what are the fundamental modes of our wayfaring, of our, of our movement?

Um, when I try to connect that to the point you just made, it seems like there's something very important there that we could realize relative to. How we wanna live and what kind of future we really wanna have. I've been 

Tim Ingold: very inspired recently by, by Hannah t's writing, um, about education in particular, because that's what I've just been working on.

And, and um, where she says that it's the responsibility of [01:31:00] grownups, people like us to introduce new people. Into a world that we love new people being children, of course. There's new people arrive and it's our job to introduce them to a world that we know in a world that we love, because only if we do that, that those new people have the chance to renew that world for generations to come.

If we tell our new young people that actually this world is complete crap, it's been rubbish. But now we have a wonderful shiny new design that we're going to, which you have to be inducted into. That's, he says, that's not education, that's, um, that's indoctrination, that's propaganda. And that's mostly what it is at the moment.

And, and so I, I, I'm very taken by this idea that. What is fundamental is what I called Amal Mundi love [01:32:00] for the world. Um, and that's what we have to regain. Somehow we've lost it 

Andrea Hiott: or we don't notice it, or we don't realize it's actually what we're looking for, or that, that idea, she, I, I remember you writing about it or saying that we have to do, we love the world enough to take responsibility for it.

Um, yes. That it, connecting that with love. It, it actually gives life meaning, doesn't it? It makes, 

Tim Ingold: yes. I mean, it's not, it's not a romantic, it's not a sentimental love. It's a no in, in Aaron's writing. It's rather austere actually kind of love. Mm-hmm. But, but what, what she means by it is, um, a recognition that this world is there, that it's before us and our job is to.

Um, to, to respect its presence and engage with it. [01:33:00] It, it might all be beautiful. It might not all be good, but it's there. And, um, we then have to, um, to honor it in some sense. And honoring it means respecting it for what it is and engaging it with it. On its terms and not on ours and, and, um, that's what I think we have tended to lose.

And the reasons for that, I suppose like most things, lying, capitalism and consumerism and this whole idea that the world is there to, in order to satisfy whatever needs or wants or desires we have. Just now. Um, that's the opposite of respecting and loving the world or honoring the world for what it is.

So I think that's probably, well, it's a [01:34:00] complicated question, but, but, but probably that, that's what lies behind much of it. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. You talked about attention before and it's part of your writing too, and a lot of people write today about how our attention has been taken or we don't. Yeah. We're not choosing where we put our attention on, maybe we're getting distracted or we, um, the, the, there's something in, there's, it's almost a, it's almost an act of kind of rebellion to actually put your attention on what's happening.

And look, 

Tim Ingold: there's an epidemic 

of, of, of thoughtlessness at the moment. Mm. And. The opposite is being thoughtful and, but, but thought being thoughtful is, is being attentive. And, and it's, again, it's being, it, it's slightly different from talking about cognition. Thoughtfulness is, is not just kind of working things out or solving a problem.

It's, it's a kind of [01:35:00] attention and responsiveness. And, and the argument I would make, and that makes as well, is that you can't have. Responsibility without responsiveness and you can't have responsiveness without attention. You can't have attention without that attention. Having been educated through, um, the work of, of others as you grow up.

So those all connected. 

Andrea Hiott: Do you think it connects to the. The, the feeling your father might have had right. With his work and trying to walk with you and teach you about it, or even I think so. The somi people and the reindeer. I mean, I feel like there's something in there that, that we all want, you know, that 

Tim Ingold: I, I think so.

And that, um, I, it's what indigenous people, it's a horrible word. Indigenous people, and it sounds like a terrible generalization, but if it just. Bear with that for a moment. It's, it's, it's, it's what they're telling us all the time. Um, they [01:36:00] talk about not the cynical way, not in a, a glib way. They talk about the, um, their ancestors and their elders.

They talk about the wisdom. Of their ancestors and their elders, and they say it's this wisdom that they're trying to learn and to follow. And they would say that we are trying to follow in the footsteps of our elders. And we are trying to keep the continuity of tradition on the grounds, not that we're stuck in the past.

And the tradition is some sort of sta Yeah. Uh uh, uh uh, not exercising nostalgia, but the tradition actually holds the promise of the future. And um, so I do think that we need to turn around and face in the direction of what some would call the past, but it's [01:37:00] actually the future because they're the people who've gone before us and laid down paths for us to follow the trouble with the kind of digital world we're inheriting now.

It leaves no paths for anybody to follow. It it, and it produces a generation that another colleague has said, called it a generation of orphans, people who don't know the love of the world that their parents should have inducted them into. And, um, so. That's, I think what we have to, we have somehow to turn, turn things around on that.

How we do it, I don't know, 

Andrea Hiott: maybe just by talking about it and by 

Tim Ingold: it will be a start and maybe by, by designing our living spaces, our cities, so that people of all generations can live together and. By changing our ways of [01:38:00] education and there's so much to change. 

Andrea Hiott: I, I don't think people are happy with this way of, of being, you know, I, I think it's that people don't know that they're missing that, that line or that lineage that you just described.

People want that. It's just how to reconnect and turn our attention back towards that I do think people want it if they, if they understood it as an alternative. 

Tim Ingold: Okay. So I think that then, then, then our job, or my job anyway, is to try and articulate what that alternative is.

I think that's what I think I'm doing and I think that's what anthropology is there for there to do. 

Andrea Hiott: I do. I think that's what you, when you talk about how should we live, and you know, you write about that and it does end up being an expression of this. I think if, if people can fill that, even if it, it's hard to put in exact words, but you can fill it in the writing.

You want more of it, right? there is a line, right? A lineage that everyone is part of, but if they don't attend to it and know they're part of it, they don't feel it. So how does one [01:39:00] become aware of that?

Tim Ingold: it's resonating. Yes. 

Andrea Hiott: So there's 

Tim Ingold: hope. There's always hope. 

Andrea Hiott: There's always hope. I, I'm sure that it is going to continue and reverberate 

Tim Ingold: hope so. 

Yeah, it's pleasure. Okay, well, I'll say goodbye and yeah, thank you then. Bye-bye. 

Andrea Hiott: Thank you.