Redrawing Anthropology

Materials, Movements, Lines

Tim Ingold

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138244740
• eBook ISBN: 9781317069782
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Why should anthropologists draw? The answer proposed in this groundbreaking volume is that drawing uniquely brings together ways of making, observing and describing. In twelve chapters, a team of authors from the UK, Europe, North America and Australia explore the potential of a graphic anthropology to change the way we think about creativity and perception, to grasp the dynamics of improvisatory practice, and to refocus the study of material culture from ready-made objects onto the flows of materials involved in the generation of things. Drawing on expertise in fields ranging from craftwork, martial arts, and dance to observational cinema and experimental film, they ask what it means to follow materials, to learn movements and to draw lines. Along the way, they contribute to key debates on what happens in making, the relation between design and performance, how people acquire bodily skills, the place of movement in human self-awareness, the relation between walking and imagination, and the perception of time. This book will appeal not just to social, cultural and visual anthropologists but to archaeologists and students of material culture, as well as to scholars across the arts, humanities and social sciences with interests in perception, creativity and material culture.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Tim Ingold

Prologue

One summer’s day, a couple of years ago, my wife and I were on our way back from the northwest coast of Scotland, after a brief holiday, and stopped off at a well-known beauty spot not far from Inverness. A short walk through the woods led to the banks of a river, crossed by a bridge that offered a fine view of a spectacular waterfall. As we gazed at the fall, our attention rapt in its tumult, my wife suddenly caught sight of what looked like a silvery streak that shot upwards, in defiance of the plunging waters, only to disappear in an instant into the foam. I failed to notice it, but scarcely had time to regret my inattention before there was another. This time, eyes alerted, I caught sight of it. Moments later, there was another, and then another. It was truly mesmerising to watch, and the impression it left has remained with me ever since. We were, of course, watching salmon, making their way up-river towards their spawning grounds. I could have drawn what we saw, like this:

‘Well, that’s not much’, I hear you say. ‘It’s just a line’. By the time you have finished reading this book, however, I hope you will agree that there is more to this line than everything else put together. To be sure, if you merely look at it, there is nothing much to see. You have rather to look with it: to relive the movement that, in turn, described the vault of my own observation as I watched the salmon leap the falls. In this line, movement, observation and description become one. And this unity, I contend, is nothing less than that of life itself.

The chapters that follow are driven by an ambition to restore anthropology to life, and by the conviction that drawing – understood in the widest sense as a linear movement that leaves an impression or trace of one kind or another – must be central to our attempts to do so. It was with this ambition, and this conviction, that a group of us got together at the University of Aberdeen, in June 2009, for a series of discussions under the theme of Redrawing Anthropology.

The objectives of our discussions were four-fold. The first was to establish an approach to creativity and perception capable of bringing together the movements of making, observing and describing. In this approach we do not first observe, and then go on to describe, a world that has already been made – that has already settled into final forms of which we can give a full and objective account. Rather, we join with things in the very processes of their formation and dissolution. Our second objective, then, was to refocus the study of material culture from ready-made objects onto the circulations of materials that these processes entail. This meant taking apart the conventional equation of creativity with innovation. For the creativity of life-processes lies in their capacity to bring forth, rather than in the novelty of the results compared with what had gone before, and is thus in no way compromised by practices that seek to copy pre-existing models. Our third objective was to explore the generative dynamics of skilled practices that – in the very precision they seek – are bound to respond to moment-by-moment variations in the environmental conditions of their enactment. Regardless of whether the intention is to fashion something new or to copy past precedent, practitioners have to improvise. Finally, we wanted to consider the potential of drawing, as a method and a technique much neglected in recent scholarship, to reconnect observation and description with the movements of improvisatory practice. This is to think of drawing not just as a means to illustrate an otherwise written text, but as an inscriptive practice in its own right, and of the lines of drawing as weaving the very text and texture of our work. Our aim, in short, was to lay the foundations for a truly graphic anthropology.

In the pursuit of these four objectives, we were bound by three injunctions. In a nutshell, they were to follow the materials, to learn the movements and to draw the lines. By way of introduction, I shall set out the reasoning that lies behind each of these injunctions, how it departs from more orthodox approaches in social and cultural anthropology, archaeology, and studies of material and visual culture, and what it entails in terms of our practices and procedures of scholarship. At the same time, I shall introduce the subsequent contributions and show how they speak to one another.

Follow the Materials

Stephanie Bunn (Chapter 2), apart from being an anthropologist, is also a maker, accomplished in the crafts of working with willow and felt. Yet looking to anthropology for insights on what happens when people make things, which might help her place her own practice in a wider comparative perspective, she was disappointed. Studies of art and material culture, she found, focus almost exclusively on made objects (whether classed as art-works or artefacts) rather than on the processes of making, and on what happens to these objects as they become caught up in the life histories and social interactions of the people who use, consume or value them. It is in this, the authors of these studies often say, that their very materiality consists (see, for example, Pollard 2004: 48, Tilley 2007: 17). However, in attending to the materiality of artefacts and works of art, the one thing these authors lose sight of is the materials of which they are made (Ingold 2007a). Not for the most part being makers themselves, they have a blind spot when it comes to materials, their properties, and what it feels like to work with them.

In principle, of course, anything we find or pick up could be regarded in one or other of two ways: either as an object or as a sample of material. View it as an object, and the material seems swallowed up in the final form; view it as material and the form recedes in our awareness, while what we see is potential – for further acts of making, for growth and transformation. In a world of materials, nothing is ever finished: everything may be something, but being something is always on the way to becoming something else. In our object-centred view of the world, we call this ‘recycling’. But from a materials-centred view, it is simply life.

Archaeologist Lesley McFadyen, in Chapter 3, offers a fine example of what this difference of perspective means in practice, in this case of what is understood to be an ancient monument. It comprises a series of ring-ditches, apparently constructed between 1800 and 1000 bc. A formal plan and section reveal the layout, shape and contours of the ditches. McFadyen, however, is more interested in the gravel that fills them. Close examination reveals that the site was continually worked and reworked by its builders, over a period of some 800 years. They would first have dug some ditches, and the material excavated would have been heaped up as adjoining banks. Later they would dig further ditches, which meant partially cutting through or filling in old ones. We can picture them now, loading baskets with gravel from the banks and casting it into the old ditches, then cutting new ones and raising new banks in the process. But then, as the centuries passed, even these new ditched were filled in, and the banks eroded, not this time by the work of labourers equipped with baskets and shovels, but through a slow and gradual process of weathering and silting up. Yet when today’s archaeologists get to work in excavating the site, with their picks, shovels and trowels, they are really re-excavating ditches that had already been dug by their prehistoric predecessors: their excavation, in this sense, is as much the re-enactment of the erstwhile building process as the recovery of an architectural form.

‘The whole idea of architecture’, writes inventor and designer Stewart Brand, ‘is permanence’ (Brand 1994: 2). From an architectural perspective, gravel is mere waste, of no interest in itself. It had to be removed, at some time in the past, to construct the form, and it had to be removed once again, in the present, to reveal it. But by tracing the movements and transferences of the gravel, from ditch to banks and back again, we obtain a quite different picture of the site: not as the immutable and structurally coherent edifice that the notion of monument implies, but as a place of ongoing building and rebuilding, accomplished not only by human hands but also by the cumulative effects of weather. If monumental architecture stands for permanence, builders inhabit a world where – in the words of dance philosopher Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (Chapter 8, p. 124) – ‘impermanence reigns’. For the builders of the past, gravel was anything but an inert, immobile and homogeneous substrate. Nor is it so for the archaeologists of today. Like any other building material, it is not permanent, but it does persist. It persists, moreover – as philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari say of matter generally – ‘in movement, in flux, in variation’. And the consequence, they go on to assert, is that ‘this matter-flow can only be followed’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 451). For ‘matter-in-movement’, let us simply substitute the word ‘material’. The builder or artisan, destined thus to follow the material, is necessarily an itinerant or wayfarer. He or she must go where the material goes, finding the grain of the world’s becoming and bending it to his or her evolving purpose (Ingold 2010: 92).

Deleuze and Guattari call such following ‘intuition in action’ (2004: 452). There is an intuition in action, as McFadyen shows us, in the way the archaeologist uses her trowel to feel the changes of texture in the earth, going with the grain of the material. And Bunn, likewise, describes both the listening and the acting that go on as makers engage with their materials as ‘working with intuition’ (Chapter 2, p. 24). Though the work may be repetitive, it is as though each time were the first. Like the wayfarer immortalised in the poetry of Antonio Machado (cited by Sheets-Johnstone, Chapter 8, pp. 123–4) – who is destined to carry on, no more able to retread steps already taken than to go back in time – in following materials the practitioner rides the cusp of what philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1964: 168) called the world’s ‘continued birth’, its perpetual coming into being. This is, in short, to enter into a world-in-formation, in which things appear not as externally bounded objects, wrapped up in themselves and presenting only their outward surfaces for inspection, but as confluences of materials that have momentarily melded into recognisable forms.

In an aside, Bunn notes that she finds the notion of ‘object’ problematic, both because of its connotations of completeness and finality, and because it seems to establish a line of separation, a cut, that divides the world against itself. She is not alone in her disquiet. As Sheets-Johnstone observes (Chapter 8, p. 124), ‘it is easier to study objects’. They offer a degree of certainty and fixity, points that can be joined up. Yet in a world of objects, there could be no life. In a world of life – an animate world – everything is in movement and nothing certain. In this world, things leak: they discharge and absorb, and are only sustained thanks to the interchange of materials across their surfaces. Cut off from the life-support system constituted by the flux of materials – reduced, that is, to objects – things would die, which is why so many theorists of material culture have been compelled to invoke a concept of ‘object-agency’ in the attempt to liven them up again. To side, by contrast, with life, with the potentials of materials, and with the paths they afford for inhabitants like ourselves to carry on, is to adopt the perspective of what, following the philosopher Martin Heidegger, we could call the thing.

Objects are against us, in Heidegger’s understanding, whereas things are with us. Rather than shutting us out, they draw us in to the very movements of their formation. They gather, hold and give forth. In his celebrated essay on ‘The thing’, Heidegger (1971: 165–86) used the example of a jug, but McFadyen’s ring ditches would have served just as well. Each is a particular gathering together or interweaving of materials in movement (Ingold 2010: 96). I have myself argued strongly in favour of a focus on things, in opposition to the object-centredness of much academic writing, and in this I think I am in tune with what many practising artists and craftspeople have to say about their processes of making. In Chapter 2, Bunn offers several examples, both ancient and modern.

But writing as an archaeologist and theorist of material culture, Carl Knappett (Chapter 4) urges caution. There are good grounds, he argues, for distinguishing the thing and the object, but not for taking sides. Any artefact could in principle be regarded as either a thing or an object. But these alternatives are not mutually exclusive, nor is one right and the other wrong. The injunction to follow the materials, with its emphasis on temporal movements and flows, is fully in accord with a thing-centred perspective. If every thing is itself a confluence of lines of flow, then the world of things would appear as a vast labyrinth of entangled lines, or what I have elsewhere called the ‘meshwork’ (Ingold 2007b: 80–2). But should we not also be prepared to recognise that fluidity has its limits, its stoppages and its moments of consolidation? ‘Up close’ and immersed in the action, things may seem fluid, but what if we were to step back and take a longer and more measured view?

From this more distanced, retrospective standpoint, there do appear to be discrete entities bound by discernible shapes and patterns, formal specifications and standardised routines. In short, there are objects. These objects, moreover, do not exist in isolation but are connected in terms of the distributions of the traits by which they may be characterised. We can represent these connections as networks in which every object, or class of objects, is a node. Zooming in, up close, we see the meshwork of things; zooming out, from a distance, we see the network of objects. To understand the dynamics of material culture in our everyday lives, Knappett argues, we need to explore the tension between these alternative topologies, of meshwork and network, rather than attending exclusively to one or the other. Methodologically, this implies that our injunction to follow the materials should be balanced by another, to connect the objects. He finds a bridge between the two topologies in the concept of the chaîne opératoire, which prehistorians – in particular – have found useful in the comparative analysis of techniques. Thus a technical operation, such as using a hand-saw to cut a plank (Ingold 2006), could be described on one level as a standard routine, sedimented in the body, and simply repeated with every stroke. On another level however, as we have already seen, it is as though every stroke were the first. Typically the analyst works from the former level, the maker or practitioner from the latter. The problem is how to engage the two, and it is one to which I shall return.

To conclude the present section, however, I would like to highlight the correspondence between ‘zoomed-in’ and ‘zoomed out’ perspectives and different understandings of sensory perception. To follow the materials, whether as practitioners or as observers (or both), we must clearly draw on all the senses we can. Depending on the circumstances, we need to watch, listen, touch, smell, and possibly taste as well. It would be wrong to suppose, however, that of these sensory modalities, some are more suited to zoomed-in and others to zoomed-out perception. It is often assumed, for example, that vision tends to put a distance between ourselves and what we see, and to cast the latter in objective forms. There is plenty of evidence in this volume to refute this assumption. In Figure 2.6, for example, Bunn reproduces for us a photograph of a Cuna man making a basket. Looking down at the work, while his fingers are engaged in a delicate tactile manoeuvre, the maker’s eyes are as much caught up as his hands in the intricacy of the intertwined strands from which the form of the basket is beginning to emerge. And in his account of martial arts training in Japan, in Chapter 5 (p. 70), anthropologist Rupert Cox writes of the way practitioners feel themselves to be ‘seen and caught in a sticky web of tactile observation’. But if vision can, in this sense, be as ‘haptic’ as touch, so conversely – in other circumstances – touch can be as ‘optical’ as vision, where it becomes (as in looking at rather than working with) not so much a modality of engagement with materials as a vector of projection in the conversion of objects to images. Such is the difference between the practitioner’s handling of materials in making and the curator’s of the finished object.

Learn the Movements

Another way of expressing the same difference, suggested by Knappett (Chapter 4, pp. 45–6; after van der Leeuw 2008), is to contrast the prospective or a priori orientation of the practitioner, moving forward in tandem with the materials that he or she follows, and the retrospective, a posteriori orientation of the student or analyst, looking back on selected outcomes and tracing their antecedent causes. In the former case, the intentionality that powers the practice is found in the action itself, in the merging of movement and sensory awareness, in pro-duction; in the latter, it is derived by ab-duction (Gell 1998: 14–16), as a prior intention hypothetically placed before the action, of which the outcome is posited to be the effect. It is because analysts have typically adopted this latter orientation that they have been so inclined to locate the sources of creativity in images and objects rather than in things and performances. To create, in this view, is in itself to innovate. The equivalence rests on a ‘backwards’ reading which finds the creativity of action by tracing the novelty of its outcomes to unprecedented ideas in the minds of individuals (Ingold and Hallam 2007: 2–3; Ingold 2010: 97).

This same reading, which equates creativity with innovation, finds its antithesis in practices of imitation. To imitate, in this view, is to run off replicas from an already established design or template. Precisely such a reading underwrites ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Materials in Making
• 3 Practice Drawing Writing Object
• 4 Networks of Objects, Meshworks of Things
• 5 Thinking through Movement: Practising Martial Arts and Writing Ethnography
• 6 Learning the ‘Banana-Tree’: Self Modification through Movement
• 7 Performing Precision and the Limits of Observation
• 8 The Imaginative Consciousness of Movement: Linear Quality, Kinaesthesia, Language and Life
• 9 Beyond A to B
• 10 Drawing with Our Feet (and Trampling the Maps): Walking with Video as a Graphic Anthropology
• 11 ‘Both Created and Discovered’: The Case for Reverie and Play in a Redrawn Anthropology
• 12 Expanded Visions: Rethinking Anthropological Research and Representation through Experimental Film
• Index