Tim Ingold > Quotes

“It is of the essence of life that it does not begin here or end there, or connect a point of origin with a final destination, but rather that it keeps on going, finding a way through the myriad of things that form, persist and break up in its currents. Life, in short, is a movement of opening, not of closure.”
― Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description

“Bathed in light, submerged in sound and rapt in feeling, the sentient body, at once both perceiver and producer, traces the paths of the world’s becoming in the very course of contributing to its ongoing renewal. Here, surely, lies the essence of what it means to dwell. It is, literally to be embarked upon a movement along a way of life. The perceiver-producer is thus a wayfarer, and the mode of production is itself a trail blazed or a path followed. Along such paths, lives are lived, skills developed, observations made and understandings grown. But if this is so, then we can no longer suppose that dwelling is emplaced in quite the way Heidegger imagined, in an opening akin to a clearing in the forest. To be, I would now say, is not to be in place but to be along paths. The path, and not the place, is the primary condition of being, or rather of becoming.”
― Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description

“the landscape tells - or rather is - a story. It enfolds the lives and times of predecessors who, over the generations, have moved around in it and played their part in its formation. To perceive the landscape is therefore to carry out an act of remembrance, and remembering is not so much a matter of calling up an internal image, stored in the mind, as of engaging perpetually with the environment that is itself pregnant with the past”
― Tim Ingold

“Indeed ethnography and theory resemble nothing so much as the two arcs
of a hyperbola, which cast their beams in opposite directions, lighting up the
surfaces, respectively, of mind and world. They are back to back, and darkness
reigns between them. But what if each arc were to reverse its orientation, so as to
embrace the other in an encompassing, brightly illuminated ellipse? We would
then have neither ethnography nor theory, nor even a compound of both. What
we would have is an undivided, interstitial field of anthropology. If ethnographic
theory is the hyperbola, anthropology is the ellipse. For ethnography, when it
turns, is no longer ethnography but the educational correspondences of real life.
And theory, when it turns, is no longer theory, but an imagination nourished by
its observational engagements with the world. The rupture between reality and
imagination—the one annexed to fact, the other to theory—has been the source
of much havoc in the history of consciousness. It needs to be repaired. It is surely
the task of anthropology, before all else, to repair it. In calling a halt to the proliferation
of ethnography, I am not asking for more theory. My plea is for a return
to anthropology.”
― Tim Ingold

“Is it not truly extraordinary to realise that ever since men have walked, no-one has ever asked why they walk, how they walk, whether they walk, whether they might walk better, what they achieve by walking, whether they might not have the means to regulate, change or analyse their walk: questions that bear on all the systems of philosophy, psychology and politics with which the world is preoccupied? Honoré de Balzac (1938 [1833]:”
― Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description

“Faced with an ecological crisis whose roots lie in this disengagement, in the separation of human agency and social responsibility from the sphere of our direct involvement with the non-human environment, it surely behoves us to reverse this order of priority. I began with the point that while both humans and animals have histories of their mutual relations, only humans narrate such histories. But to construct a narrative, one must already dwell in the world and, in the dwelling, enter into relationships with its constituents, both human and non-human. I am suggesting that we rewrite the history of human-animal relations, taking this condition of active engagement, of being-in-the-world, as our starting point. We might speak of it as a history of human concern with animals, insofar as this notion conveys a caring, attentive regard, a 'being with'. And I am suggesting that those of us who are 'with' animals in their day-to-day lives, most notably hunters and herdsmen, can offer us some of the best possible indications of how we might proceed.”
― Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill

“Our principal contention is that walking is a profoundly social activity: that in their timings, rhythms and inflections, the feet respond as much as does the voice to the presence and activity of others,”
― Tim Ingold, Ways of Walking

“There is no division, in practice, between work and life. [An intellectual craft] is a practice that involves the whole person, continually drawing on past experience as it is projected into the future.”
― Tim Ingold, Being Alive

“Every trail, however erratic and circuitous, is a kind of life-line, a trajectory of growth. 6 This image of life as a trail or path is ubiquitous among peoples whose existential orientations are founded in the practices of hunting and gathering, and in the modes of environmental perception these entail. Persons are identified and characterised not by the substantive attributes they carry into the life process, but by the kinds of paths they leave.”
― Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill

“Telling a story is not like weaving a tapestry to cover up the world, it is rather a way of guiding attention of listeners or readers into it.”
― Tim Ingold

“What difference does it make that pedestrian touch carries the weight of the body rather than the weight of the object?”
― Tim Ingold

“Artists, composers and writers...are bent upon capturing and reining in the insights of a fugitive imagination, always inclined to shoot off into the distance, before they can get away, and on bringing them back into the immediacy of material engagement. Like hunters, they too are dream-catchers.”
― Tim Ingold, Imagining Landscapes: Past, Present and Future

“But if perception is thus a function of movement, then what we perceive must, at least in part, depend on how we move. Locomotion, not cognition, must be the starting point for the study of perceptual activity. Or more strictly, cognition should not be set off from locomotion, along the lines of a division between head and heels, since walking is itself a form of circumambulatory knowing.”
― Tim Ingold

“An imagined landscape, then, is a landscape not of being but of becoming: a composition not of objects and surfaces but of movements and stillness, not there to be surveyed but cast in the current of time.”
― Tim Ingold, Imagining Landscapes: Past, Present and Future

“Life itself is as much a long walk as it is a long conversation, and the ways along which we walk are those along which we live.”
― Tim Ingold, Ways of Walking

“what the effect would be of overturning prevailing assumptions and of adopting … a fundamental orientation towards the ground.”
― Tim Ingold

“the forms of the landscape – like the identities and capacities of its human inhabitants – are not imposed upon a material substrate but rather emerge as condensations or crystallizations of activity within a relational field. As people, in the course of their everyday lives, make their way by foot around a familiar terrain, so its paths, textures and contours, variable through the seasons, are incorporated into their own embodied capacities of movement, awareness and response – or into what Gaston Bachelard calls their ‘muscular consciousness’. But conversely, these pedestrian movements thread a tangled network of personalized trails through the landscape itself. Through walking, in short, landscapes are woven into life, and lives are woven into the landscape, in a process that is continuous and never-ending.”
― Tim Ingold

“The groundlessness of modern society, characterized by the reduction of pedestrian experience to the operation of a stepping machine, and by the corresponding elevation of head over heels as the locus of creative intelligence, is…deeply embedded in the structures of public life in western societies.”
― Tim Ingold

“This may seem an odd idea to us, but only because 40 we think of walking as the spatiotemporal displacement of already completed beings from 1 one point to another, rather than as the movement of their substantive formation within 2 an environment. Both plants and people, we could say, ‘issue forth’ along lines of growth, 3 and both exist as the sum of their trails”
― Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill

“Ao invés de pensar em nós mesmos apenas como observadores, trilhando nosso caminho ao redor dos objetos espalhados pelo chão de um mundo já formado, devemos imaginar-nos, em primeiro lugar, como participantes, cada um imerso com todo nosso ser nas correntes de um mundo em formação: na luz solar nós vemos, a chuva na qual ouvimos e o vento no qual sentimos.”
― Tim Ingold, Being Alive

“It is in the very ‘tuning’ of movement in response to the ever-changing conditions of an unfolding task that the skill of walking, as that of any other bodily technique, ultimately resides. Indeed it could be said that walking is a highly intelligent activity. This intelligence, however, is not located exclusively in the head but is distributed throughout the entire field of relations comprised by the presence of the human being in the inhabited world.”
― Tim Ingold

“my first and most obvious point is that a more literally grounded approach to perception should help to restore touch to its proper place in the balance of the senses. For it is surely through our feet, in contact with the ground (albeit mediated by footwear), that we are most fundamentally and continually ‘in touch’ with our surroundings”
― Tim Ingold

“La mia idea di antropologia, a dire il vero, non è coinvolta nel “business del sapere”, poiché aspira a una relazione del tutto diversa con il mondo. Per gli antropologi, così come per le persone tra le quali lavorano, il mondo non è oggetto di studio, ma è l’ambiente di processi e relazioni nel quale sono immersi fin dall’inizio. I critici potrebbero vedere tutto questo come una debolezza, o una vulnerabilità. Per il loro modo di guardare le cose, è mancanza di oggettività. Ma per noi è la vera sorgente da cui l’antropologia attinge la sua forza. Non siamo alla ricerca di un sapere oggettivo. Ciò che cerchiamo, e che speriamo di ottenere, è la saggezza. Non è la stessa cosa, e anzi potrebbero anche essere in contrasto.”
― Tim Ingold, Antropologia

“native dwellers … learn through an education of attention. The novice hunter … travels through the country with his mentors, and as he goes, specific features are pointed out to him. Other things he discovers for himself, in the course of further forays, by watching, listening and feeling”
― Tim Ingold

“I have but one further observation to make in this regard, which brings me back to the subject of paving. It is simply that boots impress no tracks on a paved surface. People, as they walk the streets, leave no trace of their movements, no record of their having passed by. It is as if they had never been. There is, then, the same detach- ment, of persons from the ground, that runs as I have shown like a leitmotif through the recent history of western societies. It appears that people, in their daily lives, merely skim the surface of a world that has been previously mapped out and constructed for them to occupy, rather than contributing through their movements to its ongoing formation.”
― Tim Ingold

“L’antropologia, dal mio punto di vista, è una filosofia che include le persone.”
― Tim Ingold, Antropologia

“A person who can "tell" is one who is perpetually attuned to picking up information in the environment … and the teller, in rendering his knowledge explicit, conducts the attention of his audience along the same paths as his own”
― Tim Ingold

“The present is not marked off from a past that it has replaced or a future that will, in turn, replace it; it rather gathers the past and future into itself, like refractions in a crystal ball.
— Tim Ingold from “The Temporality of the Landscape,” World Archaeology (vol. 25, no. 2)”
― Tim Ingold

“To study both people and things is to study the lines they are made of.”
― Tim Ingold