Redrawing Anthropology: Materials, Movements, Lines

by Tim Ingold (Editor)

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.

Genres: Anthropology

216 pages, Hardcover

First published November 22, 2011

About the author

Tim Ingold (born 1948) is a British social anthropologist, currently Chair of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. He was educated at Leighton Park School and Cambridge University. He is a fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His bibliography includes The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill, Routledge, 2000, which is a collection of essays, some of which had been published earlier.

Reviews

[Lee Broderick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting book examining the way in which we study material culture, advocating an approach which privileges Martin Heidegger's 'Things' over objects. Tim Ingold writes a useful introduction which highlights this and explains how each succeeding paper relates to the theme, looking at actions and pathways as revelatory subjects worthy of a shift in our research focus, emphasising how Henri Lefebvre's 'meshwork' model that he has advocated in the past may be useful for this.

Carl Knappett emphasises the tension between 'objects' and 'things' as well as between 'networks' and 'meshworks' but stresses that this tension is productive if explored. Employing case studies of architecture and ceramics in Mycenaean Crete he successfully argues for the use of chaîne opératoire models in a non-prescriptive manner.