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Lines: A Brief History

Tim Ingold

4.01 · Rating details · 198 ratings · 18 reviews

What do walking, weaving, observing, storytelling, singing, drawing and writing have in common?

The answer is that they all proceed along lines. In this extraordinary book Tim Ingold imagines a world in which everyone and everything consists of interwoven or interconnected lines and lays the foundations for a completely new discipline: the anthropological archaeology of the ...more

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Paperback, 186 pages

Published July 1st 2007 by Routledge (first published May 8th 2007)

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· 198 ratings · 18 reviews

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Apr 09, 2018 Marc rated it liked it

Shelves: anthropology, modernity

I have to admit that initially I had some problems with Ingold's approach: this is obviously not a history of "the line" (as the subtitle suggests). And his approach is so fragmentary and loose that I got lost a bit in his detailed analyses of musical notation, the technique of writing and printing, and the design of genealogical family trees, etc. What also always bothers me in the work of anthropologists is the antagonism they at all costs want to prove between Western modernity and traditiona I have to admit that initially I had some problems with Ingold's approach: this is obviously not a history of "the line" (as the subtitle suggests). And his approach is so fragmentary and loose that I got lost a bit in his detailed analyses of musical notation, the technique of writing and printing, and the design of genealogical family trees, etc. What also always bothers me in the work of anthropologists is the antagonism they at all costs want to prove between Western modernity and traditional cultures, with usually a very negative undertone regarding modernity. Also Ingold follows that line a bit; at times I even had the impression that I was reading a downright anti-modernist manifesto. He often puts straight lines (connecting points, moving from one point to another, displaying evolutionary developments in line structures, etc.) on 1 line (pun intended) with rationalistic reductionism (read: straightness), and confronts them with the looser forms of gesture-singing-wandering in traditional societies, and suggesting that is a much richer way of approaching reality. As befits an anthropologist, he obviously illustrates this with examples of traditional peoples, but he also cites evidence from Western antiquity and the Middle Ages, and that is strange. For example, handwriting is compared to printing and machine-/computer writing as a completely different mental process.

Mind you: of course, it is a different mental process, but it seems to me that the historical reality is a lot more nuanced (in our modernist approach, many traditionalistic elements are included). Moreover, this modernist-straight-line rationalistic approach is not by definition negative: she made possible a scientific-technological approach that has made our world a whole lot more livable (with of course also important reverse-sides).

Now don’t misunderstand me: this is a really interesting book. Ingold's musings about lines and their influence on the way we look at reality are indeed relevant. And he is honest enough to bring on some nuances. But he also refuses to draw conclusions, deliberately so : “Lines are open-ended, and it is this open-endedness – of lives, relationships, histories and processes of thought – that I have wanted to celebrate. I hope that, in doing so, I have left plentiful loose ends for others to follow and to take in any ways they wish. Far from seeking closure, my aim has been to prise an opening. ” This is an enticing invitation, but it left me a bit unsatisfied. Maybe I should also try his next works. ...more

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Jan 20, 2015 Philippe rated it really liked it

Shelves: architecture, art, design, ecology, history, innovation, philosophy, poetry, systems-thinking, music

In `Lines' Tim Ingold retraces the contours of a momentous techno-cultural evolution by investigating the status and role of an element that is so pervasive in our lifeworld that it becomes invisible: lines and surfaces. This evolution can be described as a movement from a topian, circuitous `line of wayfaring' to the utopian, straight line of modernity to the dystopian, fragmented line of postmodernity (quoting K. Olwig). From this central premise, Ingold spins an argument that goes in differen ...more

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Jul 02, 2012 Jane rated it liked it

useful if wondering about lines is your thing

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Nov 08, 2020 João rated it it was amazing

Shelves: art, anthropology, history, music, architecture, mythology-or-folklore, philosophy

I also feel we are all "wayfarers and not navigators".

Tim Ingold case for lines is quite strong and fascinating - what an entertaining rabbit hole to fall into. But so is the case for circles and ellipses by many others. It is however my belief that eventually, everybody will arrive to the conclusion that both are right - in the form of spirals.

I am also fascinated by some of his ideas regarding weaving, e.g. "threading, twisting and knotting of fibres were among the most ancient of human arts, ...more

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Oct 22, 2017 Bill Brydon rated it really liked it

Shelves: arts, theory

"Thus the anatomical gaze, not unlike that of the shaman, resolves bodily surfaces into their constituent threads. But whereas the shaman heals by dropping lines into the body, the Western surgeon proceeds in the opposite direction, stitching up the lines he already finds within the body and whose ruptures are the cause of the malaise, so as to reconstitute the surfaces of the whole." ...more

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Nov 07, 2017 Daphne rated it really liked it

A very interesting read, Tim Ingold does as he states right at the beginning: the scope is so wide that he can only compile an overview. I wished sometimes to get more in-depth information on specific views and thematic.

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Dec 07, 2019 Michael Harvey rated it really liked it

In this book Tim Ingold examines line making in the fields of drawing, storytelling, weaving, observing and writing. Lines can be threads (in space) or traces (on a surface) and are the fundamental ingredient of the lived world to the extent that the study of peoples and things amounts to the study of lines.

The lines in question are emphatically not the abstracted straight lines of Euclidean geometry, the line seen on a map or the straight line as seen in much modernist art and architecture. It In this book Tim Ingold examines line making in the fields of drawing, storytelling, weaving, observing and writing. Lines can be threads (in space) or traces (on a surface) and are the fundamental ingredient of the lived world to the extent that the study of peoples and things amounts to the study of lines.

The lines in question are emphatically not the abstracted straight lines of Euclidean geometry, the line seen on a map or the straight line as seen in much modernist art and architecture. It is the fluid, improvised gestural and felt line made by people and things as they live in the world. The logic of inversion uses lines to contain and separate, dictate what is in and what is out, define order and measure and each step in that procedure squeezes the life out of whatever it is attempting to study. A conventional map reduces a landscape to a surface over which one can be transported. It contains no people: no life.

Ingold wants to put the rhythm of life back into anthropology by taking on the style of the wayfarer rather than specimen collector. This involves seeing our contact with the landscape as valuable and real and one worth revisiting. Much Western travelling and knowledge is imbued with the notion of discovery. Finding something or somewhere for the first time and perhaps naming it, whereas in Ingold's version we are less destination-focussed and understand and feel ourselves to be an integral part of the journey and almost always travelling in the footsteps of others in whose stories we share.
Indeed the path itself is made by walking and is itself a trace gestured into the landscape by many pairs of feet.

We are often unconscious heirs of a separated way of thinking. Ingold examines instances of the inherent (pre-printing) parity of the visual and verbal. How pictures spoke to the 'readers' of medieval manuscripts and how the vellum was more like a landscape to walk in and experience rather than our printed page. He asks the very good questions ‘How is it the word became silent and how did music lose its verbal aspect, so indivisible in many cultures and times?’

Reminding us that many things we take to be separate are in fact intimately bound is a central part of Ingold's re-configuring of the way we see the world. He would not see this as the imposition of a way of thinking that 'explains' the world but rather an acknowledgement that this is how the world is.

Again, movement is seen as a primary element in perception and cognition so that we see along a path of perception rather than a single still point of view and our knowledge of our surroundings comes from our moving through them. In fact our movement and the lines we leave and follow are so bound up with us that the traveller and their lines can be said to be one and the same thing. The story of this journey does not tell of objects, or things discovered but rather different topics, which are in themselves further bundles and entanglements of lines. Just as we are equivalent to our lines so the story walks just like a human or animal.

Drawing is a sophisticated form of line making. One in which our mistakes are recorded in a workmanship of risk that is gestural and revealing. Even in conventional drawing the goal is not to produce a likeness of whatever we are drawing but to reproduce the rhythm and movements of the world of which it is part.

Another erudite, practical, clear and stimulating book from Tim Ingold. A really helpful and inspiring book for those who know that tick-boxes and bean counting should really not be running the world.
...more

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Dec 03, 2019 Maria rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: for-study, owned, science-academic, reviewed

The concept of lines that Tim Ingold introduces is interesting and does really deserve to be taken up and tested/applied by researchers in various fields also outside of anthropology. His concept doesn't build on the established 2- and 3-dimension treatise of texture and surfaces, but rather begins by itself and redefines all that it comes across to form a tentative, yet detailed, method of perspection (if I can call it that).
Tim Ingold is rather obsessed with lines, but he does bring some inter ...more

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Oct 13, 2020 Rodrigo ChM rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: inglaterra

Las líneas representan una forma de concebir el movimiento como contenido de vida, de lo que parte Ingold para connotar a modo introductorio, sus consideraciones en torno a los nudos, los trazados, las mallas, etc. Valiéndose de análisis y descripciones etnográficas de algunos mundos periféricos al parámetro occidental, Ingold presenta la matriz cultural colonialista que equiparó la linea como movimiento con la noción de rectitud, "símbolo virtual" de la modernidad, de donde se desprenden intere ...more

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Jan 24, 2019 Boyne Narongdej rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: general-non-fiction

A thought-provoking book. It never occurred to me that 'lines' are so ubiquitous. The author gives a profound account of what is constituted as 'lines' (thread, trace, crack, crevice and so on) including imaginary 'lines' we are continually creating but often blind to their existence. Also, how the stories of 'lines' are recounted in relation to writing, drawing, storytelling, plotting, to say the least, is so captivating. I wonder if the idea of 'lines' in other Asian societies would run in the ...more

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Sep 12, 2019 bfdez.nuria rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

Sé que volveré a él, aunque solo sea por la cantidad de ejemplos interesantísimos que continuamente cita y explica, y estoy convencida de que es uno de esos libros en los que todo el mundo puede encontrar algo que le fascine por completo. Por esas dos razones se lo recomendaría (y lo haré) a cualquiera. Aún con todo, creo que a veces se aventura demasiado en sacar conclusiones y sus planteamientos me resultan un tanto caóticos, a pesar de lo mucho que intenta simplificarlos.

(PD: Aunque me haya ...more

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Oct 30, 2017 Cathy Graham rated it did not like it

The idea of wayfaring is fine. There are some interesting moments, but for the most part, this book dragged. If he could use a page instead of a sentence, he did so. Too much time spent on his Lines and not enough getting to the point.

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May 12, 2017 Melanie rated it really liked it

After reading this book, I don't think I'll ever see walking the same way again. Definitely an interesting read. ...more

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Mar 02, 2019 Rahul Chodankar rated it it was amazing

Very few books have the ability to affect us in a significant way. This book is one of them

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Dec 10, 2010 Dimitris Hall rated it liked it

Shelves: non-fiction

Just realised I never reviewed this. Lines was suggested to me by my professor when I was back in university Despina Catapoti. Ingold has a way with innovative writing about anthropology, culture and human affairs and this was one of those books. I like it when writers look for ways to connect fields that had never been connected previously. Music, writing, threads (which are added, whereas tracks are subtracted), constellations, maps? Enjoyable and intelligent.

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Mar 20, 2014 morbidflight rated it liked it

Shelves: inf

I think this is a text best read in conjunction with Carey's Communication as Culture, Revised Edition: Essays on Media and Society, but it's still an enjoyable read. ...more

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Jul 20, 2012 mahatmanto rated it liked it

Shelves: office

it might be called a comparative anthropology of the line...(p.1)
"traces, threads, surfaces" (p.39) ...more

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Jun 04, 2011 marco rated it it was amazing

a great reading for architects

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About Tim Ingold

Tim Ingold

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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 ...more