Lines: A Brief History

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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 was born in 1948. He received his BA in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge in 1970, and his PhD in 1976. For his doctoral research he carried out ethnographic fieldwork (1971-72) among the Skolt Saami of northeastern Finland, and the resulting monograph ('The Skolt Lapps Today', 1976) was a study of the ecological adaptation, social organisation and ethnic politics of this small minority community under conditions of post-war resettlement. Following a year (1973-74) at the University of Helsinki, he was appointed to a Lectureship in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. Here he continued his research on northern circumpolar peoples, looking comparatively at hunting, pastoralism and ranching as alternative ways in which such peoples have based a livelihood on reindeer or caribou. His second book, 'Hunters, pastoralists and ranchers: reindeer economies and their transformations', was published in 1980. A further spell of ethnographic fieldwork, this time among Finnish rather than Saami people, was undertaken in the district of Salla, in northern Finland, in 1979-80. The purpose of this research was to examine how farming, forestry and reindeer herding were combined on the level of local livelihood, to investigate the reasons for the intense rural depopulation in the region, and to compare the long term effects of post-war resettlement here with those experienced by the Skolt Saami. anthropography, n’, OED Online, (Oxford University Press: September 2019) accessed November 16, 2019. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, (Continuum: London, 2004), p. 156. TI: I think this problem is present in all design disciplines: designers are saying, ‘we don’t really like this idea of laying down a plan that people have to conform to. We want to allow people to be generative and have a lot of movement in a space, and we want to accept whatever emerges out of this collective dynamic.’ But then what do the designers do? Do they set down some basic parameters within which there is a lot of flexibility? Or do they give people some instructions and say: ‘now off you go and do this!’ It’s not clear what the real solution should be.

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. This is a book whose pictures alone are worth the money. Till I started to follow Tim Ingold’s path through this fascinating maze, I had never noticed how many different kinds of line there are, nor how badly we go wrong when we don’t distinguish between them. As he shows, we Westerners keep replacing sensitive, living lines with ones that are static and mechanical, and it’s quite a mistake to think that this makes us more rational.’ - Mary Midgley, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, The University of Newcastle TI: We have inherited this word – ‘ethnography’ –as a sort of historical sediment. We should not interpret it too literally, as ‘a description of the people’. But I still dislike the term precisely because of its ‘ethno-’ component. In a time of populist nationalism and ethnic conflict, it lays us wide open to misunderstanding of what we do. This is the real reason why I think it is so critical that we change it. For many people, the word ‘anthropology’ sounds very theoretical and even colonial. It has problems too. But there’s a long history of separating out the academic ‘-ology’ disciplines – the study of this or that – from those that have more to do with creating a world than studying it. Traditionally art and architecture are understood to be speculative, to be proposing things that do not yet exist. By contrast, archeology is the study of the past, and anthropology is the study of societies: it is supposed to be studying what is there, not proposing things that are not there. But this distinction is actually incoherent. You cannot speculate or propose without a deep understanding of the lived world, and deeply understanding the lived world would be completely pointless if it wasn’t linked to some sort of proposition or speculation about how life might be. What’s the point of studying how life is if you’re not interested in thinking about how life might be? All of these disciplines are pointing both to the future and to the past. Once we’ve shown that this division is really an imaginary one, then we don’t have any further problems. Throughout the years of the 4A’s course we felt that we were actually establishing a new discipline, which wasn’t interdisciplinary in any sense, but a discipline in its own right that doesn’t yet have a name. Momoyo Kaijima: With this ARCH+ issue, entitled Architectural Ethnography, we are trying to understand what kind of drawing methods, techniques, and practices are developing around us when observing the world. Your main interest is not primarily in drawing, but in the line itself, which can also be a script, a text…Andreas Kalpakci: How does this difference between anthropology and ethnography relate to drawing? Because on the one hand you say that anthropology has a speculative dimension, but on the other hand, as anthropology relies on ethnography, there is also a documentary dimension. AK: In the Department of Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen you taught a course called the 4 A’s (Anthropology, Archeology, Art, and Architecture). This course aimed at blurring the classic disciplinary boundaries between more inductive subjects like art and architecture and more academic ones, like anthropology and archaeology, for example by assigning students very practical tasks that required fieldwork observation as well as creative use of drawing and notation techniques. What exactly did your students observe?

Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2021-09-30 12:12:48 Bookplateleaf 0004 Boxid IA40248203 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier Indeed the path itself is made by walking and is itself a trace gestured into the landscape by many pairs of feet. 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 line. Conventionally, creating things has been understood as imposing form onto matter. Funded by a Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust, in this project I aim to challenge this ‘hylomorphic’ model of creation and to replace it with an ontology that assigns primacy to forces and materials. I will show that: (1) that things are not reducible to objects; (2) they are generated within processes of life; (3) a focus on life-processes requires us to attend to flows of materials; (4) these flows are creative, and (5) creative practice unfolds along a meshwork of interwoven lines. MK: For all of these reasons the word ethnography is still problematic. Although the ‘ethno-’ in ethnography means ‘people’, it carries with it quite a narrow understanding. Likewise, architecture can sometimes be very narrow and rigid, but what we are interested in, is how it makes spaces for people.Ingold’s argument leads us through the music of Ancient Greece and contemporary Japan, Siberian labyrinths and Roman roads, Chinese calligraphy and the printed alphabet, weaving a path between antiquity and the present. Drawing on a multitude of disciplines including archaeology, classical studies, art history, linguistics, psychology, musicology, philosophy and many others, and including more than seventy illustrations, this book takes us on an exhilarating intellectual journey that will change the way we look at the world and how we go about in it. TI: That’s exactly what I mean! What I am trying to say, in simpler terms, is that I would want anthropology to follow the line rather than join the dots. What architects could then learn from anthropology and ethnography is fairly obvious: it is what is called the ‘human dimension’. It comes down to the sheer extent of differences in the ways in which people relate to their environment. For any way that we think people do things, anthropologists can always find some people who do things differently. Architecture can probably gain quite a lot from looking at anthropological work on bodily practices in mundane activities like sleeping, cooking, eating, going to the shops. 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). AK: I think this is a very good point, which brings us to the distinction between a plan and a drawing. If we were to look at a drawing as composed by lines, what would be the peculiar quality of such a drawing that plans do not have? Tim Ingold’s collected essays, Imagining for Real: Essays on Creation, Attention and Correspondence will be published by Routledge later this year.