From science to art and back again: the pendulum of an anthropologist

ABSTRACT

In this article, I look back over four decades of my career as a professional anthropologist, starting with an orientation that was heavily weighted towards the natural sciences, and ending in a project that seeks to integrate anthropology with the practices of art, architecture and design. This was also a period during which science increasingly lost its ecological bearings, while the arts increasingly gained them. Tracing the journey in my own teaching and research, I show how the literary reference points changed, from foundational texts in human and animal ecology, now largely forgotten, through attempts to marry the social and the ecological inspired by the Marxian revival, to contemporary writing on post-humanism and the conditions of the Anthropocene. For me this has been an Odyssey – a journey home – to the kind of science imbibed in childhood, as the son of a prominent mycologist. This was a science grounded in tacit wonder at the exquisite beauty of the natural world, and in silent gratitude for what we owe to this world for our existence. Today’s science, however, has turned wonder and gratitude into commodities. They no longer guide its practices, but are rather invoked to advertise its results. The goals of science are modelling, prediction and control. Is that why, more and more, we turn to art to rediscover the humility that science has lost?

KEYWORDS:

• Anthropology
• art
• childhood
• correspondence
• ecology
• making
• relational thinking
• science

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Tim Ingold is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen, and a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Following 25 years at the University of Manchester, Ingold moved in 1999 to Aberdeen, where he established the UK’s newest Department of Anthropology. Ingold has carried out ethnographic fieldwork among Saami and Finnish people in Lapland, and has written on environment, technology and social organization in the circumpolar North, on the role of animals in human society, on issues in human ecology, and on evolutionary theory in anthropology, biology and history. In his more recent work, he has explored the links between environmental perception and skilled practice, focusing on questions of movement, knowledge and description. His current research is situated at the interface between anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. He is the author of The Perception of the Environment (2000), Lines (2007), Being Alive (2011), Making (2013) The Life of Lines (2015), Anthropology and/as Education (2017) and Anthropology: Why It Matters (2018).

Notes

1 Our conversation took place shortly before Rayner’s book was published. The extraordinary difficulties he experienced in finding a publisher for this volume says much about entrenched attitudes in biological science.

2 I first presented this idea at the 96th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Washington DC, November 1997, and in the following month at a conference on 'Nature Knowledge' hosted by the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, Venice. More recently, the fields of mycology and anthropology have come together in the work of Anna Tsing (2015).

3 Holdrege (2005) offers an excellent summary of the Goethean way of doing science.

4 I have borrowed this expression from Miyazaki (2004).

5 On the distinction between anthropology and ethnography, see Ingold (2011, 229–243, 2013, 2–4, 2014).

6 See Godelier (1978) for a useful summary of his position.

7 An abridged edition of this work, with an introduction by John Tyler Bonner, is available as Thompson (1961).

8 Much of the inspiration for this approach comes from science studies scholar Karen Barad. ‘We do not obtain knowledge by standing outside of the world’, Barad writes; ’we know because “we” are of the world. We are part of the world in its differential becoming’ (Barad 2003, 829).

9 Much has been written on this controversial concept, and the roll-call of artists, architects and designers who are addressing its challenges would be far too long to list here. But to get a flavour of it, see the selection in Klingan et al. (2015).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Research Council [grant number 323677 KFI].