ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDIES OF SAM 4 a ie ee ) eae ; Nis “M p mS eRe i ‘ ¥ : .* hae _. baie a ah emt . aa” ¥ "4 e B REDRAWING ANTHROPOLOGY Materials, Movements, Lines Edited by Tim IngoldREDRAWING ANTHROPOLOGYAnthropological Studies of Creativity and Perception Series Editor: Tim Ingold, University of Aberdeen, UK The books in this series explore the relations, in human social and cultural life, between perception, creativity and skill. Their common aim is to move beyond established approaches in anthropology and material culture studies that treat the inhabited world as a repository of complete objects, already present and available for analysis. Instead these works focus on the creative processes that continually bring these objects into being, along with the persons in whose lives they are entangled All creative activities entail movement or gesture, and the books in this series are particularly concerned to understand the relations between these creative movements and the inscriptions they yield. Likewise in considering the histories of artefacts, these studies foreground the skills of their makers-cum-users, and the transformations that ensue, rather than tracking their incorporation as finished objects within networks of interpersonal relations. ‘The books in this series will be interdisciplinary in orientation, their concern being always with the practice of interdisciplinarity: on ways of doing anthropology with other disciplines, rather than doing an anthropology of these subjects. Through this anthropology with, they aim to achieve an understanding that is at once holistic and processual, dedicated not so much to the achievement of a final synthesis as to opening up lines of inquiry. Other titles in the series: Conversations With Landscape Edited by Karl Benediktsson and Katrin Anna Lund Ways of Walking Ethnography and Practice on Foot Edited by Tim Ingold and Jo Lee VergunstRedrawing Anthropology Materials, Movements, Lines Edited by TIM INGOLD University of Aberdeen, UK 2} Routledge ie Routledg Taylor & Francis Group LONDON AND NEW YORKFirst published 2011 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2011 Tim Ingold Tim Ingold has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editor of this work. All rights reserved, No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing [rom the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Redrawing anthropology : materials, movements, lines. -- (Anthropological studies of creativity and perception) 1. Art and anthropology--Congresses. 2. Material culture-- Congresses. I. Series II. Ingold, Tim, 1948- 701’.03-de22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ingold, Tim, 1948- Redrawing anthropology : materials, movements, lines / by Tim Ingold. p. cm. -- (Anthropological studies of creativity and perception) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4094-1774-3 (hardback) 1, Anthropology-- Philosophy. 2. Art and anthropology. 3. Graphic arts. 4. Creative ability. I. Title. GN33.149 2011301--de23 2011017214 ISBN 9781409417743 (hbk) ISBN 9781315604183 (ebk)Contents List of Figures Notes on Contributors Preface and Acknowledgements 1_ Introduction Ingold 2_ Materials in Making Stephanie Bunn 3. Practice Drawing Writing Object Lesley McFadyen 4 Networks of Objects, Meshworks of Things. Carl Knappett 5 Thinking through Movement: Practising Martial Arts and Writing Ethnography Rupert Cox 6 Learning the “Banana-Tree’: Self Modification through Movement Greg Downey ~ Performing Precision and the Limits of Observation Brenda Farnell and Robert N. Wood o The Imaginative Consciousness of Movement: Linear Quality, Kinaesthesia, Language and Life Maxine Sheets-Johnstone 9 Beyond A toB Griet Scheldeman 10 Drawing with Our Feet (and Trampling the Maps): Walking with Video as a Graphic Anthropology Sarah Pink 11 ‘Both Created and Discovered’: The Case for Reverie and Playin a Redrawn Anthropology Amanda Ravetz 12 Expanded Visions: Rethinking Anthropological Research and Representation through Experimental Film Arnd Schneider Index7A 7.2 73 74 List of Figures JCB Cow by Sally Matthews Mr Imagination’s bottle cap throne Details of eye-shades Step-by-step process of making a flat “Turk’s Head Knot’ Kenjé Toktosunova’s felt shyrdak carpet Cuna man making a basket in Argia, Colombia Plan of Bronze Age ring-ditch Site drawing of ring-ditch section Photograph of Bronze Age ring-ditch, fully excavated Ring-ditch under excavation Detail of section Maori meeting house network Chaine opératoire diagram Chronological chart for palatial Crete Space syntax analysis showing agglutinative and articulated layouts in Minoan buildings Neopalatial conical cups Neopalatial bridge-spouted jars with tortoiseshell ripple decoration Neopalatial rounded cup with dark-on-light decoration of stylised fish motif A Kamares cup from Knossos The self observed: the author learning the tea ceremony, watched by his teacher Still image illustrating an open choreographic procedure “As work matures it is more suggestive than literal, more intimation than symbol’ (Robert Wood) Here we see Kelly exploring a heightened state of viscerality: ‘a person dancing’, not someone ‘in the role of ‘dancer’ Luca’s whole body emanates dimensions of his personal being in time and space, beyond any theatrical dramatisation7.5 Three different ‘action signs’ that look identical to an observer 7.6 The five formal possibilities for locomotion on two legs 7.7 Transcriptions of variations that can occur in mundane forms of walking, 7.8 Transcriptions of styles of walking that occur in four idioms of dancing 10.1 The natural line 10.2 The new path 11.1 Examples of a cup and saucer made by Cj during the residency in Dhal ni Pal 11.2 People and activities around the door set up in Fadiya chok 12.1 The Flicker, 1966, by Tony Conrad 12.2 Malcolm Le Grice, After Manet — le dejeuner sur herb, 1975 12.3 The Ambassadors (Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve), 1533, by Hans Holbein the Younger 12,4 Detail from The Ambassadors Material protegida por derechos de autorNotes on Contributors Stephanie Bunn lectures in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews, and is also a craftsperson specialising in felt and willow work. Bunn has carried out ethnographic fieldwork among nomadic pastoralists in Kyrgyzstan, focusing on human- environment relations, domestic textiles and the use of space in the tent. During her early research she participated in the UNESCO Steppe Route Expedition as the textile expert on their scientific team, was apprenticed to two Kyrgyz feltmakers, and studied the collections of early nomads at the Hermitage and the Ethnographic Museums in St Petersburg. She has collected and curated several exhibitions, from Striking Tents at the British Museum (1999) to From Quilis to Couture in Kyrgyzstan at the Collins Gallery, University of Strathclyde (2011). Research projects have included working with artist Eduardo Paolozzi on the artist’s relationship with materials, research on sacred sites and material culture among Kyrgyz nomads in Tajikistan, an interdisciplinary project on Sound and Anthropology, and recent work on the dynamics of change in Kyrgyz material culture. Her book, Nomadic Felts, was published by the British Museum Press in 2010. Rupert Cox is Lecturer in Visual Anthropology and Director of the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester. He has conducted fieldwork in Japan on practices such as the tea ceremony and the martial aris, resulting in his book The Zen Arts (Routledge Curzon 2002). He is currently completing another multi-sited fieldwork study which investigates the history and practices associated with the idea of Japan as a “copying culture’. As co-director of an independent documentary film company, Native Voice Films, Cox has developed broad interests in visual culture, These interests extend to the impact of new media technologies, in particular photography, on philosophies and practices of representation in Japanese Zen. In a new project that aims to develop soundscape studies and the use of sound recording within anthropology, he is investigating the perception and significance of silent places in Japan. Greg Downey is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at MacquarieUniversity, Australia. For his doctoral thesis, Downey studied the Afro-Brazilian dance and martial art, capoeira, in which he became an apprentice and off-and-on instructor. This led to his first book Learning Capoeira (Oxford University Press 2005). Drawing on recent research in the neurosciences, the psychology of perception, sports physiology, and dynamic systems theory, the book examines how cultural patterns of training and behaviour affect the body*s and brain’s development through concrete physiological processes. Broadening his research to include other forms of physical training, Downey is currently completing a book entitled The Athletic Animal. This has led him to develop a holistic anthropology that brings social and cultural research and theory together with attention to psychology, the brain sciences, physiology, and ecology. Brenda Farnell is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois. Since the mid-1980s, she has been studying the complex system of hand signs known as ‘Plains Indian Sign Talk’ (PST), through field research among Assiniboine (Nakota) people in northern Montana. In her book Do You See What I Mean? (University of Texas Press 1995), Farnell challenges the dominant western view of language as essentially verbal, and shows to the contrary that words and gestures participate equally in the creation of meaning. Drawing on dance studies, Farnell has gone on to pioneer the use of the movement script known as Labanotation in anthropological research. In subsequent work she has used the philosophical resources of Critical Realism to argue against the conventional division between the semiotic and the somatic. The somatic, she shows, is necessarily semiotic since it involves the meaning-making practices of social persons in such domains as sensory perception, the emotions and body movement. Tim Ingold is Professor of Social Anthropology and Head of the School of Social Science at the University of Aberdeen, where he founded a new Department of Anthropology in 2002. Ingold has carried out ethnographic fieldwork among Saami and Finnish people in Lapland, and has written extensively on comparative questions of environment, technology and social organisation in the circumpolar North, as well as on evolutionary theory in anthropology, biology and history, on the role of animals in human society, on issues in human ecology, and on language and tool use. His more recent work has been in the anthropology of environmental perception and skilled practice. This work is brought together in his book The Perception of the Environment (Routledge 2000). In 2005 he was awarded a Professorial Fellowship by theEconomic and Social Research Council for a three-year project on the comparative anthropology of the line, exploring issues on the interface between anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture, His book, Lines, was published in 2007, and his most recent callection of essays, Being Alive, in 2011 (both published by Routledge). He is also the co-editor of Creativity and Cultural Improvisation (Berg 2007) and Ways of Walking (Ashgate 2008). Carl Knappett holds the Walter Graham/Homer Thompson Chair in Aegean Prehistory at the University of Toronto. He specialises in Aegean Bronze Age political economies and geopolitics, is an expert on Minoan ceramics, and has co-directed excavations at the Minoan harbour site of Palaikastro. His research has ranged widely over the study of material culture, and has drawn insights from cognitive science, ecological psychology and Peircean semiotics. He has published Thinking Through Material Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press 2005) and co-edited Material Agency (with Lambros Malafouris, Springer 2008). He has recently completed a monograph, An Archaeology of Interaction: Network Perspectives on Material Culture and Society for Oxford University Press (2011). Lesley McFadyen is Lecturer in Archaeology at Birkbeck College, University of London. Before joining Birkbeck she held a Foundation for Science and Technology scholarship at the University of Porto. Her main interests include the relations between archaeology and architecture, and experiences of building and construction in the past. Whilst her background is in archaeology, the orientation of her work has often been towards the discipline of architecture, and she has participated as an archaeologist in design studios within schools of architecture. Themes that she explores in the design studio are thinking-through- drawing, drawing lines and time, and drawing the materiality of time in materials. She is working on a book-length project Between Material Culture, Architecture and Landscape — Archaeology, Architecture and Scale for Oxford University Press. Sarah Pink is Professor of Social Sciences at Loughborough University. Her work and interests, rooted in social and visual anthropology, centre on place, practice, home, media, the senses, material and visual culture, urban social movements and, most recently, sustainability and energy. In her book Home Truths (Berg 2004), Pink explores how gender diversity in Spain and Britain is articulated through people’s relationships with their “sensory homes’. The book uses a sensory focus to understand gender, agency and change, while attempting to bridge the gap betweenapplied and academic anthropology. More recently, in her book Situating Everyday Life: Practices and Places (Sage 2012), she draws on her research about domestic practices and the sensory home and on the Slow City movement in the UK to explore themes of everyday life, sustainability and activism through theories of practice and place. Pink’s methodological work focuses on the visual and the senses, developed largely in her books Doing Visual Ethnography (Sage 2007) and Doing Sensory Ethnography (Sage 2009). Her co-edited book Working Images (Routledge 2004) is one of the few works in the field of visual research to devote any attention to drawing. Her most recent edited volume, Advances in Visual Methodology (Sage 2012), brings together a set of contributors whose work develops innovations in the theory and practice of visual methodology in research and representation across disciplines. Amanda Ravetz is Research Fellow in Art and Design at Manchester Metropolitan University. Having trained as a painter at the Central School of Art and Design, she went on to complete a doctorate in Social Anthropology with Visual Media at the University of Manchester. Her doctoral research explored the possibilities of image-based media for sensory and environmental anthropology in a study of vision, knowledge and place-making in an English town. In 2004, after teaching at the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester, she joined MIRIAD (Manchester Institute for Research and Innovation in Art and Design) at Manchester Metropolitan University to pursue research into the contemporary convergence of aesthetics and ethnography. Her co-edited volume Visualizing Anthropology (Intellect Books 2005) explores questions of vision and knowledge, and investigates new collaborative possibilities linked to image- based work. Her book, Observational Cinema (co-authored with Anna Grimshaw), was published by Indiana University Press in 2009. Ravetz’s current research focuses on the relationship between artistic practice and play and the role of collaboration in modern craft. She is the editor, with Alice Kettle and Helen Felcey, of Collaborations through Craft, which will be published by Berg in 2013. Griet Scheldeman is Research Associate in the Lancaster Environment Centre at Lancaster University. Scheldeman’s doctoral research was based on ethnographic fieldwork in paediatric diabetes centres across Scotland, Europe and the US, and explored how diabetes is lived and practised by young people and their health carers. In her post-doctoral research, Scheldeman engaged inexploratory fieldwork with artists, to investigate the aesthetics of landscape. She is currently (2008-2011) conducting the component of ethnographic research in Understanding Walking and Cycling, a multidisciplinary project funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). The project investigates people’s perceptions, practices and experiences of everyday urban walking and cycling, in order to provide policy makers with effective ways to promote sustainable travel. Arnd Schneider is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo, Schneider has carried out fieldwork in Sicily, Argentina, Uruguay, Ecuador and Mexico, and his research interests focus on contemporary art and anthropology, migration and ethnographic film. Schneider was co-organiser of the landmark conference Fieldworks: Dialogues between Art and Anthropology, held at the Tate Modern, London, in 2003. Among his books are Appropriation as Practice: Art and Identity in Argentina (Palgrave 2006) and, co-edited with Chris Wright, Contemporary Art and Anthropology (Berg 2006) and Between Art and Anthropology (Berg 2010). Maxine Sheets-Johnstone is an interdisciplinary scholar affiliated with the Department of Philosophy at the University of Oregon, where she taught periodically in the 1990s and where she now holds an ongoing appointment as Courtesy Professor. She began her career as a choreographer, dancer and dance scholar. She has published numerous articles in humanities, science, and arts journals. Her published monographs include The Phenomenology of Dance (University of Wisconsin Press 1966), [Huminating Dance: Philosophical Explorations (Bucknell University Press 1984), The Primacy of Movement (John Benjamins 1998), and the three volumes of the ‘Roots’ trilogy: The Roots of Thinking (Temple University Press 1990), The Roots of Power (Open Court 1994) and The Roots of Morality (Pennsylvania State University 2008). Her collection of essays, The Corporeal Turn, was published by Imprint Academic in 2009, and Putting Movement Into Your Life: A Beyond Fitness Primer was published as an e-book in 2011. She was awarded a Distinguished Fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Study at Durham | University in the Spring of 2007, for her continuing research on xenophobia, and an Alumni Achievement Award by! the School of Education, University of Wisconsin in. 2011. Robert N. Wood is artistic director and choreographer of Robert Wood Dance New York Inc, Arriving in New York City from his native New Zealand in 1983, Wood developed a distinguishedperforming career as a soloist and featured artist in the New York dance companies of Merce Cunningham (with John Cage), Martha Clarke, David Gordon, Pearl Lang and Donald Byrd during the postmodern florescence of American Concert Dance. Tn contrast to Cunningham’s detached postmodernism, Wood’s distinct approach to the creative process seeks to recover an emotionally rich and humanised sense of physicality and state of being, revealing to the viewer attributes of the dancer's personal and cultural being, as this is constructed through, and revealed in, their movement. Wood has produced over forty choreographic works, receiving awards and grants from organisations in the USA, France, Canada, Italy, the Czech Republic and, most recently, mainland China and Hong Kong. He is currently developing a multi-sited work in the deserts of New Mexico that explores how new digital technologies can provide insights into the interior landscapes of live human performance.Preface and Acknowledgements This volume is the outcome of a conference held at the University of Aberdeen from the 22nd to the 24th of June, 2009. Over the three days of the conference, the 30 participants convened in the recently restored Old Town House, an eighteenth-century building at the heart of the King’s College campus in Old Aberdeen, Of the participants, one third were invited keynote speakers from the United Kingdom and overseas, one third were drawn from a network of researchers established through a recent series of Art, Architecture and Anthropology (AAA) seminars, and one third from staff, postdoctoral researchers and doctoral students based in Aberdeen University’s Department of Anthropology. The conference addressed three principal challenges — to ‘follow the materials’, to ‘learn the movements’ and to ‘draw the lines’ — and. one day of the conference was devoted to each of these, Each day included presentations by three keynote speakers, as well as contributions by members of the AAA research network and of the Department’s Culture, Creativity and Perception research group. The programme also included a number of workshops. In one, led by postgraduate students from the Department, participants undertook theatre exercises designed to initiate reflection on bodily and environmental movements. Another, on ‘drawing relationships’, focused on the ways in which materials and things intertwine in the dynamic environment of the seashore, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone led a workshop exploring the relation between bodily kinesis, natural language and sociality, while Michael Anusas guided us in an exploration of the use and potential of freehand sketching techniques in the design process. Alongside these presentations and workshops, an exhibition was held — also in the Old Town House — to document the results of a series of sessions on drawing and anthropology, organised by doctoral students in the Department in conjunction with Gray’s School of Art (Robert Gordon University), which had taken place throughout the 2008-09 academic year. These workshops sought both to develop the graphic skills of anthropologists and other social scientists and to consider the potential of drawing as an inscriptive practice that can work in ways that are just as engaging as film or photography, challenging any rigid dichotomy between image andtext. Workshop themes included ‘tracing form’, ‘engaging perception’, ‘thinking with materials’, ‘capturing uncertainty’, ‘scale and slippage’, ‘learning with artists’ and ‘making a cartoon’, The exhibition, entitled Drawing the Social, included a selection of work on each theme. Special thanks are due to Katy Fox, who was the driving force behind both the drawing sessions and the exhibition. 1 would like to thank all the participants in what, by all accounts, was an extremely exciting conference. Besides the contributors to this book, all of whom presented papers at the conference, they include: Susanne Kuechler, Chris Gosden, Michael Anusas, Raymond Lucas, Anne Douglas, Lorens Holm, Trish Cain, Jo Vergunst, Petra Kalshoven, and doctoral students Kathryn Lichti- Harriman, Amber Lincoln, Katy Fox, Caroline Gatt, Peter Loovers, Jen Clarke, Cristian Simonetti, Ekaterina Bartik, Rachel Harkness, and Maria Nakhshina. Finally, I would like to thank the British Academy, the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the University of Aberdeen, without whose financial support the conference — and consequently this book - would not have been possible. Tim Ingold Aberdeen, MarchChapter 1 Introduction Tim Ingold Prologue One summer’s day, a couple of years ago, my wife and I were on our way back from the northwest coast of Scotland, after a brief holiday, and stopped off ata well-known beauty spot not far from Inverness. A short walk through the woods led to the banks of a river, crossed by a bridge that offered a fine view of a spectacular waterfall. As we gazed at the fall, our attention rapt in its tumult, my wife suddenly caught sight of what looked like a silvery streak that shot upwards, in defiance of the plunging waters, only to disappear in an instant into the foam. I failed to notice it, but scarcely had time to regret my inattention before there was another, This time, eyes alerted, | caught sight of it. Moments later, there was another, and then another. It was truly mesmerising to watch, and the impression it left has remained with me ever since. We were, of course, watching salmon, making their way up-river towards their spawning grounds. | could have drawn what we saw, like this } / “Well, that’s not much’, I hear you say. ‘It’s just a line’. By the time you have finished reading this book, however, I hope you will agreethat there is more to this line than everything else put together. To be sure, if you merely look ar it, there is nothing much to see. You have rather to look with it: to relive the movement that, in turn, described the vault of my own observation as I watched the salmon leap the falls. In this line, movement, observation and description become one. And this unity, | contend, is nothing less than that of life itself. ‘The chapters that follow are driven by an ambition to restore anthropology to life, and by the conviction that drawing — understood in the widest sense as a linear movement that leaves an impression or trace of one kind or another — must be central to our attempts to do so. [It was with this ambition, and this conviction, that a group of us got together at the University of Aberdeen, in June 20089, for a series of discussions under the theme of Redrawing Anthropology. The objectives of our discussions were four-fold. The first was to establish an approach to creativity and perception capable of bringing together the movements of making, observing and describing. In this approach we do not first observe, and then go on. to describe, a world that has already been made — that has already settled into final forms of which we can give a full and objective account. Rather, we join with things in the very processes of their formation and dissolution. Our second objective, then, was to refocus the study of material culture from ready-made objects onto the circulations of materials that these processes entail. This meant taking apart the conventional equation of creativity with innovation. For the creativity of life-processes lies in their capacity to bring forth, rather than in the novelty of the results compared with what had gone before, and is thus in no way compromised by practices that seek to copy pre-existing models. Our third objective was to explore the generative dynamics of skilled practices that — in the very precision they seek — are bound to respond to moment-by- moment variations in the environmental conditions of their enactment. Regardless of whether the intention is to fashion something new or to copy past precedent, practitioners have to improvise. Finally, we wanted to consider the potential of drawing, as a method and a technique much neglected in recent scholarship, to reconnect observation and description with the movements of improvisatory practice. This is to think of drawing not just as a means to illustrate an otherwise written text, but as an inscriptive practice in its own right, and of the lines of drawing as weaving the very text and texture of our work. Our aim, in short, was to lay the foundations for a truly graphic anthropology. In the pursuit of these four objectives, we were bound by three injunctions. In a nutshell, they were to follow the materials, to learn