Adrian Ivakhiv on Ingold and Liveliness

Dr. Timothy Ingold

On the occasion of anthropologist Tim Ingold’s new book Being Alive Adrian weighs-in on the irreducibility of life as animate process:

Ingold has always been very much his own thinker, never part of any school (to my knowledge) — which means he’s always been good at finding the limitations of any train of thought. And as a social anthropologist working with herders and hunters, he’s always maintained an empirical groundedness that’s kept his theorizing from getting too abstract. (That’s another thing I’ve tried to emulate, though my “one foot in empirical research” has moved around restlessly between landscape and place conflicts, cultural identity, religious practice, and media and visual culture.)

Over the last dozen or so years, it seems that Ingold’s trajectory has paralleled my own push into Latourian, Deleuzian, and Whiteheadian process territory. His general theme, as developed in his 2007 book Lines, has become that life is lived along lines, or paths, or “wayfaring,” and that “to move, to know, and to describe are not separate operations that follow one another in series, but rather parallel facets of the same process — that of life itself” (p. xii).

This work, to my mind, provides a useful corrective to those who would seek to “flatten” our ontologies so as to erase the differences between living and those things that mediate the living, but do not, in and of themselves, initiate it. There are reasons to question the division between “life” and “non-life” (as Jane Bennett and the object-oriented ontologists have done, among others), but there are also reasons to think carefully about what it is that makes life lively.

My assessment of Ingold’s work would mirror Adrian’s, with the added assertion that before being directed towards his research as an undergrad by a sensitive and astute professor I had no sense of my own intellectual trajectory. In addition to contributing to the development of a conceptual space where I could investigate my own deep intuitions and interests, Ingold’s work directly led me to the groundbreaking work of both Martin Heidegger and J.J Gibson – two thinkers who have had an enormous formative influence on me.

Now go read Adrian’s entire post: here.