This article seeks to reverse the emphasis, in current studies of material culture, on the materiality of objects as against the properties of materials. Drawing on James Gibson's tripartite division of the inhabited environment into medium, substances and surfaces, it is argued that the forms of things are not imposed from without upon an inert substrate of matter, but are continually generated and dissolved within the fluxes of materials across the interface between substances and the medium that surrounds them. Thus things are active not because they are imbued with agency but because of ways in which they are caught up in these currents of the lifeworld. The properties of materials, then, are not fixed attributes of matter but are processual and relational. To describe these properties means telling their stories.

Both material culture studies and ecological anthropology are concerned with the material conditions of social and cultural life. Yet despite advances in each of these fields that have eroded traditional divisions between humanistic and science-based approaches, their respective practitioners continue to talk past one another in largely incommensurate theoretical languages. This review of recent trends in the study of material culture finds the reasons for this in (a) a conception of the material world and the nonhuman that leaves no space for living organisms, (b) an emphasis on materiality that prioritizes finished artifacts over the properties of materials, and (c) a conflation of things with objects that stops up the flows of energy and circulations of materials on which life depends. To overcome these limitations, the review proposes an ecology of materials that focuses on their enrollment in form-making processes. It concludes with some observations on materials, mind, and time. 427 Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2012.41:427-442. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org by Indiana University -Purdue University Indianapolis -IUPUI on 09/28/12. For personal use only.

closed I should like to begin with a simple experiment. Take a pen and a sheet of plain paper (or a piece of chalk and a blackboard) and draw a rough circle, as I have done in figure 1. How should we interpret this line? Strictly speaking, it is the trace left by the gesture of your hand as, holding the pen (or chalk), it alighted on the surface and took a turn around before continuing on its way to wherever it would go and whatever it would do next. However, viewing the line as a totality, ready drawn on the surface, we might be inclined to reinterpret it quite differentlyönot as a trajectory of movement but as a static perimeter, delineating the figure of the circle against the ground of an otherwise empty plane. With this figure we seem to have set up a division between what is on the`inside' and what is on the`outside'. Now this interpretation, I contend, results from the operation of a particular logic that has a central place in the structure of modern thought. I call it the logic of inversion (Ingold, 1993). In a nutshell, what it does is to turn the pathways along which life is lived into boundaries within which life

This paper seeks to understand what it means to live ‘in the open’. It begins with an account of experiments that test whether children have acquired a scientifically correct understanding of the shape of the earth, according to which people live all around on the outside of a solid sphere. This understanding cannot accommodate the phenomenon of the sky, in relation to which the earth can appear only as the ground of human habitation. James Gibson's ecological approach to perception offers a possible alternative, depicting earth and sky as complementary hemispheres. Yet for Gibson, this earth‐sky can be inhabited only insofar as it is furnished with objects. To that extent, it ceases to be open. Drawing on elements of Merleau‐Ponty's phenomenology, it is argued that in the open world persons and things relate not as closed forms but by virtue of their common immersion in the generative fluxes of the medium – in wind and weather. Fundamental to life is the process of respiration, by which organisms continually disrupt any boundary between earth and sky, binding substance and medium together in forging their own growth and movement. Thus to inhabit the open is not to be stranded on the outer surface of the earth but to be caught up in the transformations of the weather‐world.

No abstract