Becoming a Wandering Body: Education and Body in Tim Ingold's Thought

Abstract

The article deals with the place of the body and education in the thought of Scottish anthropologist Timothy Ingold. We present the author's main metatheoretical assumptions, highlighting those central to our argument: the pairs nature-culture, body-mind, and animality-humanity. Ingold's thought is a wager on a human education based on becoming, understood as a singular insertion in a tradition always situated on historicity and immanence. It does not have a pre-defined direction but rather establishes itself through wandering, starting from a relationship of attention and perception of the world mediated by others who are already present in it. The body is conceived as a constitutive dimension of the human being, without which it is impossible to understand the way of being-with-others in the world. Thus, human potential is realized, and attention and perception are crucial. By problematizing the consequences of this thought for human education and body education, we found powerful conceptual tools to criticize the modern tradition of education, as well as to envision another way of conceiving human and body education, which are not understood as a transmission of the knowledge with which one operates logically, nor as the education of a material body that should perform as much as possible. Contrarywise, it is conceived as the transmission of a singular form of perception and (re) creation of the world and as an instance of creating paths wandering, respectively.