Bindings against Boundaries: Entanglements of Life in an Open World

Abstract

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

Towards a new ecological conception of perceptual information: Lessons from a developmental systems perspective

“…Inclined to an ecological perspective, these studies have searched for specifying patterns in the ambient arrays that uniquely constrain the perception or action. Yet they have revealed that humans often rely on variables that correlate with, but are not specific to, the to-be-perceived property (e.g., Caljouw et al, 2004;Mi-chaels et al, 2001;Tresilian, 1999;van de Langenberg et al, 2006;van der Kamp et al, 1997 However, after feedback they can converge on more useful patterns in the ambient array, but often end up detecting variables that do not specify the to-be-perceived property (e.g., Fajen & Devaney, 2006;Jacobs et al, 2000Jacobs et al, , 2001Kayed & van der Meer, 2000Michaels & de Vries, 1998;Michaels et al, 2008;Runeson et al, 2000;Runeson & Andersson, 2007;van Hof, van der Kamp, & Savelsbergh, 2006, 2008Wagman, Shockley, Riley, & Turvey, 2001;Withagen & Michaels, 2005b;Withagen & van Wermeskerken, 2009). It is beyond the scope of this paper to provide a detailed description of all these studies.…”

“…As argued by several authors (e.g., Ingold, 2000Ingold, , 2006Ingold, , 2008Oyama, 1985Oyama, /2000Oyama, , 2000Thelen & Smith, 1994), this idea rests on an assumption that is almost central in Western thought-form is the result of a design or program that imposes structure to a material substrate. So the program already contains the form, albeit in a rather abstract code.…”

The village in the city: participation and cultural value on the urban periphery

“…Distinctions between different types of identity and belonging (Ingold, 2008;Savage, Bagnall, & Longhurst, 2005) are often the subject of jokey banter in the village (people who arrived 40 years ago are still labelled incomers by those who are born and bred), which acknowledges their fluid nature. They are also an example of the way in which the physical boundary of the village is seen as an important "container" of down-to-earthness; whose inhabitants are more grounded and ordinary than what are perceived to be the universally well-heeled residents of Cults, located further east toward Aberdeen.…”

Re-examining culture/conservation conflict: the view of anthropology of conservation through the lens of environmental ethics

“…He argues for the development of an anthropology that is not just confined to the human but is concerned with the effects of our ''entanglements'' (Raffles 2002) with other kinds of living selves. In Tim Ingold's words, ''despite human attempts to hard surface this world, and to block the intermingling of substance and medium that is essential to growth and habitation, the creeping entanglements of life will always and eventually gain the upper hand'' (Ingold 2008(Ingold , p. 1796. Ethnographies exploring emotional connection with nature (Sobel 1996;Milton 2002) and continuing the work in human geography that has been termed ''more-than-human,'' ''posthuman,'' and ''relational'' (Whatmore 2002;Castree 2003;Braun 2008) may provide way forward from the anthropocentric paradigm in which many anthropologists are caught.…”