Lines: A Brief History

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TI: That’s exactly what I mean! What I am trying to say, in simpler terms, is that I would want anthropology to follow the line rather than join the dots. What architects could then learn from anthropology and ethnography is fairly obvious: it is what is called the ‘human dimension’. It comes down to the sheer extent of differences in the ways in which people relate to their environment. For any way that we think people do things, anthropologists can always find some people who do things differently. Architecture can probably gain quite a lot from looking at anthropological work on bodily practices in mundane activities like sleeping, cooking, eating, going to the shops. What do walking, weaving, observing, storytelling, singing, drawing and writing have in common? The answer is that they all proceed along lines. In this extraordinary book Tim Ingold imagines a world in which everyone and everything consists of interwoven or interconnected lines and lays the foundations for a completely new discipline: the anthropological archaeology of the line. This project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board, was undertaken in conjunction with the School of Fine Art at the University of Dundee. The project combines approaches from fine art and anthropology to examine the relation between perception, creativity, innovation and skill, through an empirical study of the knowledge practices of fine art. The research has also explored the potential of a practice-based approach to teaching and learning in both disciplines. Momoyo Kaijima: With this ARCH+ issue, entitled Architectural Ethnography, we are trying to understand what kind of drawing methods, techniques, and practices are developing around us when observing the world. Your main interest is not primarily in drawing, but in the line itself, which can also be a script, a text… Andreas Kalpakci: How does this difference between anthropology and ethnography relate to drawing? Because on the one hand you say that anthropology has a speculative dimension, but on the other hand, as anthropology relies on ethnography, there is also a documentary dimension.

Culture from the ground: walking, movement and placemaking (2004-2006). See http://www.abdn.ac.uk/anthropology/walking.php Ingold’s argument leads us through the music of Ancient Greece and contemporary Japan, Siberian labyrinths and Roman roads, Chinese calligraphy and the printed alphabet, weaving a path between antiquity and the present.Through a reconsideration of toolmaking and speech as criteria of human distinctiveness, Ingold became interested in the connection, in human evolution, between language and technology. With Kathleen Gibson, he organised an international conference on this theme in 1990, and the resulting volume, edited by Gibson and Ingold ('Tools, language and cognition in human evolution'), was published in 1993. Since then, Ingold has sought ways of bringing together the anthropologies of technology and art, leading to his current view of the centrality of skilled practice. At the same time he has continued his research and teaching in ecological anthropology and, influenced by the work of James Gibson on perceptual systems, has been exploring ways of integrating ecological approaches in anthropology and psychology. In his recent work, linking the themes of environmental perception and skilled practice, Ingold has attempted to replace traditional models of genetic and cultural transmission, founded upon the alliance of neo-Darwinian biology and cognitive science, with a relational approach focusing on the growth of embodied skills of perception and action within social and environmental contexts of development. These ideas are presented in his book 'The Perception of the Environment' (2000), a collection of twenty-three essays written over the previous decade on the themes of livelihood, dwelling and skill. The answer is that they all proceed along lines. In this extraordinary book Tim Ingold imagines a world in which everyone and everything consists of interwoven or interconnected lines and lays the foundations for a completely new discipline: the anthropological archaeology of the line. TI: I am not sure what the line of the anthropologist is, because most anthropologists are not interested in lines. Personally, in my study of lines, I was much influenced by my reading of John Ruskin. Ruskin talked about a line as the way things are going. Imagine you want to sketch a mountain. John Ruskin (1819–1900), Aiguille de Blaitière, 1856. Drawing with watercolour. John Ruskin (1819–1900), Cormayeur, 1856. Drawing with watercolour.

AK: This distinction between the straight line of the Egyptian geometers and what you referred to as ‘abstract open-ended lines’ is very sharp in your work. If you look at the line of the architect and the line of the anthropologist, what would you say is the difference there? Learning is understanding in practice: exploring the relations between perception, creativity and skill (2002-2005). See http://www.abdn.ac.uk/creativityandpractice/

Research Overview

In the third part, Ingold carries the line into the domain of human life. He shows that for life to continue, the things we do must be framed within the lives we undergo. In continually answering to one another, these lives enact a principle of correspondence that is fundamentally social. AK: I think this is a very good point, which brings us to the distinction between a plan and a drawing. If we were to look at a drawing as composed by lines, what would be the peculiar quality of such a drawing that plans do not have?

For these alternative depictions of the fish, respectively as abstract line and profile, see Tim Ingold, ‘Introduction’, in Redrawing Anthropology: Materials, Movements, Lines, ed. Tim Ingold, (Ashgate: Farnham, 2011), pp. 1, 18. Ingold's argument leads us through the music of Ancient Greece and contemporary Japan, Siberian labyrinths and Roman roads, Chinese calligraphy and the printed alphabet, weaving a path between antiquity and the present. TI: Absolutely, there are different kinds of lines. And for that reason, people often use the word ‘line’, in one sense, for something that in another sense wouldn’t be a line at all. The most obvious example is the dotted line. If you think of a line as a succession of points, then the row of dots counts as a line, but if you think of it as the trace of a continuous movement, then it doesn’t. It is just dots. So, here I think we need to distinguish between the sort of line that is growing and moving, that doesn’t have a terminal point, and the sort of line that is straightforwardly geometrical and that connects points. Architectural drawing is quite interesting, because when architects are drawing as they think, these lines are very open-ended, they are sketch-like. But at some point, the sketch has to give way to a specification drawing that you would give to a construction company, and that even has legal force. These two kinds of line are quite different, giving rise to the problem of how you translate from one to the other. Again, movement is seen as a primary element in perception and cognition so that we see along a path of perception rather than a single still point of view and our knowledge of our surroundings comes from our moving through them. In fact our movement and the lines we leave and follow are so bound up with us that the traveller and their lines can be said to be one and the same thing. The story of this journey does not tell of objects, or things discovered but rather different topics, which are in themselves further bundles and entanglements of lines. Just as we are equivalent to our lines so the story walks just like a human or animal.

Biography

For the contrast between painting and drawing and for its anthropological correlates, see Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays in Movement, Knowledge and Description, (Routledge: Abingdon, 2011), pp. 220-222. Het vergelijken van het denken in de pre-moderne tijd met het bewandelen van een pad ('wayfaring') zonder dat er echt een einde aan het pad is, is een toevoeging van Ingold - en het grootste deel van het boek gaat ook hierover - en het is wellicht zijn wens om dit weer terug te krijgen (zowel in het denken als het doen), als een 'topisch' denken van Olwig dus, en dat is m.i. de meerwaarde van het boek. Helaas zit er veel vaags en wat mij betreft onnodigs omheen gedrapeerd, waardoor deze boodschap teveel ondergesneeuwd raakt. Ingold’s eventual incorporation of anthropological examples from eastern Peru is really where we begin to see a master at work – Ingold intimately understands the data and interpretation flows in an engaging way ... this is a vibrant read – at times when reading I shouted aloud, ‘Yes spot on!’ at other times I paced the room and exclaimed in frustration ‘No!’. That Ingold’s writing can produce such dramatic effects is a testament to the quality of his argument. Do I recommend reading this book? Definitely.’– Cambridge Archaeological Journal

anthropography, n’, OED Online, (Oxford University Press: September 2019) accessed November 16, 2019. TI: I think this problem is present in all design disciplines: designers are saying, ‘we don’t really like this idea of laying down a plan that people have to conform to. We want to allow people to be generative and have a lot of movement in a space, and we want to accept whatever emerges out of this collective dynamic.’ But then what do the designers do? Do they set down some basic parameters within which there is a lot of flexibility? Or do they give people some instructions and say: ‘now off you go and do this!’ It’s not clear what the real solution should be. As alluded to in the quote on the book's cover, it is difficult to see the world the same way after reading this book. And that may be the larger meaning to take away: as Ingold (Univ. of Aberdeen) shows, earlier conceptions of speech and writing were intimately interconnected with movement, and as wayfarers journey through the world, neither they nor the book's reader are the same as when they started… Highly recommended." Ingold's argument leads us through the music of Ancient Greece and contemporary Japan, Siberian labyrinths and Roman roads, Chinese calligraphy and the printed alphabet, weaving a path between antiquity and the present. Drawing on a multitude of disciplines including archaeology, classical studies, art history, linguistics, psychology, musicology, philosophy and many others, and including more than seventy illustrations, this book takes us on an exhilarating intellectual journey that will change the way we look at the world and how we go about in it.

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Ingold’s eventual incorporation of anthropological examples from eastern Peru is really where we begin to see a master at work – Ingold intimately understands the data and interpretation flows in an engaging way … this is a vibrant read – at times when reading I shouted aloud, ‘Yes spot on!’ at other times I paced the room and exclaimed in frustration ‘No!’. That Ingold’s writing can produce such dramatic effects is a testament to the quality of his argument. Do I recommend reading this book? Definitely.’ To live, every being must put out a line, and in life these lines tangle with one another. This book is a study of the life of lines. Following on from Tim Ingold's groundbreaking work Lines: A Brief History, it offers a wholly original series of meditations on life, ground, weather, walking, imagination and what it means to be human. MK: For all of these reasons the word ethnography is still problematic. Although the ‘ethno-’ in ethnography means ‘people’, it carries with it quite a narrow understanding. Likewise, architecture can sometimes be very narrow and rigid, but what we are interested in, is how it makes spaces for people.