Tim Ingold

Question 1

What’s the difference between philosophers and anthropologists?

Answer 1

The difference between philosophers and anthropologists: philosophers are reclusive souls, more inclined to turn inwards into a studious interrogation of the canonical texts of thinkers like themselves (dead white men), than to engage directly with the messy realities of ordinary life. Anthropologists do their philosophizing in the world. They study through a deep involvement in observation, conversation and participatory practice, with the people among whom they choose to work.

Anthropology is philosophy with the people in.

Question 2

What is the Anthropocene?

Answer 2

An era where the Human industry, above all the burning of fossil fuels on a massive scale, is affecting the world’s climate, increasing the probability of potentially catastrophic events, and in many regions shortages of water and other necessities of life have sparked genocidal conflicts. The world is in the grip of a system of production, distribution and consumption that enriches a few and leaves countless others condemned to chronic insecurity, poverty and disease.

Question 3

Why is Anthropology important in the Anthropocene?

Answer 3

It helps answers questions like: how should we live now? What could make life sustainable, not for some to the exclusion of others, but for everyone?

A kind of anthropology that does not aim at interpret or explain ways of others, not to put them in their place or consign them to the “already understood”, but rather to share in their presence, to learn from their experiments in living, and to bring this experience to bear on our own imaginings of what human life could be like, its future condition and possibilities.

Question 4

Knowledge vs wisdom

Answer 4

knowledge is power and control. The more we hide behind knowledge the less attention we pay to our surroundings (why bother to attend when we already know?). To be wise, on the contrary, is to venture out into the world and take the risk of exposure to what is going on there. To let others into our presence, to pay attention and to care. Knowledge fixes and puts minds at rest. Wisdom unfixes and insettles.

It is the task of anthropology to restore a balance between the knowledge offered by science and the wisdom gained by experience and imagination.

Question 5

What is participant obsevation?

Answer 5

A way of studying with people, it is not about writing about other lives, but about joining with them in the common task of finding ways to live. Here lies the difference between ethnography and anthropology. For the anthropologist, participant observation is NOT a method of data collection, it is rather a commitment to learning by doing, comparable to that of the apprentice or student. The overriding purpose of anthropology is not ethnographic but educational.

Question 6

What does epistemological mean?

Answer 6

Questions of knowing. Relating to the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope, and the distinction between justified belief and opinion. (Philosophy)

Question 7

What does ontological mean?

Answer 7

Questions of being. Relating to the branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being. In anthropology, this understanding of the being and becoming of things is known as animism. Regarded as a poetics of life that betters even science in its comprehension of the fullest of existence.

Question 8

Nature vs culture

Answer 8

Nature represents the essential qualities that things of a certain kind have in common, qualities that are thought to be fixed from the outset, stable and unchanging. What is natural to things is therefore also considered to be universal and innate.

Culture has ever been a mark of distinction or particularity. With its roots in the idea of cultivation or the particular qualities that are not so much given from the start, but that are developed or acquired. Where nature is fixed,culture is subject to growth, variation and historical change. Culture, it seems, is a pattern of the mind.

The human being is one thing (nature), being human is another (culture).

Question 9

How can anthropologists go beyond the idea of humanity?

Answer 9

To do so, the first step is to take nature and culture not as answers but as questions:

• Question of nature: in what respects are humans similar? What leads them to do things in much the same way?
• Questions of culture: in what respects do humans vary? Why do they do things differently?

Question 10

What is ontogenesis?

Answer 10

The development of an individual organism or anatomical or behavioural feature from the earliest stage to maturity.

Question 11

In what way, according to Ingold, life is a movement not of closure but of opening?

Answer 11

What Tim ingold argues is exactly the opposite: life is a movement not of closure but of opening, which continually overtakes any ends that might be placed before it. Our equipment for life is not ready-made, but continually forged in the crucible of activities conducted with or alongside others.
Each of us, launched into this world of continuous variation, has no alternative but to carry on from then and there, cutting a course which is ever converging with and diverging from the lifeways of others. Convergence and divergence proceed hand in hand for the duration of the life cycle, thus we are no more different from one another, as we approach the end of life, than we were the same when we were born.

Question 12

What is the meaning of community?

Answer 12

Community, from the Latin “com” together plus “munus” gift, means not just living together but giving together. We belong to communities because each of us, being different, has something to give. Identity in community is thus fundamentally relational: who we are is an index of where we find ourselves, at any moment, in the give and take of the collective life.

Question 13

What are the two approaches to identity?

Answer 13

Identity for a citizen, however, is not about belonging to others, to community or place. It is rather an attribute that belongs to you, a right or possession that you own and that can be stolen.

The contrast between the relational and attributional aspects of identity tends to emerge whenever the community feels itself under threat from the power of the state. “We” then transforms into “people like us” in opposition to “people like them”, which brings about the phenomenon of ethnicity.

A relational approach to identity opens up a radically non-oppositional understanding of what we could mean, an understanding that would allow us, at long last, to escape the self-perpetuating polarization of the West and the rest, and indeed of humanity and nature. It neither includes, nor excludes, it spreads. It is a search for a common ground, not the defense of existing heritage.

Question 14

What’s Ingold’s view on differentiation?

Answer 14

We cannot think of human differences as added on, thanks to environmental experience, to a baseline of universals that we have in common from the start. Human life is not a passage from uniformity to diversity, or from nature to culture. Differentiation is there from the start.
Learning to speak, for example, is learning to speak in the way of one’s people. It is not to add one layer of linguistic particulars onto another of pre-established universals. People learn to walk in many different ways, depending on the quality of the ground, the composition of the footwear, and variable expectations of what is proper for persons of different age, gender and status.
The fashioning of human beings in the carrying on of life is a never-ending task, we are forever creating ourselves and one another. This process of collective self-fashioning is called history. We make ourselves historically by establishing, in the things we do, the conditions under which generations to follow will grow to maturity. As these conditions change, so do we.

Question 15

What is the capacity for culture?

Answer 15

The capacity of culture: explains how even though forms of human life may vary virtually without limit, the capacity to acquire these forms is common to all. Humans are naturally pre-programmed to acquire the culture of the community into which they are born, just as they are to acquire its language. Unlike other animals that know instinctively how to do things, humans have to learn.

Question 16

Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus

Answer 16

placed human beings under the genus Homo, in the order of Primates, within a scheme of classification that encompassed the entire animal kingdom. The only way to tell humans apart, Linnaeus concluded, is to ask them. This is because humans have been endowed with the gift of reason and intellect, or with a mind.

Question 17

Robert Fitzroy

Answer 17

Commander of HMS Beagle, he took with him a group of natives from Tierra del Fuego, educated them and made them into “civilized” men. On the return trip, Darwin, who had met only the “refined” natives, was shocked to see how natives lived and behaved in Tierra del Fuego.

Question 18

The Descent of Men

Answer 18

The Descent of Men, published in 1871 by Darwin, extends to humankind the principles he set forth in his earlier work On the Origin of Species. The Descent of Men was above all about the progress of the mind, without regard to specific environmental conditions, from its most elementary manifestations in the lowliest of animals to its heights in human civilization. He was convinced that intelligence was not limited to humans, but traversed the entire animal kingdom. Darwin was not downgrading humans so much as upgrading animals.

Question 19

Thomas Henry Huxley

Answer 19

zoologist and paleontologist, in an essay on Man’s place in nature, published in 1863, declared not only that no absolute line of demarcation separates ourselves from other animals, but also that what goes for physical characteristics goes as well for mental ones. In his metaphor, civilization has sprung from bestial origins as surely as Alpine peaks are raised up from the mud of ancient seas.

Question 20

Natural selection

Answer 20

The more intelligent would always emerge victorious, and over time intelligence-enhancing variations would tend to be preserved, ratcheting up across the generations so as to bring about general advance. This argument would only work if the variations in question are heritable and in that sense innate.

Question 21

Adolf Bastian

Answer 21

German polymath: the psychic unity of mankind. According to this doctrine all human beings are equally and universally endowed with the faculty of mind, differing from nation to nation only in the extent of its cultivation. Savage, barbarous and civilized nations represented successive stages of advance: introductory, intermediate and advanced.

Question 22

Eugenics movement

Answer 22

Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin, was instrumental to founding the eugenics movement, dedicated to the artificial improvement of the human race through controlled selective breeding.
The Descent of Men provided a convenient narrative, apparently backed by scientific authority which at once accounted for the entitlement of people of European descent to inherit the earth, and justified the adventures of colonization and genocide wreaked upon populations beyond the continent. A narrative that would condense around the single word of evolutionism.

Question 23

Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland

Answer 23

was founded in 1871 and had this three-field make-up of anthropology in its constitution. The idea was that anatomical types, artifactual assembrages and institutional forms could eventually be integrated into an overarching typological sequence, running from most primitive to most advanced.

Question 24

Robert Reid

Answer 24

professor of Anatomy at the university of Aberdeen, in Scotland, and founding curator of the University’s museum of anthropology, measured up and classified everyone he could find in the name of anthropology. He studied the relation between head size and intelligence.

Question 25

Sir Arthur Keith

Answer 25

ne-time president of the Royal Anthropological Institute and Rector of the University of Aberdeen, was among the most established scientific figures of his day. In his rectorial address in 1931, he scorned the idea that the nations of the world could ever be united in brotherhood. Prejudice and xenophobia, he argued, work for the good of mankind. Loyalty to one’s own race and hatred of others constitute the very engine of evolutionary progress. The war of races, Keith declared, is Nature’s pruning hook.

Question 26

Anthropology after WWII and the Holocaust

Answer 26

The three-field approach remained present in a handful of universities, like Cambridge. While physical anthropology and archeology were still clinging to an evolutionary approach, however, social anthropology had unequivocally rejected it. For the first two branches, most of the evidence lies underground in the form of fossilized remains, ancient burials and lithic deposits. Social anthropologists, however, faced a problem: customs and institutions do not preserve like bones and stones. The only solution was to assume that all social evolution passes through the same stages. Following this assumption, the lifeways of peoples deemed to be “primitive” could be seen to offer a window on the earlier social condition of humans in general. Their present becomes the model of our past.

Question 27

Functionalism

Answer 27

According to functionalists, a tool or technique only has meaning as it is used in the context of an ongoing way of life. What are the tools without the skills to use them? The rise of functionalism led social anthropology to split off from archeology and physical anthropology.

Question 28

inheritance of acquired characteristics

Answer 28

Its implications were that race and culture, biological heredity and the heritage of tradition, had to be kept strictly separate. It became part of anthropological orthodoxy to declare that any child born of man and woman, whatever their biological ancestry, could just as readily acquire one form of cultural life as another.

One could therefore study the biological variation of humankind or the cultural variation, but these were separate enterprises that had nothing whatsoever to do with one another.

Question 29

Alfred Kroeger

Answer 29

In 1917 Alfed Kroeber, leading American anthropologist of the day, published “The superorganic”. In it, he spelled out the terms of a settlement between race and culture that would remain virtually intact for the rest of the century. Culture bears no more relation to heredity than a text to the tablet it is written on. It belongs to a realm of its own, over and above the organic. Kroever’s focus was on culture, not society.

Question 30

Anthropology in GB vs USA

Answer 30

Difference came down to whether one’s concern was with the ways people relate to one another in the conduct of social life, or with the traditions of knowledge and belief they carry with them and pass onto their descendants. The former is social anthropology (Britain), the second is cultural anthropology (America), considered an offshoot of what was then called ethnology.

German Romanticism is what contributed to render American Cultural Anthropology so different from British social Anthropology, which remained wedded to ideas from the French and Scottish Enlightenment with its stress on civility, rationality and the transcendence of nature.

Furthermore, Britain had its empire and turned to Anthropology for guidance on native social institutions to help the administration of colonial policy. America, by contrast, had its native populations, and needed anthropology to record ways of life fast disappearing.

Question 31

Franz Boas

Answer 31

Father of American cultural anthropology, Franz Boas, emigrated to the United States in 1887 (originally German). He believed that where racial variation is inscribed in the body, cultural variation is inscribed in the mind. Received as heritage rather than heredity, culture for Boas amounted to a legacy of tradition, passively absorbed rather than actively cultivated, which would shape the belief and practice of a people.

Question 32

Anthropology in the 70s

Answer 32

The three fields of anthropology in Britain split up: physical anthropology joined evolutionary biology; prehistoric archeology joined classical archeology as a discipline on its own; social anthropology joined the social sciences.

In America, anthropology had four fields: cultura, archeological, biological and linguistic. But here too, archeology became its own thing, linguistic anthropology remained a minor field, while biological anthropology and cultural anthropology were barely on speaking terms.

Question 33

Radcliffe Brown

Answer 33

Radcliffe-Brown was the person who launched the field of social anthropology as a branch of sociology distinguished by its attention to primitive societies. Social anthropology, then, was conceived as the comparative study of the forms of life to be found in such societies. With a naturalist’s approach, Radcliffe-Brown linked these forms to those of seashells: they can be compared and classified into species and genera, yet their fundamental forms appear to be limited. Is it the same for social forms? Might there only be a limited number of ways in which institutions could be assembled into a well-functioning society? He used systematic comparative analysis comparing small-scale societies rather than large-scale societies studied by sociologists.

Question 34

Societies not as entities but as processes

Answer 34

Edmund Leach, author of Runaway World?, had a background in engineering and was inclined to compare the workings of society to the operation of a mechanism, more than to its functioning. He used the drawing board instead of real life observations. All human life and history, according to Leach, can be understood as an exploration of the infinite space of possibilities opened up by combining the different settings or values of a finite set of variables. This type of anthropological reasoning is called structuralism.

Claude Lévi-Strauss first introduced structuralism in France, Leach made it popular in Great Britain.

Question 35

Evolutionary, functionalist, and structuralist paradigms

Answer 35

Thomas Kuhn, philosopher, coined the term “paradigm” to denote the set of founding principles that, at any moment in the history of a discipline, constrain the questions it can ask and the means by which to resolve them.

Anthropology came of age within an evolutionary paradigm, its leading question was: how do human beings, their artefacts and institutions evolve?
This was overcome in social anthropology by the paradigm of functionalism and the question became: how do institutions work?

Within the paradigm of structuralism, the question changed again: how do the things people say and do mean? For structuralism, social life is enacted in communication, in the meaningful exchange of signs and symbols. How signs and symbols can convey meaning. For the answers, they turned to the discipline of linguistics.

The smallest units in language, phonemes or letters, although without meaning in themselves, enable speakers to distinguish one meaningful word from another. It is because of these distinctions and not in spite of them that each word comes to mean what it does.

Question 36

Transactionalist anthropology

Answer 36

Transactionalists, on the other hand, argued that individual human beings with values to pursue and limited resources to do so, chose at every turn to interact with one another only to secure the best strategic advantage. Theorists of this persuasion argued that forms of social organization are generated, and can be explained, as the aggregate outcome of these myriad interactions, in each of which values of different kinds would be transacted. Leading advocate of this was Fredrik Barth, Norwegian anthropologist.

Question 37

Structural Marxism

Answer 37

In the 1970s, in concert with budding political and intellectual movements in Europe, anthropology had rediscovered the philosophical work of Karl Marx, combining it with structuralism to form a hybrid strain called structural Marxism. There can be no social structures without people to enact them and there can be no people without the production of the necessities for life. This calls for a more practical engagement with the environment. But no environment tells people what to do, for human beings the intentions that drive the production of livelihood come from society.

Question 38

Lévi Strauss

Answer 38

Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure in a series of lectures at the University of Geneva (1906-1911), argued that words mean what they do because of the way in which one system of contrasts, on the level of words, is mapped onto another, on the level of meaning.

Lévi-Strauss applied the same logic in a famous work on totemism, a term that describes the intimate bonds that in many societies are felt to exist between particular social groups and particular natural kinds. The “words” are species in nature, and their meanings are groups in society, and the totemic connection between a particular species and a certain group comes from mapping the differences between species onto the differences between groups. In this way nature provides its own language, a set of concrete terms with which to represent the structure of society.

Lévi-Strauss also applied to the social world a method developed by the Russian-American linguist Roman Jakobson for analysing the phonemes of any language as specific combinations of distinctive features, selected by that language from a limited number of features available to all humans. According to Lévi-Strauss the same kind of distinctive feature analysis could work not only for the exchange of words, but also for the exchange of gifts and commodities in economic life, and for the exchange of persons in forging relations of kinship and affinity. Therefore, every society that exists represents just one of countless combinational possibilities, all underwritten by the architecture and generative potential of a universal human mind.