Being Alive

Tim Ingold is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. He is the author of many books, including Lines, Making, Imagining for Real and The Perception of the Environment.

'For three decades, Tim Ingold has been one of the most consistently exploratory and provocative voices in contemporary scholarship. This book leads us, in prose that is exactingly lucid and charged with poetic eloquence, on a journey through, amongst other things, Chinese calligraphy, line drawing, carpentry, kite flying, Australian Aboriginal painting, native Alaskan storytelling, web-spinning arachnids, the art of walking and, not least, the history of anthropology, none of which will ever look quite the same again! The work is at once a meditation on questions central to anthropology, art practice, human ecology and philosophy, a passionate rebuttal of reductionisms of all kinds, a celebration of creativity understood in the broadest possible sense and a humane and generous manual for living in a world of becoming.'Stuart McLean, University of Minnesota, USA"Simultaneously intimate and all-encompassing, Tim Ingold’s second landmark collection of essays explains how it feels to craft an existence between earth and sky, among plants and animals, across childhood and old age. A master of the form, Ingold shows how aliveness is the essential resource for an affirmative philosophy of life."Hayden Lorimer, University of Glasgow, UK"In these iconoclastic essays, Ingold breaks the dichotomies of likeness and difference to show that anthropology’s subject, and with it that of the human sciences more generally, is not constituted by polarities like that of space contra place, but by a movement along paths that compose a being that is as alive to the sentient world as this world is to its human inhabitants."Kenneth Olwig, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences

• Prologue: Anthropology comes to Life Part I: Clearing the Ground 2. Materials against Materiality 3. Culture on the Ground: The World Perceived Through the Feet 4. Walking the Plank: Meditations on a Process of Skill Part II: The Meshwork 5. Rethinking the animate, Reanimating Thought 6. Point, Line, Counterpoint: From Environment to Fluid Space 7. When ANT meets SPIDER: Social Theory for Arthropods Part III: Earth and Sky 8. The Shape of the Earth 9. Earth, Sky, Wind and Weather 10. Landscape or Weather-world? 11. Four Objections to the Concept of Soundscape Part IV: A Storied World 12. Against Space, Place, Movement, Knowledge 13. Stories Against Classification: Transport, Wayfaring and the Integration of Knowledge 14. Naming as Storytelling: speaking of animals among the Koyukon of Alaska Part V: Drawing Making Writing 15. Seven Variations on the Letter A 16. Ways of Mind-Walking: reading, writing, painting 17. The Textility of Making 18. Drawing Together: Doing, Observing, Describing Epilogue: Anthropology is not ethnography