From science to art and back again: the pendulum of an anthropologist

Tim Ingold

doi:10.1080/03080188.2018.1524234

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn this article, I look back over four decades of my career as a professional anthropologist, starting with an orientation that was heavily weighted towards the natural sciences, and ending in a project that seeks to integrate anthropology with the practices of art, architecture and design. This was also a period during which science increasingly lost its ecological bearings, while the arts increasingly gained them. Tracing the journey in my own teaching and research, I show how the literary reference points changed, from foundational texts in human and animal ecology, now largely forgotten, through attempts to marry the social and the ecological inspired by the Marxian revival, to contemporary writing on post-humanism and the conditions of the Anthropocene. For me this has been an Odyssey – a journey home – to the kind of science imbibed in childhood, as the son of a prominent mycologist. This was a science grounded in tacit wonder at the exquisite beauty of the natural world, and in silent gratitude for what we owe to this world for our existence. Today’s science, however, has turned wonder and gratitude into commodities. They no longer guide its practices, but are rather invoked to advertise its results. The goals of science are modelling, prediction and control. Is that why, more and more, we turn to art to rediscover the humility that science has lost?

Highlights

It is commonly supposed that anthropology is a centrifugal discipline that discharges its practitioners into fields as remote and far away as possible, in order that they may experience ways of life as different from their own as they could hope or expect to find
Ever since I embarked on my studies of the subject, anthropology has been about finding my way home
His was a homely science, involving walks along river banks where he would collect the scum that often accumulates in brackish pools, bringing it home in glass phials to be investigated under a microscope set up on our dining room table

Summary

Introduction

It is commonly supposed that anthropology is a centrifugal discipline that discharges its practitioners into fields as remote and far away as possible, in order that they may experience ways of life as different from their own as they could hope or expect to find. In the latter years of his life, my father used to rail against the way, in his view, biological science had lost touch with the reality of living organisms.

Results

Conclusion