Explore the vast range of titles available.

Making creates knowledge, builds environments and transforms lives. Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture are all ways of making, and all are dedicated to exploring the conditions and potentials of human life. In this exciting book, Tim Ingold ties the four disciplines together in a way that has never been attempted before. In a radical departure from conventional studies that treat art and architecture as compendia of objects for analysis, Ingold proposes an anthropology and archaeology not of but with art and architecture. He advocates a way of thinking through making in which sentient practitioners and active materials continually answer to, or 'correspond', with one another in the generation of form. Making offers a series of profound reflections on what it means to create things, on materials and form, the meaning of design, landscape perception, animate life, personal knowledge and the work of the hand. It draws on examples and experiments ranging from prehistoric stone tool-making to the building of medieval cathedrals, from round mounds to monuments, from flying kites to winding string, from drawing to writing. The book will appeal to students and practitioners alike, with interests in social and cultural anthropology, archaeology, architecture, art and design, visual studies and material culture.

In this article I offer an overture to social life, starting from the premise that every living being should be envisaged not as a blob but as a bundle of lines. I show that in joining with one another, these lines comprise a meshwork, in which every node is a knot. And in answering to one another, lifelines co-respond. I propose the term 'correspondence' to connote their affiliation, and go on to show that correspondence rests on three essential principles: of habit (rather than volition), 'agencing' (rather than agency), and attentionality (rather than intentionality). I explain habit as 'doing undergoing', agencing as a process in which the \"I\" emerges as a question, and attention as a resonant coupling of concurrent movements. I discuss the ethical and imaginative dimensions of correspondence under the respective rubrics of care and longing. Finally, I spell out the implications of a theory of correspondence for the way we approach classic themes of anthropological inquiry, including kinship and affinity, ecology and economy, ritual and religion, and politics and law. In a coda, I suggest that anthropology, too, must be a discipline of correspondence. L'auteur propose dans cet article une ouverture sur la vie sociale, partant du principe que tout être vivant doit être envisagé non pas comme une masse mais comme un faisceau de lignes. Il montre qu'en se rejoignant, ces lignes composent un maillage, avec un noeud à chaque croisement. En se répondant, les lignes de vie correspondent (« co-répondent »). Il propose ce terme de « correspondance » pour décrire leur lien et partant de là, il montre que cette correspondance se fonde sur trois principes essentiels : habitude (plutôt que volonté), « agencement » (plutôt qu'agencéité) et « attentionnalité » (plutôt qu'intentionnalité). Il explique l'habitude comme le fait de « faire ce qu'on subit », l'agencement comme le processus dans lequel « je » émerge comme une question, et l'attention comme un couplage résonant de mouvements concomitants. Il aborde des dimensions éthiques et imaginatives de la correspondance dans les rubriques respectives des soins et de la nostalgie. Enfin, il énonce les implications d'une théorie de la correspondance sur la manière dont nous abordons les thèmes classiques du questionnement anthropologique : parenté et affinité, écologie et économie, rituel et religion, politique et lois. En post-scriptum, il suggère que l'anthropologie doit, elle aussi, être une discipline de la correspondance.

Both material culture studies and ecological anthropology are concerned with the material conditions of social and cultural life. Yet despite advances in each of these fields that have eroded traditional divisions between humanistic and science-based approaches, their respective practitioners continue to talk past one another in largely incommensurate theoretical languages. This review of recent trends in the study of material culture finds the reasons for this in ( a ) a conception of the material world and the nonhuman that leaves no space for living organisms, ( b ) an emphasis on materiality that prioritizes finished artifacts over the properties of materials, and ( c ) a conflation of things with objects that stops up the flows of energy and circulations of materials on which life depends. To overcome these limitations, the review proposes an ecology of materials that focuses on their enrollment in form-making processes. It concludes with some observations on materials, mind, and time.

This essay investigates the relation between becoming knowledgeable, walking along, and the experience of weather. It begins by exploring the meaning of ground. Far from being uniform, homogeneous, and pre-prepared, the ground is variegated, composite, and undergoes continuous generation. Moreover, it is apprehended in movement rather than from fixed points. Making their way along the ground, people create paths and tracks. These are made, however, through the impression of footprints rather than gestural inscription. As footprints are made in soft ground rather than stamped on a hard surface, their temporality is bound to the dynamics of its formation. These dynamics are a function of the weather, and of reactions across the interface between earth and air. Breathing with every step they take, wayfarers walk at once in the air and on the ground. This walking is itself a process of thinking and knowing. Thus knowledge is formed along paths of movement in the weather-world. Le présent essai étudie la relation entre l'acquisition de connaissances, la déambulation et la perception du temps qu'il fait. Pour commencer, il explore la signification du sol. Loin d'être uniforme, homogène et préparé, le sol est divers, composite et en recréation constante. Il est en outre appréhendé en mouvement plutôt qu'à partir de points fixes. En marchant sur le sol, les gens créent des pistes et des chemins. Ceux-ci sont produits par des traces de pas plutôt que par un geste d'inscription. Dès lors que ces empreintes s'inscrivent dans un sol meuble au lieu d'être imprimées sur une surface dure, leur temporalité est liée à la dynamique de leur formation, qui dépend elle-même du temps qu'il fait et des réactions à l'interface entre la terre et l'air. En respirant à chaque pas, les marcheurs déambulent à la fois dans l'air et sur terre. Marcher est donc en soi un processus de réflexion et de connaissance. C'est ainsi que le savoir naît le long des chemins de déplacement traversant le monde des éléments.

This article seeks to reverse the emphasis, in current studies of material culture, on the materiality of objects as against the properties of materials. Drawing on James Gibson's tripartite division of the inhabited environment into medium, substances and surfaces, it is argued that the forms of things are not imposed from without upon an inert substrate of matter, but are continually generated and dissolved within the fluxes of materials across the interface between substances and the medium that surrounds them. Thus things are active not because they are imbued with agency but because of ways in which they are caught up in these currents of the lifeworld. The properties of materials, then, are not fixed attributes of matter but are processual and relational. To describe these properties means telling their stories.

Knowledge comes from thinking with, from and through things, not just about them. We get to know the world around us from the inside of our being in it. Drawing on the fields of anthropology, art, architecture and education, this book addresses what knowing from the inside means for practices of teaching and learning. If knowledge is not transmitted ready-made, independently of its application in the world, but grows from the crucible of our engagements with people, places and materials, then how can there be such a thing as a curriculum? What forms could it take? And what could it mean to place such disciplines as anthropology, art and architecture at the heart of the curriculum rather than – as at present – on the margins? In addressing these questions, the 14 distinguished contributors to this volume challenge mainstream thinking about education and the curriculum, and suggest experimental ways to overcome the stultifying effects of current pedagogic practice.

Making and Growing brings together the latest work in the fields of anthropology and material culture studies to explore the differences - and the relation - between making things and growing things, and between things that are made and things that grow. Though the former are often regarded as artefacts and the latter as organisms, the book calls this distinction into question, examining the implications for our understanding of materials, design and creativity.