Re-injecting Anthropology With Fresh Purpose

I stumbled on this book in the manner in which one stumbles on other stuff these days: partly offline, partly online. Perhaps, one could call it “hybrid”, to borrow a word that is typically used in other contexts. The work comprises a series of interviews with Timothy Ingold, an emeritus professor at the University of Aberdeen, conducted by other anthropologists and scholars, who are captivated by his vast inventiveness. Ingold’s approach maybe the kind of rejuvenation the field needs at a time when the planet is beset with a host of new issues.

In one interview, he even said: “[In] Britain, I feel that I’ve gone in one direction and, by and large, anthropology has gone in another direction. I often wonder whether I am an anthropologist any more…I don’t worry about it too much, because I just do what I do and let other people decide whether I’m an anthropologist or not.” Given his broad interests, these conversations often extend beyond anthropology. Like his papers and books, they drift into education, ecology, psychology, the sciences, arts and humanities.

He is expectedly attuned to the field’s problematic colonial past. Yet, he thinks the field must endure, though anthropologists may need to clarify what and how they can contribute to the current environment. Some of the confusion might stem from a certain befuddlement on the part of its practitioners: “…we have been less than clear in our own minds about the purpose of anthropology in today’s world.”

Getting back then to the fundamental question of “Why Anthropology?”, Ingold suggests that every way of life is “an experiment in how to live.” We study other people, he says, in order to learn from them. It’s about educating ourselves, not merely about documenting or describing the exoticized “other.” But in order to widen impact, “teaching is an essential part of doing anthropology.” On imbibing ideas from fieldwork, we are obligated to transmit them to students or readers. “To teach is to bring students along with you, as fellow travelers, on a journey of intellectual discovery which you undertake together.”

His own fieldwork for his doctoral thesis was conducted in the 1970s, among the Skolt Sami, an indigenous people in Finland. Insisting since then that anthropologists “study with people, rather than making studies of them,” he has donated his field diaries to the community. He believes his notes can be of value to current generations who wish to comprehend what their past was like, from the perspective of a curious outsider who lived in their midst.

Ingold’s Childhood and Schooling

Born in 1948, in the small town of Sevenoaks in Kent, England, Ingold was the son of a botanist and a geologist. His mother, though trained in geology, largely became a homemaker, raising Tim and his three older sisters.

At 11, he was dispatched to a boarding school, where he was bullied and miserable. Though his school life wasn’t halcyonic, his home environment – experienced in interludes – seemed to make up for it.

His parents certainly left an imprint. His father with his inquisitiveness and discipline, his mother with her anchoring, stable presence. As a mycologist, his botanist father focused on fungi. Tim watched him accompany students into the woods, to observe fungi floating on dead leaves or broken branches or tree debris in rivers and streams. His father obsessed with “aquatic hyphomycetes”, tiny stuff that could only be examined with a microscope. Every day he would excitedly dash out, collect brackish water, then return to spend hours studying his samples. Ingold says, “As a child, watching him at work, I must have absorbed a certain attitude towards lines and drawing, and towards the curiously reticular nature of fungi.”

Discovering His Passion at Cambridge

Entering University to do science, he hated his first year at Cambridge. The professors were appalling. Nobel Prize winners would scribble esoteric stuff on blackboards, without bothering to engage with students. Moreover, with the Vietnam War raging, science and scientists felt pointless, implicated as they were in the “military-industrial complex.” When a professor suggested he read “Political Leadership Among Swat Pathans,“ he was completely taken in by Fredrik Barth’s work on the Pashtun in Afghanistan. He resolved to major in anthropology. And opted to do his fieldwork in Lapland, Finland.

Disregarding Academic Fashions

He studied Finnish to do his fieldwork, from his future wife Anna. He wishes he had learned Sami too, but it felt difficult and confusing to study two related languages at once. He also focused his fieldwork mainly on the social organization of the Skolt Sami – not so much on their myths, rituals and poetry. For that he would have needed greater mastery over their language.

His first stint on the field lasted 16 months, in 1971-72. The Sami were few in number and dispersed over a large area. He was often lonely and bored during this period. Over his career, he wasn’t one to return to fieldwork again and again. He was honestly quite glad to be done with it. But he says that his later interest in lines, atmospheres and landscapes might have been inspired by his fieldwork. The place had seeped into him at a deep level, and would affect his worldview and sense of place forever.

He was to later feel that he had not evoked the place – with its glittering snows, icy lakes and brutal winters – adequately in his thesis. But he avers that fieldwork is important because it changes researchers and the way they think about their worlds. “You cannot inhabit this kind of landscape without beginning to think of life as something that happens along pathways.”

Remaking Anthropology Inside the Academy

Tim entered the job market when it was thriving. Landing options at Manchester and UCL, he chose the former. He says colleagues who waited or lingered on fieldwork, had it much harder, when positions shrunk inside the academy. Manchester was riddled with politics. It took him sometime to unravel who was related to whom, and who hated whom. Moreover, his fieldwork wasn’t trendy. It wasn’t accorded the weightage of studies done in Africa, India or the Middle East. Reindeer herders in Lapland did not feel like a worthwhile topic to many.

Though he spent many years at Manchester, riding out the department’s highs and lows, he also focused on his own writing and ongoing intellectual journey. One book he wrote, Evolution and Social Life, “sank like a lump of lead,” panned by critics and others. After being a successful Head of Department at Manchester, he moved to the University of Aberdeen, where he was tasked with setting up the Anthropology Department from scratch. An endeavor he pulled off by turning a lot of common wisdom on its head: by building out its post-graduate program before filling it with undergraduates, by broadening its intellectual thrust, exploring creative intersections rather than working in dull silos.

A Dip Into His Ideas

Ingold consciously writes in a clear and accessible manner, rather than in “scholarly gobbledygook” in order to break down barriers between academics and the lay public. In The Life of Lines, he studies organisms (including people) as lines. He also reflects on the weather, but not as a meteorologist or artist might. He links walking and learning, both being tenuous journeys. The book progresses from knots and knotting, to lines and the weather, and finally to education and walking. If we start with the premise that every individual is “a line or, better, a bundle of lines”, the way in which we tangle up with others leads to what he calls “meshwork.” In The Rise and Fall of Generation Now Ingold suggests that we should look at generations being intertwined rather than stacked in layers.

Contending with difference has to extend beyond cultural diversity. It’s also about becoming different, embracing fluidity and differences in oneself. When you conduct fieldwork, you remember what folks told you and you ask more questions. This is how ethnographic encounters are different from ordinary encounters. Then you go back home and write up your report and that’s where it can become problematic. When you’re making notes in the field, it’s prospective. But when you’re typing up your conclusions, it’s retrospective. He feels the term “ethnography” which means “writing about the people,” ought to be retired in an age when it really should be “writing with the people.”

On education, he has been influenced by theorists like Gert Biesta and Jan Masschelein. They advocate for a ‘weak’ or ‘poor’ pedagogy – as opposed to a ‘strong’ or ‘rich’ pedagogy. For Biesta, ‘weak’ pedagogy is a process of disarmament. For Masschelein, ‘poor’ pedagogy is a process of exposure. Rather than shoring up our knowledge to confront adversaries, “it strips our defenses away, leaving us so exposed that we can actually notice our fellow beings in the world, attend to them and learn from them.” Ingold believes that anthropology – unlike more theoretical fields like philosophy and political theory – gives students that kind of grounded exposure through fieldwork.

Regardless of how the field evolves in the future, walking with a compelling and provocative thinker like Ingold (you can also listen to interviews with him on YouTube) feels like a path worth treading on.

References

Tim Ingold, Robert Gibb, Philip Tonner and Diego Maria Malara, Conversations with Tim Ingold, Scottish Universities Press, 2024

http://aura.abdn.ac.uk/bitstream/2164/24520/2/Ingold_etal_Conversations_With_Tim_VoR.pdf