Tim Ingold - Correspondences

19 Letter-line and strike-through Figure 32Four stills from Walk (strike through with pen) (2016) by Anna Macdonald: (a) at … Figure 33 Whooping Crane , from Birds of America (1827–38), by John James Audubon. (Courtes…

20 Cold blue steel Figure 34The contents of my pencil-case. Figure 35Lines written by Gerry Grams, on the colour ‘blue’. From Shauna McMullan, Someth … Figure 36 Something About a Word , by Shauna McMullan (2011). (Courtesy of the artist.)

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Tim Ingold

polity

Copyright © Tim Ingold 2021

The right of Tim Ingold to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Internal branch images: Insh1na/iStock

First published in 2021 by Polity Press

Polity Press

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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4412-7

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The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

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Over the years I have made a habit of composing letters. Unaddressed, they have entered my notebook in the form of responses to things I have come across which have roused my curiosity. These things, however, never ceased to prey on my mind, nor did I cease to ponder them. It is as if we had embarked on a kind of correspondence. In this book, I open a collection of such curious correspondences. Nearly all began, for me, during the past decade, and most within the five years between 2013 and 2018. These were the years in which I was preoccupied with leading a large project, funded by the European Research Council, entitled Knowing From the Inside (or KFI, for short). The aim of the project was to forge a different way of thinking about how we come to know things: not through engineering a confrontation between theories in the head and facts on the ground, but rather through corresponding with the things themselves, in the very processes of thought.

The essays assembled here all exemplify this aim in one way or another, and they range over the four fields that the KFI project sought to harness to it: of anthropology, art, architecture and design. An earlier version of the book, with just sixteen chapters (including four essays and three interviews omitted from the new version), was published ‘in house’ by the University of Aberdeen, in 2017, as one of a series of experimental volumes resulting from the project. 1Although I have carried over nine essays from the original version into the new one, several of them have been revised, and others are almost completely rewritten. The remaining eighteen essays are new material.

I owe an immense debt of gratitude to everyone in the KFI project for their inspiration and support, and to the European Research Council for the funding that made it all possible. In addition I have many individuals to thank, both for inspiration and for allowing the reuse of previously published material. They are: Anaïs Tondeur, Anna Macdonald, Anne Dressen, Anne Masson, Benjamin Grillon, Bob Simpson, Carol Bove, Claudia Zeiske and Deveron Arts, Colin Davidson, David Nash, Émile Kirsch, Eric Chevalier, Franck Billé, Germain Meulemans, Giuseppe Penone, Hélène Studievic, Kenneth Olwig, Marie-Andrée Jacob, Mathilde Roussel, Matthieu Raffard, Michael Malay, Mikel Nieto, Nisha Keshav, Philip Vannini, Rachel Harkness, Robin Humphrey, Shauna McMullan, Tatum Hands, Tehching Hsieh, Tim Knowles, Tomás Saraceno and Wolfgang Weileder. My gratitude to all. This book could not have been completed without you!

‘Somewhere in Northern Karelia …’ is reproduced by courtesy of Penguin Random House; ‘In the shadow of tree being’ by courtesy of the Gagosian Gallery; ‘On flight’ by courtesy of Skira Editore; ‘Words to meet the world’ and ‘Diabolism and logophilia’ by courtesy of Routledge (Taylor & Francis).