Tim Ingold

British anthropologist (Professor Emeritus, University of Aberdeen), influential thinker on materials, perception, environment, and craft. Author of Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (2011 — BA) and many other works on environmental anthropology and the phenomenology of skilled practice. Influenced by maurice-merleau-ponty and J. J. Gibson; Morin reads him as illuminating Nancy's materialism while marking two reservations.

Key Points

  • Materiality vs. materials (BA Ch 2, "Materials against Materiality"): "What academic perversion leads us to speak not of materials and their properties but of the materiality of objects?" (BA 20). Materiality is a theoretical abstraction; materials are what hikers, sculptors, and ordinary perceivers actually encounter.
  • The fetch-a-stone exercise (BA 19, 23, 32): the reader is instructed to find a stone, immerse it in water, place it on the desk, and observe. The progressively-altering surface — drying, weathering, dust — is the world of materials, irreducible to "the materiality of the rock."
  • Surfaces between materials (following Gibson): the world is "made of surfaces" — interfaces between one kind of material and another (stone, fleshy fingers).
  • Stoniness emerges through involvement, not nature (BA 32): "Stoniness, then, is not in the stone's 'nature', in its materiality. Nor is it merely in the mind of the observer or practitioner. Rather, it emerges through the stone's involvement in its total surroundings — including you, the observer — and from the manifold ways in which it is engaged in the currents of the lifeworld."

Morin's two reservations on behalf of Nancy

(Per morin-2022-mp-nancy-sense-being Ch 6 §3.)

  1. Ingold's "world of materials" reintroduces a dualism: an elemental wild-world (materials and their properties on the move) vs. a stable profane-world (objects with attributes) — echoing MP's "brute or wild being" beneath profane vision. For Nancy this elemental substrate erases the limits-as-thresholds that make contact possible.
  2. Primacy of life (Ingold's book is Being Alive): the currents of materials are called "life," giving organic life a certain ascendancy. Nancy's inorganic-body-of-sense (SW 61–2) refuses this — for Nancy, the body of sense is inorganic, "the immobile, impassive gravity of the 'there is' of things" (Nancy BP 169–70).

Connections

  • parallels jean-luc-nancy's materialism on the concrete-of-the-stone axis but diverges on the life-as-substrate axis.
  • parallels bruno-latour's post-modern-realism (the Gothenburg rock-touching scene in Latour's "Biography of an Inquiry" is structurally analogous to Ingold's fetch-a-stone exercise).
  • influenced by J. J. Gibson and maurice-merleau-ponty.
  • contrasted with graham-harman's OOO — for Ingold, things are alive in currents of materials; for Harman, things withdraw from all relations.

Open Questions

  • Is Ingold's "world of materials" closer to Nancy's concret-de-pierre (per Morin's reading) or to MP's flesh of the world (per Toadvine and similar)? Both readings are available.
  • What is the relation between Ingold's vitalism (life as substrate) and Jane Bennett's vibrant materialism? Both are tracked by Morin as parallels-but-not-Nancy.

Sources