In this work Tim Ingold offers a persuasive new approach to understanding how human beings perceive their surroundings. He argues that what we are used to calling cultural variation consists, in the first place, of variations in skill. Neither innate nor acquired, skills are grown, incorporated into the human organism through practice and training in an environment. They are thus as much biological as cultural. To account for the generation of skills we have therefore to understan...

"This new edition of one of the masterworks of twentieth-century anthropology is more than welcome…enduringly significant insights."—Marilyn Strathern, emerita, University of CambridgeIn the field of anthropology, few books manage to maintain both historical value and contemporary relevance. Roy Wagner's The Invention of Culture, originally published in 1975, is one that does. Wagner breaks new ground by arguing that culture arises from the dialectic betwe...

Despite its importance to how humans inhabit their environments, walking has rarely received the attention of ethnographers. Ways of Walking combines discussions of embodiment, place and materiality to address this significant and largely ignored 'technique of the body'. This book presents studies of walking in a range of regional and cultural contexts, exploring the diversity of walking behaviours and the variety of meanings these can embody. As an original collection of ethnographic work...

In this second and retitled edition of Anthropology and/as Education, Tim Ingold shows that there is more to anthropology than ethnography and more to education than teaching and learning. Building on the first edition’s exploration of the interface between the disciplines of anthropology and education, this revised edition pushes the bounds further, calling upon anthropologists to rethink their disciplinary vocation, by regarding it as fundamentally an educational rather than an ...

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 arc...

Anthropology is a disciplined inquiry into the conditions and potentials of human life. Generations of theorists, however, have expunged life from their accounts, treating it as the mere output of patterns, codes, structures or systems variously defined as genetic or cultural, natural or social. Building on his classic work The Perception of the Environment, Tim Ingold sets out to restore life to where it should belong, at the heart of anthropological concern.Being Ali...

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, t...

What does imagination do for our perception of the world? Why should reality be broken off from our imagining of it? It was not always thus, and in these essays, Tim Ingold sets out to heal the break between reality and imagination at the heart of modern thought and science. Imagining for Real joins with a lifeworld ever in creation, attending to its formative processes, corresponding with the lives of its human and nonhuman inhabitants. Building on his two previous essay collecti...

What do walking, weaving, observing, storytelling, singing, drawing and writing have in common? The answer is that they all proceed along lines. In this extraordinary book Tim Ingold imagines a world in which everyone and everything consists of interwoven or interconnected lines and lays the foundations for a completely new discipline: the anthropological archaeology of the line.Ingold’s argument leads us through the music of Ancient Greece and contemporary Japan, Siberian labyrint...

All that is central to the dynamic process in human society is evident in the study of hunter-gatherers - peoples whose subsistence way of life reflects the original form of human adaptation. This is the thesis of these wide-ranging volumes in which internationally leading scholars consider hunter-gatherer peoples in Africa, Asia, Australia and North America and reflect theoretically on the hunter-gatherer condition.Volume 1: Hunters and Gatherers - History, Evolution and Social ChangeVolu...

All that is central to the dynamic process in human society is evident in the study of hunter-gatherers - peoples whose subsistence way of life reflects the original form of human adaptation. This is the thesis of these wide-ranging volumes in which internationally leading scholars consider hunter-gatherer peoples in Africa, Asia, Australia and North America and reflect theoretically on the hunter-gatherer condition.Volume 1: Hunters and Gatherers - History, Evolution and Social ChangeVolu...

There is no prepared script for social and cultural life. People work it out as they go along. Creativity and Cultural Improvisation casts fresh, anthropological eyes on the cultural sites of creativity that form part of our social matrix. The book explores the ways creative agency is attributed in the graphic and performing arts and in intellectual property law. It shows how the sources of creativity are embedded in social, political and religious institutions, examines the relationship b...