Copyright © 2002 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
Vol 3(1): 5–22 [1469-6053(200302)3:1;5–22;030095]

Journal of Social Archaeology

A R T I C L E

5

From the perception of archaeology to the
anthropology of perception

An interview with Tim Ingold

Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Aberdeen

T

his interview took place in November 2001, at the McDonald Institute
for Archaeological Research, Cambridge, following a conference

entitled ‘Layers, Surfaces and Interfaces: Apotropaism and Memory as
Material Practice’, co-organized by the interviewer (Andrew Jones from
the Department of Archaeology, University of Southampton and at which
Tim Ingold spoke).

AJ:

You are one of the few social anthropologists who takes an interest
in and writes about archaeology (as opposed to the legion of archae-
ologists who take an interest in social anthropology and incorporate
it within their work). Why are you interested in archaeology and how
did you first become involved with archaeologists?

TI:

It’s true that only a few social anthropologists are really talking to
archaeologists, which is paradoxical because it’s so fashionable to say
that there are hardly any differences between anthropology and
history. Yet despite the obvious link between history and archae-
ology, anthropologists very rarely talk to archaeologists. I originally
became involved in archaeology because when I started anthro-
pology I did the Cambridge first year.

1

I was quite definite that I was

not going to go on to do archaeology, but I enjoyed it and thought
at the time that there was a link between archaeology and anthro-
pology. I think this probably helped, but otherwise it was something

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Journal of Social Archaeology 3(1)

of an accident. I had been doing fieldwork in Lapland, in the far north
of Finland, for my doctorate and I wrote up a monograph from my
thesis and then a further monograph based on this work. I was inter-
ested in changes in the reindeer economy in Lapland: I had found
that although reindeer belonged to people they nevertheless seemed
to be being hunted. I got interested in a comparison right across the
circumpolar region of different ways of exploiting the reindeer, and
particularly in the causes and consequences of the transitions
between hunting and pastoralism. It was at just that time that the
Palaeoeconomy school was rampant here in Cambridge. Higgs and
his disciples like Geoff Bailey . . .

AJ:

and Jarman . . .

TI:

Yes, Jarman and so on. Their Palaeoeconomy volumes had just come
out. Quite a few of them were particularly interested in reindeer
economies in Palaeolithic Europe and there was a debate about herd
following versus herd interception, and we read about these EU
reindeer herders who were commuting between Hamburg and Paris.
So when I produced this book in 1980, called Hunters, Pastoralists
and Ranchers, about transitions in reindeer economies, the social
anthropologists showed virtually no interest at all. But the archaeol-
ogists picked it up because it addressed some of their concerns about
the history of animal domestication, transitions from hunting to
pastoralism and so on. The arguments I developed gave them the sort
of social dimension they were looking for as an antidote to the
ecologically reductionist . . .

AJ:

and functionalist?

TI:

Yes, and functionalist approaches. So that meant that archaeologists
were reading my work, whereas social anthropologists were not. I got
invited to conferences and started to meet people. I got into archae-
ology that way. I went to several archaeology conferences. But every
time an archaeologist starts giving a paper and puts up site distri-
bution maps, then I switch off and wonder what I am doing there.

AJ:

Me too!

TI:

I began to think that archaeology and anthropology ought to be very
close together because we are both tackling problems of change in
the very long term and that ought to be as central to the task of
anthropology as it is to that of archaeology. But as to how I got into
archaeology – it was largely an accident!

AJ:

I now want to discuss your article ‘From Complementarity to Obvi-
ation’. I recently stumbled upon this article and found it very
compelling. You describe the complementary tasks of anthropology

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From the perception of archaeology

and archaeology as: (1) for anthropology, the study of the conditions
of living in the environment (or being-in-the-world); (2) for archae-
ology, the study of the formation of the environment of our living in,
our dwelling. You suggest that the distinction between anthropology
and archaeology might be thrown out (obviated). Could you outline
ways in which you see the obviation between disciplines occurring.
What areas of convergence do you expect or hope to see between the
disciplines?

TI:

Oh that article! I also addressed these issues earlier in an editorial I
wrote for the journal that was then Man, now the Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute, in which I tried to define the themes
around which I think archaeology and anthropology are joined.
These are the themes of landscape and temporality. Archaeologists
are fundamentally concerned with landscape, understood in a very
broad sense. Landscapes are certainly what archaeologists should
study. They are digging down and studying the ways in which land-
scapes are formed, particularly the ways those landscapes are trans-
formed over very long periods of time (long, that is, by comparison
with the sort of periods most historians deal with and certainly by
comparison with the periods most anthropologists deal with). I get
annoyed when anthropologists talk about putting things in a long-
term historical context when it turns out that this is basically the last
one or two centuries. This turns out to be a colonial history.

So it is in the study of long-term temporal processes based in the

landscape where I think archaeology and anthropology are joined. I
don’t think they are joined in terms of method or technique. Anthro-
pologists do fieldwork, a certain amount of archival research and
whatever else they do. They are not trained to dig and recover stuff
from sites. There is a whole battery of techniques that archaeologists
use in conjunction with excavation and interpretation which are quite
unknown to anthropologists. Again, anthropologists are probably
better at doing ethnographic research than archaeologists, but then
they are trained to do it. So in terms of training and technique they
are clearly different, but if you consider the disciplines in terms of
what their overall objectives should be, then our common objectives
should be to understand how human beings have lived in the world
over a very long period of time.

We should be developing an ambitious kind of anthropology that

tells us something about the entire sweep of human history on a
global level and over a long temporal span, rather than one that sets
up an opposition between the West and the Rest and then simply
looks at the last 200 years of colonial history. Particularly now in the
era of post-postmodernism, somewhat following sociology and
cultural studies, a lot of anthropology has almost re-invented itself as

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the study of the conditions of the transition from modernity to post-
modernity. That represents a terrible compression of time-scales, a
compression that suggests that we should only be interested in the
contemporary moment. This seems to me to be a retrograde step. I
think archaeology ought to help us to hook up to a much greater
temporal and geographical span and to a more ambitious way of
writing a history of human being-on-the-earth.

AJ:

We have talked about obviating the distinction between archaeology
and anthropology. I now want to consider the divisions within the
discipline. Apart from yourself, very few anthropologists since
Gregory Bateson have attempted to bridge the gap between social
anthropology and biological anthropology. Why do you feel this is?

TI:

Well traditionally, anyway, the integrity of social or cultural (or socio-
cultural) anthropology has rested on a notion of the autonomy or
independence of culture from so-called biological constraints. Even
now, when it is so fashionable to talk about the anthropology of the
body – about embodiment, or body and culture – anthropologists are
very reluctant to admit that the cultural processes that are embodied
are ipso facto biological. They still want to separate the biology off
and talk about the embodied self, or the embodied person, as
somehow not quite a biological entity even though it is embodied.
That is a distinction I question. Behind it is the spectre of racism.
And that is what really worries people. In the early decades of the
twentieth century, when scholars like Boas and Kroeber were insist-
ing on the independence of culture from biology, that was the centre-
piece of the anthropological critique of ‘scientific’ racism at that time.
The problem is that if anthropologists say that actually biology and
culture are indistinguishable (or that the distinction is just another
example of the Western nature/culture dichotomy, and that we need
to explode it), they are terribly worried that this will be picked up
outside of anthropology as an indication that anthropology has
returned to its racist roots. In the early part of the twentieth century,
anthropology insisted that racist thinking is wrong because culture is
separate from biology. To say, then, that actually culture and biology
are one and the same thing seems like going back on all that.

AJ:

Raising that same spectre?

TI:

Yes. But in fact, of course, it does not. I myself have come up against
the problem: I have wanted to argue that in fact cultural differences,
since they are built into the developing human organism, are
biological. Not genetic! But they are biological, in the sense that they
are properties of the human organism. But then it’s been a frighten-
ing point to make because you know that many people still interpret

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From the perception of archaeology

‘biology’ to refer to some intrinsic, essentialized, in-built property of
the human being somehow attached to genes . . .

AJ:

Biology becomes a form of truth.

TI:

If you say something like that, then people will respond: ‘you mean
that cultural differences are racial differences don’t you?’ It’s very
difficult. I think that is one reason why anthropologists have been
reluctant to go so far as to admit that the body that incorporates
cultural ways of being is a biological body.

There is another reason why so few anthropologists have tried to

close the gap between the biological and the social. It is that when
social and cultural anthropologists look at biological anthropology,
as it is presently being done by biological anthropologists, they do
not like what they see!

AJ:

They don’t recognize themselves or their discipline?

TI:

I have to say that I don’t like it either. At the moment, mainstream
biological anthropology, with some honourable exceptions, is
wedded to a strictly neo-Darwinian agenda. To my way of thinking
that agenda is a straitjacket. It does not open the way for a modus
vivendi of biological and social anthropology that works. The only
way we can do this is by getting the biological anthropologists out of
that straitjacket. That’s not easy, because naturally they don’t like us
telling them what they ought to be doing. So that’s the second reason
why it is so very hard to bring about an end to the biological/social
distinction.

AJ:

The interesting thing is that similar issues arise at a different disci-
plinary scale within archaeology, which split ‘theoreticians’ and
‘scientists’.

TI:

We saw an example of that in Orkney!

2

AJ:

Yes, exactly. This is something I have tackled in the book I’ve just
written (Jones, 2001). In this volume, I am using some of the history
and philosophy of science, and what is now loosely called the anthro-
pology of science, to examine practice, to look at how we actually
construct knowledge. I’m trying to think about networks of know-
ledge construction.

TI:

Sounds Latourian!

AJ:

I do use Latour’s ideas, amongst those of other historians and
philosophers of science. This brings me to the question of how much
you feel Latour’s broad thesis relates to some of the problems you
are dealing with.

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TI:

Let’s put it this way. I haven’t been influenced by Latour at all, but
I’ve moderately enjoyed reading some of his work. So far as I can
understand what he is saying, he seems to be developing a very
similar line to my own. In terms of rethinking the nature/society
dichotomy, he is doing the same thing. But he is coming from some-
where quite different. He is coming from the sociology of science; I
am coming from ecological anthropology. We are coming from quite
different directions but we are both taking apart the nature/society
dichotomy. But lots of other people are doing the same. I have to
confess that I sometimes find Latour’s stuff irritating, and I’m not
quite sure if it gets us very far. It seems to me that actor–network
theory, for example, is a way of stating a problem, and of making a
rhetorical point, leading you to think about the issue in a different
way. But I don’t think his idea of a network actually takes us
anywhere. I couldn’t see how to develop the idea. I have found many
more suggestions for how to move forward from reading the work of
developmental biologists and ecological psychologists than I ever got
from reading the work of Latour. He has a way of re-stating problems
which hasn’t helped me much because I had already re-stated them
myself, in my own way. What I needed was some kind of theoretical
support to help me forward. But actor–network theory isn’t really a
theory at all. It doesn’t explain anything. It is just a way of re-stating
things.

AJ:

What struck me about Latour’s thesis was its relative simplicity. It is
simply looking at how people do things in the world, how people
rhetorically construct knowledge between themselves.

TI:

That’s true. But I have got far more help in this direction, for
example, from the work of Lucy Suchman on situated action and
situated practice. I think this is very sophisticated. I got many, many
more ideas from that than I did from reading Latour. So that’s why
I find his work frustrating. You can restate a problem in Latourian
terms but that doesn’t solve it. I can see that he is doing the same
sorts of things as I am, and that he is going in the same directions,
but I don’t necessarily want to pick up too many of the points he
makes.

AJ:

Which leads me to think about the philosophical ideas that motivate
you. Dwelling (especially Heidegger’s account of dwelling) has
become a major philosophical theme. What led you in this direction
initially?

TI:

I’m trying to think where it started. I had already been reading stuff
by ecological psychologists. I remember a conversation with
somebody who was doing a PhD in architecture, at a small meeting

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of ecological psychologists in the late 1980s, who told me that I
should read ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’. So I went and read it. I
thought most of it was hocus pocus, but I found a nugget in there
that seemed to me to encapsulate something I was trying to say. I
read that little article, but I never read the whole corpus of
Heidegger’s work and I still think it would be largely a waste of time.
People who read too much of it get infected with a kind of virus and
can’t write coherently any more. So I’ve kept Heidegger at a
distance. The only things I’ve wanted to take from him are the basic
ideas of Dasein and dwelling. But around that time I was trying to
deal with a problem that arose in my own work. When I wrote Evol-
ution and Social Life and The Appropriation of Nature, both
published in 1986, I was still basing my arguments on a fundamental
dualism between the ecological and the social. I began to realize that
this dualism can’t be right, and I was trying to find a way of getting
over it. I began to see that we need to be able to regard social
relations as just a sub-set of ecological relations, but that we could
only do that by developing a new kind of ecology. This would be a
sort of phenomenological ecology in which we could talk about
being-in-the-world without its having to be exclusively human being-
in-the-world. That was what I was trying to develop and I wanted to
find a language for it. I found the beginnings of a philosophical
language in Heidegger’s notion of dwelling. Then I started to read
Merleau-Ponty and I found much, much more there of use and
interest than in Heidegger. What I did find useful in Heidegger I
largely got by way of Dreyfus, because he has a clearer way of putting
Heidegger’s ideas.

AJ:

Yes I agree. I’ve found the same thing. His work is very useful.

TI:

I wouldn’t describe myself as any kind of Heideggerian or Heideg-
gerian scholar; I am very superficial in that sense. Actually it’s not
entirely true that I got the notion of dwelling from Heidegger, because
there is a little bit in Evolution and Social Life where, towards the
end, I was thinking about architecture and I realized there was a
difference between building and dwelling, in that ‘to dwell’ is an
intransitive verb whereas ‘to build’ is transitive. I didn’t really develop
this idea further, but it was there at the back of my mind.

AJ:

There are obviously other anthropologists who are drawing on
phenomenology – James Weiner, Michael Jackson, etc. Archaeolo-
gists over the past 10 years have also begun to explore phenomen-
ology, for example Chris Tilley, Julian Thomas and John Barrett.
Why do you think phenomenology has arisen as an important area
of debate in both disciplines around the same time?

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TI:

The reason why it is important for me (I’m not so sure if it is import-
ant for me for the same reasons as for other people, but it probably
is) is that it has arisen as part of the rejection or critique of modern-
ism, particularly of the modernist paradigm that is built into various
kinds of cognitive science (in psychology), neo-Darwinism (in
biology), psycholinguistics and rationalistic philosophy. My own
agenda is to build some sort of synthesis of the biological and the
social and the archaeological that would draw on the common ground
between the critiques in these different fields: the philosophical
critique of Cartesianism, the developmental biological critique of
Neo-Darwinism, the practice theoretical critique of old-style cultural
anthropology, etc. They all seem to share features in common, and
goals also. One of the reasons phenomenology has come in, in
anthropology, is because of the influence of Bourdieu and practice
theory and the reaction against structuralism. A lot of Bourdieu is
lifted straight from Merleau-Ponty, but we don’t often acknowledge
this.

AJ:

Yes, Merleau-Ponty’s approach is quite embedded in Bourdieu’s
theories of practice.

TI:

It is embedded in there. There are other thinkers in there of course,
but there is a lot of Merleau-Ponty. The reason why Bourdieu’s work
caught on, despite being impenetrable and badly written, is that at
that time there was a feeling in anthropology that structuralism had
gone as far as it could go. People were looking for ways in which they
could move back to practice- and process-influenced approaches and
Bourdieu fitted the bill. People picked it up and realized there was a
phenomenological strand in there.

AJ:

Much the same probably happened some 10 years later in
archaeology. Bourdieu was a major influence on the early post-
processualists.

I now want to come onto the next question. One of the out-

standing essays in your recent book is ‘Stop, Look and Listen!’ It
stands out partly because the topic relates only tangentially to the
main topics in the volume, but also because it is one of the longest
essays . . .

TI:

It is the longest!

AJ:

. . . I wanted to ask you what specifically led to you writing this

essay?

TI:

It was the last essay that I wrote for the book, and in that sense it
represents my most recent thinking. Writing it was a new departure.
That’s probably one reason why it got so long. It turned into a big

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project. I also thought that if you have a book dealing with the
perception of the environment, you have to discuss the senses. I had
been reading stuff on the anthropology of the senses, partly because
I was teaching a lecture course on ‘Culture, Perception and Cogni-
tion’ at Manchester and I taught a chunk on this topic. But I got
completely fascinated by the literature on it. It is really tremendously
interesting. I was hooked. I became interested in the whole topic of
sound and hearing, partly because when I think about things I tend
to think through music. These musical interests surface in the book
now and again . . .

AJ:

The cello?

TI:

The cello comes into it. I was especially interested in the relationship
between vision and hearing. I had been reading the literature and I
thought that the way in which the issue had been handled was wrong
and very simplistic, and I wanted to look at it in greater depth. It just
took off! The thing grew and grew in ways I had never predicted. I
had imagined it was going to be a short paper that more or less
reviewed the existing literature on the anthropology of the senses, to
show that most of it is still mired in the traditional cognitivist way of
thinking exemplified by Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live
By. I wanted to find a way of critiquing the Lakoff and Johnson
model, which would have been consistent with the rest of the book
in developing ways of moving beyond the cognitivist approach to
produce a genuinely embodied perspective. But it grew in ways I
hadn’t predicted at all. I started reading this literature about the blind
and the deaf and it got so interesting that I let it carry on.

AJ:

It was a very timely essay, because archaeologists have been embrac-
ing this literature and archaeology is a very visual discipline. Those
few people who have become interested in the senses have tended to
flagellate themselves for their visualism. For instance I got very inter-
ested in colour, but then began to worry that this would be construed
as yet another example of visualism. Your essay showed that ocular-
centric systems are also found in other cultural settings and, contrary
to this literature, are not exclusively Western.

TI:

What decided that paper, apart from its taking off and having a life
of its own, was that it revolved around the work of two of the most
influential figures so far as the rest of the book is concerned: Merleau-
Ponty and Gibson. So far as I know, they had never read each other’s
work (maybe Gibson read Merleau-Ponty but he never commented
on it). They were in agreement on many things, but they disagreed
fundamentally over the nature of light. Especially in his essay ‘Eye
and Mind’, Merleau-Ponty came out with a view of light quite

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Journal of Social Archaeology 3(1)

different from the one that Gibson put forward in The Ecological
Approach to Visual Perception. What Gibson was saying about light
sounded positively Cartesian. I wanted to know how Gibson had
arrived at such a position. And I wanted to figure out what Merleau-
Ponty was really trying to say in ‘Eye and Mind’ and how, despite
otherwise saying very Gibsonian things, he ended up with such a
different understanding of light.

AJ:

One of the major themes you discuss in the recent volume is skill.
You discuss skill in terms of a relational act of becoming between
organism and world. How do you feel that this concept relates to
memory? If memory is made or woven in our interactions with the
world, what is the status of material culture with regard to memory?

TI:

Where do I see the relationship between skill and memory? It comes
down to the question of whether we are talking about memory struc-
tures or activities of remembering. I think my emphasis on skill
carries the implication that we need to talk about remembering as a
process, and of memories as things that are constituted in that
process, rather as thoughts are constituted in a process of thinking.
That idea of remembering goes back to Bartlett and his work in the
1930s. He called his book Remembering and I got a tremendous
amount of ideas through reading it. It’s a fine book. One little article,
only a few pages long, that I found terribly helpful, and which
somehow provides the basic structure behind a lot of what I have
written, is by David Rubin and called ‘Go for the Skill’. It’s the
concluding article at the end of a conference volume edited by Ulrich
Neisser on memory. In that article, Rubin is talking about two quite
contrary approaches in the psychological literature on memory. One
is called the complex structure simple process model, the other is
called the complex process simple structure model. He said that most
cognitive psychology follows the complex structure simple process
model. So you have the complex memory structure – in the brain –
and remembering is simply the business of accessing it. It is mechan-
ically as simple as putting on a CD. Instead, Rubin suggests we should
take the complex process simple structure model. That is, we should
suppose there is very little, or minimal structure in the brain – just as
much as you need to get by – and then show how remembering itself
is a very complex process indeed.

AJ:

It’s the actualization of memory through work and action, the
practice of remembering that’s important?

TI:

Yes. Again, thinking through music, it is one thing if I put on a record
or a CD of a Bach cello suite on my machine: that’s a very simple
process with a complex structure on the CD. It is quite another thing

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if I take out my cello and start to play the suite. That is a very complex
process. I’m not simply replicating the music, I’m re-producing it
every time I play. That was basically the point. Remembering is doing
and that’s a skill, which is typically part of the way in which we make
our way in the world. So that’s how skill relates to remembering as
a process.

So far as materiality is concerned, the argument that I am labour-

ing through the book is that the material forms we encounter in our
environment are not simply the realization of ideas in the head. Even
if there are ideas, which of course in many cases there are, the forms
themselves always emerge out of practical activity – they are the
crystallizations of activities within fields of relationships. I want to
show that no matter what we are talking about – whether we are
talking about organic forms, artefactual forms, or architectural forms
– these forms are always emergent within processes that are going on
in relational fields. In that sense you can say that an artefact grows
in the same way that an organism does.

AJ:

More generally, if culture is enacted in a continuous process of
becoming, how does skill relate to the instantiation of memory? Do
you feel that skill, memory and culture are all intertwined, are they
distinguishable?

TI:

I suppose so. The problem is that in the end, I don’t quite know what
makes a process a cultural process. I haven’t found any really
convincing arguments about that. Or, to put it another way, what
would make a process non-cultural? That seems particularly to be a
question one tends to ask about non-human animals. There is this
problem of the human/non-human boundary that has been plaguing
me all along. I still haven’t resolved it. Initially, my feeling was that
the way in which the human/non-human boundary was drawn was
far too rigid, and based on all kinds of dichotomies that I didn’t like.
I wanted to break these down and try to show how one could take a
phenomenological kind of approach and say that being-in-the-world
is equivalent to the life of the organism-in-its-environment, and that
you could do a phenomenological ecology just as well as you could
do a phenomenological anthropology. My inclination was to try and
break down the rigid categorical distinctions between humanity and
animality, and to find a much more relative, rather than an absolute
distinction. But I always came up against the same problem. People
would say to me: ‘Yes, but human beings are telling stories, dreaming
and making all sorts of amazing things, producing art. With all this
imagining and dreaming going on, it must surely feed back somehow
into the practical engagement with our environment that you have
been talking about’, and I had to admit that this must indeed be the

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case. But I’ve been reluctant to admit it, because in doing so you can’t
help reinstating those boundaries between a cultural kind of life and
a non-cultural one. So I’m still caught up in that dilemma and I have
to recognize that it’s the major crack in the programme I have tried
to put forward in my book. I’ve not been able to deal with it
adequately yet. It has to be the next stage but I don’t quite know how
to do it.

AJ:

I guess there is a growing literature relating to the ‘cultural’ behav-
iour of different species of animals, or even different groups of the
same species.

TI:

Oh yes, some of it is really helpful and you can do interesting things
with it. The trouble is that most of the animal behaviour literature is
produced by people working in a strict empirical tradition, with very
rigid standards of observation and data collecting. Funnily enough,
some of the people who are doing this claim to be adopting an ethno-
graphic approach to their animal behaviour studies. I read an article
recently in Behavioural and Brain Sciences about the behaviour of
cetaceans, and the authors claimed to adopt an ethnographic
approach. But they had learned what an ethnographic approach was
by reading the work of certain primatologists who really hadn’t a
clue! I think it might be possible – maybe with some creatures – to
do real ethnography. But in the present climate, it is very doubtful
that anyone doing this would get their work published in a scientific
journal.

AJ:

You would have to be published in an anthropology journal.

TI:

Yes, you’d have to publish in an anthropology journal or else have a
very big name. There are pressures against people breaking the
mould.

AJ:

That leads me quite neatly on to the next question. What relation-
ship do you feel exists between ethnography and philosophical ideas?
The last book leaned quite heavily on people like Merleau-Ponty. Do
you feel that ideas arise from ethnography, or do we apply ideas to
ethnography?

TI:

Well, my definition of anthropology is ‘philosophy with the people in’.
That implies, of course, that philosophy as done by philosophers is
‘philosophy with the people out’. Every time I worry that what I am
writing is perhaps getting too philosophical, too up in the clouds, all
I have to do is go and read a philosophy book. Then I know I’m
alright. There is something about philosophy books, though not all (I
mustn’t generalize, there are some philosophers who, when you read
them, are virtually anthropologists). When it’s really philosophical

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philosophy rather than philosophy that’s almost anthropology, you
can read it and feel straight away that it has not been produced as the
result of any engagement with life as it is lived, whether through
ethnographic fieldwork or through some other kind of empirical
research. Merleau-Ponty, for example, read a lot of work by practis-
ing psychologists. There’s a sense of engagement with documented
cases. You can tell straight away when you read a piece of work by a
philosopher who is not actually engaging directly with anything. It
seems to me that the thing that drives anthropology, and that’s absol-
utely essential to it, is the tension between philosophical speculation
about what human being-in-the-world might be like, and the actual
experience about what life in the world is actually like. It doesn’t
matter where, or in what period of history. What matters is that you
are engaging with some kind of experience of the people with whom
you have been working, or, if you’re a historian, with historical docu-
ments. You have to have that engagement and that tension. That’s
what makes anthropology distinct. It’s not that you are applying ideas
one way or the other, it’s not that you are applying your theoretical
ideas to your empirical data, or applying your empirical data to your
theoretical ideas. It’s both of these – essentially the struggle when you
are working with and through ideas. My only problem now is that I
don’t think I can get any further without doing more ethnography.

AJ:

There has been a tendency within archaeology to borrow ideas.
Archaeology is very much a ‘magpie discipline’ in that sense and
borrows ideas from lots of other disciplines. There has been a
tendency to use external ideas as a template to lay down onto
archaeological data, as we have seen with the Melanesianization of
British prehistory. I’ve always thought that good archaeology
involves a creative tension with the object of study.

TI:

It doesn’t matter what you are dealing with, the same principle
applies.

AJ:

We are fairly close to wrapping up, so my penultimate question
relates to going back into the field after writing your most recent
book. I was just wondering how you conduct ethnographies informed
by ideas of gesture and skill. How do you actually go about record-
ing these things? I’m thinking particularly about Fabian’s critique of
visualism in anthropology. You have critiqued visualism in the ‘Stop,
Look and Listen!’ essay. Having formulated ideas concerning the
importance of gesture and skill, how do you then go about recording
them in the field?

TI:

That’s a very big problem and it is striking how many people who
have taken a phenomenological perspective still haven’t addressed it

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Journal of Social Archaeology 3(1)

very clearly. How does taking this perspective affect what you do in
the field? Many accounts – Michael Jackson is one example, Paul
Stoller is another – come down to: ‘well I’m such a good ethnogra-
pher; I’ve been there and I know what it feels like and you do not’.
That’s not terribly helpful.

But there are a few hints. One thing is that when I was trained I

was told that you speak to people and you write down in your notes,
so far as you can remember, what they said. I was not told that I
should write down what it felt like, for example – if I was walking
through the forest with some reindeer men – how I was walking, or
what the forest smelt and sounded like. I could have written these
things down but I didn’t because I just assumed that that’s not what
you put in your field notes. When you write field notes you cannot
help reflecting, but there is some automatic filter that tells you ‘I am
supposed to be writing down what people told me’, so you reflect on
those things. You are not supposed to be writing down all that other
stuff, so you don’t even think about it. One thing that has changed is
that you can now go to the field and think about the light, the sounds,
the sensations, the weather and how it felt for me, and not be afraid
to put that down because it’s not what somebody else told you. This
is partly due to a critique of old third-person accounts and the recog-
nition that any account will be a first-person one. So there are not
the inhibitions that there used to be. If I was doing it again I would
feel much happier to do that.

We also have new techniques. I myself have no skills whatsoever

in film, but if you are interested in gesture and skilled practice then
film is obviously one way of recording things in a way that would have
been quite impossible in the past. We’ve got new tools, which we can
use for that kind of research. Maybe I’ll have to get skilled in this if
I’m to do that kind of thing.

But we’ve got to find ways of moving beyond the sorts of phenom-

enological accounts – perhaps beautifully written accounts – of what
it felt like to be there. We ought to get further than that.

AJ:

In terms of skill, and in terms of the paradigm of participant obser-
vation, setting aside the observational aspect of this phrase where
participation could be emphasized, we have heard papers today [at
the conference] on ethnoarchaeology, and one of the reasons archae-
ologists have become involved in small-scale ethnography is so that
they can practise skills that they otherwise would be unable to.

TI:

It’s a good thing you mentioned that because one area that has
become of great interest to many people is apprenticeship. A lot has
been written about apprenticeship, about the apprenticeship model
of learning and about the ethnographer as an apprentice. There are

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some studies where ethnographers have formally apprenticed them-
selves to master craftsmen or religious teachers and gone through an
apprenticeship and then written their accounts on that basis. This
apprenticeship model has its roots in Vygotskian psychology and to
some extent also in phenomenology and is coming into anthropology
quite strongly through the work of people like Jean Lave. We could
redefine participant observation as an apprenticeship in which you
would go to work not by camping in the middle of the village in the
old Malinowskian tradition, but by going to work with a particular
person and writing your account on that basis. This is coupled with
a recognition that we are not studying cultures anymore, we are less
concerned with the issue of whether we have talked to enough people
and whether they are representative of the culture. We are actually
going to work with people just as you might go to work with a particu-
lar scholar to do your PhD. I think that’s a positive development.

AJ:

One of the ethnographies that is a particular favourite of mine is
Maureen Mackenzie’s Androgynous Objects on string bags or bilums.
She is a craftsperson who has gone to learn traditional techniques of
looping and bag making.

TI:

That’s a lovely book. One of my former doctoral students, Stephanie
Bunn, went to work with yurt makers in Central Asia. She herself is
also a craftsperson, and had been working for many years with felt.
That kind of interaction is very nice and also suggests the possibility
of other forms of doing anthropology. It suggests that we might be
able to do anthropology not merely by writing but, for example, by
producing works of art or craft. We already have doctoral theses
based on a combination of both written work and film. Why couldn’t
we have a PhD which combines a text with a beautifully produced
artefact, which you had learned to make through apprenticeship with
a skilled craftsperson? There are all kinds of possibilities of that kind
which are quite exciting from a pedagogic point of view, with import-
ant implications for how you teach and practise anthropology.

AJ:

One final question: what are your plans for the future in terms of
ethnography?

TI:

I have field materials from northern Finland which go back to 1980
and have been on the shelf ever since. I feel I have gone as far as I
can go theoretically, at least without repeating myself. To go any
further I’ve got to do more ethnography. So I’ve been trying to get
a distance from everything I did in the book and to draw a line under
that. As soon as I can get my head above water (if ever) from
teaching and administration, my next priority is to get back to my
Finnish material. I won’t be able to write it up unless I can do more

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Journal of Social Archaeology 3(1)

fieldwork and archival research to get myself up to date. Then, hope-
fully, I can write a straightforward, honest-to-god, ethnographic
monograph based on that material, which may or may not be influ-
enced in some way by other things that I have done.

When I left that material in 1980, I had to leave it behind me

because of pressures from other things. At the time I was doing that
fieldwork, I didn’t know what questions I really wanted to ask. I was
at the end of the road in terms of my previous agenda and I didn’t
have a new one. So I was doing fieldwork without any clear sense of
what questions I wanted to address. Now I think I know what the
questions are and I can go back and start again, drawing on the
material I collected in the past and taking it forward. That’s one
reason why, in The Perception of the Environment, though I do refer
to quite a bit of ethnography, I have purposefully drawn only on the
ethnography of other people. I never refer to my own because I want
to keep it to one side. I want to keep it there and deal with it properly,
once I have a chance. I didn’t want to blow my chances by present-
ing this material before it was ready, only to have to recycle it later
on. That’s why I have made no mention of it.

Notes

1

The Cambridge tripos degree requires students reading archaeology and
anthropology to take a first year course which includes archaeology, biological
anthropology and social anthropology regardless of the subject they
subsequently go on to specialize in.

2

This remark refers to a conference held in the Orkney Isles, Scotland, in May
2001 to discuss the World Heritage Site of Neolithic Orkney. The conference
brought together environmental archaeologists and interpretative
archaeologists. The differences in their approaches to archaeology were
apparent both in content and method of presentation. This led to heated
debate. As chairperson, Tim was required to adjudicate.

References

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Time, Division 1. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Gibson, J.J. (1979) The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston:

Houghton Mifflin.

Higgs, E.S., ed. (1972) Papers in Economic Prehistory. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Higgs, E.S., ed. (1975) Palaeoeconomy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Ingold, T. (1976) The Skolt Lapps Today. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Transformations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ingold, T. (1986a) The Appropriation of Nature: Essays on Human Ecology and

Social Relations. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Ingold, T. (1986b) Evolution and Social Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University

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Ingold, T. (2000) The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling

and Skill. London: Routledge.

Ingold, T. (2001) ‘From Complementarity to Obviation: On Dissolving the Bound-

aries between Social and Biological Anthropology, Archaeology and Psychol-
ogy’, in S. Oyama, P.E. Griffiths and R.D. Gray (eds) Cycles of Contingency:
Developmental Systems and Evolution, pp. 255–79. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Jackson, M. (1989) Paths Toward a Clearing: Radical Empiricism and Ethnographic

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Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Lave, J. (1988) Cognition in Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Guinea. Chur: Harwood Academic.

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Journal of Social Archaeology 3(1)

TIM INGOLD is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of
Aberdeen, Scotland, UK. He has worked extensively on the anthropology
of hunter-gatherer and pastoral societies, ecological anthropology, evol-
utionary theory and language and technology. He has published
numerous volumes, and his many works have had a major impact on his
chosen discipline of social anthropology as well as archaeology. From his
early publication Hunters, Pastoralists and Ranchers (1980) to his most
recent, The Perception of the Environment (2000), he has had a continuous
impact on social approaches to the study of archaeology.
[email: [e-mail]]

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