Lines: A Brief History

Product Information

TI: That was always the bit that I never properly worked out. The basic principle is that notation is anything that can help transfer movement from one medium into another: for example, from something written on paper to a musical or a dance performance. The justification for looking at notation was that maybe anthropology or ethnography, whatever you want to call it, could be enriched by drawing on alternative notations to writing, or by combining different notations. So far, anthropology has done very little along these lines, whereas in architecture this is happening all the time: you look at any architectural sketchbook and there’s a mixture of drawing, writing, numbers, all sorts of things. In anthropology, we didn’t get much further than saying, ‘look, here are great possibilities.’ We looked at the issues that people faced in trying to notate music, or dance, or architecture, but then we don’t really apply them in our field. MK: For all of these reasons the word ethnography is still problematic. Although the ‘ethno-’ in ethnography means ‘people’, it carries with it quite a narrow understanding. Likewise, architecture can sometimes be very narrow and rigid, but what we are interested in, is how it makes spaces for people. In the third part, Ingold carries the line into the domain of human life. He shows that for life to continue, the things we do must be framed within the lives we undergo. In continually answering to one another, these lives enact a principle of correspondence that is fundamentally social. MK: Yes, they are all lines. Thinking about lines allows us to expand our idea of using drawings as tools of observation. You refer to this as ‘anthropography’. Sometimes you also use the word ‘linealogy’. How did you arrive at these terms?

Andreas Kalpakci: How does this difference between anthropology and ethnography relate to drawing? Because on the one hand you say that anthropology has a speculative dimension, but on the other hand, as anthropology relies on ethnography, there is also a documentary dimension. One of the most interesting issues that arose when talking about music and dance in class, for example, was the difference between what you might call digital and analog notations. In dance, for example, the Laban notation is very digital. It breaks movements down into a lot of components. It has a frame in which movements are located, and the dancer has to read them off from the frame. Other kinds of dance notation are more fluid, and basically reenact on paper the movement that the dancer would make with the body. Similarly, classic musical notation is very digital. It has these things called notes, but I am a cellist and I know that when I play the cello, there are no notes. There are phrases and movements, but no individual notes. One learns how to translate from one to the other, so when you are faced with a score you can play it, but the instrument and the score are not the same thing. Nowadays the hand crafts of spinning and weaving, once ubiquitous, are largely confined to hobbyists. Even handwriting is endangered as most of us tap our lines on keyboards. What kind of lines are these? Every letter is of a predetermined shape, not traced out but instantly delivered. And the line is but a sequence of letter-shapes, each complete in itself, and detached from its predecessors and successors. It is like the dotted line: a connected sequence of points rather than the trace of a movement. Today, when we speak of lines, it is most often to such a sequence that we refer. Linear thinking, we say, goes from point to point; linear transport from location to location; linear time from moment to moment. Of thinking, travel or time that wanders off course, or loops around, we are inclined to say that it is non-linear'. Yet did you not just draw a line with your pencil? Does the winding path not follow a line, as does the story with its twists and turns? Indeed, what we witness today is not the birth but the death of the line. To reduce a linear movement to a rigid sequence of fixed points is to drain it of vitality, of everything that gives it life and growth. For the living world, in truth, is not connected like a net, but a writhing mesh of lines. Knotted in the midst, their loose ends never cease to root for other lines to tangle with. TI: It is a matter of how we imagine the future. There is a distinction between anticipation and prediction. Prediction is modeling. This is what scientists do, when they build a model of what the world will be like, say, in 50 years. Anticipation is looking at the way things are going. It is closer to what happens when you are crossing the road and there is heavy traffic, and you are trying to decide when it is safe to cross: you are actually anticipating the movements of the cars that are going in different directions. One is taking a projection from now into the future, the other is immersed in the current of movement and paying attention to the way things are going: it is more about attentiveness and responsiveness than it is about modeling, prediction, and control. Ingold’s eventual incorporation of anthropological examples from eastern Peru is really where we begin to see a master at work – Ingold intimately understands the data and interpretation flows in an engaging way … this is a vibrant read – at times when reading I shouted aloud, ‘Yes spot on!’ at other times I paced the room and exclaimed in frustration ‘No!’. That Ingold’s writing can produce such dramatic effects is a testament to the quality of his argument. Do I recommend reading this book? Definitely.’Een van de mooiste gedachten vond ik de goed uitgewerkte vergelijking van het modernisme met de rechte lijn (utopie), het postmodernisme met de onderbroken lijn (dystopie), en een wenselijke meer organisch 'topisch' denken. Jammer genoeg is deze notie niet van Ingold zelf, maar citeert hij hier de landschapsgeograaf Kenneth Olwig.

Ingold’s eventual incorporation of anthropological examples from eastern Peru is really where we begin to see a master at work – Ingold intimately understands the data and interpretation flows in an engaging way ... this is a vibrant read – at times when reading I shouted aloud, ‘Yes spot on!’ at other times I paced the room and exclaimed in frustration ‘No!’. That Ingold’s writing can produce such dramatic effects is a testament to the quality of his argument. Do I recommend reading this book? Definitely.’– Cambridge Archaeological Journal Ingold’s argument leads us through the music of Ancient Greece and contemporary Japan, Siberian labyrinths and Roman roads, Chinese calligraphy and the printed alphabet, weaving a path between antiquity and the present. Drawing on a multitude of disciplines including archaeology, classical studies, art history, linguistics, psychology, musicology, philosophy and many others, and including more than seventy illustrations, this book takes us on an exhilarating intellectual journey that will change the way we look at the world and how we go about in it. MK: Yet even in the drawing of lines, there seem to be differences. Modern architecture is based on lines that are often related to construction systems or to the repetition of industrial components, thus forming grids. The movement of people to which you refer, however, is instead very different –its lines are more fluid and continuous.The author's ambition, to take a virgin piece of interdisciplinary territory and "write on it a bit", has been fascinatingly achieved.' - Steven Poole, The Guardian This project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board, was undertaken in conjunction with the School of Fine Art at the University of Dundee. The project combines approaches from fine art and anthropology to examine the relation between perception, creativity, innovation and skill, through an empirical study of the knowledge practices of fine art. The research has also explored the potential of a practice-based approach to teaching and learning in both disciplines. TI: I am not sure what the line of the anthropologist is, because most anthropologists are not interested in lines. Personally, in my study of lines, I was much influenced by my reading of John Ruskin. Ruskin talked about a line as the way things are going. Imagine you want to sketch a mountain. John Ruskin (1819–1900), Aiguille de Blaitière, 1856. Drawing with watercolour. John Ruskin (1819–1900), Cormayeur, 1856. Drawing with watercolour. Tim Ingold is rather obsessed with lines, but he does bring some interesting points. Nevertheless, this work by itself remains conceptional and cannot be readily applied as an established method; it still needs to be tested and tried. The author's ambition, to take a virgin piece of interdisciplinary territory and write on it a bit, has been fascinatingly achieved.'

Ingold's argument leads us through the music of Ancient Greece and contemporary Japan, Siberian labyrinths and Roman roads, Chinese calligraphy and the printed alphabet, weaving a path between antiquity and the present. This project, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, builds on a previous study that focused specifically on recreational rambling and hillwalking in Scotland. The current research is designed to reveal the sociality of walking over a broader canvas. Through an ethnography of everyday pedestrian movements we are exploring how walking binds time and place in people’s experience, relationships and life-historiesAnh-Linh Ngo: Something which has kept me preoccupied during our conversations in preparation for this ARCH+ issue, is how architects use drawings as a representational tool, rather than as an operational one. You talked about the plan and its legal status earlier. That is one very straightforward way of being ‘operational’ of course, but what I am thinking about now is the speculative character of the discipline. TI: I think this problem is present in all design disciplines: designers are saying, ‘we don’t really like this idea of laying down a plan that people have to conform to. We want to allow people to be generative and have a lot of movement in a space, and we want to accept whatever emerges out of this collective dynamic.’ But then what do the designers do? Do they set down some basic parameters within which there is a lot of flexibility? Or do they give people some instructions and say: ‘now off you go and do this!’ It’s not clear what the real solution should be. Mijn houding tegenover dit boek is nogal ambivalent. Zoals de meeste moderne antropologische werken die zich met meer abstracte concepten bezighouden, is ook dit boek op veel plaatsen vaag, springt van de hak op de tak en is het lastig uit te maken waar het heen wil. Dat laatste is de schrijver te vergeven omdat één van de 'problemen' van de modernistische rechte lijn volgens Ingold juist dat doelmatige is. Bij menig hoofdstuk twijfelde ik aan mijn eigen intelligentie (= ik snapte het niet), maar op andere plaatsen kwam Ingold met scherpe, nieuwe observaties en ideeën. En dan waren er nog observaties en ideeën die ik te ver gezocht (m.n. waar het analogieën betrof) of gewoon onjuist vond. Ingold’s research on circumpolar reindeer herding and hunting led to a more general concern with human-animal relations and the conceptualisation of the humanity-animality interface, as well as with the comparative anthropology of hunter-gatherer and pastoral societies, themes which he also explored while teaching courses at Manchester in economic and ecological anthropology. These concerns led to a number of essays which were collected together in his book 'The Appropriation of Nature', published in 1986. The same year also saw the publication of another major volume, 'Evolution and Social Life', a study of the ways in which the notion of evolution has been handled in the disciplines of anthropology, biology and history, from the late nineteenth century to the present. Two important conferences also took place in that year: the World Archaeological Congress (Southampton), in which Ingold organised a series of sessions devoted to cultural attitudes to animals, and the Fourth International Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies (London), of which he was a principal organiser. Ingold edited one of the volumes to arise from the Southampton Congress, 'What is an animal?', published in 1988, and was co-editor of the two-volume work 'Hunters and Gatherers', consisting of papers from the London conference and published in the same year.