Tim Ingold

Thinking posthumanly – from a post-Enlightenment, critical, new materialist perspective – things, including concepts, become more permeable and topological – they leak and stretch. Freed from limiting notions of agency, things behave. Rivers have established the same legal rights as humans in New Zealand  and India,  stones have been reported slithering across the desert floor in California,  an electrical power grid in the USA has revealed a unique agential dexterity  and walls have been spotted walking over mountains in the UK’s Lake District.  Thinking with a posthuman partiality, we begin to witness a democracy of objects rather than an anthropocentric dictatorship over inorganic materials. If agency is reworked into an ‘enactment’ as opposed to something that is ‘held’,  conceivably humans and other biological organisms are not necessary for agency (or life) to emerge as inorganic material agency erupts from unchoreographed assemblages of spacetimematter(ing). And if cognitive and dermatological boundaries are no longer organ-ised by an Enlightenment prescription, how might pedagogies perform differently and more equitably?
This article draws on the empirical materials from two psychogeographic walks that agitate lithic spaces with a posthuman affection. Part One examples a radical mobile classroom that I undertake regularly with university students where the use of it-narratives exposes the distributed agency of buildings. I explore what a posthuman gaze might do to/for performative pedagogies as my students attempt to interview a building. Part Two offers an example from my previous post-qualitative PhD inquiry which – by manipulating the practices of psychogeography and schizocartography – highlights how a shopping centre assemblage called Liverpool ONE diagnosed itself with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), thus reinforcing the notion of inorganic agential distribution. The pedagogic implications of this posthuman diagnosis are discussed.

This introductory chapter outlines theatricality and performativity by way of their tensions and paradoxes – between seeing and doing, novelty and normativity – and argues for a more perspectival approach with notions of ‘texture,’ derived from anthropologist Tim Ingold and philosopher Stephen Pepper. After a section on ‘metaphor,’ those of texture and weaving are further elaborated in three extensive segments, beginning from their prior usage in dramaturgy (Eugenio Barba) and philosophy (feminism, Pepper, ecology). The third and most important section introduces Ingold’s meshwork as a key figure of plural performative becoming: the interweaving of lines, as opposed to the network as a key figure of theatrical detachment or abstraction – the connecting of points or objects into which the meshwork is simplified when we optically ‘zoom out’ from its haptic engagement. In the end, the ensuing chapters are introduced, themselves addressed as specific ‘threads’ within the book’s overall texture.

M. Caravan, personnage principal mis en scène dans la nouvelle En famille de Maupassant, semble tout avoir du pauvre diable malgré lui assujetti au comique : incapable de prendre sa place dans tous les lieux qu’il fréquente, il est systématiquement montré dans une indépassable position de soumission par rapport à son employeur, à sa mère et à sa femme. C’est que, ayant un problème avec la verticalité (celle de l’organigramme ministériel, celle de l’arbre de famille) et avec les hiérarchies, M. Caravan se trouve coincé sur un autre axe, la ligne horizontale, régie par l’indépassable répétition du même. À cet égard, le pendule volé à sa mère devient une métaphore intéressante de l’homme : M. Caravan est l’homme-pendule – constamment balancé de haut en bas, il finit toujours par revenir au même point, battant inlassablement le rythme monotone du temps bureaucratique.

Wandering as Pathscaping, by Vanessa Grasse, presents a practical and theoretical enquiry into a walking and drawing practice grounded in a somatic and dance improvisation informed approach. This is articulated through the author’s experience of walking through two cities without destination, questioning: how to allow a state of wandering, the perceptual processes involved in this state, how these affect navigating, and how the research could reveal an open-ended methodology of practice. Drawing on the notion of ‘wayfaring’ (Ingold, 2011)  and  an ‘active line on a walk’ (Klee, 1953), it proposes wandering as an embodied improvisational practice that engages in a dialogue between welcoming multiplicity and finding containment, as a method to navigate perception, the urban environment and the creative process. Drawing on the attention practices of Deborah Hay, Lisa Nelson and Pauline Olivero it looks at the role of attentional and orientational dynamics in wandering; introducing attentional wandering in relation to permeability and responsiveness to indeterminacy. The extent of our here is proposed as a key orientational process in wandering, in which ground is seen as a perceptual model for the visual and aural fields through emphasizing edges and a towards me perception. Through articulating a walking-drawing practice it then proposes wandering as pathscaping; a journeying that, like drawing, welcomes, channels and scapes multiplicity into a path. The paper moves on to consider how the dialogue between flux and containment was reflected in developing a methodology of practice, revealing how the findings layered into three different modes of attention: Ground-Scape-Edges, Inner-Outer Line, Encounters-Synchronicity. These, combined with a selection of scores, are presented as a frame and an open-ended proposition for the practice. It concludes with the proposal that wandering resides in surrendering to both multiplicity and our here, and allowing a flow of inner and outer attentional dynamics in dialogue with our ground orientation to scape our emergent, wandering and unknown path.

Este es el trabajo final que escribí en 2019 para la Cátedra, Humanidad, evolución y ecología a cargo de Rolando Silla y Debora Swistun.
La consigna era escribir una especie de Ensayo relacionando algo que hayamos visto con los autores que vimos durante el cuatrimestre.
Así escribí este análisis de la Serie One strange rock ( USA) y Villefranche ( Francia) bajo la lupa de algunos autores de la Antropólogos de la mente.

O curso dedica-se ao estudo intensivo da obra de Timothy Ingold, antropólogo britânico bastante difundido atualmente em diversos campos, com propostas arrojadas em alguns domínios onde questões fundamentais para a antropologia se colocam, como o debate cultura/natureza, indivíduo/sociedade, inato/adquirido etc. Além disso, estende seus interesses para questões relativas à associação entre humanos e animais, às diferenças entre arte e tecnologia e entre reprodução e habilidade, aos processos de aprendizagem, à consideração sobre conhecimento e ambiente etc.

L'entretien qui suit a été réalisé le 27 mai 2017, à Aberdeen, à la fin d'une semaine de rencontres du réseau européen Knowing from the inside, qui rassemble tant des praticiens que des théoriciens autour de la question d'une connaissance vivante et immanente que Tim Ingold travaille depuis de nombreuses années, de façon généralement collective. À la croisée entre art et recherche, ce gathering a essayé de pratiquer et penser un paradigme épistémologique et déontologique qui a suscité en nous, en parallèle avec la lecture de ses écrits, nombre de questions relatives au commun, à la démocratie et à l'attention.

Weaving an Open World / Experiencing Urban Utopias Theoretical Foundations for Urban Experiments in the Spirit of Tim Ingold

Referring to Reinhart Koselleck and his arguments, this article discus- ses the changing nature of utopias in terms of their categories and meanings, while using dialectics to explain their phenomenon and historical attempts to implement them, as well as the rise-and-fall process of utopias and dystopias. Following in the footsteps of Tim Ingold, the author asks whether ‘dwelling perspective’ (in contrast to ‘building perspective’) and radical rejection of the Western hylomorphic mo- del may be useful to understand two contemporary, and yet contradictory urban trends: self-organising (informal) cities and spectacle cities. Can the former be re- cognised as utopias in the context of the latter losing their urban values (dystopia)?
Key words: utopia/dystopia, Tim Ingold, informal cities, spectacle cities, urban space

This project builds on James' Scott synthesis of “reactive statelessness” theory (famously beginning with Pierre Clastres), in which he argues that pastoralism, nomadism, and foraging were often secondary forms of adaptation in response to the coercive forces of agrarian states (Scott, 2009).

“[The] argument reverses much received wisdom about “primitivism” generally. Pastoralism, foraging, shifting cultivation, and segmentary lineage systems are often a “secondary adaptation,” a kind of “self-barbarianization” adopted by peoples whose location, subsistence, and social structure are adapted to state evasion. For those living in the shadow of states, such evasion is also perfectly compatible with derivative, imitative, and parasitic state forms in the hills. (Scott, 2000, pX)”

My contention is that new foraging and nomadic livelihoods are on the rise  in the wake of global neoliberalism and the transnational corporatization of power on the one hand, and the techno-militarization of States on the other. These need to be examined and contrasted with studies of the new forms of alienation that are also arising among the world's “middle” and “affluent” classes. There is nothing new here, of course (see David Graeber on the past 5000 years), except for a question of scale.

I argue that the world's old and new foragers have a lot to teach us about sustainable knowledge and livelihoods, socio-political organization, and ecological justice.

The aim of this research effort, then, is to gather ethnographic and empirical data to support the claim that there are strong overall benefits (social, political, ecological, epidemiological, etc.) to foraging lifestyles.

A word of warning, of course, about using  “foraging” as an ideological, atemporal, naturalized category. 19th and 20th century science and anthropology have produced too much of that.
My use of the term is heuristic. Tim Ingold's critique of narrow extrapolations of Optimal Foraging Theory and rational choice in biology, economics, and anthropology is a good starting point for this discussion (see Ingold, 2000; see also Barnard, 1983; 2004, or anything by Richard Lee). Following Ingold and others (see bibliography below), I focus on a few broad aspects of livelihood that can be loosely characterized as foraging, and contrasted to the increasingly standardized systems of “modernity”.

An emphasis on autonomy, immediacy, and sharing at the level of social organization; autonomy being defined as relational—in contrast to the self-contained, self-interested 'rational' individual of modern societal constructs (Ingold, 2004); relationality being forged through decentralized, established or emerging relationships among humans and non-humans in a non-finite, complex, and dynamic field of operation.
Knowledge derived and kept alive from (not just of) the environment (“natural” or not); collaborative knowledge established through the “fine-tuning” of  these “relational contexts” between humans and the world (Ingold, 2000);
Perceptual and relational involvement with the world through open-ended wayfinding, or wayfaring practices, in contrast to grid-and-point, goal-and-destination oriented navigation and cartography (Ingold, 2000; 2007).

While we must be cautious about using modern constructs like “equality” (e.g., in terms of “gender” or “poverty”--Karen Endicot (2004) has a good review of debates on gender equality among foragers), the emphasis on relational autonomy must include more-or-less conscious efforts to avoid coercion and alienation. This usually entails knowledge of more coercive systems (e.g., agrarian, industrial, militaristic, etc.), and the “reactive” adaptive efforts to “vote with one's feet” (Lee, 2004), or “take to the hills” (Scott, 2009).

“Traditional Ecological Knowledge” is not a model to be put in a powerpoint pie-chart! The point here is to look for anti-model forms of wayfaring knowledge and social organization that are constantly renegotiated in adaptive contexts.  The Inuit Elders Saullu Nakasuk, Hervé Paniaq, Elisapee Ootoova, and Pauloosie Angmaalik put it best in their group interviews with anthropologists Jarich Oosten & Frédéric Laugrand:

“Traditional knowledge is not static and not something abstract and separated from the context in which it is produced, but is always related to the present. In this respect, it contrasts with the modern education system, which sets great value on the absorption of objectified knowledge”. (Aupilarjuk  et al, 2002, p3, emphasis added)

This paper was presented as a keynote lecture at the international conference Designing and Planning the Built Environment for Human Well-Being, held at the University of Oulu in Finland, 23-25 October 2014. It is an expanded version of a paper first given at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen in November 2012, and published as a chapter in the book Towards an Ecology of Tectonics: Rethinking Construction in Architecture, edited by Anne Beim and Ulrik Stylsvig Madsen (Stuttgart: Edition Axel Menges, 2014).

The paper also builds on the arguments first presented in the book chapter Architecture, Technology and the Body: From the Prehuman to the Posthuman (2012), which set out a new theoretical framework for understanding the relationship between architecture and embodiment by questioning the now commonplace view of the body’s prosthetic relationship with technology. Drawing on the work of contemporary thinkers such as Bernard Stiegler, Raymond Tallis, and Tim Ingold, it argues that rather than treating new technological extensions of the body as in some way threatening to our sense of self, we should instead see them in a more positive way as part of a longer developmental trajectory in which ‘the human’ and ‘the technological’ are in fact mutually co-constitutive. By considering these issues within the framework of recent advances in evolutionary, cognitive and neuroscientific theory, the paper tries  to draw out some of the more significant implications of both human and technological embodiment for designing, making and thinking about architecture today.

„Ta pusta moja małżowina / pomnik na łóżku”  – pisał w jednym ze swoich wierszy Białoszewski, opisując odciśniętą w pościeli wklęsłą rzeźbę, jaką pozostawia po sobie każdego poranka. Unieobecnienie samego siebie pozwalało mu uczynić widzialnym to, co stanowiło dla niego oparcie i na czym jednocześnie odciskał swe piętno. Próbą stworzenia takiego wklęsłego pomnika ma być ten tekst, w którym zamierzam dokonać operacji teoretycznego wyjęcia figury Białoszewskiego ze środowiska, w którym funkcjonował i opisania kształtu, w jaki układała się sieć punktów styku pomiędzy nim, a tym, co sobą przysłaniał. Bohaterem tej pracy będzie więc Białoszewski paradoksalnie jedynie w tej mierze, w jakiej opowiedzą o nim jego związki z kryjącymi się zazwyczaj w jego cieniu przyjaciółmi reprezentującymi przeoczoną przez historyków literatury grupę kobyłecką.
Odwrotnie niż w przypadku Białoszewskiego, marginalizacja, której doświadczali kobyłeccy poeci, daje się postrzegać jako prosta konsekwencja ich artystycznych decyzji. Swoją działalność skoncentrowali bowiem na opisywaniu wszystkiego, co zwykle niedostrzegane i pomijane jako z rozmaitych względów wykluczone poza nawias społeczeństw i dziejów. Ponadto by przywrócić temu widzialność, sięgali po środki wyrazu, których dotąd nie uznawano za przynależne sztuce. Twórczość ta podlega więc wykluczeniu niejako podwójnie – z uwagi na treść i na formę, co w terminologii francuskiego socjologa Pierre’a Bourdieu  można określić jako wykluczenie marginalizowanych grup społecznych z pola władzy i marginalizowanych języków z pola produkcji kulturowej. Badacz ten przy pomocy pojęcia pól definiował wzajemnie na siebie wpływające segmenty struktury społecznej, w ramach których toczy się między jednostkami nieustanna walka o dominację. By osiągnąć sukces w dowartościowaniu tego, co w danym polu aktualnie lekceważone, członkowie grupy kobyłeckiej musieliby ogłosić się rewolucjonizującą to pole awangardą, ona jednak ma do siebie to, że krocząc naprzód, zdolna jest zwykle zmieniać jedynie swój własny status (w obrębie pola produkcji kulturowej), zostawiając w tyle to, co chciała reprezentować. Ambicją zaś tamtej grupy, jak się zdaje, nie było autorytatywne wytyczanie nowych ścieżek w charakterze „przedniej straży”, lecz permanentne „wycofywanie się” jako poszukiwanie „linii ujścia”  – dostępnych na wyciągnięcie ręki działań alternatywnych, wynajdywanych wciąż na nowo w ruchomych układach zmieniającej się rzeczywistości.
Tak pojętej twórczości nie sposób oddzielić od życiowej postawy, każe się ona rozpatrywać jako forma działania w rzeczywistości. Znacznie bardziej adekwatne do jej opisu wydają się więc pojęcia wypracowane w polu szeroko pojętych nauk społecznych, którymi w niniejszej pracy proponuję zastąpić niezdolne do uchwycenia fenomenu grupy kobyłeckiej kategorie estetyczne, jakimi posługuje się tradycyjna historia literatury. Tam, gdzie literaturoznawstwo grzęźnie w teoretycznych sprzecznościach, spojrzenie antropologiczno-socjologiczne uczy dostrzegać podyktowane praktyką życiową „tylne wyjście”.

This chapter introduces Boundary Line Type (BLT) mapping, a vector GIS based cross-culturally and diachronically comparative method, used for mapping the socio-spatial significance of urban built environments. This new research method is related to other methods currently used to study contemporary as well as historical urban built environments such as urban morphology, space syntax, and GIS based approaches. BLT mapping uses GIS technology in order to apply an ontology of formal boundary conceptualisations expressing the constitutive differences among the materially constructed subdivisions which shape built environments and are inhabited by urban society. This ontology resulted from a firm socio-spatial theoretical grounding (Vis in Sp Flows: Int J Urb ExtraUrb Stud 2(4): 15–29, 2013a; Vis 2013b; Vis in J Borderland Stud, forthcoming) and is here operationalised on the basis of contemporary, historical, historically reconstructed, and archaeological ground-level city plans of the historic city of Winchester (UK) and Chunchucmil (Classic Maya, Mexico). The research processes of data preparation and the analytical mapping of BLTs by identifying them in empirical data contexts are presented. This alerts the prospective user to the challenges and practical measures involved in using spatial datasets of different origin. The interpretive opportunities of the resultant formal redescription of the urban landscape and the potential of the BLT data structure for both advanced spatial analysis and visualisation is explained. Facilitating this interpretive and analytical mapping practice is expected to stimulate future research to systematically explore societyspace relations as manifest and developing in cities over time and in socioculturally contrasting urban traditions. Devising and conducting this methodology advances the qualitative GIS research agenda for the spatial humanities and social sciences by marrying theoretically informed ideational concepts to quantifiable empirical units of information.

towards an archaeology of gesture in Kurt schwitters' 'Pointless' collage (or how I 'learned' about schwitters' work through painting leftovers) abstract This article will discuss how an analysis of the readable gestures within the work of Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948) can provide a new way of experiencing his artwork in the present. Specifically addressing two artworks by Schwitters, Merzoil (1939) and Untitled (with Porcelain Shard) (1946), the article will use theoretical and art-practice-based methods to analyse the 'stain', to provide new insights into his working processes, relationship to materials and site. This research is aimed towards a better understanding of Kurt Schwitters' final 'Merzbau' the Merz Barn Wall (1947) situated within the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle.

Paperback Edition: ISBN 978-1-78570-377-5 Digital Edition: ISBN 978-1-78570-378-2 (epub) A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the publisher in writing.

Call me wolfing. I was murdered in Lancashire (now a part of Cumbria) in 1390CE, by some pre-enlightened gentlemen. It was just before the perceptual turning point from Theos to Mechanos; from a transcendent God to little ghosts in your little machines.

Historians, anthropologists, architecture theorists research the rites of construction, the rituals of the city's foundation to find the origins of architecture. They believe that the base of the architectural form is a certain order of execution of the ritual, which is carried out in the acts of construction and the processes of exploitation of the created space. The ritual function of architecture is to identify the place in space, to reconcile the inner and outer, the union of space, divided into own and alien. So architecture isn’t represent the preceding ritual, but also it is a living and volatile action: architecture has agency and autonomy. Architecture belongs to the world in which it can act and at the same time be subject to its influence. This understanding of the ritual nature of architecture is articulated in this category of architecture as performativity.

В поисках первых истоков архитектуры ряд историков, антропологов, теоретиков архитектуры обращается к обрядам, сопровождающим строительство, ритуалам основания города. Ученые приходят к выводам, что в основании архитектурной формы находится определенный порядок исполнения ритуала, который осуществляется в актах строительства и процессах эксплуатации созданного пространства. Но архитектура не только репрезентирует предшествующий ей ритуал, а сама является ритуальным действием, обладает агентностью. Ритуальная функция архитектуры заключается в идентификации конкретного места в пространстве, в примирении далекого и близкого, внутреннего и внешнего, соединении разделенного пространства. Такое понимание ритуальной природы архитектуры воплощено в современной теории архитектуры с помощью категории перформативности.

Link para compartilhar esta publicação: https://bit.ly/ebook_ibarra

Como citar: Ibarra, María Cristina. Design como correspondência: antropologia e participação na cidade. Recife: Ed. UFPE, 2021.

Este livro investiga a relação do design e da antropologia por meio da experiência de uma designer com um coletivo de moradores interessados em minimizar a violência no bairro de Santa Teresa, no Rio de Janeiro. Em primeiro lugar, baseada na pesquisa de mestrado, em que se analisaram os artefatos produzidos e pensados por não-designers das ruas de BeloHorizonte, foi realizada uma aproximação gradual com autores da antropologia e do design que valorizam o trabalho e o conhecimento dos chamados não-designers. Como segundo momento, se relatou o engajamento com o Coletivo Santa sem Violência (CSSV) preocupados com o incremento da violência na área. Ao longo da pesquisa de campo, foram realizadas múltiplas atividades que podemos classificar em duas: coleta de dados e participação ativa das reuniões e ações realizadas pelo CSSV em espaços públicos. Após quase um ano de trabalho junto com os membros do Coletivo, a experiencia foi analisada com base em abordagens do design e da antropologia. A partir do ponto de vista do design destacam-se temas como: Design Anthropology , Design Participativo, Adversarial Design e Design Ativismo. Pelo ponto de vista da antropologia: esperança, correspondência e autonomia. Esta análise permitiu a construção de reflexões que podem inspirar futuros engajamentos de designers com comunidades.

Este verbete, publicado na Enciclopédia de Antropologia do Departamento de Antropologia da Universidade de São Paulo, versa sobre o livro "Estar vivo-Ensaios sobre movimento, conhecimento e descrição" (2011). Trata-se de uma coletânea de ensaios do antropólogo britânico Tim Ingold (1948-) escritos e ministrados ao longo da primeira década do século XXI. O volume dá continuidade e atualiza um processo teórico iniciado em Lines: a brief history (2007), subsidiando formulações posteriores, reunidas em Making: Anthropology, Archeology, Art and Architecture (2013). As ideias do livro, segundo ele, orbitam em torno das três palavras-chave que o intitulam: movimento, conhecimento e descrição. Estas não são meras sequências de operações, mas compostos paralelos de um só processo, o do curso da vida.

Qual è l’attendibilità storica dei vangeli? Come si sono formati e su quali informazioni si basavano? Come si è arrivati ai diversi racconti orali e scritti della straordinaria vicenda di Gesù?

Per rispondere a queste domande, nella prima parte del libro gli autori propongono una teoria critica della memoria e della tradizione; nella seconda, invece, suggeriscono una lettura antropologica e un esame storico dei testi.

L’intento è riscoprire le tracce degli eventi, incorporate ma spesso nascoste nelle testimonianze dei vangeli.

Sulla figura di Gesù, subito dopo la sua morte, vi fu una molteplicità di informazioni trasmesse da gruppi che avevano conoscenze parziali ed erano dislocati in zone diverse della Terra di Israele.

A partire da questo dato, gli autori ricostruiscono la mappa dei luoghi da cui provengono le fonti su cui si basa ciascun vangelo.

By adopting posthuman ecology as its methodological framework, the author of this paper examines how British environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy's conceptualization of nature can radically undermine the nature/culture dichotomy. To do this, the author will survey the first and the second waves of environmental art movement, also known as Representational and Performative Environmental Art, in order to situate Goldsworthy's small-scale works within the latter. Then, by embracing Tim Ingold's idea of "thinking through making" within materialist ecology, the author puts forward that Goldsworthy's environmental art can resist the old-age hylomorphic model by using intuitiveness and improvisation as its strategy. In doing so, Goldsworthy eschews from turning nature into a representation that is to be manipulated by human subjectivity from afar, precisely by thinking from natural materials rather than about them, thus inviting us to conceive all human and nonhuman organisms as an intricate conglomerate of "leaky things" in an endless flux of ecological becoming.

Yo adhiero a esa escuela de pensamiento que sostiene que la antropología social o cultural, la antropología biológica y la arqueología forman una unidad necesaria -que son todas partes de la misma empresa intelectual. No estoy preocupado por el vínculo con la antropología biológica o "física", pero lo que tengo para decir si concierne a los temas unificadores de la arqueología y la antropología socio-cultural. Deseo enfatizar dos de estos temas, que se encuentran íntimamente relacionados. En primer lugar, la vida humana es un proceso que implica el paso del tiempo. En segundo lugar, este proceso de vida es también el proceso de formación de los paisajes en los que las personas vivieron. Entonces, tiempo y paisaje son en mi mente los puntos esenciales del contacto temático entre arqueología y antropología. Mi propósito en este artículo es colocar las perspectivas de la arqueología y la antropología en unísono a través de un enfoque sobre la temporalidad del paisaje. En particular, yo creo que este enfoque nos puede permitir trasponer la oposición estéril entre la visión naturalista del paisaje como un escenario neutral y externo para las actividades humanas, y la visión culturalista de que cada paisaje es un ordenamiento del espacio cognitivo o simbólico. Yo planteo que en lugar de cualquiera de estas posturas, deberíamos adoptar lo que denomino un "perspectiva de habitación" (N.d.T "dwelling perspective" en el original), de acuerdo a la cual el paisaje se constituye como un registro -y testimonio-duradero de las vidas y las actividades de las generaciones pasadas que habitaron en el mismo, y que al hacerlo dejaron en el algo de sí mismos.

The first thing you need to know about this book is that, far from being merely a repository of knowledge about the four "A"s of Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture, it is rather a key that can be used to open them up. Making ranges freely between the four subjects as though there were no such thing as disciplinary boundaries, drawing from the author's own background in anthropology to illuminate the other related and overlapping fields. The book sketches out a fundamental approach to the material world, and our place within it, that has much relevance for contemporary archaeologists.

This PhD dissertation concerns the challenges of cataloguing volatile art-works and vast collections. In 2011, KUNSTEN Museum of Modern Art in Denmark acquired Danish artist Mogens Otto Nielsen’s (b. 1945) mail art archive with material from approximately 600 artists from the international mail art network. The research question of the dissertation is fairly simple: How can an art museum catalogue mail art archives? The answer, however, entails an extended analysis of the archive material as well digital and curatorial method development. The analysis combines museology, art theories, phenomenology, anthropology, and new media theory with experimental and exploratory work with museums, scholars, programmers, and interactive designers.
In the first half of the dissertation, I analyse the archive material’s relation to the mail art network. In the second half, I analyse the material’s relation to the museum institution and its organizing principles. In-between chapters, readers follow in the footprint of the researcher and the hands-on work in the archive. The last two chapters suggest two possible strategies towards cataloguing mail art archives. First, the museum should catalogue the material of mail art archives by mapping relations and associations. Second, the cataloguing system should make it possible to re-enact and re-imagine the associative network of the archive. These reactivations, I suggest, should be carried out by digital mapping as well as curatorial re-enactments and re-arrangements of the archive.

Characterizing mail art and its network
Chapters 1-5 concern the archive’s relation to the mail art network from the 1960’s and onward. All kinds of mediums and materials such as collages, drawings, visual poetry, photos, sound recordings, and small objects were circulating between artists via the common postal system. The mail art pieces tap into several previous and concurrent art practices such as Dada, Fluxus, and Performance Art, technological changes, political, social, and cultural strategies, spirituality, and a newfound interest in networks as a means of exchange and artistic creation.
Chapters 6 and 7 concern the principles behind the exchanges in the network. Research into Nielsen’s archive shows that the principles of gift-exchange economy entailed social obligations and unwritten rules that would work against the recurring rubberstamped anti-rules of “no rules, no jury, no return.” Yet, excess and the adaptive nature of mail art suggest that the exchanges were based on sharing. In chapter 7, the mail art network is characterized as acts of impure sharing that mixes gift exchange logics with principles of sharing. The network was far from power-free or non-hierarchical, but these structures were – via address lists – continuously circumvented. The numerous address lists in Nielsen’s archive are traces of a “database logic,” described by Russian media theorist Lev Manovich, that shares principles with today’s digital peer-to-peer network in terms of modularity, variability, and transcoding.
Chapters 8-11 study the mail art archive’s relation to the museum institution. In chapter 8, Nielsen’s Pocket Museum is described as a reconfiguration of pre-modern cabinets or curiosity as well as modern museums. The desire to categorize and chart every corner of the world is described by academic texts, protocols, as well as literature. The analysis is supplemented with studies of the principles and procedures of the universal archive by German-Russian philosopher Boris Groys as well as French philosophers Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.
Chapter 9 retraces mail art pieces in Nielsen’s archive to the Stasi archive. Research in these archives shows the archival logics in operation. In its most absurd form, the neat and detailed forms and reports reveal a clear difference between the archive and the mail art network. However, the fondness for bureaucracy within the network disturbs this image of order on one side and anti-order on the other.
  Chapters 10 and 11 describe Nielsen’s archive as an “anarchive.” German historian Wolfgang Ernst’ definition of anarchives points to those counter-archives that mean to circumvent the orders of the archive. However, as Ernst points out, these creative archives are still tied to the logic of the archive. American performance scholar Diana Taylor’s notion of repertoires and French historian Pierre Nora’s distinction between history and memory sites extend the analysis in order to point the anecdotic, myopic, multiple, volatile and material character of mail art pieces. They have to be enacted and re-enacted for it to be passed-on within a culture or community.
Chapter 12 shifts perspective and considers the mail art archive as an actor-network along the line of French sociologist Bruno Latour. However, this image of networks is counterbalanced by Scottish anthropologist Tim Ingold’s notion of the meshwork. In Ingold’s phenomenological counter-image, mail art pieces are not merely created and reworked in nodes, but in constant transformation.
Chapters 13 and 14 propose two solutions to the challenge of cataloguing mail art archives. The museum’s categories and methods of archiving are hinged on the preservation of fixed and autonomous material, not networks, meshworks, or movements. Yet, the duality of mail art pieces as materials and motion, i.e. materials in motion, reveals the restrictions of the museum institution’s methods for cataloguing. Drawing on American performance scholar Rebecca Schneider, I characterize mail art pieces in Nielsen’s archive as “poses.” Archivists can preserve a piece of the entire “dance” or “correspondance,” but would need to re-enact the piece by different means. In the case of mail art archives, the cataloguing must attend to the movement of material by reactivating and re-arranging material.
The methods for preserving and exhibiting via re-imagination are illustrated and concretized with the exhibition design for Nielsen’s archive. The swarm quality, modularity and viability, and the concept of re-enactments were integrated into a wall installation with modular cases. The digital database and its prototypes, however, would enable users to see a corner of the mail art network structure.

Digital re-enactments
The dissertation presents two digital prototypes from the research project. They are the preliminary results of the method development of digital databases and digital maps.
Prototype one was partly based on the idea of the rhizome and the meshwork. The patterns and curved lines between nodes were created at random within a specific range of numerical values. The recreation of the archive as a digital meshwork was never sufficiently realized. However, the experiment resulted in a functional prototype of visual database. 
Prototype two represents Nielsen’s archive without lines of connections. In the “Mapping the Archive” project, I collaborated with a small group of digital designers, dramaturges, and professionals from museums of art, cultural heritage, and natural history. The material was re-imagined as clusters of small “microbes” where size and proximity represent relations. In addition, the project experimented with categorizations of colour and emotions. The pieces are attracted to a specific category, sometimes suspended between two or more, thereby re-imagining the vibrating nature of Nielsen’s archive.
In shorter intermediating texts between chapters, I describe and reflect upon the practical work in the archives, its movements, and uncertainties. The texts account for a small part of the “Erleben” and “aesthetics of presence,” as described by German-American literary scholar Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, one might experience when cataloguing and consulting these vast collections of volatile art. This wonder is a driving force for the analyses of mail art pieces in-between creative exchange and archival order.

Based on nine years of research, this is the first book to offer an in-depth ethnographic study of a transnational environmentalist federation and of activists themselves. The book presents an account of the daily life and the ethical strivings of environmental activist members of Friends of the Earth International (FoEI), exploring how a transnational federation is constituted and maintained, and how different people strive to work together in their hope of contributing to the creation of "a better future for the globe." In the context of FoEI, a great diversity of environmentalisms from around the world are negotiated, discussed and evolve in relation to the experiences of the different cultures, ecosystems and human situations that the activists bring with them to the federation. Key to the global scope of this project is the analysis of FoEI experiments in models for intercultural and inclusive decision-making. The provisional results of FoEI’s ongoing experiments in this area offer a glimpse of how different notions of the environment, and being an environmentalist, can come to work together without subsuming alterity.

Para ler uma versão atualizada da tese, leia o e-book "Design como correspondência: antropologia e participação na cidade": https://bit.ly/ebook_ibarra

Esta tese investiga a relação do design e da antropologia por meio da experiência de uma designer com um coletivo de moradores interessados em minimizar a violência no bairro de Santa Teresa no Rio de Janeiro. Em primeiro lugar, baseada na pesquisa de mestrado, em que se analisaram os artefatos produzidos e pensados por não-designers das ruas de Belo Horizonte, foi realizada uma aproximação gradual com autores da antropologia e do design que valorizam o trabalho e o saber dos não-designers. Como segundo momento, se identificou o engajamento com o Coletivo Santa sem Violência (CSSV) organizado por moradores do bairro de Santa Teresa do Rio de Janeiro preocupados com o incremento da violência na área. Ao longo da pesquisa de campo foram realizadas múltiplas atividades que podemos classificar em duas: coleta de dados e participação ativa das reuniões e ações realizadas pelo CSSV em espaços públicos. Após quase um ano de trabalho junto com os membros do Coletivo, os dados foram analisados à luz de abordagens do design e da antropologia. A partir do ponto de vista do design destacam-se temas como: Design Anthropology, Design Participativo, Adversarial Design e Design Ativismo. Pelo ponto de vista da antropologia: esperança, correspondência e autonomia. Esta análise permitiu a construção de reflexões que podem servir de base para futuros engajamentos de designers com comunidades.
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This thesis investigates the relationship between design and anthropology through the experience of a designer with a group of residents interested in reducing violence in the neighborhood of Santa Teresa in Rio de Janeiro. Firstly, based on the research for a master´s degree, in which the artifacts produced and conceived by non-designers of the streets of Belo Horizonte were analyzed, a gradual approach was made with authors of anthropology and design who value the work and knowledge of non-designers. As a second moment, an engagement was identified with the Santa without Violence Collective (SWVC) organized by residents of the neighborhood of Santa Teresa of Rio de Janeiro who were worried about the increase of violence in the area. Throughout the field research multiple activities were carried out that we can classify as: data collection and an active participation in the meetings and activities carried out by the CSSV at public spaces. After almost a year of working together with the members of the Collective, the data was analyzed in the light of the approaches from design and anthropology research. From the point of view of design certain topics stand out, such as: Design Anthropology, Participatory Design, Adversarial Design and Design Activism. From the point of view of anthropology: hope, correspondence and autonomy. This analysis allowed reflections that could serve as a basis for future engagements between designers and communities

In this paper I offer critical attention to the notion of atmosphere in relation to music. By exploring the concept through the case study of the Closed Brethren worship services, I argue that atmosphere may provide analytical tools to explore the ineffable in ecclesial practices. Music, just as atmosphere, commonly occupies a realm of ineffability and undermines notions such as inside and outside, subject and object. For this reason I present music as a means of knowing the atmosphere. The first part of this paper points to the limits of an understanding of atmosphere as a constellation of things, as proposed by Gernot Böhme. In contrast to this, Hermann Schmitz conceptualises atmosphere as half-thing which suggests movement. By expanding on this point, I argue that it is not solely an effect of music to trigger movement but that music itself is movement. Hence I propose to methodologically approach atmospheres as movements. Consequently, in the second part of this paper I closely analyse two motions as they cohere in Closed Brethren worship services: first, becoming (Deleuze and Guattari), a movement on the level of the individual worshiper; secondly, territorialisation (Deleuze and Guattari), a movement of the atmosphere towards its solidification. Here music as atmosphere is not a system of moral signification but a generative power affording intimate processes of divine encounter, whilst producing affective denominational difference.

Publius Ovid’s (43 BC-17/18 AD) describes in his Metamorphoses Niobe’s transformation into a weeping rock. Niobe’s transformation incorporates the form and matter of the medium of sculpture. According to the humanist paragone debate, painting and sculpture struggle to be the medium with the highest qualities of virtuosity. Aby Warburg (1866-1929) refers to the Niobe motif’s Nachleben in his Tafel 5: Beraubte Mutter. (Niobe, Flucht und Schrecken). This displays the images of both the bereaved mother (Niobe) and the murderous mother (Medea). The montage also introduces the theme of the descent to the underworld. It becomes clear how the cluster of motifs around the figure of Niobe - hybris, lamentatio and the chthonic substrate - functions as a direct entry to a bipolar hermeneutics of the visual medium: the ‘historical psychology of human expression’ that navigates between Apollo and Dionysus. The “weeping rock” that according to legend still stands on Mount Sipylus in Turkey, draws upon deeper anthropological patterns. Petrification indicates inertia, frigidity and a Medusan psychosis of fear. In nature, stones and rocks have a “slumbering insistence” that can be captivating. Stones are after all visible but impenetrable, they index an irrevocable absence in their presence, and ‘have abode’ in an otherworldly region of utter blindness and silence. From a psychoanalytical perspective, Niobe’s petrifaction symbolises the straitening of her life and the loss of anima within a culture divorced from authentic feeling, nature, and instinct. Here Niobe meets Echo.

The following is a a review of the anthropologist Tim Ingold's book Correspondences (2021), which consists of short pieces relating to, or, in Ingold's terminology, 'corresponding' with various exhibitions and artworks. I first sketch his general account involving a rejection of 'hylomorphic' (form + matter) explanation, and proposal of an alternative, then consider his application of the new account with regard to the arts

The author shows how houses in the northern Baltic were constructed using two realities: the reality of timber and the equally potent reality of spirits supporting and controlling the fate of structures. Excavations in seventeenthcentury Tornio (now in modem-day Finland) showed that houses were furnished with special offerings when founded and refurbished, while evidence from living folklore suggested that the houses themselves were originally given spiritual personalities and were treated as members of the family. As more modern thinking took hold, this spirituality was transferred to the more mobile and skittish household sprites.

This is an essay about the connections between the passage of time and the condition of archaeological knowledge. It revisits Tim Ingold’s 1993 paper ‘The Temporality of the Landscape’, considering its relationship with the phenomenological and interpretive archaeologies of the 1990s and what we learn from it today. Engaged not so much in an ‘ontological turn’ as in a kind of archival return, the essay compares Ingold’s discussion of Bruegel’s painting The Harvesters (1565) with an archaeological photograph from 1993. A discussion of the after-effects of performance follows, and four theses about temporality, landscape, modernity and revisiting are put forward: 1) The passage of time transforms archaeological knowledge; 2) Archaeological knowledge transforms the passage of time; 3) An archaeological landscape is an object that is known through remapping; 4) Archaeological knowledge is what we leave behind. The essay concludes that archaeology is best understood not as the study of the temporality of the landscape, as Ingold had argued, but as the study of the temporality of the landscape revisited.

Introduction.

Dwelling approaches life as a process of being-in-theworld which is open to the world. Human and nonhuman life is read as an immediate, yet also enduring, relational process of bodies-in-environment (space and place) which are (with variation) mobile, sensing, engaging, responding, exchanging, making, using, remembering, and knowing. This process-based, vitalist view of life is closely linked to phenomenology, and stands in opposition to dualized, rational Cartesian-based approaches.

As Tim Ingold suggests when setting out Heidegger’s foundational work on this concept, dwelling encompasses the whole manner in which one lives one’s life on the Earth; thus ‘‘I dwell, you dwell’’ is identical to ‘‘I am, you are.’’ For Heidegger, to be a human means to be on the Earth as a mortal. It means to dwell. This offers analternative to Descartes’ cogito – ‘I think, therefore I am’ – the foundation of rationalism which helped set up/ reinforce a series of persistent, related dualisms including those of mind–body, subject–object, society–nature, and human–nonhuman. These, some argue, are impediments
to understanding the relational nature of life, not least in terms of important questions of humans in nature/environment/place, and environmental sustainability.

Um evento como acontecimento. Um livro como ruína de um evento que
aspira a reativar e renovar o acontecimento por outros meios. Um livro como campo aberto de experimentação, não do que foi, mas do que os corpos podem ao se compor com as palavras-imagens que ele carrega junto. Um livro que a cada página afirma a multiplicidade e, em consequência, chama para que entremos nele das mais diversas maneiras. Estas podem ser infinitas, como almejamos que sejam os desdobramentos e compostagens deste livro. No entanto, aqui me limito a três breves entradas... (S. Wiedemann)

Sétima edição do Seminário Conexões:
Deleuze e Cosmopolíticas e Ecologias Radicais e
Nova Terra e…

Um seminário que chega à sua sétima edição, sempre com um
título seguindo de “e” três pontos: nova terra e… máquinas devires e… territórios e fugas e…
Desta vez o Antropoceno, tempo “marcado pelas catástrofes, pelas mudanças climáticas e nossa ação irreversível sobre as condições materiais de existência, sobre Gaia; parece que nos joga em direção ao fim do mundo”. Mas a leitura do livro fará o leitor tomar outro rumo. Luiz Orlandi, Whitehead, Brian Massumi, Charles Sanders Peirce, Aylton Krenak, uma lista de nomes entre autores e citados... e autores citados... e citados autores... A questão via Deleuze e a filosofia da diferença é que a flecha inexorável e irreversível do tempo não vai no sentido que se acreditava, nem é uma só. A flecha vem do futuro, não vai ao futuro, ela também vem do passado, mas de um passado que é presente, lugar em que uma verdadeira pororoca temporal atravessa os que nela conseguem sobreviver. Vivemos hoje e sempre vivemos no entre, acontecemos no meio, como lembra Whitehead; a todo tempo são novos tipos de encontros, como diz Luiz Orlandi. O sujeito nasce do evento, e que evento é este? O encontro, o "entre" forças irreversíveis de futuro, forças irreversíveis de virtuais, forças de encontros entre Caos, Gaia, Chronos e Aion.
Se o senso comum propaga a ideia de um mundo que é levado ao fim, o “fim do mundo”, “o fim do tempo de chronos”, o que este livro aponta é outra coisa, uma leitura necessária: não se trata de um fim do mundo, mas de um mundo inacabado. Só tem fim o que está acabado e é isto que nos relembra a todo tempo a filosofia do eterno retorno das condições do diferente. Daí o “e” três pontos, “e...”. Referência direta a um dos últimos textos de Deleuze, “Imanência: uma vida...”, Imanência-doispontos-uma-vida-três pontos, como já nos lembrava Agamben, ideia que agora reverbera neste livro, neste resultado impecável da organização de Antonio Carlos Amorim, Susana Oliveira Dias e Sebastian Wiedemann. A universidade se mantendo aberta, uma frase que resume todo o livro e que vem em meio ao texto daquele que abriu às leituras brasileiras o denso Diferença e Repetição de Gilles Deleuze, Luiz Orlandi.
Silvio Ferraz (USP)

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The story of Enlightenment literacy is often reconstructed from textbooks and manuals, with the implicit focus being what children were reading.  But far less attention has been devoted to how they mastered the scribal techniques that allowed them to manage knowledge on paper.  Focusing on Scotland, I use handwritten manuscripts to reveal that children learned to write in a variety of modes, each of which required a set of graphic techniques.  These modes and skills constituted a pervasive form of graphic literacy. I first explain how children learned to write for different reasons in diverse domestic and institutional settings.  I then explore how they acquired graphic literacy through the common techniques of copying, commonplacing, composing, book-keeping, scribbling and drawing.  In the end we will have a more detailed picture of how children used writing as an indispensible mode of learning during the Enlightenment.

In 1766, Thomas Cochran entered the Edinburgh classroom of Joseph Black (1728-1799) to learn chemistry for the first time.  Cochran was studying medicine and, like so many of Black’s students, he dutifully recorded several diagrams in his notebooks.  These visualisations were not complex.  They were, in fact, simple.  One of them was a single ‘X’, a chiasm, and Black used it to illustrate ratios of chemical attraction [Figure 1].  This diagram is often held to be the first chemical formula and, as such, historians have endeavoured to explain why it was unique and how Black invented it. 

In this essay, I wish to turn the forgoing premise on its head by arguing that Black’s chiasm was neither visually unique nor invented by him.  I do this by approaching the diagrams via a visual anthropology that allows me to examine how students learned to attach meaning to patterns that were already familiar to them.  In the end, we will see that Black’s diagrams were successful because their visual simplicity and familiarity made them ideally suited to carry the chemical theories that he so skilfully attached to them.

This study concerns field recordings, location audio gathered from unscored and unexpected sounds, which retain an indexical relationship to their origin in the natural world. The term “environmental music” describes aesthetic works that use field recordings as primary material. This practice requires an engagement with the ontology and phenomenology of place, but such relationships have remained under-theorised. This study addresses this lacuna by developing a rich vocabulary of place that can aid both the practice and analysis of environmental music. The historical development begins with the multiplicity of concepts of place known to the Ancient Greeks. One of these, Ptolemy’s geos, based on a God’s-eye view of the world, has dominated understandings of the world and its effects, hence the term “geography”. This perspectivism was reinforced first by Alberti’s optics, which placed a viewer in a strict topological relationship to the object of their gaze, and then by Cartesian rationalism, a philosophy that reduced place to mere secondary characteristics of an ordered, homogeneous space. Against this background, alternative models of place will be discussed. Topos, exemplified by tales like “The Odyssey”, emphasises the perambulations of an individuated subject, foregrounding the experiential nature of the journey. The klimata of Ptolemy models place as psychic zones of influence on the Earth. Plato’s khoros is both receptacle and material, a generative site of instability and unknowability. Taken together, these concepts assert the primacy of place as milieu, a responsive context that shapes, and is shaped by, being-in-the-world. The word “platial” is proposed to encompass this understanding. This thesis is supported by the phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as interpreted by Tim Ingold and Edward Casey. Analysis of the environmental music of Dallas Simpson, Robert Curgenven, and the author illustrate how platial thinking can provide deep insights into a variety of creative sonic practices.

It is widely known that Joseph Black's late eighteenth-century chemistry lectures were extremely popular for the hundreds of  students who studied science, medicine and the arts at the University of Edinburgh.  When his students attended his lectures  they had to learn how to use his figures and tables as diagrams, as visualisations that could be read in a number of ways.  This means that these pedagogical images consisted not only of a visual form, but also of a set of practices used to learn, make and understand that form.  They were visualisations that students were taught to think with, things that shaped what they knew and what they thought they knew.  It is this active view of an image that I use to unpack Black’s diagrams in this essay, especially the notion that they were visual forms that gained meaning and value as they moved through time and space in the notes kept by professors and students.  My intent is to gain deeper understanding of the role they played as learning tools and informatic devices that made chemistry easier for students to understand.

This paper critically reviews the current status of the concept of distance in human geography in order to argue that recent experimentally-driven work in construal-level theory offers ample opportunities for recasting distance as a key geographical trope. After analysing the four entangled dimensions of distance revealed by construal-level theory (spatial distance; temporal distance; social distance; and hypothetical distance), the paper articulates this research program from experimental psychology with geographical work on non-representational theory, geographical imaginations/imaginative geographies, learning as a geographical process, TimeSpace theorizing, and ontogenetic understandings of space. It is argued that the subjective understanding of distance afforded by construal-level theory can rescue distance from its entrenched association with positivistic geography and spatial analysis. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2016.07.018