Quotes from Tim Ingold

It is of the essence of life that it does not begin here or end there, or connect a point of origin with a final destination, but rather that it keeps on going, finding a way through the myriad of things that form, persist and break up in its currents. Life, in short, is a movement of opening, not of closure.

the landscape tells - or rather is - a story. It enfolds the lives and times of predecessors who, over the generations, have moved around in it and played their part in its formation. To perceive the landscape is therefore to carry out an act of remembrance, and remembering is not so much a matter of calling up an internal image, stored in the mind, as of engaging perpetually with the environment that is itself pregnant with the past

There is no division, in practice, between work and life. [An intellectual craft] is a practice that involves the whole person, continually drawing on past experience as it is projected into the future.

Every trail, however erratic and circuitous, is a kind of life-line, a trajectory of growth. 6 This image of life as a trail or path is ubiquitous among peoples whose existential orientations are founded in the practices of hunting and gathering, and in the modes of environmental perception these entail. Persons are identified and characterised not by the substantive attributes they carry into the life process, but by the kinds of paths they leave.

Is it not truly extraordinary to realise that ever since men have walked, no-one has ever asked why they walk, how they walk, whether they walk, whether they might walk better, what they achieve by walking, whether they might not have the means to regulate, change or analyse their walk: questions that bear on all the systems of philosophy, psychology and politics with which the world is preoccupied? Honoré de Balzac (1938 [1833]:

An imagined landscape, then, is a landscape not of being but of becoming: a composition not of objects and surfaces but of movements and stillness, not there to be surveyed but cast in the current of time.

Artists, composers and writers...are bent upon capturing and reining in the insights of a fugitive imagination, always inclined to shoot off into the distance, before they can get away, and on bringing them back into the immediacy of material engagement. Like hunters, they too are dream-catchers.

What difference does it make that pedestrian touch carries the weight of the body rather than the weight of the object?

But if perception is thus a function of movement, then what we perceive must, at least in part, depend on how we move. Locomotion, not cognition, must be the starting point for the study of perceptual activity. Or more strictly, cognition should not be set off from locomotion, along the lines of a division between head and heels, since walking is itself a form of circumambulatory knowing.

Life itself is as much a long walk as it is a long conversation, and the ways along which we walk are those along which we live.

Our principal contention is that walking is a profoundly social activity: that in their timings, rhythms and inflections, the feet respond as much as does the voice to the presence and activity of others,

Telling a story is not like weaving a tapestry to cover up the world, it is rather a way of guiding attention of listeners or readers into it.

what the effect would be of overturning prevailing assumptions and of adopting … a fundamental orientation towards the ground.

This may seem an odd idea to us, but only because 40 we think of walking as the spatiotemporal displacement of already completed beings from 1 one point to another, rather than as the movement of their substantive formation within 2 an environment. Both plants and people, we could say, 'issue forth' along lines of growth, 3 and both exist as the sum of their trails

The present is not marked off from a past that it has replaced or a future that will, in turn, replace it; it rather gathers the past and future into itself, like refractions in a crystal ball. — Tim Ingold from "The Temporality of the Landscape," World Archaeology (vol. 25, no. 2)

To study both people and things is to study the lines they are made of.

Ao invés de pensar em nós mesmos apenas como observadores, trilhando nosso caminho ao redor dos objetos espalhados pelo chão de um mundo já formado, devemos imaginar-nos, em primeiro lugar, como participantes, cada um imerso com todo nosso ser nas correntes de um mundo em formação: na luz solar nós vemos, a chuva na qual ouvimos e o vento no qual sentimos.

The groundlessness of modern society, characterized by the reduction of pedestrian experience to the operation of a stepping machine, and by the corresponding elevation of head over heels as the locus of creative intelligence, is…deeply embedded in the structures of public life in western societies.

my first and most obvious point is that a more literally grounded approach to perception should help to restore touch to its proper place in the balance of the senses. For it is surely through our feet, in contact with the ground (albeit mediated by footwear), that we are most fundamentally and continually 'in touch' with our surroundings

It is in the very 'tuning' of movement in response to the ever-changing conditions of an unfolding task that the skill of walking, as that of any other bodily technique, ultimately resides. Indeed it could be said that walking is a highly intelligent activity. This intelligence, however, is not located exclusively in the head but is distributed throughout the entire field of relations comprised by the presence of the human being in the inhabited world.

native dwellers … learn through an education of attention. The novice hunter … travels through the country with his mentors, and as he goes, specific features are pointed out to him. Other things he discovers for himself, in the course of further forays, by watching, listening and feeling

A person who can "tell" is one who is perpetually attuned to picking up information in the environment … and the teller, in rendering his knowledge explicit, conducts the attention of his audience along the same paths as his own

L'antropologia, dal mio punto di vista, è una filosofia che include le persone.