Course:MDIA300/Tim Ingold

Tim Ingold

Introduction

Timothy (Tim) Ingold is a British anthropologist and currently the Chair of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. Ingold was educated at Leighton Park School in Reading, U.K. and attended Churchill College, Cambridge, where he acquired a Bachelor of Arts in Social Anthropology in 1970. He later achieved a PhD in 1976 for his studies with the Skolt Sámi of northeastern Finland. In 2024, he donated his field diaries from the early 1970s to the community. Ingold taught at the University of Helsinki (1973–74) and then the University of Manchester, becoming a Professor in 1990. He later became Max Gluckman Professor in 1995. In 1999, he moved to the University of Aberdeen. In 2015, he received an honorary doctorate from Leuphana University of Lüneburg.

Tim Ingold (2020)

Contributions

Ingold’s studies span environmental perception, language and technology, skilled craft, creativity, human–animal relations, evolutionary theory, and ecological approaches in anthropology. His early research focused on circumpolar societies, comparing how different communities organized their livelihoods around reindeer or caribou through hunting, herding, and ranching.

In later work, Ingold developed a relational approach to human development, arguing that abilities emerge through embodied, skill-based engagement with social and environmental contexts rather than through fixed genetic or cultural transmission. This perspective led him to examine the cultural significance of lines and to explore connections between anthropology, art, architecture, and design—an intellectual trajectory he reflects on in his 2016 essay From Science to Art and Back Again .

Working within phenomenological anthropology, Ingold describes humans as organisms that navigate a world in constant motion, continually shaping and being shaped by the environments they encounter.

Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, art and architecture  

In Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture, Ingold develops a practice-based theory of creativity that emphasizes the relational processes involved in working with materials. He argues that making is not the execution of a prior design but an emergent activity shaped through ongoing correspondence between human practitioners and the properties of the materials they engage with. This view challenges the classical hylomorphic model, which separates form from matter, and instead presents form as something that arises through skilled, situated interaction.

Ingold highlights the active role of materials, noting that qualities such as texture or resistance influence how objects take shape. Knowledge is therefore understood as embodied and experiential, developing through hands-on practice rather than abstract planning. Examples from prehistoric tool-making, craft traditions, and medieval architecture illustrate the continuity of making as a dynamic, adaptive process.

The text also distinguishes between anthropology and ethnography: whereas ethnography documents cultural practices, anthropology involves transformative engagement with the environments and communities studied. Ingold extends his argument to architecture, critiquing the modern separation of design and construction and positioning building as a responsive collaboration among designers, materials, and environmental conditions.

Making presents a material and process-focused account of creativity that links anthropology, archaeology, art, and architecture through shared practices of engagement and skilled action.

Taskscape

Taskscape is a term introduced by Ingold to describe the interconnected field of human activities within a given environment. The concept parallels landscape, framing activity as socially produced and spatially situated while emphasizing that both landscapes and taskscapes are dynamic, continually unfolding processes rather than fixed forms. In analytical contexts, taskscapes are often examined through factors such as mobility, habitat, economy, nature, and public space. Ingold first developed the concept in a 1993 article on the temporal and spatial dimensions of landscape, where he used Pieter Bruegel’s The Harvesters to demonstrate how human actions take shape over time and in relation to their surroundings.

Books

• Ingold, T. (2025). Old ways, new people: Anthropology and/as education (new edition). Routledge, London, UK.
• Ingold, T. (2024). The rise and fall of generation now. Polity, Cambridge, UK. Translations into French (Éditions Seuil, 2025), Japanese (Akishobo, 2024), Italian (Meltemi, 2024).
• Ingold, T. (2022). Imagining for real: Essays on creation, attention and correspondence. Routledge, Abingdon, UK.
• Ingold, T. (2021). Machiavel chez les babouins: pour une anthropologie au-delà de l’humain. Asinamali, Paris, France.
• Ingold, T. (2020). Correspondences. Polity, Cambridge, UK. Translations into French (Actes Sud, 2024), Korean (Gamang Narrative, 2024), Spanish (Gedisa, 2022), German (Edition Trickster, 2023), Italian (Rafaella Cortina, 2021).
• Ingold, T. (2018). Splatać otwarty świat: architektura, antropologia, design. Instytut Architektury, Krakow, Poland.
• Ingold, T. (2018). Anthropology: Why it matters. Polity, Cambridge, UK. Translations into Spanish (Alianza Editorial, 2020), Portuguese (Editora Vozes, 2019), German (Peter Hammer Verlag, 2019), Chinese (Peking University Press, 2020), Italian (Meltemi, 2020).
• Ingold, T. (2018). Anthropology and/as Education. Routledge, Abingdon, UK. Translations into French (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2018), Italian (La Linea, 2019), Portuguese (Editora Vozes, 2020).
• Ingold, T. (2015). The Life of Lines. Routledge, Abingdon, UK. Translations into Spanish (Ediciones Universidad Alberto Hurtado, 2018), Japanese (Film Art, 2018), Italian (Treccani, 2020).
• Descola, P. & Ingold, T. (2014). Être au monde: quelle expérience commune? Presses Universitaires de Lyon, Lyon, France.
• Ingold, T. (2013). Marcher avec les dragons. Zones Sensibles, Brussels, Belgium.
• Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. Routledge, Abingdon, UK. Translations into French (Dehors, 2017), Italian (Rafaella Cortina Editore, 2019), Japanese (Sayusha, 2017).
• Ingold, T. (2012). Ambientes para la vida: conversaciones sobre humanided, conocimiento y antropología. Ediciones Trilcea & UDELAR, Montevideo, Uruguay.
• Ingold, T. (2011). Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. Routledge, Abingdon, UK. Translation into Portuguese (Editora Vozes, 2015).
• Ingold, T. (2007). Lines: A brief history. Routledge, London, UK. Translations into French (Zones Sensibles, 2011), Spanish (Gedisa, 2015), Japanese (Sayusha, 2014).
• Ingold, T. (2001). Ecologia della cultura. Meltemi, Rome, Italy.
• Ingold, T. (2000). The perception of the environment: Essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill. Routledge, London, UK.
• Ingold, T. (1986). The appropriation of nature: Essays on human ecology and social relations. Manchester University Press, Manchester, UK.
• Ingold, T. (1986). Evolution and social life. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. Translations into Spanish (Editorial Grijalbo, 1991), Portuguese (Editora Vozes, 2019).
• Ingold, T. (1980). Hunters, pastoralists and ranchers: Reindeer economies and their transformations. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
• Ingold, T. (1976). The Skolt Lapps today. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.

Awards

Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE)

On June 2nd, 2022, Ingold was appointed CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours for his services to anthropology. In a statement, he said he regarded the recognition as reflecting not only his own work but also the contributions of colleagues and students in the University of Aberdeen’s Department of Anthropology.

Other honours and awards

• Rivers Memorial Medal, RAI (1989)

• Fellow of the British Academy (1997)
• Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2000)
• Huxley Memorial Medal recipient for services to anthropology by the Council of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, the highest honour of the RAI (2014)
• Honorary doctorate of the Leuphana University of Lüneburg (2015)