In The Gathering Shadows of Material Things

What does it mean to join things? Only because things are joined is the material world at all coherent, and therefore habitable. Underlying the manifold ways of thinking about the join is a fundamental contrast between ‘up-ness’, or articulation, and ‘with-ness’, or correspondence. Joining up yields an addition, albeit fragmentary and contingent, otherwise known as the assemblage, defined by the exteriority of relations between its parts. Behind the additions of the assemblage, however, lie a series of practical and productive operations by which things are drawn into a nexus of relations with one another. With-ness is not additive, like the assemblage, but complicate, as a gathering of threads or pathways. In the gathering, these threads go along together and answer to one another. That is, they correspond. And whereas the elements of the assemblage are outside one another, in the gathering things both join and split apart, entangle and differentiate, from the inside. Thus the order of the gathering is not explicate but complicate. In all matter, the explicate structure of the assemblage is accompanied by the complicate structure of the gathering, like a thing and its shadow. The one lends the material world its substance; the other its coherence. Only by taking the two together – a duality encompassed in the notion of agencement – can we comprehend a world which is full of connections but in which everything takes time to build and nothing lasts.   

Tim Ingold is Professor Emeritus of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. He has carried out fieldwork among Saami and Finnish people in Lapland, and has written on environment, technology and social organisation in the circumpolar North, on animals in human society, and on human ecology and evolutionary theory. His more recent work explores environmental perception and skilled practice. Ingold’s current interests lie on the interface between anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. His recent books include The Perception of the Environment (2000), Lines (2007), Being Alive (2011), Making (2013), The Life of Lines(2015), Anthropology and/as Education (2018), Anthropology: Why it Matters (2018) and Correspondences (2020). 

Part of the Archaeology Distinguished Lecture Series

 

In The Gathering Shadows of Material Things
Date
Wed October 21st 2020, 12:00 - 1:00pm
Location
Virtual
Event Sponsor
Archaeology Center
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