Tim Ingold, born in 1948, is a British social anthropologist who held the chair of social anthropology at the University of Aberdeen from 1999 and is now emeritus professor there. His starting point was fieldwork with the Skolt Sámi of north-eastern Finland, who lived by small-scale reindeer herding and fishing, and he is best known for The Perception of the Environment (2000) and later books such as Being Alive (2011), which describe people as living beings who come to know the world by moving through it and working with it. On animism he argues that it is not a belief about the world but a way of being alive within it, open to a world that is always coming into being.
Who is Tim Ingold? #
He was born on 1 November 1948 in Kent. After a year teaching at the University of Helsinki in 1973 and 1974, he taught at the University of Manchester, becoming a professor in 1990 and Max Gluckman Professor in 1995, and moved to the University of Aberdeen in 1999 to hold the chair of social anthropology; he is now emeritus professor there. He became a Fellow of the British Academy in 1997 and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2000, and was made a CBE in 2022 for services to anthropology.1
His books include The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (2000), Lines: A Brief History (2007), Being Alive (2011), Making (2013), Correspondences (2021) and The Rise and Fall of Generation Now (2023). The philosophers Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead have had a profound influence on his thinking.1 See Who was Alfred North Whitehead, and what is process philosophy?
Who were the Skolt Sámi he first worked with? #
A Sámi people of north-eastern Finland, whom he lived among in the village of Sevettijärvi from May 1971 to September 1972. They were then a resettled minority living by a mixed economy of small-scale reindeer herding and fishing, with wage work, welfare and work away from the Sámi area besides. His book about them, The Skolt Lapps Today, appeared in 1976.2
His early work went on to compare hunting, reindeer herding and ranching among the peoples of the far north, and this question of how people live with animals is a thread through much of his later work.3
What is Ingold best known for? #
For an account of people as organisms who feel their way through a world that is itself always in motion. Instead of minds that build pictures of an outside world and then act on them, he describes people learning through perception and skilled practice, in relationship with everything around them. He draws on phenomenology and process philosophy, and has described his approach as forging a field of its own, distinct from mainstream anthropology.4
The Perception of the Environment gathers this work into essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill, with chapters on hunting and gathering as ways of perceiving the environment, on animism and totemism, on how animals and people make themselves at home in the world, and on finding the way through a landscape.5 One of his best-known lines, quoted by Graham Harvey, is that human beings everywhere perceive their environments “in the responsive mode” not because of an inborn tendency, but because to perceive at all they must already be in a world and committed to its relationships.6
What does Ingold say about animism? #
That it is a way of being, not a set of beliefs. In his essay “Rethinking the animate, re-animating thought” (2006) he argues that the usual definition, giving life to things that are really inert, fits Western people imagining life on other planets better than the Indigenous peoples to whom the word was first applied. What those peoples share is a way of being that is alive and open to a world in continuous birth, a world that is “a source of astonishment but not surprise”.7
The psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist quotes Ingold’s view that animism is not “a way of believing about the world but … a condition of being in it”.8 And Ingold draws a conclusion for the West. Re-animating Western thought, he argues, means recovering the sense of astonishment that official science has banished.7 See Who is Iain McGilchrist, and what do the two halves of the brain have to do with animism?
What does Ingold say about hunters and animals? #
In the essay “From trust to domination: an alternative history of human-animal relations” (1994, reprinted in The Perception of the Environment), he contrasts two ways of living with animals. Hunters relate to the animals they hunt through trust, with a confidence that the animals will give themselves. Herders relate to their animals through domination, setting out to make sure of what the hunter leaves to the animal; in his words, “The instruments of herding, quite unlike those of hunting, are of control rather than revelation.”9
He does not tell this as a fall from a state of harmony. The two are different kinds of relationship rather than a better one and a worse one, and he warns against romanticising hunter-gatherers. His own examples do not fall neatly on either side: the Van Gujjar, buffalo herders of the Himalayan forests whose bond with their animals rests on trust, and the Blackfoot of the North American plains, who hunted bison and herded horses.9
Do others agree with Ingold about animism and science? #
Not all of them. The anthropologist Laura Rival, writing about the Huaorani of the Ecuadorian Amazon, who lived for centuries as forest hunters and gatherers before being drawn into settled villages, does not share the assumption that Ingold, Descola and Viveiros de Castro hold in common, despite their real differences, that animism is the opposite of modern scientific knowledge. She rejects that separation and argues for an idea of biological life, growth and regeneration that does not depend on social intelligence.10
Ingold has not, so far as can be found, answered her directly. His own position, set out in the 2006 essay, is that modern science has lost something animism keeps, the astonishment that comes with being open to a living world, and that the West needs to recover it.7
How does Ingold’s work sit beside Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Most closely on two points. The first is experience over belief. In shamanism the experience comes first. It is about direct personal experience, not an act of faith, and people are invited to journey and find out for themselves.11 Hunter-gatherers did not only believe the world around them was alive and conscious; they experienced it so.12 Ingold’s “condition of being” says something similar from inside anthropology. His astonishment sits close to awe, too. Few things stir a sense of awe in us more than the Stone People, and there is a lot of interesting research on the good effects of awe.
The second is the change in how people live with animals, where the two part ways as well as meet. Hunter-gatherers lived as one species in a community of species, belonging to the land rather than owning it, and the move to what Daniel Quinn called totalitarian agriculture changed that, as people began to see themselves as owning the land and deciding what lives on it.12 Farmers came to see plants and animals as possessions, and other beings were downgraded in their sentience.13 Therapeutic Shamanism reads that change as the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer. Ingold does not: his contrast between the hunter’s trust and the herder’s control describes two different relationships, not a fall, and he cautions against romanticising either side. See What is the Fall? and Isn’t the Fall just noble-savage romanticism?
