1st Edition

Beyond Perception Correspondences with Tim Ingold's Work

Edited By Caroline Gatt, Jan Peter Laurens Loovers Copyright 2025
362 Pages 38 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

This book showcases the way a range of scholars have engaged with Tim Ingold’s opus since the publication of his ground-breaking The Perception of the Environment in 2000. Ingold’s work has become key for a variety of disciplines ranging from anthropology, archaeology, and human geography to art, architecture, design and studies of material and visual culture. As set out in The Perception of... Read more

Beyond perception: Tim Ingold, anthropology and the world

CAROLINE GATT AND JAN PETER LAURENS LOOVERS

Section I: Introduction – Wind, wing, fin, water: Co-constructing relations, ontogenesis and enskilment

AGUSTÍN FUENTES

1 On the wing: Skilled practice and learning in human/avian relationships

SARA ASU SCHROER

2 The fish’s turn: Ontogenesis and technique in Amazonia

CARLOS EMANUEL SAUTCHUK

3 Displacing the in-between: Wetlands, urbanity and the colonial logic of separation

PAOLO GRUPPUSO AND FRANZ KRAUSE

Section II: Introduction – Lines against linealogy

DAVID G. ANDERSON

4 Listening to microbe-spirits dancing: More-than-imagined dreams and emerging infectious diplomacies

CÉSAR E. GIRALDO HERRERA

5 Belonging to this world: How Tim Ingold inspires two theologians

CELIA DEANE- DRUMMOND AND NORMAN WIRZBA

6 Ingold in the minor key

MARC HIGGIN AND GERMAIN MEULEMANS

Section III: Introduction – Experiment, experience, education

ANNE PIRRIE AND JOHN LOEWENTHAL

7 Living theory: Anthropology, education, and manifold relations

JAN PETER LAURENS LOOVERS

8 Learning with trees and young people in northeast Scotland

ELIZABETH CURTIS, J. EDWARD, AND JO VERGUNST

9 Corresponding with matters of pedagogy: Bauhaus, Black Mountain and beyond

JUDITH WINTER

Section IV: Introduction – Moving forward with anthropology

SARAH PINK

10 Design anthropology as a design methodology

WENDY GUNN

11 Are anthropologists makers? Towards regenerative scholarship and pluriversities

CAROLINE GATT, GLADYS ALEXIE, JOSS ALLEN, GEY PIN ANG, VALERIA LEMBO, AMANDA RAVETZ, AND BEN SPATZ

12 The Trowel and the shaping of worlds: Humble handtools, time and imagination

RACHEL J. HARKNESS AND CRISTIÁN SIMONETTI

Section V: Introduction: Movement, becomings, growth

ELIZABETH HALLAM

13 Reimagining the body-with-chronic pain through an ‘anthropology with butoh dance’: from bodily hylomorphism to somatic morphogenesis

PAOLA ESPOSITO

14 The perception of movement in (and through) seafaring

MONTSE PIJOAN

15 Upstream and downstream: A conversation on limit as education through marathon running in prison and kayaking along rivers

PAOLO MACCAGNO AND DEBORAH PINNIGER

Afterword

ERIN MANNING

Biography

Caroline Gatt is a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology at the University of Graz, Austria.

Jan Peter Laurens Loovers is an independent researcher and curator based in Aberdeen, UK.

Beyond Perception is a loving and creative analysis of the main themes so caringly and revealing explored throughout Ingold’s oeuvre –a wayfaring of sorts by the chapter authors, woven of Ingoldian lines and threads: embodiment, movement, place, landscape, history, becoming, knowledge, enskillment, art, education, ecology, sentience, even theology. It richly displays the enormous significance of Tim Ingold’s philosophical anthropology for understanding our existential predicaments, for it is, ultimately, about life itself, and about worldmaking and design writ large. This superb collection vividly shows why Ingold’s work is fundamental to a much-needed transition of the human sciences towards relational ontologies of emergence. Above all, Beyond Perception is a celebration of the rich intellectual journey through the landscapes of life and thought by one of today’s wisest elders of an alternative West.”

- Arturo Escobar, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA

 

“This utterly inspiring book is a must-read for anyone studying more-than-human perception and complex learning ecologies. Each chapter offers fascinating detail of relational worlds made all the more alive by the far-reaching insights of Tim Ingold.”  

- Elizabeth de Freitas, Adelphi University, USA

 

“Beyond Perception, a collection of essays on one of the most important anthropologists of our time, is not hagiographic in any sense – which would be utterly inappropriate – but wild: like Ingold’s own work, it assembles a wide range of diverse topics and methodologies, constantly reflecting on our relation to the natural world without necessarily conforming to disciplinary divisions. The book is an exercise in thinking from and with Ingold, in drawing out lines that he started, in communicating, collaborating, and developing perspectives that sometimes diverge from Ingold but retain a distinctive feel, a methodological and philosophical freedom that he practiced and engendered. The reader has a sense of being welcomed into a unique community of looking, listening, and thinking.”

- Christian Grüny, State University of Music and Performing Arts Stuttgart, Germany