Ingold 2007_Materials against materiality.pdf

discussion article

Archaeological Dialogues 14 (1) 1–16 C

2007 Cambridge University Press

doi:10.1017/S1380203807002127 Printed in the United Kingdom

Materials against materiality TimIngold

Abstract

This article seeks to reverse the emphasis, in current studies of material culture, on

the materiality of objects as against the properties of materials. Drawing on James

Gibson’s tripartite division of the inhabited environment into medium, substances

and surfaces, it is argued that the forms of things are not imposed from without upon

an inert substrate of matter, but are continually generated and dissolved within the

ﬂuxes of materials across the interface between substances and the medium that

surrounds them. Thus things are active not because they are imbued with agency but

because of ways in which they are caught up in these currents of the lifeworld. The

properties of materials, then, are not ﬁxed attributes of matter but are processual

and relational. To describe these properties means telling their stories.

Keywords

materials; landscape; artefacts; perception; agency; ﬂux

Before you begin to read this article, please go outside and ﬁnd a largish stone,

though not so big that it cannot be easily lifted and carried indoors. Bring it

in, and immerse it in a pail of water or under a running tap. Then place it

before you on your desk – perhaps on a tray or plate so as not to spoil your

desktop. Take a good look at it. If you like, you can look at it again from

time to time as you read the article. At the end, I shall refer to what you may

have observed.

I begin with a puzzle. It is that the ever-growing literature in anthropology

and archaeology that deals explicitly with the subjects of materiality and

material culture seems to have hardly anything to say about materials . 1 I

mean by materials the stuff that things are made of, and a rough inventory

might begin with something like the following, taken from the list of contents

from Henry Hodges’s excellent little book Artefacts :

pottery; glazes; glass and enamels; copper and copper alloys; iron and steel;

gold, silver, lead and mercury; stone; wood; ﬁbres and threads; textiles and

baskets; hides and leather; antler, bone, horn and ivory; dyes, pigments and

paints; adhesives; some other materials (Hodges 1964, 9).

This matter-of-fact volume is packed with information about all sorts of

materials that prehistoric people have used to make things. Yet I have

2 discussion

Figure 1

never seen it referenced in the literature on materiality. Looking along

my shelves I ﬁnd titles like The mental and the material , by Maurice

Godelier (1986); Material cultures. Why some things matter , edited by

Daniel Miller (1998a); Mind, materiality and history , by Christina Toren

(1999); and Matter, materiality and modern culture , edited by Paul Graves-

Brown (2000). In style and approach, these books are a million miles from

Hodges’s work. Their engagements are not with the tangible stuff of craftsmen

and manufacturers but with the abstract ruminations of philosophers and

theorists. To understand materiality, it seems, we need to get as far away

from materials as possible.

For me, the problem came to a head when, in November 2002, I attended a

session at the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association

which were held in that year in the city of New Orleans. The session

was entitled ‘Materiality’, and included presentations on such topics as

‘Immateriality’, ‘For a materialist semiotics’, ‘Materiality and cognition’, and

‘Praxeology in a material world’. These presentations were overﬂowing with

references to the works of currently fashionable social and cultural theorists,

and expounded in a language of grotesque impenetrability on the relations

between materiality and a host of other, similarly unfathomable qualities,

including agency, intentionality, functionality, sociality, spatiality, semiosis,

spirituality and embodiment. Not one of the presenters, however, was able

to say what materiality actually means, nor did any of them even mention

materials or their properties. For the most part, I have to confess, I could make

neither head nor tail of what they were talking about. As anthropologists, I

Materials against materiality 3

thought to myself, might we not learn more about the material composition

of the inhabited world by engaging quite directly with the stuff we want to

understand: by sawing logs, building a wall, knapping a stone or rowing

a boat? Could not such engagement – working practically with materials –

offer a more powerful procedure of discovery than an approach bent on the

abstract analysis of things already made? What academic perversion leads

us to speak not of materials and their properties but of the materiality of

objects ? It seemed to me that the concept of materiality, whatever it might

mean, has become a real obstacle to sensible enquiry into materials, their

transformations and affordances.

Why should this be so? One clue to the answer lies in the title of a conference

held at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge,

in March 2003: ‘Rethinking materiality. The engagement of mind with the

material world’. The pretext for this conference came, in large part, from a

reaction against the excessive polarization of mind and matter that has led

generations of theorists to suppose that the material substance of the world

presents itself to humanity as a blank slate, a tabula rasa, for the inscription

of ideational forms. For example, in The mental and the material , Godelier

argues that there can be no deliberate action of human beings upon the

material world that does not set to work ‘mental realities, representations,

judgements, principles of thought’ (1986, 11). Where, then, do these mental

realities come from? Do they have their source, as Godelier intimates, in

a world of society that is ontologically distinct from ‘the material realities

of external nature’ (ibid., 3)? At the Cambridge conference Colin Renfrew

argued, to the contrary, that the kinds of representation and judgement to

which Godelier refers are not so much imported into arenas of practical

activity as emergent within them, arising from the very ways in which human

beings are interactively involved with material substance (Renfrew 2001,

127). Yet in his formulation of what he now calls ‘material engagement

theory’, the polarity of mind and matter remains. For the engagement of

which he speaks does not bring the ﬂesh and blood of human bodies

into corporeal contact with materials of other kinds, whether organic or

inorganic. Rather, it brings incorporeal minds into contact with a material

world.

What, then, is this material world? Of what does it consist? For heuristic

purposes, Christopher Gosden suggests, we could divide it into two broad

components: landscape and artefacts (1999, 152). Thus it seems that we

have human minds on the one hand, and a material world of landscape

and artefacts on the other. That, you might think, should cover just about

everything. But does it? Consider, for a moment, what is left out. Starting

with landscape, does this include the sky? Where do we put the sun, the

moon and the stars? We can reach for the stars, but cannot touch them; are

they, then, material realities with which humans can make contact, or do

they exist for us only in the mind? Is the moon part of the material world for

terrestrial travellers, or only for cosmonauts who touch down on the lunar

landscape? How about sunlight? Life depends on it. But if sunlight were a

constituent of the material world, then we would have to admit not only that

the diurnal landscape differs materially from the nocturnal one, but also that

4 discussion

the shadow of a landscape feature, such as a rock or tree, is as much a part of

the material world as the feature itself. For creatures that live in the shade, it

does indeed make a difference. What, then, of the air? When you breathe, or

feel the wind on your face, are you engaging with the material world? When

the fog descends, and everything around you looks dim and mysterious, has

the material world changed, or are you just seeing the same world differently?

Does rain belong to the material world, or only the puddles that it leaves in

ditches and potholes? Does falling snow join the material world only once it

settles on the ground? As engineers and builders know all too well, rain and

frost can break up roads and buildings. How then can we claim that roads

and buildings are part of the material world, if rain and frost are not? And

where would we place ﬁre and smoke, not to mention liquids of all kinds

from ink to volcanic lava?

None of these things fall within the scope of Gosden’s second component of

materiality, namely artefacts. Moreover, the category of the artiﬁcial raises its

own anomalies. In an experiment I asked a group of undergraduate students

to sort a motley collection of objects that they had found lying around outside

into two piles, one of natural objects, the other of artefacts. It turned out that

not a single thing could be unequivocally attributed to one pile or the other.

If they seemed to vary on a scale of artiﬁciality, it was only because for some

more than others, and at different times in their histories, human beings had

played a part in the processes that led to their being where they were, and

taking the forms they did, at the moment when they were picked up. In this

sense the bifacial stone hand-axe recently made for me by a professional

ﬂint-knapper is perhaps more artiﬁcial than the stone recovered from your

garden that you have before you on your desk. But that does not make the

former any more a part of the material world than the latter. More generally,

why should the material world include only either things encountered in situ ,

within the landscape, or things already transformed by human activity, into

artefacts? Why exclude things like the stone, which have been recovered

and removed but not otherwise transformed? And where, in this division

between landscape and artefacts, would we place all the diverse forms of

animal, plant, fungal and bacterial life? Like artefacts, these things might be

attributed formal properties of design, yet they have not been made but have

grown. If, moreover, they are part of the material world, then the same must

be true of my own body. So where does this ﬁt in? If I and my body are one

and the same, and if my body indeed partakes of the material world, then

how can the body-that-I-am engage with that world?

An alternative way forward is offered by James Gibson, in his pioneering work

on The ecological approach to visual perception . Here he distinguishes three

components of the inhabited environment: medium , substances and surfaces

(Gibson 1979, 16). For human beings the medium is normally air. Of course

we need air to breathe. But also, offering little resistance, it allows us to move

about – to do things, make things and touch things. It also transmits radiant

energy and mechanical vibration, so that we can see and hear. And it allows us

to smell, since the molecules that excite our olfactory receptors are diffused in

Materials against materiality 5

it. Thus the medium, according to Gibson, affords movement and perception.

Substances, on the other hand, are relatively resistant to both. They include

all kinds of more or less solid stuff like rock, gravel, sand, soil, mud, wood,

concrete and so on. Such materials furnish necessary physical foundations

for life – we need them to stand on – but it is not generally possible to see

or move through them. At the interface between the medium and substances

are surfaces. All surfaces, according to Gibson, have certain properties. These

include a particular, relatively persistent layout, a degree of resistance to

deformation and disintegration, a distinctive shape and a characteristically

non-homogeneous texture. Surfaces are where radiant energy is reﬂected or

absorbed, where vibrations are passed to the medium, where vaporization or

diffusion into the medium occur, and what our bodies come up against in

touch. So far as perception is concerned, surfaces are therefore ‘where most

of the action is’ (Gibson 1979, 23).

It is all too easy, however, to slip from the physical separation of gaseous

medium from solid substance to the metaphysical separation of mind from

matter. Thus the artefact is characteristically deﬁned – as it is by Godelier –

as an object formed through the imposition of mental realities upon material

ones (1986, 4). The artisan, it is argued, begins work with an image or design

already in mind of the thing he plans to make, and ends when the image

is realized in the material. For example, in the making of the stone biface

mentioned above, the knapper must have begun – as Jacques Pelegrin says of

his prehistoric counterpart – with a ‘pre-existing mental image ... deserving of

being termed a “concept”’ (1993, 310). Or, as Karl Marx famously declared

of the human architect, the most incompetent of his profession is to be

distinguished from the best of bees in that ‘the architect has built a cell in his

head before he constructs it in wax’ (1930, 169–70). Here the surface of the

artefact or building is not just of the particular material fromwhich it is made,

but of materiality itself as it confronts the creative human imagination (Ingold

2000, 53). Indeed, the very notion of material culture, which has gained a

newmomentum following its long hibernation in the basements of museology,

rests on the premise that as the embodiments of mental representations, or

as stable elements in systems of signiﬁcation, things have already solidiﬁed or

precipitated out from the generative ﬂuxes of the medium that gave birth to

them. Convinced that all that is material resides in things, or in what Bjørnar

Olsen (2003) calls ‘the hard physicality of the world’, students of material

culture have contrived to dematerialize, or to sublimate into thought, the

very medium in which the things in question once took shape and are now

immersed. Ironically, Olsen does just this when he accuses social scientists

who take leave of the material world for the realms of cognitive experience

of being guided by a hermeneutics in which ‘all that is solid melts into air’

(Olsen 2003, 88).

Another example of this kind of slippage, from materials to materiality,

can be found in an article by the sociologist Kevin Hetherington, on the role

of touch in everyday practices of placemaking. In the course of his argument, 2

Hetherington suggests that Gibson’s theory of perception offers only ‘a weak

acknowledgement of the materiality of the world’. For whatever its virtues, the

theory has so far failed to address ‘what an encounter between the ﬁngertip

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: