Tim Ingold, Creatures of the soil, reborn – The Understory of the Understory

The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish: The Understory of the Understory 5th & 6th December 2020 Online at themind.fish The Understory of the Understory is the fourth instalment in an ongoing series of festivals on consciousness and intelligence across species, part of the Serpentine’s General Ecology project. With The Understory of the Understory, we go to that place which is simultaneously ground, land, soil and Earth, that is to say, the place where diverse species come together, collaborate, communicate and constitute one another but also where complex systems of redistribution of toxicity, logics of extraction and geopolitics meet. Tim Ingold Creatures of the soil, reborn In his New Science of 1725, Giambattista Vico suggested that the word ‘human’ came from the Latin for soil, humus, and for the verb ‘to bury’ humando. Humans, then, were creatures of the soil who bury their dead. Yet the Enlightenment project, of which Vico himself was a leading exponent, would upend this logic, emancipating humankind from earthly bondage and cutting all ties to ground, place and nature. The modern concept of humanity has its source in this inversion. In this talk Ingold explores its consequences for the way we think about ground and soil. As Enlightenment humanism is itself buried in the rubble of environmental destruction and social injustice, a return to the soil, Ingold suggests, offers hope for rebirth and renewal. 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).

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