The misperception of the environment: A critical evaluation of the work of Tim Ingold and an alternative guide to the use of the senses in anthropological theory

Abstract

This article presents a critical evaluation of the work of Tim Ingold from the standpoint of social and sensory anthropology. It acknowledges the novelty of the emphasis on enskillment, movement, process, and growth in Ingold's work. However, it is critical of his abstraction of the senses, which are rendered ‘interchangeable’, and of persons, who are reduced to generic individuals. Ingold's anthropology is shown to be pre-cultural and post-social at once, with the result that it fails to address the sociality of sensation and cultural mediation of perception. Ingold's doctrine of ‘direct perception’ is exposed as particularly problematic. In place of his emphasis on ‘the life of lines’, this article foregrounds the life of the senses, and in lieu of his diminution of the social, it acknowledges the politics of perception that inform most every perceptual act. The article concludes with a series of reflections on how to go about sensualizing anthropological theory and practicing sensory ethnography (i.e. the methodology of participant sensation).

Introduction

I had been reading the works of Tim Ingold till well into the night on the plane from Montreal to Heathrow in preparation for a talk at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology in Oxford. I had booked a room at St Benet's Hall on St Giles’ Street, and as I made my way up the stairs to my lodgings, I was arrested by the beauty of a series of framed sketches on the wall. One was of a child's head, others were of women in flowing gowns. The sketches were profoundly sensuous, and their voluminousness (thanks to the sinuous lines and subtle shading of the artist's pencil) was awe-inspiring. Later, I asked the porter whom the drawings were by, as we inspected them together. They were bequeathed to the college by the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones, she informed me. I said to her: ‘There is a lot more than lines to those drawings’. ‘Yes’, she responded enthusiastically, ‘there is life!’ So true, I thought to myself, yet Ingold has a lock on ‘life’ (the term figures in the titles of a number of his books), and he has reduced life to lines – bold, stark lines, or in some cases squiggles, without the least trace of nuance or shading.

I think of Tim Ingold as the great gadfly of contemporary anthropology, like that other renowned gadfly, Socrates, continuously asking questions that disturb our complacency. He is a prolific scholar, a proficient cellist, an accomplished administrator, a generous host, and there is no denying the originality of his thinking. Based in Aberdeen, Ingold is a giant of the contemporary academic scene, with over 75,000 citations, according to Google Scholar.

I have met Tim Ingold in person a number of times over the years. The last time he was in Montreal, as the guest of my colleagues in McGill Anthropology, I invited him out for coffee. I couldn't very well take him to a café; it would not fit this theorist, who places so much stress on the activity of life, to sit. So, I packed a thermos-full of coffee and picked up some croissants, and we drove, together with his wife Anna, and a scholar who was visiting the Concordia Centre for Sensory Studies from Finland, up Mount Royal and then hiked to the look-out. We sat on some steps and ‘took in the colors’, a favorite Montreal pastime. (It was a glorious October day, and the maple trees were at their finest.) Our conversation ranged over many topics, and was highly memorable, as usual.

In print rather than in person, Ingold is a different man. Consider his acid critique of the ‘anthropology of the senses’ in The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (2000). This is a field that I and others, such as Constance Classen (1993, 1997), Paul Stoller (1989, 1997), and Steve Feld (1982, 1996), as well as Edmund Carpenter (1972) ¹ and Alfred Gell (1977, 1995) had been cultivating over the previous decades. In his critique, Ingold dismissed the contributions of the whole lot of us and promulgated his own vision of the senses, grounded in the phenomenological philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the ecological psychology of J.J. Gibson, in its place. In 2011, Ingold and I had a debate (Ingold and Howes, 2011), from which he emerged triumphant. Perhaps emboldened by this victory, in recent years, he has gone on to challenge others, such as Philippe Descola and Webb Keane (Ingold, 2016, 2018a). I know I am not alone in feeling that Ingold is undoing anthropology – or social anthropology, anyway – as he remakes the discipline in his own image, never mind his disparagement of ‘ethnography’, the one thing anthropologists (once) thought they were good at. It is surprising that there has not been more pushback.

Ingold's thought has evolved since 2011 – for example, his doctrine of ‘direct perception’ (Ingold, 2018a), his philosophy of ‘linealogy’ (Ingold, 2015) – and it is on that evolution that I shall be concentrating in what follows, after a brief synopsis of the point at which the anthropology of the senses had arrived before Ingold intervened and sought to correct it. In my estimation, Ingold's brand of post-social anthropology and idiosyncratic rendition of phenomenology needs to be countered by a rigorous defence of the primacy of the social which, in the instant case, means attending to the sociality of sensation and the cultural mediation of perception.

In what follows, therefore, I present a case for a full-bodied ‘multisensory anthropology’ (Howes, 2019) which counters the formalist abstractions of Ingold's perception anthropology (or ‘activity theory’). I also advance a theory of ‘sensory-processing’ as involving rather more than information pick-up in an environment (i.e. the understanding of perception that comes out of Gibson's ecological psychology) in addition to running contrary to the reduction of perception to ‘patterns of brain activity’ in the field of cognitive neuroscience (Howes, 2009, 2022a). I maintain that perception, or meaning-making does not go on ‘in some secret grotto in the head’ (Geertz, 2000: 76); rather, it goes on out there in the environment (i.e. between sense organ and object) no less than within. This externality makes processes of sensing susceptible to socialization and technological amplification. Sensing is public: it is not ‘all down to our DNA’ (Hollingham, 2004), it is always also up to our culture – ‘culture tunes our neurons’ (Sacks quoted in Howes, 2005: 21–2). In sensory anthropology, the focus is on process and practice over physiology (Harris, 2018: 251).

Sensory awakenings

My talk at the Institute was entitled ‘Multisensory Anthropology: Prospects and Impediments’. I began by acknowledging my debt to my teacher, Rodney Needham, Professor of Social Anthropology at All Souls College from 1976 until his retirement in 1990. Needham was the gadfly of an earlier generation. His radical empiricism (in the tradition of the philosopher David Hume) led him to question whether a capacity for belief constitutes a ‘human universal’ (Needham, 1972), and also to caution fellow anthropologists against positing causal relations where the ethnographic record contains no evidence of anything beyond associations (Needham, 1976).

Needham was one of those responsible for my own sensory awakening. For example, ‘Olfaction and Transition’ (Howes, 1987) was directly inspired and modelled after his seminal piece on ‘Percussion and Transition’ (Needham, 1967). The other main influence was Marshall McLuhan. I attended an informal talk McLuhan gave in the Senior Common Room at Trinity College, Toronto, in 1979 at which he expounded on the ‘laws of media’ (posthumously published as McLuhan and McLuhan, 1992). A decade later, I went to Papua New Guinea to explore his hypothesis to the effect that oral societies are more ‘ear-minded’ than literate societies due to the prevailing technology of communication being speech as opposed to writing or print, which reduce words to ‘quiescent marks on paper’ (Ong, 1982). During my sojourn at Ambunti in East Sepik Province and Budoya in Milne Bay Province, I came to see that it was misleading to conceptualize the difference as turning on a contest between the eye and the ear alone, for there are as many differences to the orchestration of the senses between (and within) societies without writing as between so-called oral societies and literate societies. In other words, there is no great divide, only a panoply of different sensory orders, and each society must be approached on its own sensory terms.

The anthropology of the senses or sensory anthropology (I use these terms interchangeably) is a dynamic and highly robust field of study. ² It stands for a cultural approach to the study of the senses and a sensory approach to the study of culture: the senses are treated as both subject of study and means of inquiry. In The Life of the Senses: Introduction to a Modal Anthropology, François Laplantine summed up the gist of this approach as follows: ‘The experience of [ethnographic] fieldwork is an experience of sharing in the sensible [partage du sensible]. We observe, we listen, we speak with others, we partake of their cuisine, we try to feel along with them what they experience’ (Laplantine, 2015: 2). Sensory ethnography, then, departs from the conventional anthropological methodology of participant observation by virtue of its emphasis on participant sensation – or sensing and making sense along with others.

Since the 1990s, the social anthropology of the senses has spread throughout the discipline as it has been taken up by archaeologists (Hamilakis, 2014; Skeate and Day, 2020) and linguists (Majid and Levinson, 2010). It has also spread across the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences as it has been adopted and refined by historians (Corbin, 1990, Classen, 1993, 2014), sociologists (Synnott, 1993; Vannini et al., 2012), and geographers (Pocock, 1993, Rodaway, 1994, Paterson, 2009), among others. These developments have been charted on the Sensory Studies website (www.sensorystudies.org) and came to a head with the publication of the four-volume Senses and Sensation: Critical and Primary Sources compendium (Howes, 2018), which includes a chapter by Ingold, incidentally.

The sensory revolution in scholarship, or joining of the senses in research and research-creation, can also be seen in the recent reconstitution of the field of visual anthropology as ‘multimodal anthropologies’ (Collins et al., 2017). The latter term denotes how anthropologists have increasingly taken to experimenting with diverse media, such as audio recording, drawing, photography, videography, VR, installation art and performance, as well as such practices as walking and even combat sports, to ‘conceptualize, design, conduct, and communicate ethnographic research’ (Elliott and Culhane, 2017: 3; Cox et al., 2016; Spencer, 2014). In the result, anthropology is no longer the ‘discipline of words’ it once was (Grimshaw, 2001), and sensing cultures has taken over from the notion of ‘writing culture’ that was so prevalent in the 1980s (Howes, 2003, 2016). Yet the current explosion of creative methodologies – i.e. the crossing of art and anthropology – appears to have left Ingold cold: ‘most attempts to combine art and anthropology, deliberately and self-consciously, have focussed on ethnography as the glue that holds them together. These attempts have not, in my view, been wholly successful: they tend to lead both to bad art and bad ethnography’ (Ingold, 2018b: 3)

Benchmarks

We shall deal with Ingold's objections to mixing art and anthropology presently. But first we need to take stock of some of the points at which the anthropology of the senses had arrived before Ingold intervened. What does it mean to approach a culture on its own sensory terms? It entails, first of all, suspending any analytic preconceptions as to the nature and function of the senses, including their number, their bounds, and how they interact. It means recognizing that the senses are made, not given. Hence the focus on inquiring into how the senses are fashioned in and by myth, ritual, cosmology, technology, art and architecture (or ‘material culture’), language, childrearing (the ‘education of the senses’), and so forth (Howes and Classen, 1991) with a view to delimiting a given culture's ‘sensory model’ (Classen, 1997)

Second, it involves attending to the mediatory role of the senses. In addition to mediating the apprehension of the environment and modulating each other, ‘[t]he senses mediate the relationship between self and society, mind and body, idea and object’ (Bull et al., 2006: 5). This focus on the dynamic interrelations of the senses and that which they relate set the anthropology of the senses apart from the anthropology of the body. The latter approach, through promoting such notions as the ‘embodied mind’ and/or ‘mindful body’, had succeeded in overcoming the Cartesian split between mind and body that is so deeply engrained in Western thought and culture, but it has also tended to foist a spurious unity on the sensorium. This fusion can sometimes do violence to indigenous understandings (see Leenhardt, 1979). Furthermore, the anthropology of the senses is as interested in how the senses are distinguished from one another and conflict as in how they coalesce.

Third, it entails being alert to the politics of perception or ‘distribution of the sensible’ (Laplantine, 2015). As Constance Classen stated in ‘Foundations for an Anthropology of the Senses’ (1997) and reiterated in Ways of Sensing: ‘Anthropologists must be attentive to intracultural variation, for there are typically persons or groups who differ on the sensory values [and practices] embraced by the society at large, and resist, instead of conform to, the prevailing sensory regime’ (Howes and Classen, 2014: 12; Classen, 1997: 402)

Fourth, by starting with the senses and sensation, the anthropology of the senses had begun to put ‘cognition’ in its place by charting a middle course between cognitivism and empiricism. The former treats perception as determined by cognition. The focus is on analyzing the ‘cognitive map’ of the individual subject which is supposed to dictate how their senses function. The latter views the mind as a tabula rasa and the senses as passive receptors of the impressions made on them by the exterior world. The former is too top-down, and the latter too bottom-up. Both approaches ignore the mediating role of culture and the socialization of the senses in addition to overlooking the agency and interactivity of the people doing the sensing and of the senses themselves.

This focus on the interface between the sensible and the intelligible, the sensual and the rational is reflected in Michael Taussig's notion of ‘sensuous mimesis’, as elaborated in his ‘particular history of the senses’ (Taussig, 1993). Sensuous mimesis refers to ‘both the faculty of imitation and the deployment of that faculty in sensuous knowing, sensuous Othering’ (Taussig, 1993: 68). So too does the Buddhist doctrine of the mind as a sixth sense – that is, the mind as on a par with the other senses rather than lording it over them – confound the conventional distinction between thinking and sensing. The psychologist Rudolf Arnheim also challenged this distinction in his book Visual Thinking (1969), where he sought to show that thinking is a continuation of seeing; vision is not the handmaiden of cognition (see further Halpern, 2014). Conversely, the ethnomusicologist Anthony Seeger records that among the Suyà of Brazil knowing is assimilated to hearing: the word m-ba means both ‘to hear’ and ‘to know’ (Seeger, 1975). When Suyà know something, even something visual such as a weaving pattern, they say: ‘It is in my ear’. Seeger relates how the Suyà regarded his practice of note-taking (the visual inscription of data) as evidence that his ears were ‘swollen’. In Why Suyà Sing, in keeping with the priority of aurality in Suyà culture, Seeger went on to elaborate not an anthropology of music but a ‘musical anthropology’. Seeger's work (1975, 1981, 1987) exemplifies sensory ethnography at its finest.

The misperception of the environment

Ingold's own account of perception is both highly idiosyncratic and strangely generic. Arguably, it is both pre-cultural and post-social, as I shall attempt to show. For example, ‘I am, at once, my tasting, my listening, and the rest’, he wrote (Ingold, 2011: 325; see further Ingold, 2000: 262). ³ The extreme ego-centredness of this position is consistent with the alleged phenomenological underpinnings of his approach – Merleau-Ponty's notion of the ‘bodily synergy’ and ‘prereflective unity’ of the senses (Ingold, 2000: 262). But in extrapolating this position to the rest of humanity it is also unreflexive regarding Ingold's own social position as a male subject of a particular social class and ethnicity and moment in history. If, as Marx (1987: 10) asserted, ‘The forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present’, then anthropologists must surely take account of how much baggage their senses carry. Sensory anthropology entails cultivating the capacity to ‘be of two sensoria’ about things – one's own and that of the culture under study (Howes, 2003: 10–14), which is neither a first person nor a third person perspective, neither phenomenological nor ‘scientific’, but both at the same time. Developing a ‘disciplined conscious awareness’ of one's own and others’ sensory biases is no easy task, but remains crucial to the successful pursuit of ‘sensuous scholarship’ (Stoller, 1997). Having to live with some degree of cognitive dissonance comes with the territory.

In The Perception of the Environment, Ingold sought to shelve this cultural approach to the study of perception, which highlights how the senses are constructed and lived, by introducing Gibson's ‘non-representational’ theory of the senses as ‘perceptual systems’ and promoting what he calls ‘affordance-thinking’, or ‘the idea of direct perception’. Thus, Ingold alleges that at the heart of the anthropology of the senses is ‘a representationalist theory of knowledge, according to which people draw on the raw material of bodily sensation to build up an internal picture of what the world ‘out there’ is like’ (Ingold, 2000: 282). He further alleges that it ‘upholds a notion of cultures as consisting in systems of collective representations, over and above the conditions and contexts of practical life within which people develop and embody their own skills of action and perception’ (284, emphasis added). And, he clinches his case by arguing that ‘the eyes and ears should not be understood as separate keyboards for the registration of sensation but as organs of the body as a whole, in whose movement, within an environment, the activity of perception consists’ (268, emphasis added).

According to Ingold's rendition of Gibson (1966, 1979), the senses are to be considered as ‘means of active inquiry and of orienting oneself in the world’, and from this perspective they are ‘interchangeable’ (Ingold, 2000: 245, 276–81). Following Gibson, what the perceiver looks for are constancies underlying the continuous modulations of the optical array as they move from place to place. These constancies or invariants constitute ‘affordances’, or so many ‘possibilities for action’, which are not mental constructs but rather inherent in the environment itself. Assuming the givenness of affordances, in his recent debate with Webb Keane, Ingold introduces ‘the idea of direct perception’, which holds that ‘living beings can find meaning in an environment unmediated by signs. … It asserts that we perceive things directly, as they come forward into presence and impinge on our [practical] activity, not indirectly through the signs they leave in their wake’ (Ingold, 2018a: 41). Perception is ‘a mode of action’ (Ingold, 2000: 166), not representation, and not interpretation. ‘Interpretation comes later’ (Ingold, 2018a: 41). As for culture, there is no room nor any need for it in Gibson's ‘ecological equation’. ‘Like life, perception carries on’ (39), Ingold says, at what he presumes to be an infra- or pre-cultural level.

There is much to commend Gibson's theory of perception as ‘information pick-up’ in an environment, if one is not too concerned by his instrumentalization of the senses nor bothered by the extrapolation of his findings concerning visual perception to the rest of the senses, as if they were ‘interchangeable’. There are those who have sought to show that what goes for vision also goes for audition, etc. (Clarke, 2005) with some success. However, more discerning scholars (Hetherington, 2003; Valiquet, 2019) baulk at this assimilation, with good reason. The fact that their objections typically fail to register has much to do with the vaunted status of vision in the Western sensory hierarchy: being the paragon sense, it can stand for all the senses, with the result that the ‘other’ senses are either ignored or else assimilated to a visual model without further ado.

It is not surprising that Ingold cleaves to the work of a psychologist and distances his perspective from the more socially minded and cross-culturally sensitive work of anthropologists like Gell or Stoller given his ‘ontogenetical’ fixation. At various points in his writing, Ingold comes down squarely on the side of ‘ontogeny’, the development of the individual, and trivializes the role of ‘phylogeny’, the development of the species, including the state of society (see Ingold and Howes, 2011: 314; Ingold, 2000: 379; Howes, 2019b: 27). Indeed, Ingold is so dismissive of the social that, as he would have it, ‘relations among humans, that we are accustomed to calling ‘social,’ are but a subset of ecological relations’ (Ingold, 2000: 5). This skipping over the social, and preferring the term ‘relations’ (without further specification) to that of social structure, is what makes him a post-social anthropologist. Ingold is not alone, of course. His methodical individualism is consistent with that of other British anthropologists, such as Nigel Rapport, author of I am Dynamite (2003), and can be seen as rooted in the venerable tradition of ‘English individualism’ (Macfarlane, 1991). In support of his position, Ingold poses the question: ‘You can see and touch a fellow human being, but have you ever seen or touched a society?’ and then with unseemly haste goes on to aver: ‘Granted that we are not sure what societies are, or even whether they exist at all …’ (Ingold, 2011: 238). ⁴

As a corollary to his agnosticism with respect to society, Ingold maintains that he subscribes to a theory of the ‘relational individual’, but it would be more accurate to say that his theory is one of the generic individual. Consider his persistent use of the pronoun ‘he’, ‘his’ or ‘him’ in The Life of Lines: ‘Let us imagine the walker … making his way’ over hills and through valleys; or, again: ‘In walking the labyrinth, … the walker is under an imperative to go where it takes him’ (Ingold, 2015: 42, 132). Here, he is merely (uncritically) subscribing to the convention that the category ‘man’ encompasses that of ‘woman’, and ‘he’ includes ‘she’. There is admittedly a certain economy to this mode of representation, but that does not excuse its exclusionary aspects, and there are alternatives, such as using ‘they’ in place of ‘he’, or, to be resolutely inclusive and specific at once, using ‘auteur.e’ or ‘flaneur.euse’ à la française.

Furthermore, as recent advances in medical research have shown (Holdcroft, 2007), gender-blindness can lead to the infliction of many hidden injuries (misdiagnosis, drugs that treat male ailments but exacerbate female disorders, etc.), and, as the extensive body of research in the history and anthropology of the senses has revealed, gender difference is one of the major engines of ‘intracultural variation’ in the ordering of the senses as of society (Classen, 1997, 1998); and, not only are the senses gendered (the male gaze, the female touch), ⁵ they are also racialized (Stoever, 2016; Sekimoto and Brown, 2020) and modulated by class position (Bourdieu, 1987). With all due respect for Ingold's scholarship, this is what makes it so necessary to attend to ‘the distribution of the sensible’ (Laplantine, 2015), and develop the capacity to be ‘of two (or more) sensoria’ about things, rather than insist on the ‘prereflective unity’ of the senses or Gibson's ‘ecological equation’.

Ingold is largely mum as regards the constraints of social structure or politics of perception. To his credit, he acknowledged this in a recent interview in Suomen Antropologi. The interviewer, Timo Kaartinen, observed that: ‘one of the most difficult things to do … is to find a satisfactory integration between a phenomenological account of landscape as what you perceive and what it feels like to be in this world, and a politics of landscape which is all about power relations and access and who can control what form this landscape is going to take’ (Kaartinen, 2018: 59). Ingold acknowledged that: ‘it's very hard to integrate the two. I still don't know how it can really be done’, before going on to state that his ‘response to those who say that what I have written on environmental perception is apolitical – is to say that to write against the grain of mainstream understandings of human cognition and action is itself a political act’ (in Kaartinen 2018: 59). Perhaps. But surely a more effective strategy would be not to separate the two in the first place, to recognize with Michael Bull and company that: ‘The perceptual is … political’ (Bull et al., 2006: 5; see further Howard, 2018). Fortunately, there are other phenomenologies (e.g. Ahmed, 2006; Voegelin, 2018; Mattingly, 2019) that embrace rather than displace the critical and political.

Ingold attaches a premium to ‘practical activity’, to people ‘going about their business’, or practicing their vocation. Being so disposed, he approved of the example I gave in The Varieties of Sensory Experience (see Howes, 1991: 168) of the sensory specialization of the Western musician, who may develop a refined sense of hearing, or the chef with their equally subtle sense of taste, even though both belong to ‘a society that is inclined to describe the knowledge and judgement of each through metaphors of sight’ (Ingold, 2000: 283). ‘To his credit’, Ingold wrote, ‘Howes does recognize that human beings are not simply endowed by nature with ready-made powers of perception, but that these powers are rather cultivated, like any skill, through practice and training in an environment’ (Ingold, 2000: 283, emphasis added). Here, he makes it sound like a focus on skill (his term) distinguishes my work from that of Classen and company (i.e. Stoller, Gell, Carpenter). But I was (and remain) with them, and I cannot accept his backhanded compliment.

I hasten to add that Ingold's theory of enskillment has inspired some fine ethnographic works (e.g. Downey, 2005; Marchand, 2008, 2009), but for my part, following Mauss (2007), I have always preferred the term ‘technique’ as in ‘les techniques des sens’ (Howes, 1990), or ‘way’, as in ‘ways of sensing’ (Howes and Classen, 1991: 257; Howes, 2003: 32–34; Howes and Classen, 2014). This preference is motivated by the fact that neither the notion of style nor that of moral value has any place in Ingold's theory of skilled practice. ⁶ For example, in Kathryn Geurts’ masterful analysis of the Anlo-Ewe sensorium in Culture and the Senses: Bodily Ways of Knowing in an African Community (2003), she notes how, due to the premium attached to balance, the Anlo-Ewe have a vocabulary of over 50 words for different ways of walking, or kinaesthetic styles, each of which carries a different moral valence (Geurts, 2003: ch. 4). How does Ingold view walking? As locomotion (see Ingold, 2011: ch. 3). The accent is on bodily mechanics and the cognitive concomitants thereof, not moral action. Indeed, Ingold abstracts morality from his account of perception. Yet the exercise of the senses is always and everywhere hedged in by moral norms. For example, the practice of looking is strictly curtailed and regulated in societies that subscribe to the notion of the ‘evil eye’ (see Bille, 2017). So too with eating (gluttony is a sin), and a fortiori smelling, which is perhaps the most morally ambivalent and discerning of the senses across all cultures, from the Danish prince who smells a rat to the African diviner sniffing out witches (Classen et al., 1994). I would attribute the amorality of Ingold's approach to perception to the instrumentalism and information-centric bias of ecological psychology.

Being mindful of the strictures entrained by Ingold's exclusive focus on ‘practical activity in an environment’, I called him out in our 2011 debate. I observed that his portrayal of the environment in ‘Stop, Look and Listen!’ (Ingold, 2000: ch. 14) is ‘one in which you can look, listen, and are always on the move, but not taste or smell’ (Howes in Ingold and Howes, 2011: 313). His response was telling. He protested that, despite the ostensible marginalization (or elision) of olfaction and gustation in The Perception of the Environment, ‘there is nothing in my argument [that] … rule out taste and smell. I do not subscribe to the Aristotelian hierarchization of the senses’, and goes on to reiterate the ‘interchangeability’ (or amodality) hypothesis – namely, understood as a ‘mode of active, exploratory engagement with the environment … vision has much more in common with audition than is often supposed, and for that matter also with gustation and olfaction’ (Ingold in Ingold and Howes 2011: 313–14). No evidence is presented for the latter part of this claim. Elsewhere, he falls back on the doctrine that ‘my body is a ready-made system of equivalents and transpositions from one sense to another’ (alluding to Merleau-Ponty 1962: 235) to scuttle any suggestion that it is necessary to attend to the full panoply of senses, their differences, or their interplay. ⁷ In other words, the twin doctrines of the ‘prereflective unity’ and ‘interchangeability’ of the senses excuse him from having to pay detailed attention to the ways in which the senses are discriminated and combined in different ways in different cultures. How convenient!

The curious thing here is that, quite apart from all the evidence of differential sensory elaboration in the ethnographic record (e.g. Feld, 1996; Geurts, 2003; Finnegan, 2002; Howes, 2003, 2022a), even Merleau-Ponty (whom Ingold professes to follow), for all his talk of synaesthesia, was alert to the issue of sensory diversity, as when he describes how the spatiality of sight contrasts with the spatiality of touch in the Phenomenology of Perception (1962). ⁸ The implication is that there are biases (spatial/temporal, distance/proximity, etc.) to each of the senses, though I would add that these biases can be augmented or diminished – and in any event modulated – by a given culture’s sensory regime, or techniques as well as technologies of perception and communication.

Ingold blithely overrides all of these biases in the interests of legislating his doctrine of direct perception for all humanity, and castigating the (alleged) hypostatization of the sign and precession of interpretation in anthropology generally. I have some sympathy for this critique. For my part, I have long been critical of the reduction of ethnography to the ‘interpretation of interpretations not our own’ (following Geertz, 1973 with his idea of cultures ‘as texts’ to be read) or to a ‘process of textualization’ tout court (as per Stephen Tyler in Clifford and Marcus, 1986) on account of the way the verbocentrism of these language-based models deflect attention from the sensate (Howes, 2003: ch. 1). However, there is a less radical solution than banishing signification and suspending the work of interpretation in the name of ‘affordance-thinking’. Ingold's solution risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The solution is rather to double down on the notion of sensing. The word ‘sense’ includes both sensation and signification, both feeling and meaning (as in the ‘sense’ of a word) in its spectrum of referents, which may be thought of as forming a continuum. On this account, signifying is an aspect of sensing, and semiosis is an aspect of sentience, though not all there is to perception.

Once we allow the idea of signing – as an aspect of sensing – back in, it quickly becomes apparent that Ingold (2011: 138) is wrong to suggest that ‘we do not see light but see in it’: we do see light - it comes in many gradations: from melancholy or sombre through dull or gloomy to radiant or brilliant with the first terms in this series having negative connotations and the last terms positive connotations (Dutson, 2010; Bille, 2017). These gradations are what the late Nancy Munn (1986) would call ‘quali-signs of value’ (see further Chumley, 2017). So too with sound. For example, we discriminate between sound and noise. Noise is unwanted sound, which again implies a process of valuation (Thompson, 2017; Mopas, 2019). Sound is never neutral. The harsh social reality of this fact is brought out by Jennifer Stoever in The Sonic Color Line (2016) where she discusses how the sounds and rhythms of Black English Vernacular are excoriated by speakers of Standard American English (see further Eidsheim, 2019).

What is good about Ingold's pre-cultural, post-social anthropology? Well, it is outdoorsy: ‘We [anthropologists] do our philosophy out of doors’ (Ingold, 2011: 238). Furthermore, the world is always fresh or ‘alive’ and bustling with activity, there is lots of room for improvisation, and you can be you! ⁹ Many apparently find the novelty and improvisatory nature of Ingold's world attractive (or he would not have so many citations). It is a world from which the ‘dead hand of objectification’ (Ingold, 2013: 96) and ‘deadweight of Durkheim's sociologism’ (Ingold, 2011: 235) have been expunged, a world in which ‘attention’ in the now is vaunted over ‘transmission’ the inheritance of culture, as he argues in Anthropology and/as Education (Ingold, 2018c).

Ingold has written extensively about creativity and improvisation, and co-edited a book on the subject (Hallam and Ingold, 2008). For my part, though, as a social anthropologist, I wonder about his claim to the effect that ‘imagination’ should be defined ‘not as a capacity to construct images’, but rather as ‘a way of living creatively in a world that is not already created, already formed, but that is itself crescent, always in formation’ (Ingold, 2012: 3). This formulation, which is consistent with Ingold's privileging of attention over transmission in Anthropolgy and/as Education (2018c), abstracts the social preformation of the senses and obfuscates the work of repetition that is integral to the mastery of a technique, such as, for example, calligraphy (see Pearce et al., 2018). Coupled with the doctrine of ‘direct perception’, it eclipses the complex interaction between thinking and doing, imaging and making, mind and material, which is better conceptualized, following Christopher Bardt (2019) as a process of exchange, or bridging.

Linealogy versus sensology

I was asked to review the manuscript of Ingold's first book on lines (Ingold, 2007) by the publisher, and of course I praised it for its bold and original approach and recommended publication. But I also harboured some misgivings. I was reminded of my college art teacher's admonition that ‘there are no lines in Nature’, as he sought to teach us how to make sketches using charcoal. Rendering an object in charcoal is very different from using a pencil. Charcoal drawing is atmospheric: rather than hedge things in with lines, it brings out volumes, shades and textures. There are exceptions, of course, such as the pencil sketches of Burne-Jones.

I was also mindful of the fascinating chapter called ‘Codifications of Reality: Lineal and Nonlineal’ by the author and philosopher of cultural anthropology Dorothy D. Lee, who taught at Harvard for a spell (1959–1962), and was an associate of Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan. Lee exposed the axiomatic nature of the ‘lineal phrasing of reality’ in Western thought and culture.

When we see a line of trees or a circle of stones we assume the presence of a connecting line which is not actually visible. And we assume it metaphorically when we follow a line of thought, a course of action or the direction of an argument; when we bridge a gap in the conversation, or speak of the span of a life or of teaching a course, or lament our interrupted career (Lee, 1959: 111).

Lee goes on to discuss some of the other codifications of reality presented by the world's societies (Trobriand, Wintu), which emphasize or value ‘patterned activity’ over lineality. We shall come back to this point presently.

I have stared at the line drawings in Ingold's books repeatedly, trying to see them as the ‘trace of a gesture’ and as ‘pulsional’ and brimming with life, the way he does. But I cannot. All I see is senseless abstractions, which is of course what lines are: a line ‘has neither body nor colour nor texture, nor any other tangible quality: its nature is abstract, conceptual, rational’ (Billeter (1990) quoted in Ingold, 2013: 51). Ingold circumvents this limitation by multiplying the species of lines: in addition to the geometric line (as above), there are organic lines (or outlines) and abstract lines (after Deleuze and Guatari) which are ‘laid down in growth and movement’ (Ingold, 2013: 136). Ingold points to the slime-trails made by slugs on the flagstones outside his house by way of illustration. It is unclear whether the slugs in question perceive their trails the same way Ingold does, but no matter (Compare the account of how the elements (not lines) of Chinese calligraphy are all “modulated elements whose common feature is that they are bodied” in Billeter 1990: 57-9).

Consider also Ingold's doctrine of correspondence. There are many profoundly multisensory takes on the notion of correspondence in Western culture, from medieval liturgy and cosmology (Jørgensen et al., 2015; Classen, 1998: 13–20, 30–35) to Swedenborg's ‘celestial sensorium’ (Schmidt, 2009) and from the Symbolism of the poets Baudelaire and Malraux and the painter Moreau (Classen, 1998: 109–26) to the Structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss (Boon, 1972). There are also many polysensory instantiations of this notion without the confines of Western culture, such as the synaesthetic cosmology of the Desana of Colombia (Classen, 1993: ch. 6) or the ancient Chinese Theory of the Five Elements, according to which each of the five elements (Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, Water) corresponds to a different musical note, color, odor, taste, season, and direction (Howes and Classen, 2014: ch. 6). But Ingold's is not one of them. What interests him is the ‘correspondence of lines’ and he takes letter-writing (the most literal understanding of ‘correspondence’ there can be) as his model (Ingold, 2013: 105–8).

According to Ingold's doctrine of correspondence, life becomes a matter of ‘put[ting] out a line and let[ting] it correspond with others’, of ‘answering and being answered to’ in the ‘in-between’ (Ingold, 2015:154–57). Ingold waxes eloquently about the responsivity of his lineal vision of human interconnection, or ‘meshwork’, and would that his vision were true. However, due to its formalism and the abstract tangles of his concept of ‘meshwork’, Ingold's account flies in the face of sensing and making-sense together with others (compare Finnegan, 2002; Keane, 2018).

It is a tribute to his tremendously fertile and abstract (albeit thoroughly Western) imagination that Ingold is able to perceive lines just about everywhere, from the knots in a tree to the way us ‘blobs’ (his rather unflattering term for persons) ‘send out lines’ when we relate to each other. ¹⁰ Lee would smile. She would also point to how this phrasing is but one among others. For example, based on her analysis of Kilavila, the language of the Trobriand Islanders, she shows how value is attached to ‘patterned activity’ and lineality either fails to register or is actively disparaged. Thus, the arrangement of huts in a Trobriand village (which Malinowski's eyes obstinately saw as forming a circle) is referred to by a term, kway, which means ‘aggregate of bumps’. Meanwhile, the Trobrianders’ denial of lineality is evidenced not only by their notorious ‘denial of paternity’, but also by the system of ceremonial exchange which Malinowski dubbed the ‘Kula Ring’. The ‘pattern’ here is one of giving and receiving kula valuables (necklaces ‘circulate’ clockwise, armshells counterclockwise), but these acts of giving and receiving are always separated in time and space, and when in the course of a visit a man gives gifts to their kula partner to induce the latter to give a specially valuable kula article in return, he is labelled with ‘the vile phrase: he barters’ (Lee, 1959: 113–14). ¹¹

So, too, there is nothing lineal about the way in which the Chinese Theory of the Five Elements informed the etiquette of the Emperor's court. The preservation of the order of society as of the cosmos depended on the performance of cross-sensory correspondences: the selection of which color clothes to wear, which incense to burn, which victuals to eat, which direction to process in, etc. varied with the passage of the seasons (Howes and Classen, 2014: 162–64). Lee brings this discussion of ‘patterning’ (as distinct from ‘lining’) home by invoking the eminently homely example of making a sweater: ‘When I embark on knitting one, the ribbing at the bottom does not cause the making of the neckline, nor of the sleeves or the armholes; and it is not part of a lineal series of acts. Rather it is an indispensable part of a patterned activity which includes all these other acts’ (Lee, 1959: 113). Ingold would no doubt phrase this differently.

The medieval historian Richard Newhauser, in the introduction to A Cultural History of the Senses in the Middle Ages (2014) coined the term sensology, defined as ‘the reconstruction of a period's sensorium’, and deemed the effort at reconstruction to be ‘an essential step in writing a comprehensive cultural history’ (Newhauser, 2014: 1). Sensology is a good antidote to Ingold's linealogy. So too is reading the other five volumes in the Cultural History of the Senses set to which Newhauser's book belongs (Classen, 2014). If all one ever reads in preparation for fieldwork is the Phenomenology of Perception, one risks being taken in by appearances (phenomenonology comes from the Greek phainómenon meaning ‘that which appears’ and logos, ‘to study’) whereas schooling oneself in the cultural history and anthropology of the senses fosters reflexivity (or, ‘being of two sensoria’) and ‘critical practice’ (Cox et al., 2016)

Sensory ethnography

Sensory ethnography – or, the practice of participant sensation (not observation) – is the methodology of sensory anthropology. It comes in many varieties. It is exemplified by the work of Anthony Seeger and Kathryn Geurts (discussed above) as well as that of the Manchester School (Andrew Irving, Rupert Cox), the Austin School (Kathleen Stewart, Marina Peterson, Craig Campbell), and the Concordia Centre for Sensory Studies, to mention but a few key sites. Its practice has been codified by Sarah Pink in Doing Sensory Ethnography (2009) and it has also been the focus of extensive multimedia experimentation at the Harvard University Sensory Ethnography Lab, directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor.

Ingold is not sympathetic to the idea of ethnography – that is, to the ‘detailed description of other peoples lives’ and the idea that there should be a ‘one-way progression from ethnography to anthropology’ (Ingold, 2011: 241–42). But if one does not start from ethnography how can one be sure that one is truly open to alterity? What is more, there are now so many ways (besides writing) to go about ethnography by enjoining multiple media – and, thereby, multiple senses – that crossing art and anthropology under the banner of ethnography should surely be regarded as a good thing (e.g. Schneider and Wright, 2010), not a bad thing.

Consider a work like Phone & Spear: A Yuta Anthropology (2019) by Miyarrka Media. ¹² It is full of colors and patterns, which are of meaning to Yolŋu people, and scantly any lines. ¹³ The contributors, Paul Gurrumuruwuy, Enid Guruŋulmiwuy, and four others, in conversation with Jennifer Deger (their adoptive daughter), are profoundly mindful of their relationships with each other, with other Yolŋu, and with balanda (white people), not merely their ‘relations’ (the rather thin descriptor favoured by Ingold). They ‘worry’ (warwuyun) about others, particularly their distant kin, and are always careful not to speak for or act in place of anybody else on account of the distribution of the sensible: for example, colors (such as red, green, blue and yellow) and modes of behavior (such as thrashing like an angry shark or beaming like an octopus – both totemic creatures) are constitutive of the identities of different social groups in accordance with rom (law, tradition, way of life) or, to put a finer point on it, dhäkay-ŋänhawuy rom (the law of relationship through feeling).

It is true that Miyarrka Media's ethnography comes in the form of a book, but it is a book unlike any of Ingold's treatises. It ‘hums’. This effect is due not only to the vibrancy of the colors and patterns, but also to a recent event, the funeral of Fiona Yangathu, which weighed on all of the contributors’ spirits. On their way to the burial site, Yangathu's surviving kin, holding roses, ¹⁴ ‘danced around her coffin … dancing as bees darting back and forth’, and saw her white coffin as ‘a fallen gadayka’: the fallen ‘mother’ tree that once held the hive, meaning that the bees have to leave [despite their longing to stay] and find another home [that is, accede to the necessity to go]’ (Miyarrka Media, 2019: 188–89). The book is dedicated to Yangathu, hence its ‘hum’. Phone & Spear is a collaborative ethnography that mixes art and anthropology, brilliantly.

Yolŋu perceive their world (including books) as multi- and intersensory, and they also perceive each other as having distinct and complementary sensory orientations, in accordance with their totemic affiliations. It is doubtful they would ever think of their selves either as blobs or as bundles of lines, the way Ingold bids us do. This leads me to suggest that we, too, could (and should) throw off the shackles of linealogy and sense ourselves and others as the polysensory beings of whom Bruce Cockburn sings in Lovers In A Dangerous Time:

These fragile bodies of touch and taste

This vibrant skin, this hair like lace

Spirits open to the thrust of grace

Never a breath you can afford to waste. ¹⁵

We are all lovers in a dangerous time in the wake of the 2020 COVID19 pandemic. I hope we shall recover our senses in its aftermath, particularly our senses of smell and taste (which the novel coronavirus obliterates), and, with Cockburn, go on ‘kicking at the darkness till it bleeds daylight’.

Conclusion

This article has sought to disclose the exclusionary aspects of Tim Ingold's perception anthropology or ‘activity theory’ – and, in particular, his propensity to polarize discussion on a wide range of issues such as, for example: ecological psychology versus sensory anthropology; interchangeability versus multiplicity of the senses; direct perception versus the cultural mediation of sensation; attention versus transmission; materials versus materiality; linealogy versus patterned activity (as well as colour); practical activity or enskillment versus cultural practice and/or style; and, the generic individual versus the individual as positioned at the intersection of gender, class, ethnic or racialized and other social divisions. ¹⁶ Ingold consistently privileges the first term in each of these pairs of contraries and explicitly or implicitly belittles or dismisses the latter. This groundclearing operation has attracted many adherents. It is to be wondered, however, whether those who have gone over to ‘dwelling’ in Ingold's world are fully cognizant of all the elisions that his remake of anthropology entails, such as the diminution of the social, the depoliticization of the perceptual, the abstraction of the senses and human sensuousness. Should not these expunctions give them pause? Would not more reflexivity and nuance be in order?

A few brave souls, such as Webb Keane in ‘A Minimalist Ontology, with Other People In It’ (2018) have stood up to Ingold, and no doubt been surprised at the virulence of his response (Ingold, 2018a). It was for daring to interpret Gibson's ecological psychology otherwise that Keane got himself excommunicated. Excommunicated from what? Excommunicated from Ingold's church of pre-cultural, post-social anthropology.

One of the cardinal tenets of sensory anthropology and sensory history, and of the interdisciplinary field of sensory studies that has emerged out of their crossing, is that: ‘sensory critique is the beginning of social critique’ (Howes, 2022a: prologue). As regards history, think of how Charles Fourier's exposé and denunciation of the ‘sensory ills’ of civilization inspired Marx and Engel's critique of the depredation and alienation of the senses under capitalism (Classen, 1998: ch. 1; Howes, 2003: 204–8), or, within anthropology, how the polysensory, ‘ensensed’ approach advocated in Beyond Text? Critical Practices and Sensory Anthropology (Cox et al., 2016) and A Different Kind of Ethnography (Elliott and Culhane, 2017) has contributed to the precipitation of multimodal anthropologies.

Sensory anthropology, like the social anthropology of yore, is a broad church precisely because it is open to entertaining other philosophies of life than Ingold's singular definition of ‘life’ in Being Alive and The Life of Lines (2015). ¹⁷ This openness stems from its commitment to the practice of ethnography – sensory ethnography, that is, which depends on cultivating the capacity to be ‘of two (or more) sensoria’ and, therefore, of more than one mind about things. Now, Ingold criticizes the anthropology of the senses for the ‘case against vision’ (i.e. critique of visualism) it presents (Ingold, 2000: 286). If that were all sensory anthropology stood for, his critique would be just But it is (and has always been) so much more than that. It insists on a relational and resolutely social as well as ‘particular’ (Taussig, 1993) approach to the study of the sensorium. In this way, it opens the anthropological imagination up to other senses than the visual, and also brings to light the varieties of visuality not only across cultures but within Western society itself (Howes, 1991: chs. 10, 13, 15, 16, 17; Classen, 2014). It is not ‘antiocularcentric’ (Jay, 1993); rather it is polycentric, and it is in this polysensoriality that its chief contribution to anthropological theory lies.

The term ‘theory’ comes from the Greek theōria which means ‘a beholding, speculation’, or basically ‘to look at’. In Downcast Eyes (1993), Martin Jay brings out well how beholden to vision (or ‘ocularcentric’) Western philosophy has been throughout its history, and how contemporary French thought (or ‘Theory’) is marked by an equally virulent ‘antioculacentrism’. But deconstructing vision à la Foucault or Derrida is a purely negative gesture (and still remains fixated on the ocular). Why not try changing the register, as sensory anthropology suggests? What if theory-building were to involve sensing instead of only ever seeing things, including own and other cultures? In Time and the Other (1983), Johannes Fabian presented a powerful critique of the ‘visualism’ of conventional anthropological theory, and when Classen (1997) proposes the concept of the ‘sensory model’ or Taussig (1993) proffers ‘sensuous mimesis’, when Feld (2015) gives us ‘acoustemology’ or Sutton (2010) suggests ‘gustemology’, they are sensualizing theory, and they do so to great effect. There are diverse allusions to 'sensuous engagement' in Ingold's work (see, for example, Ingold, 2000: 345, 350), but he rarely does more than pay lip service to the senses since his doctrine of the ‘interchangeability’ and ‘prereflective unity’ of the senses excuses him from having to analyze the specific ways in which the senses are discriminated, valued and combined in cultural practice.

Putting the senses first, or leading with the senses, holds out the promise that the senses might become ‘directly in their practice theoreticians’ in that seminal (albeit cryptic) phrase of Marx's (Marx, 1987; Dawkins and Loftus, 2013). Of course, Marx held that the senses could only come into their own with the overthrow of private property relations (see Howes, 2003: ch. 8). But we anthropologists cannot wait: the ‘time of the senses’ (Bendix, 2005) is now.

Doing anthropology with and of the senses has the potential to radically transform what Michael Herzfeld (2001) calls our ‘practice of theory’. Building on Classen (1997), Herzfeld (2001: 252–3) affirms that: ‘The broad range of applications for a sensory analysis of culture indicates that the anthropology of the senses need not be only a “subfield” within anthropology, but may provide a fruitful perspective from which to examine many different anthropological concerns’, from politics and gender to ‘religious beliefs and practices to the production and exchange of goods’. ¹⁸ All anthropology could, and Herzfeld would say should, be grounded in sensory ethnography. To accomplish this, we will need to keep on keeping our wits (an archaic term for senses) about us.