18 Quotes by Tim Ingold

Artists, composers and writers...are bent upon capturing and reining in the insights of a fugitive imagination, always inclined to shoot off into the distance, before they can get away, and on bringing them back into the immediacy of material engagement. Like hunters, they too are dream-catchers.

Telling a story is not like weaving a tapestry to cover up the world, it is rather a way of guiding attention of listeners or readers into it.

A person who can "tell" is one who is perpetually attuned to picking up information in the environment … and the teller, in rendering his knowledge explicit, conducts the attention of his audience along the same paths as his own

the landscape tells - or rather is - a story. It enfolds the lives and times of predecessors who, over the generations, have moved around in it and played their part in its formation. To perceive the landscape is therefore to carry out an act of remembrance, and remembering is not so much a matter of calling up an internal image, stored in the mind, as of engaging perpetually with the environment that is itself pregnant with the past

Every trail, however erratic and circuitous, is a kind of life-line, a trajectory of growth. 6 This image of life as a trail or path is ubiquitous among peoples whose existential orientations are founded in the practices of hunting and gathering, and in the modes of environmental perception these entail. Persons are identified and characterised not by the substantive attributes they carry into the life process, but by the kinds of paths they leave.

my first and most obvious point is that a more literally grounded approach to perception should help to restore touch to its proper place in the balance of the senses. For it is surely through our feet, in contact with the ground (albeit mediated by footwear), that we are most fundamentally and continually ‘in touch’ with our surroundings

What difference does it make that pedestrian touch carries the weight of the body rather than the weight of the object?

But if perception is thus a function of movement, then what we perceive must, at least in part, depend on how we move. Locomotion, not cognition, must be the starting point for the study of perceptual activity. Or more strictly, cognition should not be set off from locomotion, along the lines of a division between head and heels, since walking is itself a form of circumambulatory knowing.

It is in the very ‘tuning’ of movement in response to the ever-changing conditions of an unfolding task that the skill of walking, as that of any other bodily technique, ultimately resides. Indeed it could be said that walking is a highly intelligent activity. This intelligence, however, is not located exclusively in the head but is distributed throughout the entire field of relations comprised by the presence of the human being in the inhabited world.