Tim Ingold’s Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description has been on my bookshelf for several years, one of those books I’ve bought with every intention of reading and hadn’t opened. In fact, I think I bought it because someone recalled the copy I had borrowed from the library, which was also sitting on a shelf, unread. It’s not like I’m ignorant of his work: I quote one of his books on lines, and one of his essay on walking, in Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road. However, I don’t know his work that well. Before I left for Spain and The Walking Assembly 2026, I put Being Alive into my daypack. Ingold was giving the keynote, which turned out to be a talk on rivers and the valleys through which they flow. That talk, and this book, have encouraged me to learn more.
Being Alive deserves more attention than a sleep-deprived traveller on trains and aircraft can give it, but its main point is that Ingold wants to bring anthropology back to life—to a study of movement, becoming, flow, process, habitation, rather than one of pausing, being, stasis, product, occupation. He’s big on such binaries, but that’s fine; they’re the stuff of academic argument. I wonder, though, if those binaries aren’t points on a spectrum.
Take Ingold’s distinction between the network and the meshwork. A network, he argues, is static. What matters there are the nodal points, the places where the lines of the network cross. The more lines that converge on a specific point, the more important that point must be. The lines connecting those points become less important. The meshwork, in contrast, is all about the lines of which it’s constituted, their flow, their energies. It’s a polemical position, an argument in favour of attending to fluidity (which is difficult; it’s so much easier to grasp phenomena that are understood as static, even if that understanding is flawed, rather than open-ended movement, the way it might be easier to comprehend a still photograph of a creature than the living, breathing creature as it moves around and avoids its observer, or that a published poem is easier to write about than an improvisation at a slam), and that’s fine, but the points where the lines cross have meaning, too. Perhaps it’s a shift in perspective or emphasis, and perhaps his argument is a necessary corrective.
Among other things I’m taking away from this book is a need to read Gilles Deleuze and Felix Gauttari, especially A Thousand Plateaus, another book which has been on one of my shelves for ages. Their ideas about lines are a big influence on Ingold. And, in a way I find charmingly honest, he notes how that book’s difficulty defeated him at first. Eventually, when he was ready for their thinking, he was able to understand it. Perhaps I’m finally ready. I would just need to find the time.
But I found the time to read this book, however imperfect my reading of it is, even if I finished it on a jolting local train from Barcelona to Portbou to see the Walter Benjamin memorial. And, I hope, have another café con leché.
Also, a bonus: Ingold was kind enough to sign my book. It’s now a little travel worn, but the creases and stains, along with the signature, might be considered signs of the journey I’ve been making.
