Lines: A Brief History

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In Euclid, the geometrical line is defined as the shortest distance between two points. This is in contrast to (a) the organic line, which outlines the boundaries or contours of a form, and (b) the abstract line, which traces the curve of a movement or growth. For these three kinds of line, and their different properties, see Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture, (Routledge: Abingdon, 2013), pp. 134-6. Setting out from a puzzle about the relation between speech and song, Ingold considers how two kinds of line – threads and traces – can turn into one another as surfaces form or dissolve. He reveals how our perception of lines has changed over time, with modernity converting to point-to-point connectors before becoming straight, only to be ruptured and fragmented by the postmodern world. His two previous collections, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill andBeing Alive: Essays in Movement, Knowledge and Description , will also be published by Routledge in new editions. MK: For all of these reasons the word ethnography is still problematic. Although the ‘ethno-’ in ethnography means ‘people’, it carries with it quite a narrow understanding. Likewise, architecture can sometimes be very narrow and rigid, but what we are interested in, is how it makes spaces for people. For these alternative depictions of the fish, respectively as abstract line and profile, see Tim Ingold, ‘Introduction’, in Redrawing Anthropology: Materials, Movements, Lines, ed. Tim Ingold, (Ashgate: Farnham, 2011), pp. 1, 18.

TI: That was always the bit that I never properly worked out. The basic principle is that notation is anything that can help transfer movement from one medium into another: for example, from something written on paper to a musical or a dance performance. The justification for looking at notation was that maybe anthropology or ethnography, whatever you want to call it, could be enriched by drawing on alternative notations to writing, or by combining different notations. So far, anthropology has done very little along these lines, whereas in architecture this is happening all the time: you look at any architectural sketchbook and there’s a mixture of drawing, writing, numbers, all sorts of things. In anthropology, we didn’t get much further than saying, ‘look, here are great possibilities.’ We looked at the issues that people faced in trying to notate music, or dance, or architecture, but then we don’t really apply them in our field.The author's ambition, to take a virgin piece of interdisciplinary territory and write on it a bit, has been fascinatingly achieved.' This project, funded by a Professorial Fellowship from the Economic and Social Research Council, pursues the implications of treating the human being not as a self-contained entity but as growing along a way of life. Every such way is a line of some kind. Through a comparative and historical anthropology of the line, the research will forge a new approach to understanding the relation, in human life and experience, between movement, knowledge and description. As a work of intellectual synthesis, the research will be library- based, spanning literatures in several disciplines within and beyond the social sciences. It will lead to the production of two major books. 'Life on the line' will explore how, in the transition from the trace to the connector, the growing line was shorn of the movement that gave rise to it. 'The 4 As' will examine the relations between anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture as disciplinary paths along which environments are perceived, shaped and understood.

The word ‘anthropography’ was actually coined by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the late eighteenth-century to refer to a description of the different ways of mankind. [1] But I didn’t know that when I first came up with the word! I thought of ‘anthropography’ as a way of pursuing a speculative inquiry through a method that leaves traces of one sort or another. I have also used the word ‘linealogy’ – albeit not really seriously: if one is going to study lines, well, that’s what you would call it. Thinking about lines is linked to a process perspective, to the idea of a world in becoming, because the line is something that doesn’t just trace out how things have been, but also points to possible ways in which things will go. There is something inherently speculative and experimental about tracing lines. That’s what I wanted to bring out with both words, ‘linealogy’ and ‘anthropography’: I wanted to describe a sense of a movement that is not closed, but open-ended, moving, and becoming. Indeed the path itself is made by walking and is itself a trace gestured into the landscape by many pairs of feet. anthropography, n’, OED Online, (Oxford University Press: September 2019) accessed November 16, 2019. This is a book whose pictures alone are worth the money. Till I started to follow Tim Ingold’s path through this fascinating maze, I had never noticed how many different kinds of line there are, nor how badly we go wrong when we don’t distinguish between them. As he shows, we Westerners keep replacing sensitive, living lines with ones that are static and mechanical, and it’s quite a mistake to think that this makes us more rational.’ - Mary Midgley, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, The University of NewcastleTI: That’s exactly what I mean! What I am trying to say, in simpler terms, is that I would want anthropology to follow the line rather than join the dots. What architects could then learn from anthropology and ethnography is fairly obvious: it is what is called the ‘human dimension’. It comes down to the sheer extent of differences in the ways in which people relate to their environment. For any way that we think people do things, anthropologists can always find some people who do things differently. Architecture can probably gain quite a lot from looking at anthropological work on bodily practices in mundane activities like sleeping, cooking, eating, going to the shops. Tim Ingold case for lines is quite strong and fascinating - what an entertaining rabbit hole to fall into. But so is the case for circles and ellipses by many others. It is however my belief that eventually, everybody will arrive to the conclusion that both are right - in the form of spirals.