Imagining for Real: Essays on Creation, Attention and Correspondence

Description

What does imagination do for our perception of the world? Why should reality be broken off from our imagining of it? It was not always thus, and in these essays, Tim Ingold sets out to heal the break between reality and imagination at the heart of modern thought and science. Imagining for Real joins with a lifeworld ever in creation, attending to its formative processes, corresponding with the lives of its human and nonhuman inhabitants. Building on his two previous essay collections, The Perception of the Environment and Being Alive , this book rounds off the extraordinary intellectual project of one of the world’s most renowned anthropologists. Offering hope in troubled times, these essays speak to coming generations in a language that surpasses disciplinary divisions. They will be essential reading not only for anthropologists but also for students in fi elds ranging from art, aesthetics, architecture and archaeology to philosophy, psychology, human geography, comparative literature and theology. Cover Half Title Endorsement Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Table of Contents Figures Preface and Acknowledgements General Introduction The Perception of the Environment Imagining for Real Creation, Attention and Correspondence Anthropology, Philosophy and Other Delights The Book Part I Creating the World Chapter 1 Creation Beyond Creativity Theology Psychology History Philosophy Art Chapter 2 Landscapes of Perception, Landscapes of Imagination The Human Condition Truth and Illusion Imagining Is Being Alive Chapter 3 Life in a Whirl The Generative Turn On Describing a Circle Questioning Words Spinning Threads The Whirling Wind? Chapter 4 Evolution in the Minor Key; Or, the Soul of Wisdom The Major and the Minor The Evolution of Life The Self and the Soul Wisdom Is Ecological Chapter 5 Dreaming of Dragons Facing the Facts The Shape of Fear Dreams and Reality Word of God, Works of God Reading the New Book of Nature Science and Silence Knowing in Being The Bible and the Land Part II Light, Sound and Experience Chapter 6 What in the World Is Light? Physics and Phenomenology What It Takes for Light to Shine The Ray and the Flame Observing the Stars Colouring in the Darkness In the Shadows Chapter 7 Between Noise and Silence: On the Meaning of Sound Black and White Outside Or Inside? Making Things Out Pitch-line and Earline The Colour of Sound Chapter 8 The Cello and the Lasso: Five Propositions On Beauty From Forms to Relations High Latitudes Low Notes Beauty Is Attentional Beauty Is in the Unity of Affects Beauty Is Enchanting Beauty Is in Hearing and Seeing Beauty Is Sensed Along the Path of Presence Five Propositions Chapter 9 Episode Zero: The Reduction and Revival of Aesthetic Experience As I Was Going to St Ives An Art of Thinking Beautifully The Birth of Empirical Aesthetics To Begin With the Input Inside the Box: From Brain to Critic The End of the Episode The Work Goes On Lanyon’s Revenge Part III Surface Tensions Chapter 10 The Conical Lodge at the Centre of the Earth-Sky World Entering the Lodge Earth and Sky The Smooth and the Striated The Peasant, the Mariner and the Nomad From Gathering to Projection The Hearth of Renewal Chapter 11 What If the City Were an Ocean, and Its Buildings Ships? Landmarks Humans and the Sea The Sea Is Not Level Lands and Ships as Containers Nothing But Waves Underground, Overground Debris and Phenomena Chapter 12 Palimpsest: Ground and Page Prologue Land, Tree and Book Anti-stratigraphy Deposition Is Not Inscription What Is the Ground? Two Sides Or One? The Origins of Stratigraphy Re-entering the Page Epilogue Chapter 13 On Opening the Book of Surfaces Veil Pane Sheet Chapter 14 Strikethrough and Wipe-Out: Tactics for Editing the Past Under Erasure Crossing and Wiping Writing On the Mirror Rolling, Folding and Stacking Camouflage and Burial And Finally … Part IV Material Thinking Chapter 15 Of Work and Words: Craft as a Way of Telling Personal Knowledge and the Habitus The Silence of Explication Telling in the Zone of Hapticality Vortices of Thinking and of Sound The Principle of Habit Beyond Verbalisation and Embodiment Chapter 16 Thinking Through the Cello Opening Declaration Letting Sound Be To Play Is to Feel The Silence of the Score Taking Flight Chapter 17 In the Gathering Shadows of Material Things The Assemblage The Gathering Correspondence Concrescence Chapter 18 The World in a Basket On the Passage of Generations Weaving Life Curiosity and Wisdom Mathematics and Memory Numbers and Words Slowing Down Part V Life as a Whole Chapter 19 Animals Are Us: On Living With Other Beings On Reindeer and Men Machiavelli Among the Baboons Us and Them The Wrong Kinds of Nonhumans Species Being The Hybrid Community Anthropology By Correspondence Chapter 20 Posthuman Prehistory Original Humans The Species and the Condition The Humanifying Animal The Braid and the Stack André Leroi-Gourhan: Posthuman Prehistorian? The Reinvention of Humanism Chapter 21 The Sustainability of Everything Beginning With the Conversation The Plenum Folding, Cutting, Splitting Progressive Development and the Continuity of Life Carrying On Art and Science In Search of Truth Ending With the Conversation Chapter 22 Confessions of a Semiophobe Semiology and Semiotics Umwelt and Niche Lines, Not Signs From Semiosis to Life Chapter 23 One World Anthropology The Singular and the Plural Wholes and Parts Filiation and Alliance Differentiation and Diversity Animism and Naturalism The Plane of Immanence Agency and Patiency An Ontogenetic Turn? Universe, Fractiverse, Pluriverse Tangentialism and Correspondence Notes References Index