The keynote talks at this conference (including my own) are being videotaped and will be made available publicly sometime in the coming months, as I understand it, so I haven’t made any effort to document them here. But with Tim Ingold I couldn’t resist.
Anthropologist Ingold has been a prominent star in my intellectual sky since I first read, as a graduate student, the important 1988 collection he edited entitled What is an Animal? Since then several of his articles — some of which later appeared in the book The Perception of the Environment — encouraged me to look to diverse sources for making sense of nature-culture conundra: sources including the ecological psychology of James J. Gibson, the Umwelt theory of Jakob von Uexkull, some of the specifics I had initially missed of Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenologies, and a potpourri of out-of-the-mainstream anthropologists, geographers, and others who helped me conceptualize the theory underlying my dissertation and later my first book, Claiming Sacred Ground. (See more here.)
Ingold’s keynote speech here today was my first time to hear him speak in person. The following are my notes from it. They don’t capture his warm and funny storytelling style nor his use of visuals (on a blackboard, to his insistence). But hopefully they convey a fragment of his ideas.
Notes on “The North is Everywhere”
One could speak of four kinds of history: a history of (i.e., the history that is continuing), which is the West’s history; a history about (histories of civilizations that have risen and fallen), which is the East’s; a history against (histories of resistance), which is/are the South’s; and a history from, which is the North’s.
The North’s history is about inhabitation, (re)vitalization, working from the present, with no gap between nature and culture or between time and history.
References to Hagerstrand’s 1970s critiques of the nature-society dichotomy: the big tapestry which nature is weaving = the land, not as substrate or base, but as mesh of interwoven lines and trajectories. And to Irving Hallowell’s work on Ojibwa ontology, and the 1995 collection of Anishnabe indigenous thought, We Have the Right to Exist.
When we walk to a lake, for a westerner the lake is just there and it’s we who walk to it with an empty pail, and away from it with a full pail. In an Ojibwa ontology, we would meet the lake: the lake is doing its thing, we are doing our thing, and the two of us would meet and then go on doing our own things (with some change resulting from the meeting).
The land is not homogeneous, but a zone of interpenetration in which sky mingles with earth in ongoing production of life. The land is not against but with the sky. Land = earth-sky.
E-environment vs. e-environment: the first is global, the world we (humanity, the West) have surrounded, the stage on which life is lived; the second is the environment we find ourselves in, an EwO, or Environment without Objects. Here Ingold spent a few minutes critiquing object-oriented ontology (OOO) and identified himself as doing the precise opposite of them, i.e., wanting to render everything alive, process-relationally (my term, of course, though in the Q & A he admitted that his was a process ontology).
The ground is the zone of interpenetration where sky and earth mingle. In northern environments, people and animals move in a world where everything else also moves. The problem is one of sensory attunement, musical improvisation, co-respondence.
Histories from the North are narratives, ways of remembering but also ways of carrying on. What’s important is all the things that happen along the way; a relay, with every telling being both a movement along the way and a remembering of how the story goes.
Western stories of Progress distinguish between Time as endless repetition and History as what doesn’t repeat. Progress belongs to History: novel events, with repetitions subsiding into time. But histories form the North don’t distinguish between time and history: history is the temporal continuation of life as it flows and changes. History from the North understands indigenousness as habitation, migration as movement, and identity as emplacement within a fluid environment.
Northness is everywhere. So are the others, especially the West with its universalist claims — it is everywhere and nowhere, at the surface of the globe where people live as exhabitants not inhabitants. The North’s Everywhere is an inhabited one, relational.
* * * * *
In the Q & A, Ingold acknowledged that his “North” is an attempt to formulate a worldview that is more like that of indigenous peoples.
Afterward, also, Patty Limerick and I agreed that while Ingold’s story is a good one, historians today don’t really tell history in the way Ingold’s capital-H history of the West does; they have incorporated the stories of resistance (the South) and of situated relationality (the North) into their practices. So much the better for history as a scholarly discipline. But the broader political picture is less enlightened than that.
