Being Alive

Tim Ingold's Being Alive was a thought-provoking yet frustrating read. Ingold is an anthropologist, and the book is an attack on the way anthropologists approach their subject, and in a larger sense, on how westerners think, and interact with the world. It's extremely low-level, challenging the reader on how they think about objects and motion and walking. Most of a chapter is spent discussing the action of sawing a piece of wood, and what that means.

Fundamentally, he argues that we think about the world around us as being comprised of objects. We mentally model the world as being a collection of "things" that have "properties", and have relationships. It's a world that can be represented as a set of connected points. He then argues in many ways and from many points of view, that we should be thinking of ourselves as lines (or bundles of lines) rather than as points, and that the lines interact with each other in many ways. He refers to a number of cultures that think about the world like this, and explains how our western way of thinking about the world blinds us to a real understanding of how these cultures work. Animism, the beliefs of many hunter-gatherer societies around the world, is in this picture not a world view where everything is imbued with a spirit, but is rather a world view where animals, people, rocks, and everything in the world are parts of stories, and there is no rigid separation between "living things" and "non-living things". That distinction isn't needed because they don't see the world as being comprised of objects, and so they don't need to imbue certain objects with the property of "living" in order to explain their ability to act in the world.

I don't think I've read anything that is quite such a fundamental attack on the way the western world  thinks, and it left me intellectually reeling in a number of places. I hadn't even considered the possibility of not thinking of the world in this way.

On the other hand, there is a lot about the book that frustrated me. There were an awful lot of straw men used to support his arguments - stating that people generally think of things in a certain way, which was clearly (to me) a blatant simplification of how actual people think. Plenty of unsupported arguments. And the most fundamental problem was that he never really explained what his alternative world-view was. He explained some of the properties of this world view, but never what the "lines" really actually represented - what they meant. So while I often agreed with his position that there are other ways of thinking about the world, I couldn't bring myself to embrace his position, because it wasn't ever stated. And lastly, as a mathematician by training, I found his statements about things "not being points, but rather, being lines" seemed rather trivial - there are plenty of things that can be represented as lines or points depending on how you want to view them - it's a simple transformation, not a fundamentally different thing.

I think Being Alive will give different things to different people. I can understand how it would appeal to humanities folks much more than it did to me. In many ways, the most important thing it contains is the questions it asks - many of which I've never heard asked before - rather than the answers it attempts to give.