Imagining for Real

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 demonstrates beyond doubt why Tim Ingold is one of the most original thinkers of our time.' Arturo Escobar, University of Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA. 'With the publication of Imagining for Real, Tim Ingold completes the landmark trilogy that secures his standing among a very select group of writers that have the power to transform our thinking about life's most basic questions. To read these lucid, insightful, and compelling essays is to discover oneself stitched into a dynamic world overflowing with possibilities. It is to know and feel oneself more fully alive. I can't recommend this work highly enough.' Norman Wirzba, Duke Divinity School, USA. 'An inspiring, profound, theoretically scintillating, yet refreshingly down-to-earth account of human imagination, Imagining for Real is the book we need to navigate reality in the 21st century.' Jill Bennett, University of New South Wales, Australia. 'Tim Ingold offers a compelling and original treatise on humans and their relations with the world. Addressing a variety of classic and emerging issues in plain language, this book is a tour de force, acutely relevant for our times.' Gísli Pálsson, University of Iceland. 'Ingold's distinctive sense of direction and wayfinding allows him to travel into unmapped territories. Imagining for Real takes us on such a journey along previously unknown paths that connect imagination and reality. Along the way we get to know 'creation from the inside' and to 'imagine for real' using anthropology's transformational capacity. Never before has a book made this journey possible.' Lambros Malafouris, University of Oxford, UK. 'Imagining for Real is genuine Ingold, featuring the author's unique ability for concrete-abstract thinking.' Ton Otto, Aarhus University, Denmark.

Autorentext

Tim Ingold is Professor Emeritus of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. He has carried out fieldwork among Saami and Finnish people in Lapland, and has written on environment, technology and social organisation in the circumpolar North, on animals in human society and on human ecology and evolutionary theory. His more recent work explores environmental perception and skilled practice. Ingold's current interests lie on the interface between anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. His recent books include The Perception of the Environment (2000), Lines (2007), Being Alive (2011), Making (2013), The Life of Lines (2015), Anthropology and/as Education (2018), Anthropology: Why It Matters (2018), Correspondences (2020), Imagining for Real (2022) and The Rise and Fall of Generation Now (2024). Ingold is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 2022 he was made a CBE for services to Anthropology.

Inhalt

Part I: Creating the world Introduction to Part 1 1. Creation beyond creativity 2. Landscapes of perception, landscapes of imagination 3. Life in a whirl 4. Evolution in the minor key, or, the soul of wisdom 5. Dreaming of dragons Part II: Light, sound and experience Introduction to Part 2 6. What in the world is light? 7. Between noise and silence: on the meaning of sound 8. The cello and the lasso, or, five propositions on beauty 9. Episode zero: the reduction and revival of aesthetic experience Part III: Surface tensions Introduction to Part 3 10. The conical lodge at the centre of the earth-sky world 11. What if the city were an ocean, and its buildings ships? 12. Palimpsest: ground and page 13. On opening the book of surfaces 14. Strike-through and wipe-out: tactics for editing the past Part IV: Material thinking Introduction to Part 4 15. Of work and words: craft as a way of telling 16. Thinking through the cello 17. In the gathering shadows of material things 18. The world in a basket Part V: Life as a whole Introduction to Part 5 19. Animals are us: on living with other beings 20. Posthuman prehistory 21. The sustainability of everything 22. Confessions of a semiophobe 23. One world anthropology