mike,
well I'm definitely in the category of those "not doing what they ought to
be doing" but oddly enough what I've been doing: building an oak Morris
chair, has provided a very good space for reflecting on Ingold's articles.
I've now read both papers and find that I agree with him totally in his
critique of cognitive anthropology and the implications of mentalistic
approaches in general. Similarly I agree with his position that the basic
framework found in genetic theories of evolution and mentalistic models of
both psychology and cognitive anthropology reflects an underlying
form/substance dichotomy typical of western metaphysics since the Geeks at
least. But I'm dissatisfied with his alternative on a number of points and
working on the Morris chair really helped bring these abstract criticisms
(e.g., he accords no independent ontological status to the cultural or
history) into much more concrete terms.
In a sense it seems that Ingold wants to map all cultural phenomena and all
forms of mind onto the paradigm he derives from the Lapp reindeer herders
and by extrapolation the cultures and minds of other groups at an extremely
low level of development of productive forces, including most importantly
the productive force that culture and mind are themselves.
Look at the principal examples he uses in each case to refute the
mentalistic, culture is something transmitted from mind-to-mind, model:
walking and throwing a lasso. He then extrapolates these physical
competencies to argue that nothing is really passed from mind to mind and
therefor, implicitly, denies or at least provides no place for what Ilyenkov
identitied as the ideal; that complex relationship between the image of an
outcome existing in the mind before the activity is begun, an image that
also represents/reflects objective reality . He rather dissolves everything
into a Whiteheadian type of process but without the corresponding levels of
ontological distinction. It's not that Ingold doesn't keep "objective
reality" out of the picture, it's something that appears as a
sleight-of-hand movement. For example, when discussing how cultural
differences manifest themselves, he says: "Our two characters perceive their
surroundings differently because they have been trained, through previous
experience of carrying out diverse practical tasks involving particular
bodily movements and sensitivities, to orient themselves in relation to the
environment and to attend to its features in different ways." Here he
writes as though the "features of the environment" are stable and identical
for everyone but this is patently not the case as color classification
studies have clearly shown.
In "From the Transmission of Representations . . . " he even more explicitly
reduces the realm of practice to that which is bodily situated with the
similar consequences/conclusions. Although I totally agree with his
position that cultural capacities exist "neither 'inside' the body and brain
of the practitioner nor 'outside' in the environment", I find his appeal to
"properties of environmentally extended systems that crosscut the boundaries
of body and brain" insufficient. If this were his starting point, great!
but it isn't, it's what he proposes and I find that insufficient, especially
since there are practices that do pass from mind-to-mind even though they
are necessarily embeddded in activities, both practical and theoretical.
Which is what I've been meditating on while building the Morris chair.
Unlike my previous wordworking, fence building, wall repairing and other
projects, I'm building this one from a set of carefully drawn and detailed
plans that I acquired from a wood crafts shop in southern Ohio. Since all
of the pieces of the chair are joined using either dowels or mortice and
tennon, the process of making extremely precise holes on different pieces of
wood is fundamental. Oak is very hard and won't forgive an error of 1/16".
Now the plans are full-scale which means that I can lay the piece of wood on
the paper and score the places for cuts and dowel holes, but this really is
less precise than using a square and rule to measure and score the wood.
Now clearly I wouldn't be in any position to follow these instructions if I
hadn't had some prior practical experience working with wood; but nothing in
my previous experience would have enabled me to produce this chair -- which
is turning out very nicely -- without the plans. And the essence of the
plans is not the direct mapping of wood to the plan on the paper but the
translation of the dimensions through a process of measurement from the
paper where they are written as symbols indicating totally ideal measures,
to wood where they become embodied.
I'm sure you can recognize that there is a quantum leap between the process
I undertake building my chair and what a group of NASA flight engineers do
when they guide a space shuttle to the space station or even more "ideally"
send a small metal object over a period of 5 or ten years to intersect the
rings of Saturn. Here they must take into account not the simple fact that
oak is hard and requires an accuracy of at least 1/32" if the holes on two
pieces are to match, they must take into account the objective structure of
the solar system as represented in a complex mathematical, ideal model, and
calculated to a tolerance of microns.
So I'm somewhat disappointed. But this tendency is implicit in the Mearleau
Ponty side of Bourdieu's development of the concept of "habitus" -- there is
an ideal dimension that is missed.
Well now I'd better get back to what I'm doing instead of doing what I
should be doing.
Paul H. Dillon
----- Original Message -----
From: Mike Cole <mcole@weber.ucsd.edu>
To: <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Sent: Sunday, March 11, 2001 5:13 PM
Subject: distracted by Ingold
>
> Faced with the need to write an intro to the next, extremely diverse and
> stimulating issue of MCA, and not up to the task, while I struggle to find
> threads of unity in the diversity, I turned to the second of Tim Ingold's
> pieces, Three in One. I recommend it warmly to those similarly bent on
> not doing what they ought to be doing, or simply those who want a braod,
> intelligent, discussion of many issues of long term intrest to mca-like
> folk.
>
> For openers, I was startled to find the term, habitus, in the mouth/pen
> of Marcel Mauss from a time when Bourdieu (who figures later in the piece)
> was at most a mere pup. Harbingers of things to come.
>
> Here is one para I thought emblematic and perhaps inducive of further
reding
> for others, as I turn back to the "real" tasks at hand.
> mike
> ---
> Human beings, then, are not born biologically or psychologically
identical, prior to their differentiation by
> culture. There has to be something wrong with any explanatory scheme that
needs to base itself on the
> manifestly ludicrous claim - in the words of John Tooby and Leda
Cosmides - that 'infants are everywhere
> the same'.26 Even parents of identical twins know this to be untrue! The
source of the difficulty lies in the
> notion that culture is an extra ingredient that has to be 'added in' so as
to complete the human being. We have
> found, to the contrary, that all those specific abilities that have
classically been attributed to culture - to walk
> in a certain way, to speak a certain language, to sit or squat, and so
on - are in reality incorporated, through
> processes of development, as properties of human organisms. In that sense,
they are fully biological. Culture,
> then, is not superorganic or supra-biological. It is not something added
to organisms but a measure of the
> differences between them. And these differences, as I have shown, arise
from the ways in which they are
> positioned vis-`-vis one another, and non-human components of the
environment, in wider fields of
> relationship.onents of the environment,
> in wider fields of relationship.
>
> ---
>
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