ingold_landscape lives but archaeology turns to stone_2005

8/3/2019 Ingold_landscape Lives but Archaeology Turns to Stone_2005

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Comments on Christopher Tilley: The Materiality ofStone: Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology.Oxford: Berg, 2004.

TIM INGOLD

LANDSCAPE LIVES, BUTARCHAEOLOGY TURNS TO STONE

Archaeology is an outdoor science. In the

field its practitioners face the same elementsthat, through the ages, have battered, eroded

and smothered the monuments to past

activity they seek to recover. Yet almost

invariably, when it comes to the analysis and

interpretation of their results, they retreat

indoors to the safety and seclusion of the

laboratory, library or study. The deskbound

body, as it thinks and writes, is no longer

bathed in the light of the open air, infused by

its scents, blown by its currents or immersedin its pulses of sound. The multisensory

experience of being out in the open is

something that fieldworkers may strive, with

difficulty, to write about, but it is not

something they write in. In effect, the move

indoors converts such experience into an

object of discourse that is endlessly recycled

as it is passed, in writing, from one analyst to

another. Buried in their texts, analysts

compete to craft the most subtle, nuancedor elaborate literary expressions of feelings

long since forgotten in the flesh, or that they

can conjure up only in faraway recesses of

the imagination. Beguiled by the thought

that such bookish pursuits amount to

exercises in theory, they have produced a

literature that can only reconstruct the

immediacy of sensory experience in the

image of its representations, in a kind of

double inversion that far from returning us

to the contexts of our primary perceptual

engagement with the world cuts us adrift

from it entirely.

In his new book, The Materiality of Stone:

Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology

(2004), Christopher Tilley writes against this

tendency. Indeed the book could be read as a

manifesto for a genuinely outdoor archae-

ology. Tilley complains, with good reason,

that most writing on landscapes of prehistory

is not only set down on paper but also

derived from paper (p.27). Real landscapes

however, unlike paper ones, cannot be read

like texts or viewed like pictures. To get to

know them, they have to be inhabited. Only

by spending time in them, and becoming

accustomed to the sights, sounds, odours and

feelings they afford, under varying condi-

tions of illumination and weather, can they

properly sink in. And to appreciate their

features you have to explore them on foot (or

if need be, on all fours), getting a sense of

how they look and feel from different

angles and in different directions. As

your thoughts begin to take shape you

need to write them down, since the slow

and deliberate concentration entailed in

the act of writing sharpens your own

perception. At least half of this book, Tilley

tells us, was written not at a desk but in situ.

That, in itself, is an impressive statistic, and

attests to a serious attempt by the author and

his assistant, Wayne Bennett, to practise

what they preach. Among writers of a

phenomenological bent, notorious for their

DISCUSSIONNorwegian Archaeological Review, Vol. 38, No. 2, 2005


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abstruse and recondite prose, the attempt

may be almost unique.

It is, however, an attempt shot through

with paradox and contradiction. Apart from

a general theoretical introduction and a shortconcluding chapter, the book comprises

three substantial case studies, each focusing

on ancient monuments of massive stone or

rock. The first study is of the neolithic

menhirs or standing stones of Brittany; the

second is the temple architecture of neolithic

Malta, and the third is of Bronze Age

carvings in southern Sweden. These make

for a nice set of comparisons and contrasts:

for example between landmarks and enclo-sures, and between rocks that have been put

in place and bedrock that has been inscribed.

In each case, Tilley takes us on his peram-

bulations around and within the various

sites, offering meticulous description and

commentary along the way. This is where

the first paradox arises. Introducing his

project, Tilley argues that to grasp the

experience of a place or monument, we need

to avoid a deadened and deadening litera-lism (p.28), and to use a language that is

richly evocative and suffused with poetic

metaphor. Fortunately, perhaps, Tilley does

not write like that at all. His descriptions are

resolutely matter-of-fact; his writing lucid

and literal rather than ambiguous and

metaphorical. The language is that of an

excellent guide-book, which does not even

pretend to convey the richness of immediate

experience but provides readers with precisedirections so that, on site and book in hand,

they may relive the experience for them-

selves.

Interspersed with descriptive sections are

more speculative passages, pondering what

the monuments may have meant for people in

the prehistoric past. Here is the second

paradox. The opening line of the book

equates, under the rubric of epoche, the

suspension of belief with the bracketing of

experience. But these are not the same. Indeed

Tilleys expressed aim is to revealthe world of

holding off on whatever beliefs people might

have entertained about it. In practice, how-

ever, he does exactly the opposite. When not

expounding on the actuality of the world,

Tilley is eagerly speculating on what peoplemight have believed it all meant! To take just

one example, the solution basins created by

erosion on a standing-stone were perhaps

regarded as carvings created by the ancestors

(p.51). Perhaps they were; perhaps they were

not. Tilley has a penchant for wheeling in the

ancestors, whenever needed, to lend an air of

ethnographic authenticity to his conjectures.

But if his concern is really with experience,

why do these conjectures deal so exclusivelywith what people might have believed?

Part of the problem seems to be that in

pursuit of his phenomenological project,

Tilley remains encumbered by the philoso-

phical baggage of a tradition of material

culture studies that treats the physical world

as a pool of metaphorical resources for the

expression of social or cosmological princi-

ples. In this tradition, material objects stand

in for cultural concepts. There are manyexamples of such reasoning in this book.

Maltese temples, for example, are interpreted

as embodiments of ideas, material meta-

phors through which the island world and

that beyond became known (p.144). Again,

whereas the menhirs of Finistere, with their

sinuous profiles, suggest fertility and growth,

those of Bas-Leon, shaped like axe-blades

struck into the ground, suggest human

mastery over the land. Thus, a metaphorof organic growth of stones from the soil was

replaced by a metaphor of wilful transforma-

tion and dominance over nature and

natural forces (p.86). And the schematic

depictions of boats in the inscribed rocks of

southern Sweden signified both social

groups and the structuring principles in

terms of which these groups were organised

in relation to each other (p.195).

In these examples, the sheer materiality of

stone stands to its ideological significance as

nature to culture. These are, as Tilley himself

Comments on: The Materiality of Stone 123


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are the physical features of the landscape

(whether or not shaped by human hands), on

the other the symbolic meanings encoded

into them. Together they constitute a com-

plex system of signification (p.220). Yetfollowing his phenomenological bent, Tilley

is keen to refute any opposition between the

material and the ideal. His approach, he

declares, transcends any distinction between

nature and culture. But how can the

distinction be transcended if they are to

remain as two sides of a coin? The sides may

indeed be inseparable, but they are opposite

nonetheless. This is the third paradox, and it

is written into the very title of the book. It isone thing to consider stone as material; quite

another to consider the materiality of stone.

Tilley devotes a great deal of attention to the

former, and in this he makes a major

contribution, above all in his recognition

that the character of stone its stoniness if

you will is not some fixed essence but

endlessly variable in relation, for example, to

light or shade, wetness or dryness, and the

position, posture or movement of the obser-ver. Thus the stoniness of stone does not

reside in its nature that is, in its

materiality but rather in the manifold ways

in which it is engaged in the currents of the

lifeworld. It has to do with the properties

and qualities of materials, not with the

materiality of objects.

Exactly the same problem arises when we

turn from stones to the people, both pre-

historic and contemporary, who are sup-posed to engage with them. Within the space

of a single page, Tilley both espouses a

radical materialism, asserting that it is

precisely because people are physical objects

that they are able to perceive the world, and

then denies any such thing, insisting that the

body-person is not an object among other

objects in the world but rather a particular

way of inhabiting the world, of being

present in it, sensing it (pp.23). But if

people are not objects among objects, then

nor, strictly speaking, are stones. A stone in

presence, taking the form of a block,

boulder, protuberance or outcrop organi-

cally embedded in the solid earth below and

immersed in currents of water or air above.

These enveloping media afford perception,and it is thanks to their fluctuations and

transformations that components of the

landscape present themselves in the ways

they do. Thus, as Tilley notes (p.11), the

qualities of a stone will vary depending,

among other things, on the light and the

direction from which it shines. And on a

misty day the entire landscape in which it sits

may look quite different, compared with a

clear day. From this example, however, hedraws a strange conclusion, namely that the

difference is due to the point of view of the

person who perceives it.

This is the fourth paradox in Tilleys

account. On the one hand he accepts that

landscapes of perception, for all their appar-

ent solidity, are never the same from one

moment to the next. For example the

Maltese temples, constructed of massive

stone blocks, are like pivots around whichrevolves an oceanic cosmos described by the

movements of wind and waves, the arrivals

and departures of migratory birds, the

celestial cycles of the sun and moon, and

the growth cycles of plants (p.135). Yet on

the other hand, in a world where persons

make things and things make persons

(p.217), no space remains for such generative

movements. To suppose that persons and

things, and their mutually constitutive inter-actions, are all there is, is a bit like saying

that a river is constituted by interactions

between eddies and banks, forgetting that

there would be neither eddies nor banks were

it not for the flow of the river itself. Likewise,

there would be neither persons nor land-

scapes were it not for those atmospheric

fluxes that normally go by the name of

weather. It is astonishing that Tilleys out-

door archaeology, with its exclusive focus on

persons and things, cannot begin to compre-

hend the weather. That is why, for example,

124 Tim Ingold & Chris Tilley


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mistiness and clarity to the constitutive

intervention of persons in the landscape,

rather than to fluctuations in the medium

that enshrouds both.

It is also why he rushes to endow stones,along with trees, places and the entire land-

scape with agency (pp.18, 31, 217, 222). In

this topsy-turvy world, rivers flow because of

the interacting agency of eddies and banks.

Tilley advocates a return to an ontology of

animism, and I sympathise. But animism is

not about imputing life and agency to things.

It is rather a matter of restoring those things

to the circulatory currents of life and activity

within which they are generated and take onthe forms they do, each in relation to the

other. The much vaunted problem of

agency is of our own creation, and has its

source in an inverted view of reality that

represents the dynamic potential of the

lifeworld to bring forth forms of manifold

kinds as an interior property that is carved

up and distributed among the forms them-

selves, whence it is supposed to set the world

in motion. Thus Tilley asks us to imagine apainter and a tree. But in his account the

visuo-manual movement of the painter as he

paints the tree is rendered as an effect of the

trees agency as it moves the painter (p.18).

This is the fifth paradox of the account, and

it stems from the impossible attempt to

marry an animistic ontology, according to

which all things are suspended in currents

of life and activity, with a philosophy of

substance that seeks the wellsprings of lifeand activity in a world that already consists

of things-in-themselves.

This same paradox reappears in Tilleys

frequent allusions to the relations between

persons and place. On the one hand, he

asserts (p.25) that all human experience is

fundamentally place-bound. Places are

kinds of things to which living bodies

belong from the very moment of their

coming into the world. They have an agency

of their own (p.31), and shape the identities

of their inhabitants just as the latter shape

recognises that life entails movement, and is

lived not in places but around them, and

along the paths that lead to and from places

elsewhere. Thus, far from human experience

being bound in places, places are bound inthe flows of human movement (p.26). It is

along paths, not in places, that humans

experience the world. Or in short, experience

is place-making but not place-bound. Places

are like vortices, anchorages or resting points

in currents of movement. In his resolute

attempt to have it both ways, Tilley succeeds

in confusing the stickiness of place with the

very fluidity of the movement within which it

is generated. For having asserted that placesare things with which people interact, he

promptly declares that place should not be

understood as a fixed and definite thing but

rather as something fluid and flowing

(p.220). But if places are flows of movement,

then how can people move from place to

place?

Even more peculiar is Tilleys admission,

in a postscript to the introductory chapter,

that the embodied experience of place is partof a bedrock of universal humanity that is

given prior to the particularities of culture.

Human bodies, he tells us, carry specific

knowledges and traditions, meanings and

symbols (culture) into places and articulate

them there (p.31). So where does this culture

come from? Does Tilley really believe that

there exists some ethereal domain of sym-

bolic meaning, floating above the plane of

material existence, from which culture issiphoned into the heads of people who then

import it with them into the contexts of their

engagement in the lifeworld? True, there are

many besides Tilley who have argued thus,

but it is a view that flies in the face of his own

argument that knowledge, identity and

meaning have their generative source in the

lived experience of body-persons in a land-

scape.

Out of this welter of paradox, what

conclusions can we reach? Can anything be

said with any certainty? Tilley clearly thinks



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the experience and meanings of massive

stone for prehistoric people are prefaced

with words like certainly, obviously and

undoubtedly. Of other things he is appar-

ently less sure, as indicated by his frequentuse of phrases like in all probability, it is as

if, could have been or simply perhaps.

Some statements are simply left as open

questions. But in reality these variations

along the continuum from doubt to certainty

are invoked merely for rhetorical effect.

There is no reason why any of his pro-

nouncements should be considered more or

less reliable than any other. What is reliably

true, in Tilleys account, is trivially true:because the terms in which it is expressed are

so vague and all-encompassing that they

could be said of almost anything sufficiently

impressive. Thus when Tilley concludes that

Maltese temples are fundamentally to do

with the manipulation and transformation of

human experience (p.138), or that in their

depictions of boats, Bronze Age people in

southern Sweden were making fundamental

statements about themselves to themselvesand about the principles of social and

political and cosmological order (p.201),

we learn at once both everything and nothing

about them.

It does not matter to Tilley that none of

his conclusions can be deduced from the

facts. For he is not a detective but a

conjurer. Indeed he is a master of the art.

No one can surpass his ability to pull entiresocial orders or cosmologies from a footprint

or a scratch in the rock. Every exercise in

hyper-interpretation is like balancing an

elephant on a pinhead; it supports so much

on so little. We should not however begrudge

him this. Surely some informed ideas about

the meanings of prehistoric stone monu-

ments are better than none, and if we dont

like the stories Tilley tells, it is up to us to do

better. He has placed the ball firmly in hisreaders court. As for the appearance of the

book itself, I have only one complaint.

Though it includes plenty of photographs,

there are only a few drawings of rather poor

quality. This is strange, in view of Tilleys

own argument (p.223) that photography

affords no more than the passive apprecia-

tion of a site. Only in situ writing, he argues,

takes us in, allowing us to perceive actively,

and to make connections. But drawing doesthis too, albeit in different ways, and in many

parts of this book I felt it could have done

the job better than words. I wonder why

Tilley only writes his conclusions, and does

not draw them.

Reply to Comment

CHRIS TILLEY

BODY THOUGHTS

I appreciate very much Tim Ingolds

thoughtful and polemical discussion of my

recent book. This is so much more interest-

ing than the normal type of review, attempt-

ing some form of dry summary. Ingold

doesnt give much of the plot away here at

all so if the reader is really interested in

finding out what the book has to say theyll

have to read it themselves!

Ingolds central claim is that the book is

apparently shot through with paradox and



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contradiction. Enough to chuck it into the

academic dustbin, then, but he apparently

likes it anyway. There is a fair amount of

paradox and contradiction, of course, in

Ingolds own discussion, from my point ofview. Do we simply identify these contra-

dictions in an objective and rational man-

ner? Are they to be taken in some way as

absolutes, somehow independent of our own

particular point of view, or do we create

them as part of a particular intellectual

debating strategy of reading and analysis?

Most scholars have their own particular axe

to grind and Ingold is no exception, as he

makes clear in numerous places.Paradox one: I advocate a metaphorical

style of writing but in fact do the reverse. The

text is lucid and literal instead, which for

Ingold is probably preferable. All writing is

metaphorical in the sense that metaphor is

part and parcel of language. We cant express

ourselves adequately in literal terms. To

describe my text as lucid is to deploy a

metaphor! So Ingold thinks that there is a

clear demarcation line between literal andmetaphorical language when none really

exist. In fact the problem appears to be

not the presence or absence of metaphors in

the book, but I clearly havent been poetic

enough for him, and if I had, you can be sure

that Id be criticised for that. I described

Breton menhirs as giant axes and sprouting

rhizomes, the rocks at Simrishamn as look-

ing like old ice, as containing petrified waves,

the Maltese islands as islands of honey,floating on the sea: lucid and literal or

metaphorical descriptions? Cannot meta-

phorical descriptions be more lucid than

literal ones anyway? In the book I generally

try to describe landscape, and evoke the

material qualities of stone, in what might be

described as a realist style which does not

mean the absence of metaphor and where I

felt it appropriate more striking poetic

metaphors were employed as part and parcel

of the interpretative strategy, for that to me

is why metaphors and metaphorical language

the argument in Tilley 1999). Ingolds para-

dox is not one I share. To encounter some

excellent examples of deadening archaeo-

logical literalism I suggest he reads a few

excavation reports.I could describe the approach to writing

adopted as being in some ways akin to a

documentary film with slow panning shots

when I discuss the stones themselves, then

cutting and moving on to something much

more theatrical when the imagined people

come in and enter the experiential stage, then

cutting and moving back to the rocks once

more, and so on.

Paradox two: I advocate the bracketing ofexperience while eagerly speculating about

what people might have believed. Apparently

I should have not have attempted to provide

such an interpretation. To clarify: the brack-

eting of experience is a phenomenological

strategy to remove the theoretical presuppo-

sitions or prejudices that some things are

more important than others to study. The

entire reason for doing this is to permit a

different interpretation of experience. Noparadox there. Then Ingold sets up a strange

distinction between experience and belief:

If his concern is really with experience, why

do these conjectures deal so exclusively with

what people might have believed? Simply

because experience does not determine belief

or action in any simple manner, it offers

differing possibilities and alternatives, or

affordances.

Paradox three: I deny the nature/culturedistinction while in fact maintaining it. I

declare that nature and culture are like two

sides of the same coin, i.e. that they are

inseparable. However, for Ingold the impor-

tant point here is that because they are

on different sides of the coin, they still

remain opposite. Well, I can appreciate

the metaphorical point he is making!

However, the coin cant be cut in half

without destroying it. In other words nature

is in culture and vice versa. They form part

of each other, constitute each other. Paradox



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Paradox four: I claim landscapes and

stones and people are always changing,

infinitely variable yet also apparently main-

taining that they stay the same. The argu-

ments Ingold advances to establish thereality of this paradox are somewhat

involuted and lack the usual standard of

decisive lucidity we are accustomed to find

in his writing! I describe stone as infinitely

variable and not having a fixed essence. This

leads Ingold to argue strangely that the

stoniness of stone does not reside in its

nature that is, in its materiality but

rather in the manifold ways in which it is

engaged in the currents of the lifeworld. Itappears then, for Ingold, that for stone to

have the property of materiality it has to

have a fixed essence somehow independent

of the lifeworld. It can then be labelled

natural. Since I do not accept stone has a

fixed essence it cannot be nature as opposed

to culture the nature of stone is in its

culture. This is an important property of its

very materiality as a medium relating to

social practice, and why it can be experiencedand understood in many different ways.

Ingold points out that I claim both that

people are physical objects and yet at the

same time they are not. I do not think this

amounts to a contradiction at all not in

Ingolds presumably perjurative use of that

term. It is simply to assert that people are

both physical objects in the same sense as

stones are objects but they are also cultural

subjects: an existential fact. I apparentlyhave difficulty in comprehending the weather

attributing the difference between mistiness

and clarity to the constitutive intervention of

persons in the landscape. This is a striking

obfuscation of my position, which is that

weather alters landscapes so people perceive

these landscapes differently. There is, there-

fore, no stable landscape to perceive. Ingold

regards weather as fluctuations in the

medium that enshrouds both persons and

things. I agree entirely and I think indeed

that an entire archaeology and anthropology

developed. My regret is that I did not pay

sufficient attention to the phenomenal effects

of weather in the book.

Ingold doesnt apparently like the philo-

sophical baggage of a tradition of materialculture studies that treats the physical world

as a pool of metaphorical resources for the

expression of social or cosmological princi-

ples. Well, thats his problem and because he

denies this fundamental link he finds para-

doxes that dont exist. He doesnt like the

claim that persons make things and things

make persons. I think my definition of a

thing is probably far broader and more

inclusive that Ingolds. He appears to thinkthat wind and waves, cycles of the sun and

moon, migrating birds, and the weather are

not things at all, but something else. To me

these are all material culture, things. Of

course they are not static things but flows

and processes. So, because the moon moves,

I suppose that Ingold would not wish to

categorize it as a thing, a material medium,

but as something else. However, Ingold has

no name for such an entity that existsalongside persons and things in the world.

Paradox five: this apparently arises

because of the impossible attempt to marry

an animistic ontology ... with a philosophy of

substance in which the world already consists

of things-in-themselves. Such a paradox is of

Ingolds own creation, since while agreeing

that animism is important he appears to

regard this to simply arise from flows and

circulations in the lifeworld. It is just thereand everywhere, naturally arising, I sup-

pose. I attribute agency to things, which

according to him, is a false attribution. The

reason why I attribute agency to things is

because I dont draw a clear distinction

between persons and things. Things can be

like persons and vice versa. Thus things can

have agency or effects on persons, a theme

running throughout the book. What Ingolds

position is on this is quite impossible to work

out.

Paradox six: I associate places with both



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Landscape to me, in the most abstract sense,

is a relational nexus of places and paths of

movement. The former have both the prop-

erties of stasis and change over time and

there is really no paradox there at all exceptin Ingolds mind. Places are sticky nodes in

the flows of movement and movement flows

in places. Ingold thinks it strange that I

should regard experience of place as a human

universal prior to the particularities of

culture and yet maintain that people have

culture which they articulate in particular

places which is different. This prompts him

to ask where this culture comes from and

how it lands in a place: something thatpeople pluck out of the air? This apparently

flies in the face of my argument that

identities are created out of places. I see no

problem whatsoever in regarding platial

experience as a universal, i.e. as an ontolo-

gical part of that which it is to be human,

while still arguing that peoples particular

experiences in particular places create their

particular identities.

Why Ingold finds so many paradoxes,apart from the fact that this was obviously a

pleasing intellectual exercise, appears to be

that in the manner of an analytical philoso-

pher of the logical positivist tradition he

wants clear-cut and conceptually closed

categories, so place and movement, nature

and culture, persons and things, all need to

be opposites that share nothing in common.

This is precisely the kind of surreal attitude

to the world that a phenomenological posi-tion debunks, and demonstrates to be itself

highly paradoxical and contradictory.

We quite clearly see this demand for closed

categories better closed thinking when

he clearly wants distinctions to be drawn

between what might be reliably known

about the past and what is instead specula-

tion. He states that no conclusions that I

draw can be deduced from the facts. So,rather than being a trustworthy detective,

Im a conjurer, a master of illusion and

trickery, who simply sets out to seduce and

beguile the reader into believing the veracity

of what I have to say on no basis whatsoever!

Here Ingold draws, quite clearly, that old

and tired distinction between fact and value,

objective knowledge and subjective know-

ledge, which is so clearly a hallmark of the

entire empiricist tradition debunked andabandoned long ago throughout the social

sciences. Yet curiously, he does not begrudge

my speculation at all, whereas surely it

should be utterly condemned! If Ingold really

is so interested in facts, and their deduction,

hes clearly in the wrong discipline anthro-

pology altogether! But as he himself is

continuing to produce anthropological spec-

ulations (i.e. interpretations) of the greatest

interest he probably doesnt believe in factsat all, or indeed have a great deal of faith in

the paradoxes and contradictions he has so

deftly created in my book either.

I would love to sketch my conclusions to

this reply but unfortunately lack the artistic

skill and brilliance that would be required to

do so. So the rest of the page will have to

remain as a paradox, or a contradiction, in

the white.

REFERENCE

Tilley, C. 1999. Metaphor and Material Culture.

Blackwell, Oxford.



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