Tim Ingold was born in 1948. He graduated in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge in 1970 and obtained his doctorate in 1976, based on ethnographic fieldwork (1971-72) among the Skolt Saami in Northeastern Finland. His university career in Social Anthropology ran for many years at the University of Manchester. In it, he continued his research on the circumpolar peoples of Northern Europe. Such research focused on populations that are basically hunter-herders of reindeer, gatherers and small farmers. This work has led him to a much broader interest in the relations between man and animal, nature and culture. Such a framework would never cease to extend, encompassing problems of human evolution, the relationship between language and technology, art, ecology, psychology, etc., etc.

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The originality and philosophical structure of his thinking were definitively imposed worldwide by the publication of “The Perception of the Environment” (2000), a collection of essays written during the previous decade, which marked a profound change in Anthropology.

 

Ingold obtained the chair at the University of Manchester in 1990, and in 1995 became Max Gluckman Professor of Social Anthropology. He edited the monumental 'Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology', published in 1994. In 1988, he founded the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory and edited in a volume the first six annual debates ('Key Debates in Anthropology', 1996).

 

In 1999 Tim Ingold moved to take up the newly established chair of social anthropology at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, where he played a key role in the creation of the UK's most recent Department of Anthropology in 2002. Three themes were the focus of his research, between 2005 and 2008: the dynamics of pedestrian movement, the creativity of practice and the linearity of writing. Those questions were addressed in the project entitled "Explorations in Comparative Anthropology of the Line". Starting from the premise that both walking, observing and writing have in common the following "lines" of any kind, the project has achieved a new approach to understanding the relationship, in human social life and experience, between movement, knowledge and description. At the same time, and in complementing this study, Ingold has researched and taught the connections between anthropology, archaeology, art, and architecture (his already famous "4 As"), conceived as ways of studying relations between humans and the environments in which they live. It is a radically different approach from conventional anthropologies and archaeology of art and architecture, which treats works of art and buildings as merely objects of analysis. On the contrary, Ingold has sought ways of uniting the 4 As at the practical level, as forms that deeply interact in our involvement with the environment.

 

The enormous wealth of the work produced and always in surprising development make the author, today, at the time of his retirement, one of the most important figures of the social and human sciences, worldwide, present in numerous scientific events that go far beyond Anthropology as a discipline.

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More data here: https://www.abdn.ac.uk/socsci/people/profiles/tim.ingold