The Ray and the Flame, or, What It Takes for the Sun to Shine

Tim Ingold is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. Following 25 years at the University of Manchester, where he was appointed Max Gluckman Professor of Social Anthropology in 1995, Ingold moved in 1999 to Aberdeen, where he established Scotland’s youngest Department of Anthropology. Ingold has carried out ethnographic fieldwork among Sámi and Finnish people in Lapland, and has written on comparative questions of environment, technology, and social organization in the circumpolar North, the role of animals in human society, issues in human ecology, and evolutionary theory in anthropology, biology, and history. He has gone on to explore the links between environmental perception and skilled practice, replacing traditional models of genetic and cultural transmission with a relational approach focusing on the growth of bodily skills of perception and action. 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), and Imagining for Real (2022). 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.