Introduction
Timothy Ingold, FBA, FRSE (born 1 November 1948) is a British anthropologist, and Chair of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen.
Background
He was educated at Leighton Park School in Reading, UK and his father was the world-renowned mycologist Cecil Terence Ingold. He attended Churchill College, Cambridge, initially studying natural sciences but shifting to anthropology (BA in Social Anthropology 1970, PhD 1976). His doctoral work was conducted with the Skolt Saami of northeastern Finland, studying their ecological adaptations, social organisation and ethnic politics. Ingold taught at the University of Helsinki (1973–74) and then the University of Manchester, becoming Professor in 1990 and Max Gluckman Professor in 1995.In 1999 he moved to the University of Aberdeen. in 2015 he received the honorary doctorate by Leuphana University of Lüneburg (Germany). He has four children.
Contributions
His interests are wide-ranging and his scholarly approach is individualistic. They include environmental perception, language, technology and skilled practice, art and architecture, creativity, theories of evolution in anthropology, human-animal relations, and ecological approaches in anthropology.
Early concern was with northern circumpolar peoples, looking comparatively at hunting, pastoralism and ranching as alternative ways in which such peoples have based a livelihood on reindeer or caribou.
In his recent work, he links the themes of environmental perception and skilled practice, replacing traditional models of genetic and cultural transmission, founded upon the alliance of neo-Darwinian biology and cognitive science, with a relational approach focusing on the growth of embodied skills of perception and action within social and environmental contexts of human development. This has taken him to examining the use of lines in culture, and the relationship between anthropology, architecture, art and design. He discusses his entire career in From science to art and back again: The pendulum of an anthropologist (2016).
Writing within the anthropological realm of phenomenology, Ingold explores the human as an organism which 'feels' its way through the world that "is itself in motion"; constantly creating and being changed by spaces and places as they are encountered.
Recognition
- Rivers Memorial Medal, RAI (1989)
- Fellow of the British Academy (1997)
- Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2000)
- Huxley Memorial Medal recipient —established in 1900 in memory of Thomas Henry Huxley— for services to anthropology by the Council of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, the highest honour of the RAI (2014)
- Honorary doctorate of the Leuphana University of Lüneburg (2015)