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To clarify, for Richard, it is helpful to provide some Heideggerian context:

“May world in its worlding be the nearest of all nearing that nears, as it brings the truth of Being near to man’s essence, and so gives man to belong to the disclosing bringing-to-pass that is a bringing into its own. ” (from Lovitt’s translation of “The Turning”)

Does that help? No? Then please just substitute the phrase “Do Things”.

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This sentence is the first in Tim Ingold’s lecture and points, I believe, to the issues with which he is concerned.

1. The topic is “Human being and knowing”
2. The understanding pursued is “generous, comparative and but nevertheless critical.”
3. It assumes “the one world we all inhabit.”

“Human being an knowing” casts a wide net, ranging from the biology of human wetware to philosophical meditations. Given that human being is an inescapably social activity, sociology is included. Given the distinctiveness of human language and human construction and use of symbols, culture, too, is part of the package.

What, then, of the understanding pursued. “Generous” suggests that non-judgmental openness to other possibilities that has always been at the heart of the anthropological enterprise. “Comparative” suggests something often forgotten in obsessive focus on the site or sites where fieldwork is done — Clifford Geertz’s observation in _Islam Observed_ that anthropologists look for insights in microscopic settings, but their value can only be judged in larger conversations that include information from other times and places. “Critical”? Yes, but why is “critical” preceded by “but nevertheless”? Here I detect a warning against not only sloppy scholarship but also the misleading tender-heartedness to those inclined to be generously open-minded are prone. Here I recall Larry Crisman’s remark that, “Culture shock is discovering that your best informant has sold his daughter into prostitution to buy a motorcycle” and Voltaire’s distain for Leibniz’s proposition that whatever is must be for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

Which brings us to “the one world we all inhabit.” Yes, subjectively speaking we may all inhabit different worlds. In this sense my world and that of Rush Limbaugh are very different places. At the end of the day, however, reality intrudes and, barring the radical solipsism of the late Robert Heinlein, in which everything imaginable is real in some dimension, it refuses to go away even if belief denies it. Anthropology is, in this sense, part of the reality based community.

Is this what Ingold meant to say? I can’t say. Have to read the whole thing first and likely, as Kerim suggests, read more of what Ingold has written to ground a serious interpretation. My first take, however, is highly positive.

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