Comments on: The Sideways Glance

By: Students Are Not Natives – So Why Do We Treat Them That Way? « Neuroanthropology

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 18:59:22 +0000

[...] to ethnography and its relation to anthropology in Small Craft Warning. Kerim at Savage Minds also takes on the ethnographic side of Ingold’s essay, in particular “the idea of a one-way progression from ethnography to anthropology.” In my [...]

By: Stephen Robertson

Stephen Robertson — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 23:15:24 +0000

For those interested in hearing Prof. Ingold deliver the lecture in an audio format, I’ve added to a anthropology related podcast I’ve started curating at http://www.huffduffer.com There are some other lectures from around the web that I’m sure will be of interest to Savage Minds readers.

http://huffduffer.com/RobertsonCrusoe

By: Fieldwork is Not What It Used to Be » Small Craft Warning:

Fieldwork is Not What It Used to Be » Small Craft Warning: — Wed, 27 May 2009 20:48:28 +0000

[...] posted a note on Savage Minds about this book, which followed up on another post by Kerim about Tim Ingold’s Radcliffe-Brown Lecture, “Anthropology is not ethnography.” George suggested that the craft aesthetic addressed [...]

By: Wednesday Round Up #65 « Neuroanthropology

Wednesday Round Up #65 « Neuroanthropology — Wed, 27 May 2009 14:24:55 +0000

[...] The Sideways Glance Some nice considerations of Tim Ingold’s Ethnography Is Not Anthropology [...]

By: John Postill

John Postill — Wed, 27 May 2009 08:57:53 +0000

I’m still digesting Tim Ingold’s full lecture – which I may be using for a debate on media anthropology that we’re about to have through the journal Social Anthropology – but can I say for now that I find unhelpful Ingold’s rejection of chronology as a supposedly ‘positivist’ way of going about history and his favouring instead of a phenomenological, open-ended ‘being in the world’ approach to history.

In my view chronology has its place in the anthropological toolbox. How else would we be able to understand the unfolding of events in our neck of the woods – or in a broader geographical region, say Southeast Asia in the crucial 1997-1998 period – over a period of time? To put it colloquially, anthropologists should date more, not less.

By: Kerim

Kerim — Sat, 23 May 2009 06:03:50 +0000

Here are two links to get you started:

http://carbon.cudenver.edu/~mryder/itc_data/semiotics.html#jakobson

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_anthropology#The_Structural_Anthropology_of_L.C3.A9vi-Strauss

I hope that helps.

By: John McCreery

John McCreery — Sat, 23 May 2009 02:39:48 +0000

Kerim, could you tell us more about Jakobson’s semiotics? I learned about the phonology, which remains to the best of my knowledge, the most successful application of the method of minimal contrasts, in this case to dig below phonemics to the universals encoded in the international phonetic alphabet. Somehow whatever, if anything, I was taught about the semiotics has totally slipped my mind.

By: Kerim

Kerim — Fri, 22 May 2009 23:45:26 +0000

Thanks John. I mostly agree with you, although I’ve always thought that L-S owes his approach more to Roman Jakobson’s semiotics than to Hegel’s dialectics…

By: John McCreery

John McCreery — Fri, 22 May 2009 06:36:42 +0000

I do have to wonder why my comment, which used to appear here, has disappeared. But, anyway, I have now read through to the end of Ingold’s speech, and while I approved very much of his opening, his last remark strikes me as a totally wrong-headed misreading of Levi-Strauss’s project.

bq. Levi-Strauss’s plan for drawing up an inventory of all human societies, past and present, with a view to establishing their complementarities and differences, is surely the closest thing to butterfly collecting ever encountered in the annals of anthropology. Unsurprisingly, the plan came to nothing.

Levi-Strauss’s objective was not “an inventory of all human societies” but rather what he calls, in _Tristes Tropiques_, a Mendelevian table of the mind, a set of elements from which all myths, symbols, and other cultural artifacts are constructed. Drawing on the model of Jacobson’s phonology, L-S proposed, moreover, that these elements would be identified through the use of binary contrasts, a method like that used by linguists to identify phonemes and allophones.

The weakness in L-S’s approach lay not in the objective, to identify a set of basic elements, but rather in the chemistry by which those elements were supposed to interact. Here L-S turned too quickly to the Hegelian dialectic of his French philosophical education, which produced an analysis consisting, at the end of the day, of little more than an endless stream of thesis-antithesis-synthesis=image-opposite-mediator triads. These were too easily constructed and unconstrained by considerations of detail and sequence in the materials he examined. Instead of science he produced an illustrated metaphysics.

Where Ingold fails in his swinging back and forth between theorizing and observation lies in failing to look beyond the mass of material assembled in the _Mythologiques_ and the unconvincing method used to organize it to the goal toward which it represents a failed attempt–a goal that, in light of George Lakoff’s work in, for example, _Philosophy in the Flesh_, is a grand project, indeed.

By: Kerim

Kerim — Thu, 21 May 2009 07:17:57 +0000

Fixed. Sorry about that.

By: maniaku

maniaku — Thu, 21 May 2009 06:35:39 +0000

Tim!