Research Statement

My research career can be divided roughly into four phases: the first from 1970 to 1988, the second from 1988 to 2002, the third from 2002 to 2018, and the fourth from 2018 and continuing.

The first phase began with my doctoral research among Skolt Sami people in the far northeast of Finland. I had gone there to study the local-level ethnopolitics of a small and apparently endangered minority, but soon became caught up in what, for the people themselves, were much more pressing questions surrounding the management of their reindeer herds and the contingencies of making ends meet in an environment that otherwise offered meagre returns from fishing, berry-gathering and casual labour on road-building sites. These questions became the subject of my doctoral dissertation, and my first book (The Skolt Lapps today, 1976).

Arriving at the University of Manchester in 1974 as a newly appointed lecturer in social anthropology, I was required to teach classes in ecological anthropology, and soon became immersed in the literature on human-environmental relations, with a particular focus – stemming from my own field experience – on relations between humans and animals. Since the Sami were, at least nominally, a pastoral people, I was initially drawn to situate my research within the field of anthropological studies of nomadic pastoralism. Most of these studies, however, were located in ethnographic regions – North and East Africa, the Mediterranean, Southwest and Central Asia – in which conditions were so very different from what I had encountered that it was hard to find a basis for comparison. Much more promising comparative possibilities, however, were offered by studies of other indigenous peoples around the circumpolar North, many of whom lived by hunting, or by some combination of hunting and herding. My second book, Hunters, pastoralists and ranchers: reindeer economies and their transformations (1980), took up this comparison, of peoples around the North for whom the reindeer or caribou was a mainstay of livelihood. In this work, human-animal relations – and especially the question of whether or in what sense these relations could be considered ‘domestic’ – took centre stage.

This comparative research, together with my teaching in ecological anthropology, eventually drew me into the field of hunter-gatherer studies. Work in this field was addressing topics at the heart of our understanding of the human condition in a way that studies of pastoralism, at least at that time, were not. Such topics included: What constitutes an environment for human beings and how can they be said to adapt to it, or alternatively, to transform it? What does it mean to make and use tools, and when does making and use amount to a ‘technology’? How do people relate to, or exercise rights over, lands and waters, and what does it take for these relations to be understood as forms of property or tenure? If movement is a condition of human life, then how do the movements of people designated as ‘nomadic’ differ from those of people characterised as sedentary? What does it mean to store stuff for the future, and how does storage affect the quality of social relations? How do people reconcile their sense of autonomy with dependence on others?

In addressing these and other topics, in both my research and my teaching, I started from a premise that, at the time, I thought unassailable, namely that as both living organisms and social persons, all human beings are necessarily caught up in two, ontologically distinct systems of relations: of ecological relations with non-human components of the environment; and of social relations with one another in respect of these components. The issue, then, always boiled down to how these two relational systems, distinct yet intimately coupled, intersected with one another. This, in turn, set the agenda for my third book, The appropriation of nature: essays on human ecology and social relations (1986).

At the same time, while following this agenda, I was also confronting a series of broader theoretical issues founded on the conviction that what we say about social life and culture must at least be consistent with what biological science teaches about human evolution. It soon became evident that in order to progress in integrating the two fields, of social anthropology and evolutionary biology, I would first have to unravel the many different senses in which the paired concepts of history and evolution had been enrolled – sometimes as equivalents, sometimes in opposition – by advocates of radically different positions both on the nature of change and on the question of human uniqueness. Accordingly, I set about a systematic inquiry into how these concepts had been used, in the fields of biology, history and anthropology, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. The result was my fourth book, Evolution and Social Life (1986). However, what I had hoped to be a monument of theoretical integration turned out, in many ways, to be a failure, since in the very course of writing it, my own thinking was undergoing a profound shift, occasioned primarily by my encounter with the process philosophies of Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead. It was a shift that, in the book, remained incomplete and unresolved.

Only some years later, in 1988, did it dawn on me that the only way forward would be to rewrite biology, or rather to seek a rapprochement with a biology that was developmental rather than evolutionary in orientation. For my previous attempts at integration had foundered on an absolute incompatibility between the kind of ‘population thinking’ which was axiomatic in mainstream evolutionary biology and the ‘relational thinking’ fundamental to contemporary social anthropology. I wanted a synthesis that would be relational through and through. And for this, I would have to look to alternative sources. In biology, I turned to Susan Oyama’s inspirational work in founding what has since come to be known as ‘developmental systems theory’ (DST). In philosophy I turned to the phenomenological writings of Martin Heidegger and, above all, Maurice Merleau-Ponty. I also needed to incorporate thinking from psychology, a discipline that had been conspicuous by its absence from my earlier work. Here I turned not to mainstream cognitive psychology but to the ecological approach to perception founded by James J. Gibson. I had already been introduced to this approach in the mid-1980s, but only some years later did I begin to realise its full significance for anthropology. It was my engagement with ecological psychology that really distinguished the second phase of my research.

Ecological anthropology, at that time, had reached an impasse, which had to do with the positioning of culture in human-environmental relations. Some saw culture as the human means of adaptation par excellence, others saw it as an autonomous system of meaning, transcending the ecological nexus and setting its conditions. Gibson, however, proposed a way of understanding how animals, whether human or non-human, can perceive their environment directly, in the very course of acting in it, in ways that answer to their current practice. This not only offered a way through the impasse; it also helped to break down the increasingly problematic bifurcations between human and non-human, and between culture and nature. In short, ecological psychology promised just the kind of relational perspective I was looking for. With the singular exception of A. Irving Hallowell who – always way ahead of his time – was already reading and referencing Gibson’s work in the mid-1950s, I believe I was the first to draw its significance to anthropological attention. However I had also been reading the work of Jakob von Uexküll, retrospectively acknowledged as the founder of biosemiotics. Like Gibson, von Uexküll had also placed the animal at the centre of its own perceptual world, but in other respects their respective approaches differed greatly. For Gibson, the animal discovers meanings in the environment, in the form of what he called its affordances, for von Uexküll, the animal projects meanings on its environment, to form what he called its Umwelt. A paper published in 1992, ‘Culture and the perception of the environment’, was my first attempt – indeed the first by any anthropologist – to compare the approaches of Gibson and von Uexküll, and to examine their relevance for anthropology.

I went on to pursue these themes throughout the decade of the 1990s, in a series of essays, most of which were originally written as special lectures or conference presentations. In many of these I carried on my earlier interests in hunting and pastoral societies, in which I reconsidered questions of perception (e.g., ‘Hunting and gathering as ways of perceiving the environment’, 1996), human-animal relations (e.g., ‘From trust to domination: an alternative history of human-animal relations’, 1994; ‘Totemism, animism and the depiction of animals’, 1998) and domestication (‘Growing plants and raising animals: an anthropological perspective on domestication’, 1996). Other essays took up the questions of what it means to perceive a world, to dwell in it and to move around in it, in more general terms. Some focused on the meanings of environment and landscape (e.g., ‘The temporality of the landscape’, 1993), others on human-animal differences (‘Building, dwelling, living: how animals and people make themselves at home in the world’, 1995). In a third group of essays I took up the concept of skill, understood in terms of the coordination of perception and action, and its bearing on the emergence of the ideas of technology (e.g., ‘Society, nature and the concept of technology’, 1990), of language and intelligence (e.g., ‘The poetics of tool-use: from technology, language and intelligence to craft, song and imagination’, 1993), and of the evolution of so-called ‘modern humans’ (‘“People like us”: the concept of the anatomically modern human’, 1995).

I eventually revised and assembled these essays into a single volume. Entitled The perception of the environment: essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill, the book was published in 2000. Four of its 23 essays, however, were written especially for the book, and published there for the first time. One, ‘A circumpolar might’s dream’, a reanalysis of Hallowell’s classic work on Ojibwa ontology, anticipated many of the ideas that have more recently been promulgated in anthropology under the twin rubrics of perspectivism and the ‘ontological turn’. Another, ‘Ancestry, generation, substance, memory, land’, explored understandings of these five dimensions of indigeneity in terms of a contrast between genealogical and relational models. In ‘Stop, look and listen! Vision, hearing and human movement’ I argued for my approach to perception, derived from Gibson and Merleau-Ponty, through a critique of approaches being proposed at the time by advocates of the ‘anthropology of the senses’. The essay that perhaps had the greatest bearing on my subsequent work, however, was entitled ‘To journey along a way of life: maps, wayfinding and navigation’. This explicitly took up the contrast between Gibson’s approach to wayfinding, understood as a movement along what he called a ‘path of observation’, and theories of cognitive mapping, which think of navigation in terms of the location and integration of point-specific images within an overarching mental representation.

Despite their diverse themes, the thread running through all my essays for The Perception of the Environment was an ambition to establish a synthesis alternative to the dominant one – of neo-Darwinian biology, cognitive science and cultural anthropology – by bringing both ‘developmental systems’ thinking in biology and ‘ecological’ thinking in psychology into a dialogue with ‘relational’ thinking in anthropology. This, in turn, laid the foundation for the third phase of my research.

III

The starting point for this phase was the idea that life is lived not in locations but along paths or lines. Thus the ‘way of life’ has to be understood quite literally, not as a received body of tradition handed down independently and in advance of its enactment in the world, but as a creative and improvisatory process of finding a way through, in a world of relations and processes that are forever unfolding. Here, the figure of the line took centre stage. The launch of this new phase of research, on the history and anthropology of the line, closely followed my move from Manchester to the University of Aberdeen, to set up a new programme of teaching and research in anthropology. Another turning point was my decision, following the Ninth International Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies, which my colleague Alan Barnard and I co-convened in Edinburgh in 2002, to relinquish the field of hunter-gatherer studies in order to concentrate on another set of themes that I had begun to develop prior to leaving Manchester, on the interface between anthropology, art and architecture. With this came an entirely new set of interdisciplinary challenges, which have been at the forefront of my research ever since.

I initially pursued my work on the line in three directions, concerning respectively the dynamics of pedestrian movement, the creativity of practice, and the linearity of writing. My research on walking, carried out together with my colleague Jo Vergunst, led to our co-edited volume Ways of walking: ethnography and practice on foot (2008). In this, we were able to show how walking along together, as opposed to the face-to-face encounter, is a primary form of human sociality, and how it resembles storytelling as a way not just of going from place to place, but also of making the places themselves. In my research on creative practice, I returned to the writings of Whitehead and Bergson – despised when I first encountered them in the early 1980s, but now back in vogue – with the aim of decoupling the idea of creativity from that of innovation, and of linking it instead to a sense of improvisation, as a movement that is continually attentive to the comings and goings of human and non-human others.

A highlight was the 2005 conference of the UK Association of Social Anthropologists, which I convened in Aberdeen, on Creativity and cultural improvisation. A conference volume, bearing the same title, and co-edited by myself and my colleague Elizabeth Hallam, was published in 2007. In the same year I brought out my book Lines: a brief history. The book had evolved from the series of Rhind Lectures, sponsored by the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, which I had presented in Edinburgh in 2003, entitled ‘Lines from the past: towards an anthropological archaeology of inscriptive practices’. However, while in the lectures I had focused on the linearity of writing and drawing, in the subsequent book I sketched out a much broader approach to understanding the relation between movement, knowledge and description.

Key to this approach was the distinction between two kinds of line: the gestural trace and the point-to-point connector. Lines of the first kind, typically made by hand, or by walking, comprise what I call the ‘meshwork’, as distinct from the network of punctual interconnections. Thus travellers, improvising their passage through the world along the paths of the meshwork, and attending and responding to surrounding conditions as they go along, are wayfarers. In Lines, I tried to show how wayfaring – as opposed to transport, the carrying across of persons or goods from point to point – is the most fundamental way in which living beings inhabit the earth. These ideas were further developed in a collection of 19 essays, all written during the 2000s, and published under the title Being alive: essays on movement, knowledge and description (2011). Highlights of the collection include: ‘Culture on the ground: the world perceived through the feet’ (2004), which explored how developments in footwear, street-paving and transport all contributed to an assumed separation, underpinning much work in cognitive science, between locomotion and cognition; ‘Point, line, counterpoint: from environment to fluid space’ (2009), in which I return to my earlier comparison of the approaches of Gibson and von Uexküll to understanding how animals perceive the world around them, finding a resolution of sorts in the thinking of Gilles Deleuze; ‘Against space: place, movement, knowledge’ (2009), which shows how the modern logic of inversion converts emplacement into enclosure, travelling into transport and ways of knowing into transmitted culture, and ‘The textility of making’ (2010), in which I shift the focus from ready-made objects to the processes of their generation and dissolution, a shift that requires us to follow the materials as they flow, mix and mutate.

While, throughout this phase, I have continued to draw inspiration from the ecological psychology of James Gibson, I have also become more aware of the limitations of his approach. For while it accords to the perceiver an active and exploratory role, the world perceived seems static, as if it were already laid out. In Being Alive – particularly the essays ‘Earth, sky, wind and weather’ (2008) and ‘Landscape or weather world?’ (2005) – I have sought to overcome this limitation, by shifting the focus from the surface of the earth to the atmospheric dynamics of wind and weather, thus situating the wayfarer at the heart of a world in continuous flux. The wayfarer’s line, in short, not only leaves its trace on the ground but also threads an atmosphere. In order to understand the relation between lines and atmosphere, I realised that I would have to bring together the study of both, combining lineaology with meteorology. In The life of lines, published in 2015, I sought to do just that. The book has three parts. The first, ‘Knotting’, focuses on the many ways in which lines are enmeshed in the formation of the ground, its features and inhabitants. In the second, ‘weathering’, I turn to the atmosphere, showing how light and sound, in particular, can be understood as atmospheric phenomena. In the third part, however, I bring the argument back to the perennial question of what it means to be human, or to lead a human kind of life, in the kind of world I have described. My answer is to suggest that humans are not so much beings as becomings; indeed that in their doings and undergoings, they are ‘humaning’. In a word, to human is a verb.

Once again, the inspiration for this move comes in part from Gibson’s ecological psychology. I had been particularly attracted to his ideas that perceiving is about attending to things, and that attention is a skill that can be honed through practice. He called this ‘the education of attention’. In an article which I still regard as a landmark, ‘From the transmission of representations to the education of attention’ (2001), I set out an ecological alternative to the dominant view that culture consists in systems of representation transmitted by social learning from one generation to the next. Against this, I argued that the variations that we are inclined to call cultural are in fact variations of skill, and that skills are not transmitted ready-made but learned anew in each generation under the guidance of already accomplished practitioners. I have repeatedly returned to this argument against transmission in critiquing neo-Darwinian models of genetic and cultural evolution, and supplanting them with a relational approach, for example in my article, ‘Beyond biology and culture: the meaning of evolution in a relational world’ (2004), and in the volume, co-edited with Gisli Palsson, Biosocial becomings: integrating social and biological anthropology (2013). This volume, based on a session of the 2010 conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists, was perhaps the first to set out a coherent approach to human evolution from the viewpoint of social anthropology, and founded upon a relational ontology. Not surprisingly, it has received a cool reception among most evolutionary biologists!

In the third part of The Life of lines, however, I returned to the theme of the education of attention, comparing Gibson’s approach with that of the educational philosopher Jan Masschelein. In 2016 I was invited to present the Dewey Lectures at Centre for Education, Learning and Didactics at the University of Rennes, and I used these lectures as an opportunity to spell out the argument against transmission, and for attention, in greater depth. The lectures formed the basis for my book Anthropology and/as education (2018). The key thesis of the book is that anthropology, understood as a way of going along with and learning from others, is itself educational in practice and intent. The practice – of going along with and answering to others – is what I call ‘correspondence’, and this was the theme of my 2014 Royal Anthropological Institute Huxley Memorial Lecture, ‘On human correspondence’ (published in 2017). However the idea of correspondence, and the new focus on education, is also part of my ongoing attempt to reunite perception with imagination, understood not as a power of mental representation but rather as a way of entering creatively into the very becoming of things – of moving ‘upstream’ to the moment of their incipient formation. It is precisely in its failure to offer a convincing account of imagination that the Gibsonian approach to perception is found most wanting. In a number of recent papers, such as my ‘Introduction’ to the 2012 volume Imagining landscapes: past present and future (co-edited with Monica Janowski) and ‘Dreaming of dragons: on the imagination of real life’, I have attempted to rectify this, and my latest collection, Imagining for real: essays on creation, attention and correspondence, assembles these and other essays, mostly written between 2010 and 2018, between two covers. The collection was published in November 2021.

The greater part of my work, from 2002 onwards, has been situated on the interface between anthropology (broadly conceived to include social and biological anthropology as well as prehistoric archaeology), art and architecture. From 2003 to 2010, I taught a course at the University of Aberdeen entitled The 4 As. The As in question were anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture, and the themes we tackled ranged from questions of design and making, materials, form and function, movement and gesture, the senses in perception, craft and skill to lines, drawing and notation. I drew on my experience of the course for my book Making: anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture, published in 2013, and – following that – for a successful application to the European Research Council for an Advanced Grant. The project, entitled Knowing from the inside (or KFI for short) set out to forge a new synthesis at the confluence of anthropology, art, architecture and design, based on the premise that in all four disciplines, knowledge grows from the crucible of our practical and observational engagement with the world around us – that is, from thinking with, from and through beings and things, not just about them. The overall aim of KFI was to show how research underpinned by this premise could make a difference to the sustainability of environmental relations and to the well-being that depends on it. KFI ran for five years, from 2013 to 2018, and has left a lasting influence through publications, completed doctoral theses, and other forms of dissemination.

In September 2018, following the completion of the KFI project, I formally retired. However my research and writing have continued unabated. My little book Anthropology: why it matters, intended for a general readership, was published in the same year. The first pandemic year of 2020 saw the publication of my book Correspondences, which brings together my personal reflections on a range of art-anthropology collaborations in which I have been engaged over the past several years. In the following year, 2021, I brought out my essay collection Imagining for real, along with new editions of my two previous collections, The perception of the environment and Being alive, together forming a trilogy and wrapping up the past three decades of work. The same year saw the publication of a special issue (co-compiled with my colleague and former student Cristian Simonetti) of the journal Theory Culture and Society, under the title ‘Solid fluids: new approaches to materials and meaning’, based on a project funded by the British Academy for the four years 2015-19. Finally, I have put together an edited volume on alternative pedagogies, drawing on experience from the KFI project, entitled Knowing from the inside: transdisciplinary experiments with matters of pedagogy, due to be published in March 2022. Beyond all that, my long-term plan is to return to the field in Finnish Lapland, and to pick up from where I left off in 1980. I will become an ethnographer again!