ABSTRACT
What do walking, weaving, observing, singing, storytelling, drawing and writing have in common? The answer is that they all proceed along lines of one kind or another. In this book I aim to lay the foundations for what might be called a comparative anthropology of the line. So far as I know, nothing quite like this has been attempted before. Indeed when I have broached the idea to friends and colleagues, their initial response has usually been one of blank incredulity. Did they mishear me: was I talking about lions? ‘No’, I would answer, ‘I mean lines, not lions.’ Their bafflement was understandable. The line? This is hardly the kind of thing that has served traditionally as the focus of our attention. We have anthropological studies of visual art, of music and dance, of speech and writing, of craft and material culture, but not of the production and significance of lines. Yet it takes only a moment’s reflection to recognize that lines are everywhere. As walking, talking and gesticulating creatures, human beings generate lines wherever they go. It is not just that line-making is as ubiquitous as the use of the voice, hands and feet – respectively in speaking, gesturing and moving around – but rather that it subsumes all these aspects of everyday human activity and, in so doing, brings them together into a single field of inquiry. This is the field that I seek to delineate.
