ABSTRACT

What does imagination do for our perception of the world? Why should reality be broken off from our imagining of it? It was not always thus, and in these essays, Tim Ingold sets out to heal the break between reality and imagination at the heart of modern thought and science. Imagining for Real joins with a lifeworld ever in creation, attending to its formative processes, corresponding with the lives of its human and nonhuman inhabitants. Building on his two previous essay collections, The Perception of the Environment and Being Alive , this book rounds off the extraordinary intellectual project of one of the world’s most renowned anthropologists.

Offering hope in troubled times, these essays speak to coming generations in a language that surpasses disciplinary divisions. They will be essential reading not only for anthropologists but also for students in fi elds ranging from art, aesthetics, architecture and archaeology to philosophy, psychology, human geography, comparative literature and theology.

chapter |9 pages

General introduction

part I|70 pages

Creating the world

chapter Chapter 1|14 pages

Creation beyond creativity

chapter Chapter 3|11 pages

Life in a whirl

chapter Chapter 5|20 pages

Dreaming of dragons

part II|68 pages

Light, sound and experience

chapter Chapter 6|17 pages

What in the world is light?

chapter Chapter 7|12 pages

Between noise and silence

On the meaning of sound

chapter Chapter 8|16 pages

The cello and the lasso

Five propositions on beauty

chapter Chapter 9|19 pages

Episode zero

The reduction and revival of aesthetic experience

part III|73 pages

Surface tensions

chapter Chapter 12|19 pages

Palimpsest

Ground and page

chapter Chapter 13|13 pages

On opening the book of surfaces

chapter Chapter 14|10 pages

Strikethrough and wipe-out

Tactics for editing the past

part IV|61 pages

Material thinking

chapter Chapter 15|16 pages

Of work and words

Craft as a way of telling

chapter Chapter 16|13 pages

Thinking through the cello

chapter Chapter 18|11 pages

The world in a basket

part V|95 pages

Life as a whole

chapter Chapter 19|21 pages

Animals are us

On living with other beings

chapter Chapter 20|15 pages

Posthuman prehistory

chapter Chapter 21|12 pages

The sustainability of everything

chapter Chapter 22|10 pages

Confessions of a semiophobe

chapter Chapter 23|33 pages

One world anthropology