ABSTRACT
The importance of materials in the social imagination has risen and fallen historically at particular times, and especially in reaction to enlightenment ideas of knowing and dominating a material world through the power of mind and body. The modern technical capacity to turn lead into gold at a molecular level, for example, would be at a conceptual level no surprise to a medieval alchemist. Tim Ingold draws on James Gibson’s work to describe a world of materials, which conceives of flows and material properties coming to the fore: Supported by the ground, the inhabitants of Gibson’s account are not so much composites of mind and body, participating at once in the material world and the world of ideas, as immersed in a world of materials comprising earthly substances and the aerial medium. Hence the work of evocation of a ‘materials world’ is difficult and not necessarily what reader might expect.
