ABSTRACT
Knotting is about how contrary forces of tension and friction, as in pulling tight, are generative of new forms. Knotting, then, registers in a number of domains of thought and practice by which patterns of culture are sustained and bound into the interstices of human life. These include: the flows and growth patterns of materials, including air, water, cordage and wood; bodily movement and gesture, as in weaving and sewing; sensory perception, especially touch and hearing, perhaps more than vision; and human relationships and the sentiment that infuses them. The children of a union, 'knit together', as the biblical psalm has it, in the same 'womb', are like lines that eventually go their separate ways, only to tie themselves with lines extending from other knots. These life-historical lines are, by the same token, lines of feeling or sentiment, whose rooting for one another rests upon what social anthropologist Meyer Fortes called 'the axiom of amity'.
