ABSTRACT
Tim Ingold’s work already contains a rich reflection on the question of inheritance, of what is passed on as a body, skill, or story. Not tradition as dead weight against which each new generation has to strive in order to find a breath of fresh air, but tradition as that which shapes us, shapes our capacity to respond and improvise, more a question of posture than of thought systematised. If Ingold’s work has become part of the anthropological tradition, it is less in the form of anthropological theory than as a form of anthropological practice: the discipline of anthropology - in the image of a piece of music - in the minor (as opposed to major) key.
Written as a personal reflection on how Ingold’s work has shaped our research with soil and clay and paying close attention to the frictions that have been so productive for us, this chapter draws out a tension within Ingold’s work, between what seems to be the development of an ontology – of process, of relation, of life – that by default plays in the major key, leaving little place for other points of view, and epistemology that resituates ontology in practice, in practices, in which ontology makes way for ontogenesis in the plural.
