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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Is the future about to close in, or is it open to new horizons? For anthropologist Tim Ingold, the root of our difficulty in facing up to the future lies in the way we think about generations. We imagine them as layers, succeeding one another like sheets in a stack. This view figures as a largely unquestioned backdrop to discussions of evolution, life and death, longevity, extinction, sustainability, education, climate change and other matters of contemporary concern. What if we were to think of generations, instead, as wrapping around one another along their length, more like fibres in a rope than stacked sheets?
In this compelling new book, Ingold argues that a return to the idea that life is forged in the collaboration of overlapping generations might not only assuage some of our anxieties, but also offer a lasting foundation for future coexistence. But it would mean having to abandon our faith both in the inevitability of progress, and in the ability of science and technology to cushion humanity from environmental impacts. A perfect world is not around the corner, nor will our troubles ever end. Nevertheless, for as long as life continues, there is hope for generations to come.
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Seitenzahl: 214
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
1 Generations and the Regeneration of Life
The rope and the stack
Filiation
The genealogical model
Inheritance and perdurance
Notes
2 Modelling the Human Life Course
Ageing and begetting
The Angel of History
The bell-curve
Life and death
Notes
3 Remembering the Way
The laminated ground
Pathways from the past
From archive to anarchive
Longing
Notes
4 Uncertainty and Possibility
Lifting the curse
Doing in undergoing
The structure of attention
Surprise and astonishment
Notes
5 Loss and Extinction
The catalogue of species
Lineages of begetting
Race and generation
Conservation and conviviality
Notes
6 Recentring Anthropos
Humaning beyond humanity
The charge of exceptionalism
Progress and sustainability
Of herds and turbines
Notes
7 The Way of Education
The academic posture
Reason and response-ability
New people, old ways
Wisdom and curiosity
Notes
8 After Science and Technology
From STEM to STEAM
The Science and the arts
Digitization and fingerwork
Winding up
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1
The rope and the stack, in five generations
Figure 1.2
Filiation
Figure 1.3
Ontogenesis and phylogenesis
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1
Ageing and begetting
Figure 2.2
The turn on the present and the future’s past
Figure 2.3
Lived time and clock time
Figure 2.4
Angelus Novus, monoprint by Paul Klee
Figure 2.5
The bell-curve
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1
Over and under, with a stacked ground and a turning ground
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1
Opportunity and possibility
Figure 4.2
The structure of attention
Figure 4.3
The eye, the moon and the arc of longing
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1
Early man, anatomically modern humans and the ‘human revolution’
Chapter 7
Figure 7.1
Leading out and leaning over
Figure 7.2
Authority as confrontation and as the exercise of responsibility
Figure 7.3
The voices of wisdom and curiosity
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Begin Reading
Index
End User License Agreement
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The Rise and Fall of Generation Now
Tim Ingold
polity
Copyright © Tim Ingold 2024
The right of Tim Ingold to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2024 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5662-5
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number 2023937146
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Preface
This little book arises out of my participation, over the past few years, in an interdisciplinary Working Group, ‘Facing the Anthropocene’, organized by Duke University’s Kenan Institute for Ethics, with funding from the Henry Luce Foundation. We were tasked, as a group, with addressing some of the more urgent questions posed by the ongoing planetary crisis, such as how we should understand our own humanity in a milieu that includes so many more ways of being alive than ours, what systems of distribution and democratic governance could rise to these critical times, and what assumptions we would need to revisit, about species and nature, politics and agency, economics and value, in order to restore justice to a world that has tipped so cruelly off balance. In the course of our discussions, I became increasingly convinced that the root of much of our difficulty in facing the future lies in the way we think about generations. We are quick to treat each generation as its own layer, in command of the present, having supplanted its predecessor but destined to be supplanted in its turn. Historically, this way of thinking is anomalous, yet it is nowadays mostly taken for granted as an unquestioned backdrop to discussions of evolution, life and death, longevity, extinction, sustainability, education, climate change, and a host of other matters of intense contemporary concern.
In this book, I suggest a return to the older idea that life is not confined within generations but forged in the collaboration of their overlap. It is by living and working together along the ways of ancestors, I argue, that generations secure a future for themselves and for their descendants. We have reason to be respectful towards those who have worked so hard, and put so much life and soul, into creating a world for us to inhabit. We owe our very existence to their labours, just as those who come after us will owe their existence to ours. Would we not wish the same respect from them? Life is like a relay, and so long as it is carried on, there is hope for generations to come. I have tried in these pages to develop a conceptual vocabulary which would help us give voice to this hope. Many of its keywords are disarmingly simple and of great antiquity; perhaps it will come as no surprise, moreover, that their grammatical form is predominantly that of the verb. They include: to come and to long (from which we get ‘becoming’ and ‘belonging’), to age and to beget, to lean and to last, to care and to attend, to unearth and to undergo, and behind all these, to human. All are words of process.
To forestall any possible misapprehension, however, let me be clear what this book is not. For one thing, it is not an ethnographic or sociological study, documenting and analysing the experience of any particular generation, in any specific period or region of the world, or charting the fortunes of its population. My concern is more philosophical: it is with the of generation, and with how it might be thought otherwise. The Generation Now of my title, then, is the idea a generation has of itself from the act of staking a claim to the present. We can therefore understand its rise and fall in two senses. First, if every Generation Now takes its turn on stage to be in charge of the affairs of the day, then it must have risen to this station in life, and is bound to fall again on making way for its successor. But second, the idea itself has a historical trajectory, rising in tandem with the idea of progress as part of that great project of European thought known as the Enlightenment, but now falling again as the project itself, beset by the multiple social and environmental crises it has set in train, crumbles into disarray.
For another thing, this is not a book about gender. Indeed, I scarcely touch upon the topic. I take ‘engendering’, here, in its primary sense of begetting, of bringing forth new life, rather than in the secondary sense of investing this life with male or female qualities. Readers so inclined may well detect intimations of femininity in the mutuality of bearing and being borne, and of caring and being cared for, that begetting entails. And they may likewise find intimations of masculinity in the determination of Generation Now to seize the opportunities of the present, in order, as those in its vanguard would say, to ‘make history’. They would not be wrong to do so. But I would venture that this is not because generational relations are fundamentally gendered but, to the contrary, because our own understandings of gender are deeply inflected by the way we think about generations. Changing the latter could therefore have profound consequences for the former. To put it more strongly, there can be no justice in gender relations until the injustices built into the predominant model of generational replacement and succession, particularly towards the young and the elderly, are addressed and resolved. That’s what I attempt in this book. To explore the consequences of rethinking generations for the ways we think about gender would indeed be a logical next step. I am happy, however, to leave this challenge to scholars better qualified than myself to undertake it.
I offer my thoughts in this book as modest suggestions, rather than grand theory. I do not pretend that they are fully coherent and watertight, or even particularly original. They nevertheless reflect a feeling that has been growing on me for some time. I am persuaded that we need an alternative approach to generations, not just to ameliorate some of our anxieties for times to come, but, more profoundly, to lay a lasting foundation for coexistence. I admit that the approach I propose would mean having to abandon some of our most cherished convictions, including our faith in the inevitability of progress, and in the ability of science and technology to cushion humanity from environmental impacts. I do not believe that a perfect world is just around the corner, or that a day will dawn when our troubles come to an end. But, rather than blaming these troubles on the mistakes of predecessors, only to start over again, I think we might do better to bring generations together once more in the ongoing conversations of life. The message of this book is that life is not – or at least not primarily – about shooting at targets. It is about muddling along, in the gap between means and ends. This is where all possibility lies. In the midst of it all, we don’t see a future heading towards us but one that extends as far as we can see. It moves as we do. We’ll never get there. But so long as we can keep on going, there is reason for hope.
It remains for me to thank the Henry Luce Foundation for its generous financial support, and Norman Wirzba, in particular, for his steadfast encouragement. The confidence of Ellen MacDonald-Kramer, of Polity Press, in the merits of the project has kept me going throughout. The book has benefited from the comments of two anonymous reviewers. I dedicate the book to my ancestors, without whose labours I would not be here to write it, and offer it to my descendants, with the wish that it may give them succour in troubled times.
Tim Ingold, Aberdeen, January 2023
1Generations and the Regeneration of Life
The rope and the stack
Imagine you are making rope. For your raw material, you have harvested a quantity of long meadow grass. The rope is formed through a double movement, first by twisting stems of grass, aligned along their length, into strands, and then by twisting the strands around one another. The key thing is that the second twist should be contrary to the first. This ensures that the torque of the individual strands, which would otherwise cause them individually to unwind, only tightens the twist of their winding together, while the torque of the latter, in turn, tightens the twist of each strand. These countervailing forces, along with the friction of longitudinal alignment of the stems themselves, both prevent the rope from unravelling and give it its tensile strength. No grass stem, of course, is more than so long. But by paying new stems into the twist as old ones begin to give out, the rope itself can wind on indefinitely – or at least for as long as your supply of material lasts. If it runs out, you may have to wait another season, for more to grow. Then, with a new harvest, you can pick up again from where you left off.
Now imagine that each stem of grass is a life. It need not be a human life, but let us suppose for the moment that it is. As we know from experience, human lives are generally lived not in isolation but in the company of others. They go along together and, especially in more intimate settings such as of home and family, they twist around one another. And these intimate gatherings, in turn, revolve around one another in the wider circulations of social life. Each winds the other up, lending social life a certain cohesion, and preventing it from fraying. The inclination of particular lives to go their separate ways exerts a friction that tightens the bonds of community; while, conversely, any loosening of communal bonds tightens the intimacy with which these lives rub along. The counterpoint of tension and friction – what the Ancient Greeks called harmony (armonia) – holds it all together. No one, of course, lives forever. But as fast as some age and eventually give out, others are born and entered into the twist. Thus, despite the turnover of individual participants, social life can carry on indefinitely, with a rhythm born of the cycle of human generations.
The analogy, to be sure, is not perfect. Perhaps the most critical difference between the rope and social life is that the first is made from materials already gathered, whereas the second makes itself as it goes along, from lives ever growing from the tip. They might be better likened to vines or creepers, each winding around the others as it makes its way through a dense tangle of vegetation. As with the latter, new lives are not introduced from without – as are stems in making rope – but are born from within, in much the same way as, prior to harvesting, new shoots are born from old stems. Nevertheless, I find the image of the rope a helpful place to start in thinking about the generation of social life. That’s the subject of this book. My questions are simple. What, in the passage of generations, comes before, and what after? Are ancestors in front or behind; descendants behind or in front? How does social life secure its own continuity, or perdure? The answers, however, are of the utmost consequence, not least at a time when this continuity, or perdurance, seems under threat as never before.
I believe this threat, or at least our perception of it, has much to do with a pronounced tendency in modern times to switch focus from the generation of social life to generations. What a difference the plural makes! Generation is a process – a bringing forth of life, not just at conception or birth but in every moment of existence. Living, as we shall see, is what we do, but it is also what we undergo as, winding along together, we actively generate ourselves and one another. But generations, in the plural, are like slices that cut across the life process: every generation is a cohort of humanity that has fallen into rank at a particular time, or over a particular interval, whose members judge themselves or are judged in some sense to be coeval, and whose formation is complete at the outset. And in the march of cohorts, we witness not continuity but serial replacement, as each in turn takes the stage and, having enjoyed its share of the limelight, is overlain by its successor and sinks into the past. Generation carries on, but generations pile up, stage by stage, layer upon layer, into a stack.
This kind of stratigraphic thinking is deeply seared into modern sensibilities, and leads to an easy equation of generational layers with layers of sedimentation in the history of the earth, of deposits in the occupation of an archaeological site, of documents in an archive, even of consciousness in the human mind. It is a way of thinking that has worked itself, often without our noticing, into every sphere in which human pasts and futures are at stake, whether in concerns about tradition and heritage, conservation and extinction, sustainability and progress, or art and science. In the following chapters, we will see how it has done so. In every case, substituting the metaphor of the rope for that of the stack casts these concerns in an entirely different light. For whereas, with the stack, as we see in Figure 1.1, every generation is set to replace its predecessor, with the rope young lives overlap older ones, and life itself is regenerated in their collaboration. Nor is this collaboration confined to human lives, since it extends to relations among living beings of every complexion. Only by rethinking generation along these lines, I contend, can we fashion a lasting foundation for coexistence.
1.1 The rope and the stack, in five generations
Filiation
According to the book of Genesis, it all began with Adam. ‘This is the book of the generations of Adam’, proclaims the opening line of the book’s fifth chapter. At the great age of 130, Adam begat his son Seth, though he still lived for another eight centuries, and went on to beget many more sons and daughters. During all this time, Adam and Seth carried on their lives together. At 105, Seth begat his son Enos, but he too lived for another 807 years before he died. And so it went on: Enos begat Cainan, who begat Mahalaleel, who begat Jared, who begat Enoch, who begat Methuselah, who begat Lamech, who begat Noah.1 Each of these named characters, except Seth, was a first-born, and went on to enjoy an extraordinarily long life, begetting abundant sons and daughters. These were men of might and renown, and their numerous descendants multiplied on the face of the earth. Yet it was filled with violence and corruption. What happened next is not my concern here. My attention is rather drawn to the slightly archaic verb, ‘to beget’. What does it mean, exactly, for one human being to beget another?
Literally, it is to set a new life in train. It is for the one to bring the other into existence with the promise that the latter, when their time comes, will do the same again. There is a sense, here, of life being handed on in the manner of a relay, kept going by the fresh momentum that newcomers can impart, even as the energies of forerunners begin to fade. In a relay, the baton passes from hand to hand with no change of direction, quite unlike the kind of changing hands that happens, for example, when goods are bought and sold or, as we shall see, when they are inherited. Crucial to begetting, in other words, is that it belongs to the same movement of life as the life it begets. It is a carry-on, not a crossover. And, as such, it is not instant but temporal. Begetting may begin in sexual congress, but this is only the commencement of a process that endures, above all in the everyday work of nurturance and care through which parents bear and raise their offspring, and the latter theirs. It is a labour of carrying and lifting.
The story of Adam and his descendants, while relentlessly patriarchal, is far from unique. Many peoples around the world take pride in reciting lengthy genealogies, extending from founding ancestors to generations alive today. Often, as in the biblical case, the list follows the male line, but some societies trace it through women, while others keep parallel lists of male and female lines. Common to every such list, however, is that it is compounded of tales of begetting and being begotten. Anthropologists call this ‘filiation’, the fundamental relation of parent and child. The word comes from the Latin filius and filia, respectively son and daughter. Both, however, are personalized derivatives of filium, meaning ‘thread’. Every begetting thus introduces a new thread. Brought forth in the labour of parturition, it proceeds to wind around the parental threads as they carry on together, only to spin new threads as old ones give way. Filiation, then, is an entwining of threads. And to recite a genealogy, by listing its names, is to follow the twine. Indeed, naming is itself part of the process of begetting, of introducing the person and indexing their affiliations. Every name, in its enunciation, becomes part of the story.2
Consult any classic anthropological text on the subject of kinship and descent, however, and this is not how filiation is depicted. Such texts are full of genealogical charts in which persons are conventionally represented by means of miniature icons: triangles for males and circles for females. If the chart is intended to depict a relation that is indifferent to the gender of those it links, convention dictates a diamond.3 A straight line connecting any two icons then depicts the relation: horizontal if of the same generation, such as siblings from the same union; vertical if of successive generations. Filiation, then, appears as a straight, vertical line, connecting parent (mother or father) and child (boy or girl). You can see this in the diagram on the left of Figure 1.2. But the line drawn here is not a line of life. On the contrary, the life of every person is condensed – in the diagram as on a typical kinship chart – into a point, be it shaped as a circle, triangle or diamond. This point is immobile, fixed into place by its position in the genealogical frame. And the line, even as it connects points, marks their irrevocable separation.
There is no begetting here, no relay-like carry-on from one life to the next. For as long as they live, the distance between parent and child remains constant. Whatever practical or affective contact they have during their lives will neither bring them closer together, nor drive them farther apart. They are where they are, located by a calculus that determines their position independently of their lifetime comings and goings. This is the calculus of relatedness. When we say that parent and child are related, in this sense, it tells us nothing about the quality of their relationship, or about how they carry on their lives together. It tells us only that certain attributes or properties of the parent are replicated in those of the child. Compare this to the diagram on the right in Figure 1.2, which shows the life of the child issuing from that of its parent in a relation of filiation that continues for the duration of their overlap. Here there is no gap to cross. Rather, the growing distance between child and parent is a function of the gradual diminution of affective contact as one, outliving the other, goes on to bind with its own offspring.
1.2 Filiation: as depicted on an anthropological chart (left), and as one thread of life issuing from another (right)
