Lines: A Brief History by Tim Ingold

In January 2022 our very own co-founder Victoria Jamieson introduced Tim Ingold’s book Lines: A Brief History. She provided the following provocations to open the conversation:

Ingold’s Lines: A Brief History is a fine example of bringing something into presence and out of the ordinary context. Ingold demands that the reader attends to ‘lines’ in ways we may not have done so before. Taking his arguments in different directions, Ingold brings together a number of diverse practices such writing, speaking, drawing, weaving, reading, building, dwelling, mapping, and travelling. At times, Ingold leaves many things unresolved, though he illuminates matters which can be taken as ordinary from a completely different perspective. Is there space in education to teach children to attend, and to learn from what they observe and experience, and embrace the unfinished and incompleteness? And, how might we as educators bring education out of the ordinary?

Ingold casts doubt over the contemporary way of life - life which often demands linearity in the pursuit of certainty, logic, and rigour. Chapter 6 explores the implications of straight lines: straight lines have a clear sense of direction (p.167). Education has just experienced a rupture in its ‘straight line’. How might this fragmentation and rupturing of the line be a passage for the future of education?

Ingold draws a distinction between the traveller and the wayfarer. He elevates the path of the wayfarer over that of the traveller. For Ingold, wayfaring is where life is lived where knowledge is forged along the way. As Ingold writes, ‘[i]ndeed the wayfarer or seafarer has no final destination, for wherever he is, and so long as life goes on, there is somewhere further he can go’ (p.76). How might we, as educators, cultivate wayfarers?