Growing Downward

A plant never rushes. It waits for the right moment — sunlight shifting through the air, a brief touch of rain — and then begins, quietly, to grow. Its roots grow downward, not to dominate the soil, but to become part of it. Above the ground, its leaves unfold to meet the wind, trembling but certain, aware that to stand upright one must first hold fast below. Observing a plant’s growth made us question what it really means to exist. Perhaps living isn’t about striving to move forward or reach higher, but learning how to maintain—with the ground, with others, and with the conditions that make life possible. 

A plant doesn’t stand apart from the world—it lives through it, shaped by what it touches and what touches it. Heidegger might call this “dwelling”: living in care and attention to what sustained us, being between earth and sky rather than above them. Ingold builds on this idea—he turns Heidegger’s notion of dwelling into something lived and practiced. In Making, Ingold writes about how knowing and creating are not detached acts of control but ongoing relationships with materials. We learn and make from the space between the earth and sky, where we actually live. Instead of being distant observers, we are part of the world’s unfolding. As he describes, when the traveller’s body merges with the “shimmering luminosity of the sky” and the “embrace of the damp earth,” earth and sky are no longer divided by the horizon but unified at the very center of being (Ingold 137). To “grow downward” is to understand this form of relationship—to see that we exist not by hovering above, but by rooting ourselves within.

Sorge: Turning Towards the World

Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher whose work reshaped how we think about being itself. Raised in a Catholic family in Messkrich, he began studying theology before turning to philosophy under the influence of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology (Wrathall). Yet Heidegger soon moved beyond Husserl’s focus on consciousness. His work “Being and Time” marked this shift: rather than asking what beings are, Heidegger asked what it means to be.

At the center of Heidegger’s “Being and Time” lies the idea of the term “Dasein”, which is his preliminary explanation of human existence as constituted by our relationships to the practical and social contexts that give meaning to our actions (Wrathall). Yet this is never purely individual. Most of the time, we exist as part of the one, absorbed in everyday routines and social habits that pull us away from authentic awareness of our existence. Heidegger calls this withdrawal not an absence, but a reminder that being is never fully available; it always withholds itself, keeping us in a state of searching and care. From this tension comes sorge, or care—a way of being that turns us toward the world and others, responding to what continually reveals itself and then slips away.

The Mound

Ingold extensively utilizes the mound as a metaphor for his concept of the continuation of life. He resists the idea that life, like edifices, is built from the ground up. Instead, like the fluid accumulation of the mound, matter does not have a clear boundary of beginning and end—its very process of becoming is its reason for becoming. And human life, even though one may argue, ends at the decay of flesh, does not truly end as it transforms into layering, sedimentation, and decay (Ingold 77). Humans, as a “thing” and not an “object”, adhere to this principle. Ingold directly cites Heidgger to distinguish between “things” and “objects”, thus as to why “things” require unique interventions: “The object, he argued, is complete in itself, define by its confrontational ‘over-againstness’ -face to face or surface to surface- in relation to the setting in which it is placed” (85). Participation is key to the ongoing process of “things” on earth’s surface. Similar to the nature of the mound, Ingold’s experiment with the village houses demonstrated how dwelling required involvement and movement. Heidegger’s presumption enhances Ingold’s idea of dwelling as performance, “The spaces of dwelling are not already given, in the layout of the building, but are created in movement” (85). The moment of movement is the moment of gathering, and is the act of joining the mound rather than terminating the worlding of things.

The Thing 

In “The Thing”, Heidegger describes a “thing” not as a functional object but an instrument of gathering the fourfolds—a place where earth, sky, divinities, and mortals come into relation. A “thing”, for him, is not merely a tool or container. Instead it holds the world together through this act of gathering. Ingold picks on the earth and mortal aspects of this idea by inviting instances of lived experience. In his critique of the monument versus the the mound, Ingold claims that, “A cairn, for example, is just a pile of stones that grows as every traveller, passing by a particular place, adds a stone picked up along the way as a memento of the trip” (83). Essentially, the cairn embodies the earth (stones) and the mortal (humans adding stones), justifying Ingold’s belief that a “thing” exists beyond to be looked at. It exists by being in the moment of contact between movement and matter. It emerges in the very act of relation, in the meeting of weight, texture, and gesture.

Heidegger’s concept of the “thing” is vital because it shapes our understanding of Ingold’s theory of correspondence. Ingold doesn’t merely cite Heidegger–he reworks Heidegger’s thinking of the “thing” to a more sensory and material appraoch. He frames gathering into a process of mutual formation in which he coined as correspondence. As Ingold writes, “To touch it, or to observe it, is to bring the movements of our own being into close and affective correspondence with those of its constituent materials” (85). In this reimagining, correspondence is all established on the basis of the material and our movement, forming a dynamic flow of transduction–a continual exchange of forces that mutually transforms the maker and the material. In this sense, Ingold preserves Heidegger’s insight that being is relational but makes it tangible, where life itself is sustained through the harmony of making and response.

From Thought to Touch

Heidegger’s concept of dwelling is largely metaphysical, unlike the lived and sensory approach that Ingold pursued. Although Ingold inherits from Heidegger the belief that humans do not stand apart from the world but dwell within it (Heidegger 1971; Ingold 3), the poetics of the fourfolds cannot be fully defined but can only be evoked. Hence, to situate this Ingold turns dwelling into a lived process. For this reason, he doesn’t always cite Heidegger directly, and that absence is intentional. Ingold had already acknowledged Heidegger explicitly in earlier chapters, such as “The Materials of Life,” where he draws on The Thing to describe how touching and observing bring our being into correspondence with materials (21). Transitioning to the chapter “Round Mound and Earth Sky”, Heidegger’s influence has already been absorbed into the fabric of Ingold’s prose, as seen in his description of the earth as “not the solid and pre-existing substrate that the edifice builder takes it to be” but “rather the source of all life and growth” (77). That said, Ingold departs from Heidegger’s abstract meditation to ground dwelling in the immediacy of sensory experience. In the case where “buildings are part of the world, and the world will not stop still but ceaselessly unfolds along its innumerable paths of growth, decay and regeneration, regardless of the most concerted of human attempts to nail it down, or to cast it in fixed and final forms” (48), Heidegger would reflect the human impulse as an interruption of gathering, but Ingold would rather stress the ceaseless unfolding as the flow of material and life that is necessary of becoming.

Conclusion

“The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it” (Genesis 2:15) expresses a perennial truth about human life that it is rooted in care, not command. Modernity, however, teaches us that to live is to rise—to build higher, reach farther, and transcend. Cities embody this logic in glass and steel, lifting us above the very earth that sustains us. Ingold offers a resolute reversal: to live is to grow downward, to take root, to correspond. A plant’s growth is not an escape from the soil but a deepening within it, an act of grounding rather than ascent. He translates Heidegger’s metaphysics into lived experience: the sky is what allows things to breathe, and the earth is what lets them grow. To “grow downward,” then, is not to retreat but to recognize our place within the flow of life—to live with the world, not above it. Anthropology, in this sense, becomes the practice of rooting knowledge. To understand, then, is to return to the ground: not to possess it, but to dwell within it—to let thought take root where life already grows.

Works Cited

Ingold, Tim. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. Routledge, 2013. 

Wrathall, Mark. “Martin Heidegger.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 31 Jan. 2025, plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/#:~:text=Martin%20Heidegger%20was%20born%20on,at%20the%20University%20of%20Freiburg.

The Holy Bible: New International Version. Zondervan, 2011.

Cover art: “Antonio Mora on Instagram: ‘Plant Fashion’ En 2025: Arte, Estatuas, Disenos de Unas.” Pinterest, 8 Aug. 2025, www.pinterest.com/pin/26247610323734509/. 

By Gina Chang and Nicole Jiao