In Ingold’s Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture, he identifies a major theoretical source of anthropologist Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory, published in 1998, in which he uses as a point to expand, challenging Gell’s focus on the finished artwork and its social functions, and discovers for an anthropology that emphasizes process, practice, and correspondence.
About Alfred Gell
Alfred Gell (1945–1997) was a British social anthropologist who was trained by professors of both Cambridge and the London School of Economics. He was known for sharp, concept-driven writings mostly based on ethnographic cases. Gell was deeply interested in how humans use material objects to act, communicate, and exert influence, and his research varied across topics such as symbolism, ritual, the cognitive dimensions of art, etc.
About the Source
Gell’s book, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (1998), has became famous for changing the way many scholars think about art. Instead of treating art mostly as a vehicle for aesthetics or cultural meanings, Gell claims artworks as parts of social action. He argued that artworks help to make things happen as they guide attention, influence decisions, and carry the presence of people across time and space. Gell further claimed that objects can be understood through the ways in which they connect to people and their original intentions. Moreover, he stated that the “anthropology of art” is the study of a set of social relations that an object stands in a special, “art-like” relation to a social agent. In other words, it is to start from the object, map the social relations around it, and then reconstruct the intentions and meanings that brought it into being.
Ingold’s Citation
Ingold cites the above idea in his book that Gell’s definition captures a widespread habit in the anthropology of art, in which specifically, the process of taking a finished object, placing it in the social context, and reading it backwards from the object to the maker’s intention or cultural meanings. From this, Ingold suggested that Gell refers to that “it should be possible to trace a chain of causal connections, in reverse, from the final object to the initial intention that allegedly motivated its production, or to the meanings that might be attributed to it” (Ingold 7). Ingold further thinks this move turns art into a static thing to be decoded, and that it hides the actual, living work of making, which is the growth of form in materials and the skilled perception of practitioners as they act and respond. In this case, Ingold sets out his own alternative that rather than an anthropology of art that reads in reverse from object to intention, he is convinced that it would be an anthropology with art that moves forward along with practice, and following how forms arise in time through attention, action, and material response.
Ingold’s Application of Source
Gell tends to reject the idea that artworks are only aesthetic objects or only symbols. As we mentioned before, he treats them as parts of action. In this view, it was further argued that an artwork is an index of a person or event and that it can stand in for a maker, bind a promise, intimidate, attract, or persuade. From Ingold’s perspective, he thinks that starting from the finished object leads us to miss or pay less attention to the ongoing movements, adjustments, and sensitivities through which forms actually come to be and these are the most vital parts. While Gell’s tool helps us to analyze how objects work in social networks after they are made, Ingold tends to want a tool for staying with the momentum growth of the work during its making process. Therefore, we suppose this was the reason that Ingold distinguishes the anthropology of art from the anthropology with art, in which further emphasizes the learning from art as a practice that trains perception and judgment in real time.
Across the book, Ingold argues that anthropology, archaeology, art, and architecture are not only fields that study things, but they are crafts of inquiry and that they share a basic commitment of that knowledge grows by working with materials, paying careful attention, and adjusting to it as we gain them. From this, he raises the term participant observation. According to Ingold, participant observation is not just a technique for gathering “qualitative data” to analyze for later, it is also a way of knowing from the inside.
Applying Gell’s insights, he stated a clear statement of a dominant approach that he wanted to challenge which is it focuses on the object and reconstructs intentions in reverse. Ingold calls this a “reverse-reading, analytic approach” and mentions that it leads to a dead end for the relation between anthropology and art, as it encourages anthropology to make other practices into objects for study instead of learning along with them. He proposes a different relation of that to think of art and anthropology as companion practices that both “reawaken our senses” and let knowledge grow “from the inside of being.”
We would say that Ingold uses Gell’s views as motivations to sharpen his own terms. Gell offers “agency” as an answer to the problem of how objects can matter in social life. In this case, Ingold responds by shifting the starting point that instead of asking how finished objects “act back” on people or stand in for them, he perhaps question how the work would involve materials, and how creators follow the lines of movement, force, and flow as they bring the work alive.
Overall, Gell provides us a strong analysis of art as part of social action, in which Ingold does somehow agree, but Ingold comes up with his own insights towards that with the living processes of making and seeing. By citing Gell’s views and then offering his own insights on “anthropology with art”, “knowing from the inside”, and “correspondence”, Ingold redirects the vision from what an object leads to how a work would process through time. This shift also reshapes his view of method, in which participant observation becomes a craft commitment to learn by moving with people and materials.
Contributors
Christina Zhao
Jacqueline Shen
References
Alfred Gell. Editorial Herder Mexico. (2022, February 21).
Claude Smith. (2015, April 9). A messy studio is a happy studio….work in progress.
Gell, A. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon.
Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (1st ed.).
Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203559055