By: Alisha, Sam, and Nihitha

Tim Ingold, a British anthropologist and theorist, is known for examining the boundaries between anthropology, archaeology, art, and architecture. His 2013 book, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture, looks at ideas about creation, knowledge and material engagement. Not just looking at the realization of a fixed design, Ingold offers thoughts about the process between humans and the materials they work with. He argues that making is not about shaping material but an interaction between a creator and their material. His redefinition of making reflects his commitment to understanding life as a continuous process of how the environment evolves through active involvement. His book brings together anthropology, art and philosophy, allowing readers to look at boundaries between creator and material through action and humans. 

For Ingold, the act of making reveals how humans come to understand and inhabit the world. He points out that knowledge is not abstract or detached from material practices, but it shines through with the act of doing, from working hands-on and interacting with the environment. From his example on weaving and architecture sketches, structures are not just an act of thinking in the form of a motion but a process that he calls correspondence, which he defines as responding to movements and the possibilities that the material presents. This new understanding changes how we look at creativity, directing the appreciation towards the creator and the materials in use. From focusing on people’s relation with making, Ingold looks at the process between people and material and how it brings together the creators, materials and the environment that surrounds them. Through this view, creativity is not a singular act but a shared experience and process grounded in our environment. 

James J. Gibson (1904–1979) was an American psychologist whose work transformed understandings of perception across psychology, philosophy, and the human sciences. Educated at Princeton and later a professor at Cornell University, his theories rejected the dominant idea that perception depends on internal representations or mental reconstructions of sensory input. Instead, he argued that organisms perceive their environments directly, through the detection of invariant information present in the ambient array of light, sound, and texture. Central to his framework was the concept of affordances, the action possibilities that the environment offers to a perceiver relative to their capabilities. His approach was initially controversial within experimental psychology, where the prevailing models of perception emphasized cognitive mediation and mental imagery. However, his work has since gained significant influence beyond psychology, shaping fields such as anthropology, design, architecture, robotics, and human–computer interaction. 

Gibson’s theories redefined how perception is understood in relation to its environment. His most influential book happens to be The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979), which argues that perception is not necessarily a process of interpreting sensory data within the mind; instead, it is more so a direct engagement with the world. This work is used as a theoretical source for Tim Gold in his writing, as he draws on Gibson’s ecological psychology to develop his own concept of learning through “an education of attention”(Gibson 254; cf. Ingold) .

Gibson’s earlier works laid the basic ideas for this ecological perspective. In The Perception of the Visual World (1950), he broke away from traditional psychological models that viewed perception as a mental reconstruction of visual images. He instead proposed that perception and action were inseparable processes. He further expanded on this idea by writing that we perceive the world through the ways we move and orient within it. For instance, vision, explained by Gibson, is not just a picture, but an unfolding process where our understanding of depth and distance depends on movement through this space. As we shift, walk, or turn our heads, the changing visual provides continuous information about the environment. Therefore, perception is inherently dynamic and happens through our engagement with the surroundings. 

Later on, he wrote The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (1966). This is where he furthered his challenge to conventional psychology by reframing senses as active systems engaged in continuous exploration. Traditional psychology would typically isolate the senses like sight, sound, and touch and treat perception as a sum of these, later processed by the mind. However, Gibson disagreed by emphasizing that perception is a coordinated activity of the whole organism. For example, while one is walking down the street, they would use vision, hearing, and coordination of movement to navigate through the space. In this way, all the senses form an integrated system.  Across all of Gibson’s works, he presents the idea that the vision of perception is relational and participatory. Essentially, meaning is not imposed upon the world by the mind but discovered through living and engaging with it. This idea has a large influence on Ingold’s own expansive theories in Making.

Ingold examines the thoughts of psychologist James J Gibson throughout his work, with a particular focus on Gibson’s concept of affordances from his book The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979). Gibson proposes the idea that perception is not a detached or mental process, but a direct engagement with the environment. He claims that we understand the world as a way of affordance, what it can do for us. For example, a surface affords walking, a chair affords sitting, and materials afford shaping. Ingold uses Gibson’s theory to support his arguments that making us not about forcing fixed ideas on materials, but about responding to what the materials offer to us. 

Chapters 2 and 3 of Ingold’s Making go over the process of hands-on making, from basket weaving to axe making. Ingold emphasized that creators’ knowledge comes through interaction with material rather than execution through the process of fixed plans. An example he uses is basket weavers, and how they must adjust the tension and flexibility of the materials they use to take shape, different from how an axe maker must rely on the type of wood and stone as a tool to take shape. These examples show us how materials aren’t passive objects to be controlled but a partner in creating that helps guide creators throughout the process of making. 

Ingold incorporates Gibson’s education of attention in his discussion of novices learning through guided rediscovery. Ingold writes that individuals grow into the knowledge of their predecessors, “[…]through a process that could best be described as one of ‘guided rediscovery’”(Ingold 110). This relates closely to Gibson’s idea that perception and learning arise through active engagement with the environment, which “educates” individuals by presenting affordances—opportunities for action that are inherently available. Ingold’s emphasis on storytelling and following trails supports the view that knowledge is cultivated through embodied, participatory interactions with the world, rather than passive reception.

An example of Ingold’s application of Gibson’s theory can be seen in how a new parent makes sense of an infant’s subtle signals. Initially, the sounds and movements are indistinct and overwhelming. But through daily, attentive engagement—touching, listening, and responding—the caregiver begins to develop a finely tuned perceptual sensitivity. This process of making is relational; as Ingold suggests, perception is not the detached observation of a world already made but an evolving relation between beings who learn to attend to one another within it. Over time, both caregiver and infant co-create a shared perceptual space, shaping each other’s awareness through continuous, engaged practice. It is through this ongoing process of making and responsive interaction that understanding emerges, not simply taught but lived and made anew with each shared moment. 

Tim Ingold’s Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture allows us to redefine how we think about knowledge and perception, as he writes about them in the context of material engagement and lived experience. Using James Gibson’s psychology, specifically about affordances and the education of attention, Ingold discloses that perception emerges through direct engagement with the environment. Both theorists merge the boundaries between mind and matter, as well as theory and practice, as they emphasize that to know is to engage, move, and attend. 

Work Cited

Gibbons, James J. Approach to Visual Perception. 1st Edition, Psychology Press, 2014. taylor & francis, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315740218.

Gibson, James J. The Perception of the Visual World. 1st Edition, Houghton Mifflin, 1950

PhilPapers, https://doi.org/10.2307/2181436

Gibson, James J. The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. 1st Edition, Houghton 

Mifflin, 1966. PhilPapers, https://doi.org/10.1086/406033

https://www.britannica.com/biography/James-J-Gibson
Ingold, Tim. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. Routledge, 2013.