#taskscape

I walked a patch of land to the side of the new Spiers Bruce Way, opposite the Granton Castle Walled Garden in Edinburgh and imagined who had walked there before me, human and other-than-human. Walking the Taskscape* on the first Friday of June 2026///image.flames.voted I walk the grounds belonging to Granton Castle in 1160. As Head Gardener, I nurture the soil to provide vegetables, fruit, and…

Time and Landscape are the essential points of topical contact between archaeology and anthropology. 

Avoid the dualistic opposition between naturalistic view (landscape as a neutral external backdrop to human activities) and culturalistic view (every landscape is a particular cognitive or symbolic ordering of space)

--> Adopt a ‘dwelling perspective’: ie the landscape is constituted as an enduring record of - and testimony to - the lives and works of past generations who have dwelt within it, and in so doing, have left there something of themselves. 

[Note: is this perspective still relevant when approaching other landscapes than let say the British countryside..]

Landscape

not ‘land’, not ‘nature’, not ‘space’. It is the world as it is known to those who dwell therein, who inhabit its places and journey along the paths connecting them. It is not environment, which is a more functional view (organism / environment relationship- affordances) 

The landscape puts the emphasis on ‘form’, in just the same way that the concept of the body emphasizes the form rather than the function of a living creature. [note:form / function: landscape / environment, body / organism (soma) ]

Like organism and environment, body and landscape are complementary terms: each implies the other, alternatively figure and ground. The forms of the landscapes are not, however, prepared in advance for creatures to occupy, nor are the bodily forms of those creatures independently specified in their genetic makeup. 

Ingold sees Embodiment as a movement of incorporation rather than inscription, not a transcribing of form onto material but a movement wherein forms themselves are generated (? Ingold 1990 - An anthropologist looks an biology)

 Taking the organism as our focus of reference, this movement is what is commonly known as the life-cycle. Thus organisms may be said to incorporate, in their bodily forms, the life-cycle processes that give rise to them. 

Ingold proposes to regard the environement as an embodiment. 

Temporality

not chronology (regular system of dated intervals) , not history (as any series of events which may be dated in time according to their occurrence in one or another chronological interval)

Taskscape

Ingold uses temporality to introduces his ‘taskscape’. ‘Task’ defined as any practical operation, carried out by a skilled agent in an environment, as part of his or her normal business of life. In other words, tasks are the constitutive acts of dwelling. No more than features of the landscapes, however, are tasks suspended in a vacuum. Every task takes its meaning from its position within an ensemble of tasks, performed in series or in parallel, and usually by many people working together.  Technical and social should not be separated, as ‘ human technical practices are embedded in the current of sociality. It is to the entire ensemble of tasks, in their mutual interlocking, that I refer by the concept of taskscape. Just as the landscape is an array of related features, so -by analogy- the taskscape is an array of related activities. 

Value is measured in units of money, land in units of space, and labour in units of time. astro time and social time. Taskscape is essentially social. 

Taskscape is embedded in temporality. “the notion that we can stand aside and observe the passage of time is founded upon an illusion of disembodiment. This passage is indeed, none other than our own journey through the taskscape in the business of dwelling. 

Taskscape is social because people, in the performance of their tasks, also attend to one another. 

In the resonance of movement and feeling stemming from people’s mutually attentive engagement, in shared contexts of practical activity, lies the very foundation of sociality.

Music mirrors the temporal form of the taskscape.  1. Cycles and repetitions in music as in social life, these are essentially rhythmic rather than metronomic 2. In music as in social life, there is not just one rhythmic cycle, but a complex interweaving of very many concurrent cycles. Whilst it reflects the temporal form of social life, music in fact represents a very considerable simplification, since it involved only one sensory register (the auditory), and its rhythms are fewer and more tightly controlled. The temporality of the taskscape, while it is intrinsic rather than externally imposed (metronomic), lies not in any particular rhythm, but in the network of interrelationships, between the multiple rhythms of which the taskscape is itself constituted.   3. The forms of the taskscape, like those of music, come into being through movement. Music exists only when it is being performed. Similarly, the taskscape exists only so long as people are actually engaged in the activities of dwelling, despite the attempts of anthropologists to translate it into something rather equivalent to a score. - a kind of ideal design for dwelling - that generally goes by the name of ‘culture’, and that people are supposed to bring with them into their encounter with the world. 

What is the relation between Taskscape and Landscape? 

If music best reflects the forms of taskscape, it might be thought that painting is the most natural medium for representing the forms of the landscape. 

And by looking at differences between music and painting, we could deduct differences between taskscape and landscape. 

Music is performed, paintings don’t have to. But actually, this appears more as a systematic bias in Western thought, that privileges form over process. Thus the actual world of the painting is subordinated to the final product; the former is hidden from view so that the latter alone becomes an object of contemplation. In many societies, (eg the Yolngu in Northern Australia), the order of priority is reversed, the emphasis is on painting as a performance. Far from being the preparation of objects for future contemplation, it is an act of contemplation in itself. (see also Thankas painting in Tibetan buddist tradition, or yantras in Hinduism) 

“musical sound, of course, is subject to the property of rapid fading: speeding outwards from its point of emission, and dissipating as it goes, it is present only momentarily to our senses. But where, as in painting, gestures leave their traces in solid substance, the resulting forms may last much longer, albeit never indefinitely.” 

“One cannot treat landscape as an object if it is to be understood. It is a living process; it makes men; it is made by them” (Inglis, 1977:489). Just as with music, the forms of the landscape are generated in movement, but this movement is through a solid medium. 

“A landscape is the most solid appearance in which a history can declare itself” (Inglis, Ibid) 

Thanks to their solidity, features of the landscape remain available for inspection long after the movement that gave rise to them has ceased. 

The Harversters, (1565) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Animated version by Arlo Mountford. \

The landscape is the congealed form of the taskscape. The landscape seems to be what we see around us, whereas the taskscape is what we hear. To be seen, an object need do nothing itself, for the optic array that specifies its form to a viewer consists of light reflected off its outer surfaces. To be heard, on the other hand, an object must actively emit sounds or, through its movement, cause sound to be emitted by other objects with which it comes into contact. Thus outside my window I see a landscape of houses, trees, gardens, a street and pavement. I do not hear any of these things, but I cam hear people talking on the pavement, a car passing by, birds singing in the trees, a dog barking somewhere in the distance, and the sound of hammering as a neighbor repairs his harden shed. In short, what I hear is activity, even when its source cannot be seen. And since the forms of the taskscape, suspended as they are in movement, are present only as activity, the limits of the taskscape are also the limits of the auditory world. (Whilst I deal hear only with visual and aural perception, we should not underestimate the significance of touch, which is important to all of us, but above all to blind people, for whom it opens up the possibility of access to the landscape - if only through proximate bodily contact)

I wish I did this when I was 13

It’s taking me ages to get into it