#tim ingold

In Western societies, straight lines are ubiquitous. We see them everywhere, even when they do not really exist. Indeed the straight line has emerged as a virtual icon of modernity, an index of the triumph of rational, purposeful design over the vicissitudes of the natural world. The relentlessly dichotomizing dialectic of modern thought has, at one time or another, associated straightness with mind as against matter, with rational thought as against sensory perception, with intellect as against intuition, with science as against traditional knowledge, with male as against female, with civilization as against primitiveness, and - on the most general level - with culture as against nature. It is not difficult to find examples of every one of these associations.

Once, to have said that an article is ‘made by hand’ would have been a statement of the obvious. How else would you have made it? By foot? In today’s world, however, ‘handmade’ is a mark of distinction. It connotes a kind of authenticity and devotion that people, increasingly cast as passive consumers rather than active citizens, feel is otherwise missing from their lives. With citizenship comes moral responsibility, yet how can we be responsible for a world that comes to us readymade? At the very same moment when the whole world is at our fingertips, it also seems completely out of our hands.

The human genotype, in short, is a fabrication of the modern scientific imagination. This does not mean, of course, that a human being can be anything you please. But it does mean that there is no way of describing what human beings are independently of the manifold historical and environmental circumstances in which they become - in which they grow up and live out their lives.

Through living in it, the landscape becomes a part of us, just as we are part of it.