#timingold

We are accustomed to speaking of the ‘lines’ of kinship, and to drawing these lines in genealogical diagrams. It is also usual, in such diagrams, to depict them as linking persons point to point. Kinship is made to look as though its lines connect. Correspondence thinking, however, acknowledges what the people among whom we work already know, namely, that the lines are persons.

Turning to ecology and economy, both terms share a common root in the Greek word for ‘house’ (oikos). Economy is house-holding. In the definition of ecology – a term coined by the zoologist Ernst Haeckel in 1866 – nature itself becomes a household in the continuation of which each and every organism plays its part. But what could a household be in a world without objects? Certainly not the potato in a sack so commonly invoked in studies of tribal and peasant societies organised by the so-called ‘domestic mode of production’. It is, rather, analogous, if anything, to a potato in the ground: a reservoir bound to others along thread-like tendrils that carry the torch of further growth. What if we were to think of the household likewise: as a concentration of materials and potential energy from which lifelines fan out into the milieu of earth and air, where they tangle with the lines of all the other living things that, in their habitation of the earth, deposit their own trails in the form of roots and runners, paths and tracks? To make a living, farmers and woodsmen must join with the ways of plants; hunters and herdsmen with the ways of animals; artisans with the ways of their materials. Production, in such an ecology of correspondence, is about attending to the trajectories of these non-human lives. Here we can return to an earlier question posed, but not answered, in Chapter 8: do people produce upon the earth, or do they assist in harvesting what the earth has itself produced? In an economy of lines, production is on the side neither of humans nor of the earth; it is, rather, a correspondence of earthly undergoings and human doings. For as much as kinship is about attending to persons, economy is about attending to active materials. In this, humans are not just the producers of objects to consume. They too are transformed in the process; what they achieve is achieved in them. To produce, in short, is actively to undergo, in the middle voice. And just as undergoing always overflows doing, so the production of life always exceeds the finalities of consumption.

way·far·ing

"As estruturas neurológicas, o conhecimento que adquirimos e as habilidades que desenvolvemos emergem juntas como momentos complementares de um processo único, ou seja, o processo da vida de todos aqueles que habitam o mundo. O conhecimento torna-se, assim, imanente à vida, à experiência e à consciência do sujeito, à medida que se processa no campo da prática. Nesta perspectiva, a cognição é um processo em tempo real".