
































The Subtle Arts of Ethnography and Lineology 

Review by Sideeq Mohammed & Felicity Heathcote-Márcz

The Life of Lines

by Tim Ingold

Routledge, 2015

Introduction

This review aims to offer readers a concise yet (hopefully) robust review of Tim Ingold’s latest work,

The Life of Lines. Readers familiar with Ingold’s work will remember his controversial (but arguably

misunderstood) definition of anthropology as “philosophy with people in” (1992, p.696), as well as his

vehement  opposition  to  the  synonymity  of  ethnography  and  anthropological  work  (Ingold,  2014).

Considering this position, it  is possible to read  The Life of Lines as a well written anthropological

treatise - one attentive to the culture and mores of a global community or collective “we” (as opposed

to a particular people, time and place; the conventional objects of ethnographic investigation) - which

weaves together a cross-disciplinary set of themes around the question of the line. There is, however,

another dimension to this argument in which it would be an injustice to depict  The Life of Lines as

anything other  than an  ethnographic monograph.  Such a  definition of “ethnographic”,  however,  is

heterogeneous  to  the  mainstream  images  of  qualitative  researchers  with  pragmatist  principles

investigating the realities of how things work in everyday organizations (Watson, 2011, 2012). Indeed,

it is one which tries even contemporary definitions of “the field” within anthropology (Amit, 2000)

pursuing “interlocutors” through the worlds of art,  literature, philosophy, meteorology, cartography,

Ingold’s childhood memories, and conversations with several major works of anthropological canon. 

In many ways then,  The Life of Lines may be seen as the product of an entire life subjected to the



“retrospective judgement” which, for Ingold (2014), defines “ethnographicness”. As he astutely puts it:

“to lead a life is to lay down a line” (2015, p.118). A life which follows and creates lines, that is, and

Ingold’s  is  undoubtedly  a  life  that  is  religiously  observant  to  the  lines  that  have  become  his

anthropology  and  ethnography.  His  ethnography  of  lines  is  one  which  is  long-term,  in-depth,

committed, attentive, complex, and ‘wanders’ in interesting ways. Few texts which we might more

commonly call  ethnographic provide us with such conceptually  nuanced glimpses into the thought

processes, understandings and practices of the ethnographer. It would also be an error to describe this

work as merely theoretical, for the classificatory schema of “theory” does not adequately depict that

Ingold is out for a walk among the thoughts of the world; that he is tying a series of richly complex

conceptual knots. The lines of thought which constitute The Life of Lines interweave and knot together

throughout Ingold’s corpus, reaching even to his earliest works. Indeed, this is perhaps what Ingold can

offer to scholars in Organization Studies whose research ventures into the ethnographic: the practice of

weaving, creating an intricately complex meshwork of concepts out of “the field”. In this sense, it may

be that a new discipline is needed to describe these efforts, that weave in-between ethnography and so

many other disciplines  -  what  Ingold himself  calls  a  lineology -  a  discipline whose principles this

review will attempt to espouse. While Ingold,  the lineologist,  may be prone to an almost religious

devotion to the tracking of lines, we shall argue that there is much that his work can teach us in terms

of reconciling the questions surrounding an engagement with “theory” and, more broadly speaking,

ethnographic practice.

On the Meshwork

To begin simply, Ingold’s definition of the line is kept unsurprisingly general, delineated in the initial

statements  of  Lines:  A Brief  History as  merely  that  which  unifies  “walking,  weaving,  observing,

singing, storytelling, drawing and writing” (Ingold, 2007. p.1). In a broader context, the line (or in the

least the relation which the line implies) is perhaps the smallest anthropological unit of measure, for

lines are not about fixity, singularity and uniqueness but about connection, linkage and association;

those basic building blocks of culture and the social with which the anthropologist concerns herself.

Ingold himself underscores this in  The Life of Lines noting the centrality of “the entwining of lines”

(p.4)  to  the  social  fabric.  One  may  thus  be  tempted  to  dismiss  Ingold  as  another  thinker  of  the

globalized, network society but he defies the ubiquity of the “network” in our thinking by turning to to

Lefebvre (Ingold, 2007. p.81) and the concept of the “meshwork”: “a dense tangle of trails” (2015,

p.82) which are “interwoven” (2011, p.63) rather than “interconnected”. If one were to try to delineate



the tenets and principles of lineology, one would necessarily have to begin with the idea of developing

a meshwork. The Life of Lines develops the concept of the “meshwork” itself (previously developed by

others  such  as  De  Landa,  1995)  through  the  language  of  “knotting”.  This  conceptualisation  first

emerges  for  Ingold  in  Looking  for  Lines  in  Nature (2012),  via  the  work  of  the  architect,  Lars

Spuybroek. While a network will have nodes and communicate point to point, a meshwork will have

knots or tangles where the lines of slugs, or the trails of Australian Aboriginal people, or concepts, will

be drawn close together and allowed to resound with each other. 

Following this imaginary, Part I of  The Life of Lines interlaces the concepts of blobs with images of

octopuses and anemones from Marcel Mauss, with questions of joining and carpentry, with the work of

Immanuel Kant and the grounds of perception, and with Ingold’s previous work on walking (see Ingold

and Vergunst, 2008). It is worth noting, however, that for Ingold this weaving practice always produces

a number of concepts which emerge as “loose ends”, as Spuybroek might term them, while others are

knotted together with different concepts, continuing to evolve as a part of the weaving. Indeed, some of

the aforementioned concepts become such “loose ends” in The Life of Lines, while others continue to

occur throughout the text. Such loose ends are inevitably a part of a meshwork and indeed, a life (see

Ingold, 2012). What we might learn from this is perhaps that these diverse lines of thought can be

placed into correspondence with one another, if only to see what they produce. That is, rather than

merely borrowing and applying concepts from the world of philosophy, Ingold is actively engaged in

creating  his  own though the interweaving of  a  meshwork of  different  sources.  Though this  is  not

altogether a novel practice, Organization Studies has long expressed difficulty at navigating the many

answers to the question of what to do with philosophy (Jones and ten Bos, 2007), and more mainstream

approaches  appear  to  struggle  around more  basic  questions  of  theory/practice  and the  role  of  the

“theorizer”  (Hatch  and  Cunliffe,  2013).  It  may  be  that  there  is  a  method  to  the  weaving  of  the

meshwork of The Life of Lines and the consequent creation of concepts “from the field” that Ingold can

offer to aid us in understanding broader debates around the role of “theory” in driving ethnographic

research (see Wilson and Chaddha, 2009).

On Discipline

Ingold’s weaving practices can also be seen in the disciplinary irreverence of his more recent works and

this may meaningfully be read as the second tenet of lineology. Ingold’s own history of attempting to

articulate anthropology with and through other disciplines, culminates in The Life of Lines with his own



correspondence of multi-disciplinary lines of thinking, following lines from his own corpus as well as

from art, architecture, literature, meteorology and philosophy. However, Ingold’s pursuit of a concept

goes beyond this, tracking it over long periods of time and drawing our focus to its process - to the in-

between (that we will discuss in our next section).

This cross-disciplinarity is especially observable in Part II of The Life of Lines: “Weathering” (p.51).

Taking the example of the storm, we might trace the line of thought beyond Part II of The Life of Lines

to Ingold’s early studies of Finnish Lapland where, as he notes, he would often include in his field-

notes descriptions of the weather (p.69-70). Ingold’s (2005) work on visual perception similarly begins

with  an  anecdote  about  the  experience  of  standing  on  a  Scottish  shoreline  with  a  colleague  and

watching a storm materialize as a presence in the sky, the “eye” of the storm leading Ingold into a

protracted  discussion  of  vision  and  light  via  Merleau-Ponty  and  Gibson.  This  discussion  of  the

perception of the weather is continued via a similar reminiscence in 2011’s Being Alive where Ingold

takes a class of students to the shore, observing a “world without objects” (p.131) amidst the weather-

world of  the  fluctuating  and impossible  to  define boundaries  between sky and ocean.  The line of

thought continues to Ingold’s (2012) paper which speaks of the storm as pure movement, as other than

a bounded, contained entity spiralling across the sky, drawing analogies between it and the movement

of slugs on the driveway. The thought itself  is  thus always in the middle of becoming, always ‘a

relation of correspondence between lines’ (p.56).

In  The Life of Lines, Ingold asks his readers to weather with him, as he returns to the discussion of

storms and the atmosphere in order to apply a “blending of the cosmic with the affective” (2015. p.92)

in their thinking. In the space of a few short chapters Ingold elaborates from the whirling of the storm

(2015. p.54-5), connecting to his previous work on walking and the difficulty drawing boundary lines

around trees (see Ingold, 2010) as well as, in keeping with his attention to the sensual, developing the

aforementioned work on visual perception through discussions of van Gogh’s  A Starry Night (p.94),

Taussig’s (2009) comments on colour in relation to affect (p.103) and sonority in relation to Bach’s

third suite for unaccompanied cello (p.109). In each of these cases, what is crucial is that the lines of

thought  which  constitute  this  meshwork  are  pursued  across  time,  spaces,  and  the  boundaries  of

disciplines - from anthropology, to meteorology, to art criticism, to music theory. It may indeed be

argued that all ethnography is interdisciplinary - following any issues that arise from encounters in the

field as matters of concern. Yet Ingold’s contribution in The Life of Lines, in introducing the lineologist

(who carefully and intricately knits a meshwork of concepts across many so called disciplines, spaces



and points of reference) provides us with a useful and unique reminder of the possibilities weaving

ideas across and beyond all sorts of boundaries may realise.

On the In-between

This question of the middle or, more accurately, the in-between is the final major preoccupation for the

lineologist. Ingold’s attention to the “meshwork” rather than the “network”, and the “knot” rather than

the “chain”, are his attempts to think differently about relations of ‘the social’ and to re-imagine a broad

praxis of life’s activities - from building to standing upon the ground, as something else in the middle.

Part III of The Life of Lines sees Ingold also replacing the noun “human” with the verb “Humaning”,

perhaps the most telling demonstration in the book of the conceptual centrality of the in-between for his

own conception of what it means to carry out research anthropologically. This is an attention to that

which is without fixity, without origin or destination. Whether this stems from broader preoccupations

around the in-between (and related issues like liminality), or it results from the affinity which The Life

of Lines demonstrates for the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, or whether the question of the

in-between emerges spontaneously from the meshwork of the text, are questions only for speculation.

However, in reflecting on these comments from A Thousand Plateaus:

“A line of becoming has only a middle. [...] A becoming is always in the middle; one can

only get it by the middle. A becoming is neither one nor two, nor the relation of the two;

it is the in-between, the border or line of flight or descent running perpendicular to both.”

(Deleuze and Guattari, 2005. p.293)

The line of thought that is being developed becomes clear, particularly in the context of the parable of

the river and the ferryman (p.150-151) which Ingold invokes. While the ferryman is between when he

is at the midpoint between the two known and identifiable banks, the river flows in-between the banks

to and from the unknown and the untraceable. In short, the river becomes.

We can see an attention to the in-between demonstrated in Ingold’s previous work, particularly on

walking and travel. In conjunction with Jo Vergunst (2008), Ingold describes the initial steps of walking

on a  journey as  those  taken with  neither  clear  comprehension of  bearing  and direction,  nor  clear

understanding when the journey began and will end. This is placed in terms of the between and the in-

between in Ingold’s (2007) differentiation of travelling and wayfaring, the former moving between the

fixed points of a network and the latter moving in-between, that is, without definitive purpose, start or

end point. Similar to that of the lineologist, the life of the wayfarer and the line his movement draws is,



read via the logic of the artist Paul Klee, a line out for a walk, a line in-between.

In Part III of The Life of Lines Ingold returns to the wayfarer and walking in-between, this time in the

context of the maze and the labyrinth, the former entrapping the fixed point-to-point movements of a

“navigator” with dead-ends while the wayfarer tracks uncharted trails within the labyrinth, always in a

middle.  Ingold  continues  by  invoking  Jan  Masschelein’s  words  to  describe  the  act  of  walking  in

relation to education (p.135). We might elaborate these comments to say that, much like the wayfarer

wandering the labyrinth, the lineologist learns with no final point of arrival, research goals or firm

standpoint. In irreverently following her different lines with expressions and anecdotes from various

disciplines, the life of the lineologist becomes one which is fundamentally out-of-position (p.135). The

leading of life Ingold conceives of as at once ‘not yet’ and ‘already there’ (p.118), is both this in-

between-ness and what is meant by his serious invitation to ‘lay down a line’ (p.118). It is the not being

or going anywhere mapped out, that ties Ingold’s concept of correspondence to the middle - where

proliferating  lines  of  concepts,  thinkers  and  histories  meet,  to  ‘stretch  the  fabric  of  time’ from

imagination and memories (p.157), and to walking ‘paths of observation’ that Ingold invokes from

James  Gibson’s  work.  Rather,  the  correspondence  of  lines,  most  crucially  for  Ingold,  provides

education in a life.

To understand this we address ourselves to the senses and their role in ethnographic experience, as

these provide a foundation for Ingold in his discussion of the ‘in-between’. Air, light, sound and touch

all fall into this ontology for Ingold, as senses are evoked as the ruffling of surfaces (p.150) of all kinds

in the haptic modes of contact of the in-between. We might see this sensuality in the way Ingold (2013)

attends to the reading practices of eleventh century monks which,  he suggests,  required no spaces

between words, hence text was made up of nothing but a middle, and was sensorially experienced, or

“read out, following the line of letters” (Ingold, 2013. p.741) by both touching and speaking them. This

corporeality,  the  embodied  experience  of  following  a  line  is  undoubtedly  a  part  of  “participant

observation”; itself, as defined by Ingold, a practice of correspondence (p.157). However, rather than

using  this  to  produce  retrospective  accounts  as  an  ethnographer  would,  it  would  seem  that  the

lineologist  must  bodily  walk  with  others  in  the  sense  of  “an  ongoing  exploration  of  what  the

possibilities and potentials of a life might be!” (p.157), a learning without end or aim.

Conclusion



Through  developing a  conceptual  meshwork,  practicing  disciplinary  irreverence  via  every  knot  of

thought he ties and being committed to the in-between, it seems clear that Ingold and The Life of Lines

succeed in both drawing out and articulating a means of corresponding to the world that we might

uniquely  call  lineology.  We  venture  that  lineology  might  indeed  be  a  way  of  developing  future

academic  praxis,  particularly  through  the  weaving  which  might  take  us  beyond  the  divisions  of

disciplines  and  into  studies  of  the  weather,  walking,  the  work  of  Gilles  Deleuze  or  ontologies

concerned with “humanifying” rather than the human (and perhaps what remains for future research is

to place the conversations of The Life of Lines into the broader context of the ontological turn). While

we have tried to draw out themes which relate to lines from Ingold’s oeuvre and are thereby perhaps

guilty of exaggerating them, Ingold’s life of lines, over a decade of publication across multiple books

and papers which clearly follows little other than the line, seems to present as a kind of obsession, an

almost religious faith in the ‘correspondence of lines’ and the promise that they hold for rethinking

anthropology. One can only wonder what Ingold’s ethnography of the line, his lineology, might be able

to contribute to Organization Studies. An interest in philosophy and a more robust engagement with its

concepts?  A  reopening  of  questions  around  the  ends  of  “organizational  ethnography”  or  the

“autoethnographic” though its provocation? Perhaps, simply, helping us catch up to shifting definitions

of “the field” or the debates around “the ontological turn”? Rather than dismissing this work as abstract

or disconnected, perhaps there is space within the current intellectual climate to appreciate this kind of

dedication to finding and following lines. To return once more to Ingold’s (2014) comments, perhaps

what we need is not merely to say “that’s enough about ethnography”, but the courage to speak in

support of lineology: a life of lines.

References Cited

Amit, V., 2000. Constructing the field. London: Routledge.

De  Landa,  M.,  1995,  Homes:  Meshwork  or  hierarchy? [Available  at:

http://www.mediamatic.nl/Doors/Doors2/DeLanda/DeLanda-Doors2-E1.html]  (Accessed  30  March

2016).

Deleuze, G. &amp; Guattari, F., 2005. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London:

University of Minnesota Press.

Hatch,  M.  &amp;  Cunliffe,  A.,  2013.  Organization  Theory:  Modern,  Symbloic  and  Postmodern



Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ingold, T., 1976. The Skolt Lapps Today. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press.

Ingold, T., 1980. Hunters, pastoralists and ranchers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ingold, T., 2005. The eye of the storm: visual perception and the weather. Visual Studies, 20(2), pp. 97-

104.

Ingold, T., 2007. Lines: A Brief History. London: Routledge.

Ingold, T., 2010.  Bringing Things to Life: Creative Entanglements in a World of Materials- NCRM

working  paper.  [Online]  Available  at:

http://eprints.ncrm.ac.uk/1306/1/0510_creative_entanglements.pdf [Accessed 10 January 2016].

Ingold, T., 2011. Being Alive: essays on movement, knowledge and description. Oxon: Routledge.

Ingold, T., 2012. Looking for Lines in Nature. EarthLines, 3(1), pp. 48-51.

Ingold,  T.,  2013.  Dreaming  of  dragons:  on  the  imagination  of  real  life.  Journal  of  the  Royal

Anthropological Institute, 19(1), pp. 734-752.

Ingold, T., 2014. That's Enough About Ethnography.  Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 4(1), p.

383–395.

Ingold, T., 2015. The Life of Lines. London: Routledge.

Ingold,  T.  &amp; Vergunst,  J.,  2008.  Introduction.  In:  T.  Ingold &amp; J.  Vergunst,  eds.  Ways of

Walking: Ethnography and Practice on Foot. Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, pp. 1-21.

Jones, C. &amp; ten Bos, R. eds., 2007. In: Philosophy and Organization. Routledge: Oxon.

Watson, T., 2011. Ethnography, Reality, and Truth: The Vital Need for Studies of ‘How Things Work’ in



Organizations and Management. Journal of Management Studies, 48(1), pp. 202-217.

Watson, T., 2012. Marking Organizational Ethnography. Journal of Organizational Ethnography, 1(1),

pp. 15-22.

Wilson, W. &amp; Chaddha, A., 2010. The Role of Theory in Ethnographic Research.  Ethnography,

10(4), pp. 549-564.

Felicity Heathcote-Márcz is a doctoral researcher at Alliance Manchester Business School. Her PhD

“Managing the Cyborg” follows an ethnography of the strategic Technology Centre of a global bank,

and  “ethnographic  peeking”  of  a  unique  technology-arts  organisation  in  the  North  of  England.

Felicity is a member of the Manchester Ethnography Network.

Sideeq Mohammed is a doctoral researcher at Alliance Manchester Business School. His PhD project

is  an ethnography of  one of  the largest  shopping centres  in  the  UK which attempts  to  develop a

research method out of the works of philosopher, Gilles Deleuze. Sideeq is a member of the Manchester

Ethnography Network.

© 2016 Felicity Heathcote-Márcz & Sideeq Mohammed


