A new book by the anthropologist Tim Ingold is always a reason for me to interrupt whatever I’m doing and to spend the next 24 hours reading, and his Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (Routledge, 2011), does not disappoint. Ingold’s mission is to show us how much our fashionable academic languages and intellectual schemas prevent us from understanding the way the world works. He ranges across the globe, drawing insights from numerous anthropological studies, but also from artists, writers, and musicians, and an eclectic array of thinkers past and present, in order to shake off our misperceptions of what life is. For Ingold, modern thought conspires against us, erecting a series of dyads–nature/culture, mind/body, subject/object–which are visible in (and reinforced by) the worlds we create around ourselves. Asphalt pavements, concrete roads, stiff leather shoes, chairs, prescribed gaits and upright postures all conspire to convince us that we stand over above the world rather than in it. The entrenched dichotomies of modern Western thought need not to be thought across or ‘deconstructed’ but thought around, strenuously, with a lot of help from those who would never have dreamed of making such distinctions, and much detailed reflection on the nature of our own experience.

Ingold would perhaps disapprove of the existence of a ‘Centre for Material Texts’, which risks perpetuating the myth that there is something immaterial, outside the world and supervening on it, when in fact all of experience is equally embodied and disembodied, grounded and dreaming. The early sections of the book do a brilliant job of lancing some of the more cartoonish ways in which we are tempted to talk when we start to think about (what Ingold does not want to call) ‘material culture’. Yet, as in his earlier book, Lines, there is much in Being Alive for thinkers on text–in particular, Part V on ‘Drawing Making Writing’, which traces a dazzling set of connections between the legible, visible and singable letter, between writing, wayfaring, spinning, flying kites and doing anthropology. It’s truly inspirational stuff.