Place and Pathways

 

Tim Ingold (2007) explains how living beings inhabit in their environment as follows:

 

“For inhabitants […] the environment does not consist of the surroundings of a bounded place but of a zone in which their several pathways are thoroughly entangled. In this zone of entanglement – this meshwork of interwoven lines – there are no insides or outsides, only openings and ways through” (Ingold 2007: 103).  

 

In my research I draw on Ingold’s conceptualization of place. Ingold contrasts Edward Casey’s conceptualization of place with his own. For Casey “To be is to be in place” (cited in Ingold 2008: 1808). Ingold explains this argument as follows: “we are in place [...] because we exist as embodied beings” (Ingold 2008: 1808 emphasis original). He contends however that the “body is not confined or bounded but rather extends as it grows along the multiple paths of its entanglement in the textured world. Thus to be [...] is not to be in place but to be along paths. The path, not the place, is the primary condition of being, or rather of becoming” (ibid.).

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This conceptualization of place emphasises movement: “To be a place every somewhere must lie on one or several paths of movement to and from places elsewhere. Life is lived [...] along paths, not just in places” (Ingold 2007: 2).