ingold_2007_Earth, sky, wind, and weather.pdf

Earth, sky, wind, and weather

ngold

University of Aberdeen

This paper seeks to understand what it means to live ‘in the open’. It begins with an account of

experiments that test whether children have acquired a scientiﬁcally correct understanding of the

shape of the earth, according to which people live all around on the outside of a solid sphere. This

understanding cannot accommodate the phenomenon of the sky, in relation to which the earth can

appear only as the ground of human habitation. James Gibson’s ecological approach to perception

offers a possible alternative, depicting earth and sky as complementary hemispheres. Yet for Gibson,

this earth-sky can be inhabited only insofar as it is furnished with objects. To that extent, it ceases to

be open. Drawing on elements of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, it is argued that in the open

world persons and things relate not as closed forms but by virtue of their common immersion in

the generative ﬂuxes of the medium – in wind and weather. Fundamental to life is the process of

respiration, by which organisms continually disrupt any boundary between earth and sky, binding

substance and medium together in forging their own growth and movement. Thus to inhabit the

open is not to be stranded on the outer surface of the earth but to be caught up in the

transformations of the weather-world.

We all know what it feels like to be out in the open air on a windy day. Yet once we try

to pin it down within established categories and conventions of thought, no experience

could be more elusive. What is the open air? Does it circulate in the sky or the

atmosphere? Are these the same or different? If the atmosphere surrounds our planet,

and the sky arches above our heads, then in what shape or form can the earth exist in

relation to the sky? And if we are out in the open world of earth and sky, how can we

simultaneously be in the wind? How, in other words, can we inhabit the open? If we can

do so only by containing it, then how can the wind still blow? In what follows I seek to

establish what it means to be ‘in the open’. Instead of thinking of the inhabited world as

composed of mutually exclusive hemispheres of sky and earth, separated by the

ground, we need to attend, as I shall show, to the ﬂuxes of wind and weather. To feel the

wind is not to make external, tactile contact with our surroundings but to mingle with

them. In this mingling, as we live and breathe, the wind, light, and moisture of the sky

bind with the substances of the earth in the continual forging of a way through the

tangle of life-lines that comprise the land.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) ,S

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Tim Ingold

To reach this conclusion I shall proceed in four stages. I begin with what is supposed

to be the objective, scientiﬁc account of the shape of the earth, an account that cannot

readily accommodate the phenomenon of the sky. For in relation to the sky, the earth

can exist only as a ground of habitation. Yet as I go on to show, a ground populated

solely by people and objects, and a sky that is empty but for birds and clouds, can exist

only within a simulacrum of the world, modelled in an interior space. The third stage

of the argument is to show that in the open world, beings relate not as closed, objective

forms but by virtue of their common immersion in the ﬂuxes of the medium. The

process of respiration, by which air is taken in by organisms from the medium and in

turn surrendered to it, is fundamental to all life. Thus, ﬁnally, to inhabit the open is to

dwell within a weather-world in which every being is destined to combine wind, rain,

sunshine, and earth in the continuation of its own existence.

How to draw the sky

There is currently some controversy in the ﬁelds of cognitive and developmental

psychology concerning how children learn the shape of the earth. A number of studies

suggest that a correct understanding of the earth, as a solid sphere surrounded by space,

challenges fundamental presuppositions that children everywhere, regardless of cul-

tural background, initially bring to their reasoning about the world. These presuppo-

sitions are, ﬁrstly, that the ground is ﬂat, and, secondly, that unless supported, things

fall. To grasp such a counter-intuitive understanding that the earth is round like a ball

and that people can live anywhere on its surface without falling off calls, it is argued, for

nothing less than a complete conceptual restructuring in the child’s mind, comparable

to a paradigm shift in the history of science. Experimenting with schoolchildren aged

between

and

But this research is not without its critics. They argue that the problems of recon-

ciliation that many children undoubtedly faced in these experiments have less to do

with their own intuitions or ‘naïve theories’ about the world than with the demands of

an experimental situation in which they are called upon to justify what they had said or

drawn in response to previous questioning. In reality, these critics claim, children do

not begin with any beliefs, intuitions or theories about the shape of the earth, but rather

set out with an open mind. Their knowledge is then acquired piecemeal, in loosely

connected fragments, through participation in a social and cultural environment that

is scaffolded by knowledgeable adults such as teachers, but also by artefacts such as the

ubiquitous globes of school classrooms. Since there is no initial conceptual barrier to be

overcome, and given adequate scaffolding, children have little difﬁculty in acquiring a

‘scientiﬁc’ picture of the earth. Indeed, experiments involving children having to

choose between ready-made pictures – rather than drawing them themselves or having

to respond to interrogation – seem to show little difference in understanding between

younger and older children, or even between children and adults (Nobes, Martin &

Panagiotaki

1992

; see Fig.

I do not intend to take a stance in this debate. It is but one version of a long-

standing argument in psychology about whether knowledge acquisition is strongly

2005

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years, researchers claim to have identiﬁed a developmental sequence

in thinking about the earth, running from an initial mental model of an earth that is ﬂat

like a pancake to a ﬁnal model of a spherical earth, by way of various intermediate

models in which children attempt to reconcile their initial presuppositions with infor-

mation supplied by their teachers, or gleaned from books and other sources (Vosniadou

1994

; Vosniadou & Brewer

Tim Ingold S21

Figure 1. Mental models of the Earth. Reproduced from Vosniadou & Brewer (1992: 549) with the

kind permission of Elsevier.

constrained by innate mental structures or more fundamentally dependent on socio-

cultural contexts of learning. It is what the two sides have in common that interests

me. For neither is in any doubt that there exists a ‘scientiﬁcally correct’ account of the

shape of the earth, against which any alternatives may be judged more or less erro-

neous. 1 More remarkably, both sides seem to agree that where there is an earth, there

must also be a sky. How, then, might we render a ‘scientiﬁcally correct’ account of the

nature and shape of the sky? Let me present two examples, taken from studies rep-

resenting opposed positions in the debate outlined above, of what is taken to be the

‘correct’ view. In the ﬁrst example,

1992

557

see Fig.

A).

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-year-old Ethan tells the experimenter – in

response to her questions – that the earth has the shape of a ball, that to see it one

should look downwards, and that it is completely surrounded by space. The experi-

menter then asks Ethan to draw a picture of the earth, and he obliges with a rough

circle, within which he draws the outlines of what look like continents. ‘Now’, com-

mands the experimenter, ‘draw the sky’. Ethan is perplexed. ‘The sky has no shape’, he

protests, ‘you mean space’. Nevertheless, draw the sky he must, so he proceeds to

describe a ring around the circle depicting the earth (Vosniadou & Brewer

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Tim Ingold

Figure 2. A: Ethan’s drawing of the spherical earth surrounded by the ‘sky’. B: Darcy’s drawing of

the sky, the ground (with houses) and the spherical earth. Reproduced from Vosniadou & Brewer

(1992: 558) with the kind permission of Elsevier.

In the second example the experimenters prepared a set of picture-cards, each of

which showed the earth, people, and sky in one of sixteen possible combinations of

the following alternatives: earth a solid sphere, ﬂattened sphere, hollow sphere, or

disc; people all around or only on top; sky all around or only on top. Participants, who

included both children (aged

). Some two-thirds of the participants in the study

selected, as their ﬁrst choice, the combination of solid sphere with both people and

sky all around. On the card depicting this combination, the earth ﬁgures as a greeny-

brown ball, with rigid, Lego-like people standing around its circumference and set

against a light blue background ﬂecked with ﬂuffy white patches resembling clouds

(Fig.

2005

). The selection of this card by the majority of participants, according to the

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) ,S

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) and adults, were individually asked ﬁrst to select

the card they thought looked most like the real earth and then to repeat the procedure

with all the others so as to yield a ranking from ‘most’ to ‘least like the Earth’ (Nobes,

Martin & Panagiotaki

Tim Ingold S23

Figure 3. Spherical earth with people and sky around. Reproduced from Nobes et al. (2005: 54) with

the kind permission of the British Psychological Society.

). The picture is, however, strangely paradoxical. On the one hand, it depicts

people distributed around the outer surface of a solidly spherical earth, but, on the

other hand, it depicts the sky in a form that would be apparent only to someone lying

on his or her back on the earth’s surface, gazing upwards! The perspective that leads

us to recognize the earth as a ball is not one that could possibly yield an image of a

blue sky with scattered clouds.

The perspectival double-take involved in the attempt to combine the spherical earth

and the sky in the same picture confused participants in the ﬁrst experiment, as much

as in the second. Ethan, as we have seen, took the experimenter to mean not sky but

space, and the gesture he made to signal his understanding that space is all around left

its trace in the outer ring of his drawing. But the reaction of another participant in this

study,

-year-old Darcy, is even more revealing. Responding to the experimenter’s

request, Darcy has drawn a round earth, and has added the moon and some stars. The

experimenter then asks Darcy – as she had asked Ethan – to draw the sky. Like Ethan,

Darcy is thrown by this. ‘It’s icky’, she says. Her solution, however, is to sketch some

roughly horizontal lines, looking much like a cloud-base, near the top of the paper, and

above her drawing of the earth, moon, and stars. When the experimenter asks where

people live, Darcy draws a house whose base lies along the lower border of the paper.

The experimenter asks again, and Darcy draws another house. On the third request,

Darcy eventually gives in to the experimenter’s implicit demands, rubs out one of her

houses, and draws a stick ﬁgure upon her round earth (Fig.

B). But this only sparks

off a further bout of interrogation. ‘This house is on the earth isn’t it?’, says the

experimenter, pointing to the sketch of the house that remains after the other was

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authors of this study, ‘indicated a scientiﬁc understanding of the Earth’ (Nobes et al.

2005

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) ,S

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