Vital Signs: Keynote speakers - Tim Ingold
Biography
Tim Ingold gained his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1976. From 1974 to 1999 he taught at the University of Manchester, becoming Max Gluckman Professor of Social Anthropology in 1995. In 1999 he moved to take up his current appointment as Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen, and founded a new Department of Anthropology there in 2002.
Ingold has carried out ethnographic fieldwork among Saami and Finnish people in Lapland, and has written extensively on comparative questions of environment, technology and social organisation in the circumpolar North, as well as on evolutionary theory in anthropology, biology and history, on the role of animals in human society, on issues in human ecology, language and tool use, and on environmental perception and skilled practice. He has edited the Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology (1994) and was editor of Man (the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute) from 1990 to 1992. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His major publications include Evolution and Social Life (1986), The Appropriation of Nature (1986), Tools, Language and Cognition in Human Evolution (co-edited with Kathleen Gibson, 1993), Key Debates in Anthropology (1996), The Perception of the Environment (2000) and Creativity and Cultural Improvisation (co-edited with Elizabeth Hallam, 2007). In 2005 he was awarded a Professorial Fellowship by the Economic and Social Research Council for a 3-year project on the comparative anthropology of the line, exploring issues on the interface between anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture.
His latest book, Lines: A Brief History, was published by Routledge in 2007. View details on publisher's website [new window].
See his web page for more details of his research and publications [opens in a new window].
Tim will be giving a plenary session on 9th September entitled 'Bringing things back to life: Creative entanglements in a world of materials'.
