Comments on ‘Follow the Cut’ 97

Fig. 7. Another materiality, another way of thinking? A Spanish Civil War bunker before clearing the rubble.

interest in flow and flux comes from our own
experience of a world that we perceive as fluid.
Flow and flux are among the metaphors we
live by (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). We live in
a state of liquid modernity, where nothing
seems to be static, starting from our own iden-
tities (Bauman 2000). It is not surprising that,
if we see the world and ourselves in perpetual
flow, we see the past and our craft in similar
terms. I do not intend to say that the trope of
flux in not productive for archaeology, but I
wonder: are there not other metaphors that
could express the gist of our craft? Or, to put
it in another way, which kind of concepts of
archaeological practice, materiality and the
past would emerge from a different set of
metaphors? What would it happen if instead
of going with the flow, we tried to think
against the flow? I mean this literally: why do
not we try to think in terms of stasis, instead of
flux? After all, if things have a capacity to
resist, as Edgeworth argues, part of this capa-
city lies in their ability not to move and not to
change, often for millennia: they force us to
respect their immobility and their silence.
AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL LESSON IN THE
RECLAMATION OF ANTHROPOLOGY
TIM INGOLD
Matt Edgeworth complains that archaeolo-
gists are far too eager to look outside their
discipline for sources of theoretical inspiration

Tim Ingold, Department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, Scotland, UK. E-mail: tim.ingold@abdn.ac.uk.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00293652.2012.679428 © Norwegian Archaeological Review (2012)

98 Matt Edgeworth et al.
to help them make sense of their findings.
Rather than taking lessons from scholars in
other disciplines, he argues, they can and
should feel much more confident and secure
in the power of archaeology itself to generate
its own theory. This power, which gives
archaeology its literal cutting edge, is rooted
in the practices of excavation and in the parti-
cular skills, rhythms and structures of atten-
tion they foster. In these practices, archa-
eologists are destined to follow the materials,
not passively or inattentively, as in trailing
along behind, but actively, rather like a hunter
following the tracks of his prey. Thus the
archaeologist’s cut, as Edgeworth compel-
lingly shows, is a path of attention. I can only
agree, having argued much the same myself, in
almost identical terms, but from a point of
view situated within my own discipline of
anthropology (Ingold 2011a, pp. 212–214,
2011b, pp. 2–6). In fact the three-word phrase,
‘follow the materials’, first came to my mind
as I was trying to sum up the overall gist of the
contributions to a session on ‘Overcoming the
modern invention of material culture’, held
during the 2006 Theoretical Archaeology
Group (TAG) Conference at the University
of Exeter (Ingold 2007). The session included
a memorable contribution from Edgeworth
himself.
Much to my embarrassment, it was only
after my concluding comment on the confer-
ence session had been written and published
that I discovered that the philosopher Gilles
Deleuze, in collaboration with psychoanalyst
Félix Guattari, had expressed the same injunc-
tion – to follow the materials – in virtually
identical terms, and moreover had elaborated
on it in ways that already anticipated much of
what I wanted to say (Deleuze and Guattari
1987, pp. 450–454). With the false modesty
that is expected of scholars, I am happy to
say, in hindsight, that I have been ‘inspired’
by Deleuze and Guattari, although it might be
closer to the truth to admit that, by being able
to cite their writings in my support, I can
endow my arguments with a pedigree, cred-
ibility and gravitas that they might otherwise
lack. We all do this; it is the way the academic
game is played. In a review of the published
proceedings of the TAG session (Jorge and
Thomas 2007) in the pages of this journal,
Per Cornell (2010) is keen to spot the theorists
from whom the various contributors take their
bearings, and to gauge their relative promi-
nence: there is Heidegger, of course, and
Deleuze, not much Latour but a bit of Peirce,
the redoubtable Foucault, the voluble Žižek.
But, Cornell wonders, why not Derrida?
Thank goodness, I say, since I have yet to
read a word of this most garbled and obtuse
of philosophers that makes the slightest sense.
Edgeworth’s point, with which I wholeheart-
edly concur, is that the kind of academic pos-
turing which requires us to appeal to the arcane
ruminations of one or other of a cast of more or
less incomprehensible philosophers is neither
necessary nor desirable. Why should archaeol-
ogists not draw their theoretical inspiration
from the one source that is available to the
practitioners of no other discipline – least of
all to armchair philosophers – and that consti-
tutes their unique strength, namely those
engagements that take place ‘at the trowel’s
edge’, in their encounters with lively materials,
embedded in the earth and bathed in the ele-
ments of sunshine, rain and wind? ‘One does
not have to be a Deleuzian or Ingoldian’,
Edgeworth writes, ‘to take these lines’, and I
agree. Why should I be telling archaeologists to
follow the materials, when that is what they do
anyway? Indeed, taking Edgeworth’s criticism
to heart, it is none of my business for me, as an
anthropologist, to be telling archaeologists
what to do. But, even though Edgeworth and
his colleagues do not have to be Ingoldians, I
am more than happy to declare myself an
enthusiastic Edgeworthian. By this I do not
mean that – contrary to what is often under-
stood to be the usual balance of trade between
archaeology and anthropology – Edgeworth
has a theory that I would like to buy to help
interpret ethnographic data. For what
Edgeworth is really proposing is a radical
recasting of the relation between theory and
practice, by which the former is embedded in

the latter rather than applied ‘after the fact’. As
theory, in his view, grows from the crucible of
our practical and observational engagements
with the stuff of the world, so knowing grows
from the inside of being.
Some recent commentators have taken to
calling the acknowledgement of this kind of
knowing-in-being, rather tendentiously in my
view, the ‘ontological turn’ (Alberti et al.
2011). Edgeworth, I think, would prefer sim-
ply to call it ‘doing archaeology’. But it is
‘doing anthropology’ too, and that is why I
can be an Edgeworthian without borrowing
from archaeology. At the present time,
anthropology finds itself in a predicament
not unlike the one that Edgeworth diagnoses
for archaeology. For better or for worse, the
days when anthropologists appealed to their
own discipline for theoretical frameworks
with which to interpret ethnographic data are
long gone. They, too, take their theoretical
bearings from outside the discipline, and the
more they do so, the more anthropology itself
contracts into the art of ethnography.
Anthropology has joined archaeology as a
net importer of ‘theory’, with the result that
archaeologists in search of a theoretical
armoury are now going to disciplines other
than anthropology to find it. To be an anthro-
pological Edgeworthian, however, is to pro-
test against this search for the holy grail of
‘theory’ in some ethereal realm far removed
from our practical engagements in the living
world, when the soil for theoretical work is
there to be cultivated under our very noses.
For Edgeworth, the power to reshape actions
and thoughts lies in the emerging evidence of
the archaeological encounter itself. Could the
same not be said of the anthropological
encounter as well?
I can imagine many of my anthropological
colleagues nodding in agreement. They would
remark condescendingly that they have
known this all along. Are not our actions and
thoughts shaped by the practices of
Gavin Lucas, Department of Archaeology, University of Iceland, Reykjavík, Iceland. E-mail: gavin@hi.is
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00293652.2012.679429 © Norwegian Archaeological Review (2012)
Comments on ‘Follow the Cut’ 99
participant observation, and is it not the
grounding of our ideas in these practices that
give them their particular power? This may be
so. Yet it seems to me that, in taking refuge
in their cherished concept of ethnography,
anthropologists have sanctioned the normal-
ization of field observation so as to conform to
an academic model of knowledge production
according to which its role is not to reshape
thought or action but to furnish the raw mate-
rial – the data – from which, with the aid of
imported theoretical toolkits, it is possible to
frame authoritative accounts of other worlds.
This is what tempts anthropologists to forsake
the hard-won lessons of the field, and the ways
of knowing that have grown from being there,
and to go running off to schools of philosophy
staffed by theorists who have never come
closer to the heartbeat of the earth than a
Parisian café. In this abscondence lessons in
life become the materials of ethnography, to
be analysed and interpreted rather than read
and digested. Studies with become studies of. It
is high time, I believe, to reclaim anthropology
from its annexation as ethnography, as a path
to knowing-in-being that, rather like art, seeks
to challenge the division between data gather-
ing and theory building that underwrites nor-
mal science (Ingold 2011a, pp. 229–243). This
reclamation is the precise counterpart, in
anthropology, of what Edgeworth urges for
archaeology. Anthropologists can learn from
it. They, too, need to follow the cut.
RAW, COOKED AND FLUID MATTER
GAVIN LUCAS
I really like the opening premise of this paper:
archaeologists should be more confident in the
uniqueness of their practice to generate inter-
nal theories and interpretations rather than
import models from other disciplines.
Edgeworth situates this uniqueness in both
the materiality of our evidence as well as the