Yesterday we published the Open Access essay collection, Pathways, edited by Daniel Svensson, Katarina Saltzman and Sverker Sörlin. Wed feel very honoured that Tim Ingold agreed to write a Foreword for the volume and here we shamelessly recycle it.
When I began my career as a university teacher, I considered myself ahead of the curve. I wasn’t just teaching new ideas; I was also using the latest instrumentation to do so. My department had recently acquired a contraption known as an ‘overhead projector’. None of my more senior colleagues would touch it, but I was an avid user. I liked to include diagrams in my lectures, and I could prepare by drawing every diagram on a transparent acetate sheet. Placed on the glass of the projector with a powerful light shining below and an inclined mirror above, the diagram would be projected onto a big screen for everyone in the audience to see. I could even write on the sheets with a felt pen, either beforehand or as I spoke. Placing the sheets on top of one another, however, produced an odd effect. As the lower diagrams showed through, the image that appeared on the screen would be a mixed-up jumble of crisscrossing lines. Might this be analogous to the way landscapes are formed? Observing a landscape, we see a ground likewise crisscrossed with lines of all sorts, including lines of passage like roads, trails, paths and waterways, as well as boundary lines like walls and fences. Some look to be of considerable antiquity, others more recent or even new. Could it be that this line-crossed ground has been assembled in just the same way as the composition on the overhead projector, through the superposition of multiple layers, each marked up with its own inscriptions? Does the history of a landscape stack up, as every present adds its own layer on top of those already laid in the past? Admittedly the lines of old look faint and, compared with more recent ones, are hard to discern. But this, we suppose, is because ground layers are rather less transparent than my acetate sheets. Every additional layer, then, would further obscure its predecessors as the latter sink ever lower in the stack. Nevertheless, as with the projector, the past still shows through, albeit dimly, and all the more so under powerful illumination.
This idea of a laminated ground is deeply ingrained in modern sensibilities, as in the scholarship informed by them. We find it, for example, in studies of language and literature, archaeology and architecture. Thus, linguists distinguish the plane of synchrony from the axis of diachrony; on the first is laid out the state of a language at a given time, and along the second the changes it undergoes as one state gives way to the next. Literary theorists describe how new texts and genres overlay old ones, as if on a clean sheet, through which words from the past still remain partially visible, complicating present readings. Archaeologists speak of layers in the occupation of a site, each with its distinctive artefact assemblage, and arrayed in a sequence of strata with the most recent on top and older ones below. Even architects, whose aim is to construct the future rather than to uncover the past, tend to suppose that every new project begins with an immaculate ground on which to build anew.
Behind these examples lies a common premise, namely, that life is lived in the present. We, today’s people, live in our time; the people of the past lived in theirs. But it is impossible, according to this premise, for descendant lives to prolong ancestral ones, or for ancestral lives to animate their descendants. Social life may be a long conversation but, for linguists, every utterance in the conversation – insofar as it is governed by a structure common to speakers of the language – takes place on the plane of the present. It is like running on one spot. For students of literature, likewise, the text is an expression of its era; in the literary canon, every genre is a generation, and writing goes on within genres rather than in generating those to come. In the archaeological record, artefacts hold fast to the date of their manufacture, while sinking ever further into the past. And in architecture, buildings belong to the centuries of their construction, surviving in the present thanks only to acts of preservation.
This premise, however, is also fundamental to the idea of heritage. Literally, heritage is an inheritance, a legacy that one generation passes on to the next. To be inherited, this legacy – whether of things or ideas, tangible or intangible – must be broken off from the ebbs and flows of life, and from the histories of place and people of which our own life-stories are the continuation. A past that lives on in the present cannot, by the same token, be inherited. Children do not, as a rule, inherit their parents and grandparents. Nor do they inherit the homes or the landscapes in which they were raised. They cannot inherit these persons or things because they comprise the very matrix from which they have grown, and are already constitutive of who they are. But while you cannot inherit your parents or grandparents, you can inherit their property. And while you cannot inherit the home in which you grew up, or the landscape around it, you can inherit the house, and the plot of land on which it stands.
What, then, does it take to turn the past into heritage? It is the same as turning persons into properties, homes into houses and landscape into land. In every case, it means taking the life out of them rather than regarding each as an ongoing nexus of growth and development. With this reduction, the person is but an ensemble of genetic or cultural traits, the home but a building, the landscape but its physical setting. The more life is drained from the past, in its conversion to heritage, the more it is consequently confined to the plane of the present. That’s why evolutionary biologists, for example, insist on the distinction between ontogeny and phylogeny. By the former they mean the life-cycle of the individual organism, within a particular environment. By the latter they mean the transfer of resources (genetic, cultural, environmental) from one life-cycle to the next, along a line of descent. Here, ontogeny is to phylogeny as growth to inheritance. One is a life-process, but not intergenerational; the other is intergenerational but not a life process.
Here again, we find the idea that generations are layered over one another, each inhabiting its own slice of time, both separated and connected by the transfers of inheritance. What happens, then, when the object of transfer is a path? That’s the central question of this book. It starts from the recognition that paths are worn by the passage of many feet. Just one or two pairs is not enough. A single, bipedal human leaves only footprints, with spaces between them measured by the walker’s gait. A quadrupedal animal, such as a horse or dog, leaves a different but equally recognisable pattern of hoof- or pawprints. These are tracks, and you can read much from them about the creature that made them – what it was, when it passed, where it was heading and even how fast it was going. But tracks are not paths. To wear a path, so many feet must pass the same way, whether in one mass movement or in numerous solitary movements over an extended period, that distinct prints are rarely discernible.
In short, when it comes to its formation, the path emerges along with the people who walk it, the homes they inhabit and the landscape in which it is inscribed, as the crystallisation of a collective life process. As such, it carries on through generations. As a child, you may have walked a familiar path with your parents and grandparents, who may have once walked it with theirs, when they were young. It is something that you and they make together. But precisely because it is continually coproduced in the collaboration of generations, the path is not inherited. Perhaps that’s why so few paths, even today, are commemorated as vehicles of heritage. In our everyday experience to walk a path is, at the same time, to remember how it goes; it is a vital movement of prolongation that proleptically picks up the past as it anticipates the future. To turn a path into heritage would mean breaking this movement, converting it into an object of memory, like a story completed, ready to be handed over like any other heritable property.
To walk a heritage trail, then, is not to carry on a living tradition but to re-enact a past that is already over. To return to my comparison with the overhead projector, it is like placing one acetate sheet upon another that is already marked up with a line, and then tracing the same line on the new sheet. Crucially, in this operation the traced line overwrites the original without ever making contact with it. On the heritage trail, we can never walk in the footsteps of our ancestors, as once we walked with our parents and grandparents, since the logic of inheritance has placed us on separate layers whose surfaces can touch but whose lines can never meet. Perhaps this is the source of the peculiar idea that to walk a path is in itself to place a new layer over the ground. It is as if walking along a way of life were like rolling out a carpet. With the walk completed, a new layer is laid, only for the next pedestrian to do the same!
Except under artificial conditions which carefully protect the heritage path from the wear of passing feet, for example by placing it under glass, this is not what happens in practice. On the contrary, far from adding a new layer to the ground, the walker’s footprints contribute to its ongoing inscription. Meanwhile the ground surface itself is continually renewed, not through the addition of layers but by way of their removal, through natural processes of erosion. This, finally, is why the analogy with the workings of the overhead projector fails. To explain, let me return to the question of why older paths should appear more faint than recent ones. Long ago, when they were much in use, these ancient ways would have been deeply inscribed in the ground. But, since then, gradual erosion, principally through the effects of weathering, has brought the depths of these inscriptions almost to the surface, soon to disappear altogether. They are scarcely visible. Meanwhile, later paths, yet to suffer prolonged exposure to the weather, have left deeper marks; the most recent deepest of all.
The comparison, in this instance, is not with the overhead projector but with the product of a much earlier technology of writing, with pen on parchment, namely the palimpsest. This is formed when the same parchment is reused, over and over again. Between every round of inscription, the surface is scraped with a penknife, so as to remove as much of the previous traces as possible. But some always remain, casting their shadow on later writing. With the palimpsest, in short, past inscriptions do not lie beneath the semi-translucent surface of the present, but rather rise up to the surface even as the inscriptions of the present sink down. It is exactly the same in the formation of the ground. Like the writer’s parchment, the ground is renewed not by layering but by turning, much as the ploughman turns the soil, bringing up nutrient-rich soil from below while burying the stubble of recent cropping. And this immediately puts it at odds with a discourse of heritage that works on the opposite principle, of renewal by superimposition.
This volume gently nudges us towards a different way of thinking of heritage. It is a way that repudiates the logic of inheritance in favour of what we might call perdurance. This is to treat heritage not as a legacy from the past but as an intergenerational life process, in which older and younger generations can once again work together in coproducing the future. It makes no more sense, in this view, to ask how old a path is, than it would do to ask the age of the wind, the river or the mountain. The path never grows older, never recedes from its point of origin, precisely because it is originating all the time, for as long as people of different generations wind along together. Here, generations are not stacked vertically but align longitudinally. Like the twisted strands of a rope, new people enter the weave even as old ones give out. Instead of layering the present over the past, it is by introducing the young into old ways that we can best restore hope of renewal for generations to come.
FOREWORD
Tim Ingold
When I began my career as a university teacher, I considered myself ahead of the curve. I wasn’t just teaching new ideas; I was also using the latest instrumentation to do so. My department had recently acquired a contraption known as an ‘overhead projector’. None of my more senior colleagues would touch it, but I was an avid user. I liked to include diagrams in my lectures, and I could prepare by drawing every diagram on a transparent acetate sheet. Placed on the glass of the projector with a powerful light shining below and an inclined mirror above, the diagram would be projected onto a big screen for everyone in the audience to see. I could even write on the sheets with a felt pen, either beforehand or as I spoke. Placing the sheets on top of one another, however, produced an odd effect. As the lower diagrams showed through, the image that appeared on the screen would be a mixed-up jumble of crisscrossing lines. Might this be analogous to the way landscapes are formed?
Observing a landscape, we see a ground likewise crisscrossed with lines of all sorts, including lines of passage like roads, trails, paths and waterways, as well as boundary lines like walls and fences. Some look to be of considerable antiquity, others more recent or even new. Could it be that this line-crossed ground has been assembled in just the same way as the composition on the overhead projector, through the superposition of multiple layers, each marked up with its own inscriptions? Does the history of a landscape stack up, as every present adds its own layer on top of those already laid in the past? Admittedly the lines of old look faint and, compared with more recent ones, are hard to discern. But this, we suppose, is because ground layers are rather less transparent than my acetate sheets. Every additional layer, then, would further obscure its predecessors as the latter sink ever lower in the stack. Nevertheless, as with the projector, the past still shows through, albeit dimly, and all the more so under powerful illumination.
This idea of a laminated ground is deeply ingrained in modern sensibilities, as in the scholarship informed by them. We find it, for example, in studies of language and literature, archaeology and architecture. Thus, linguists distinguish the plane of synchrony from the axis of diachrony; on the first is laid out the state of a language at a given time, and along the second the changes it undergoes as one state gives way to the next. Literary theorists describe how new texts and genres overlay old ones, as if on a clean sheet, through which words from the past still remain partially visible, complicating present readings. Archaeologists speak of layers in the occupation of a site, each with its distinctive artefact assemblage, and arrayed in a sequence of strata with the most recent on top and older ones below. Even architects, whose aim is to construct the future rather than to uncover the past, tend to suppose that every new project begins with an immaculate ground on which to build anew.
Behind these examples lies a common premise, namely, that life is lived in the present. We, today’s people, live in our time; the people of the past lived in theirs. But it is impossible, according to this premise, for descendant lives to prolong ancestral ones, or for ancestral lives to animate their descendants. Social life may be a long conversation but, for linguists, every utterance in the conversation – insofar as it is governed by a structure common to speakers of the language – takes place on the plane of the present. It is like running on one spot. For students of literature, likewise, the text is an expression of its era; in the literary canon, every genre is a generation, and writing goes on within genres rather than in generating those to come. In the archaeological record, artefacts hold fast to the date of their manufacture, while sinking ever further into the past. And in architecture, buildings belong to the centuries of their construction, surviving in the present thanks only to acts of preservation.
This premise, however, is also fundamental to the idea of heritage. Literally, heritage is an inheritance, a legacy that one generation passes on to the next. To be inherited, this legacy – whether of things or ideas, tangible or intangible – must be broken off from the ebbs and flows of life, and from the histories of place and people of which our own life-stories are the continuation. A past that lives on in the present cannot, by the same token, be inherited. Children do not, as a rule, inherit their parents and grandparents. Nor do they inherit the homes or the landscapes in which they were raised. They cannot inherit these persons or things because they comprise the very matrix from which they have grown, and are already constitutive of who they are. But while you cannot inherit your parents or grandparents, you can inherit their property. And while you cannot inherit the home in which you grew up, or the landscape around it, you can inherit the house, and the plot of land on which it stands.
What, then, does it take to turn the past into heritage? It is the same as turning persons into properties, homes into houses and landscape into land. In every case, it means taking the life out of them rather than regarding each as an ongoing nexus of growth and development. With this reduction, the person is but an ensemble of genetic or cultural traits, the home but a building, the landscape but its physical setting. The more life is drained from the past, in its conversion to heritage, the more it is consequently confined to the plane of the present. That’s why evolutionary biologists, for example, insist on the distinction between ontogeny and phylogeny. By the former they mean the life-cycle of the individual organism, within a particular environment. By the latter they mean the transfer of resources (genetic, cultural, environmental) from one life-cycle to the next, along a line of descent. Here, ontogeny is to phylogeny as growth to inheritance. One is a life-process, but not intergenerational; the other is intergenerational but not a life process.
Here again, we find the idea that generations are layered over one another, each inhabiting its own slice of time, both separated and connected by the transfers of inheritance. What happens, then, when the object of transfer is a path? That’s the central question of this book. It starts from the recognition that paths are worn by the passage of many feet. Just one or two pairs is not enough. A single, bipedal human leaves only footprints, with spaces between them measured by the walker’s gait. A quadrupedal animal, such as a horse or dog, leaves a different but equally recognisable pattern of hoof- or pawprints. These are tracks, and you can read much from them about the creature that made them – what it was, when it passed, where it was heading and even how fast it was going. But tracks are not paths. To wear a path, so many feet must pass the same way, whether in one mass movement or in numerous solitary movements over an extended period, that distinct prints are rarely discernible.
In short, when it comes to its formation, the path emerges along with the people who walk it, the homes they inhabit and the landscape in which it is inscribed, as the crystallisation of a collective life process. As such, it carries on through generations. As a child, you may have walked a familiar path with your parents and grandparents, who may have once walked it with theirs, when they were young. It is something that you and they make together. But precisely because it is continually coproduced in the collaboration of generations, the path is not inherited. Perhaps that’s why so few paths, even today, are commemorated as vehicles of heritage. In our everyday experience to walk a path is, at the same time, to remember how it goes; it is a vital movement of prolongation that proleptically picks up the past as it anticipates the future. To turn a path into heritage would mean breaking this movement, converting it into an object of memory, like a story completed, ready to be handed over like any other heritable property.
To walk a heritage trail, then, is not to carry on a living tradition but to re-enact a past that is already over. To return to my comparison with the overhead projector, it is like placing one acetate sheet upon another that is already marked up with a line, and then tracing the same line on the new sheet. Crucially, in this operation the traced line overwrites the original without ever making contact with it. On the heritage trail, we can never walk in the footsteps of our ancestors, as once we walked with our parents and grandparents, since the logic of inheritance has placed us on separate layers whose surfaces can touch but whose lines can never meet. Perhaps this is the source of the peculiar idea that to walk a path is in itself to place a new layer over the ground. It is as if walking along a way of life were like rolling out a carpet. With the walk completed, a new layer is laid, only for the next pedestrian to do the same!
Except under artificial conditions which carefully protect the heritage path from the wear of passing feet, for example by placing it under glass, this is not what happens in practice. On the contrary, far from adding a new layer to the ground, the walker’s footprints contribute to its ongoing inscription. Meanwhile the ground surface itself is continually renewed, not through the addition of layers but by way of their removal, through natural processes of erosion. This, finally, is why the analogy with the workings of the overhead projector fails. To explain, let me return to the question of why older paths should appear more faint than recent ones. Long ago, when they were much in use, these ancient ways would have been deeply inscribed in the ground. But, since then, gradual erosion, principally through the effects of weathering, has brought the depths of these inscriptions almost to the surface, soon to disappear altogether. They are scarcely visible. Meanwhile, later paths, yet to suffer prolonged exposure to the weather, have left deeper marks; the most recent deepest of all.
The comparison, in this instance, is not with the overhead projector but with the product of a much earlier technology of writing, with pen on parchment, namely the palimpsest. This is formed when the same parchment is reused, over and over again. Between every round of inscription, the surface is scraped with a penknife, so as to remove as much of the previous traces as possible. But some always remain, casting their shadow on later writing. With the palimpsest, in short, past inscriptions do not lie beneath the semi-translucent surface of the present, but rather rise up to the surface even as the inscriptions of the present sink down. It is exactly the same in the formation of the ground. Like the writer’s parchment, the ground is renewed not by layering but by turning, much as the ploughman turns the soil, bringing up nutrient-rich soil from below while burying the stubble of recent cropping. And this immediately puts it at odds with a discourse of heritage that works on the opposite principle, of renewal by superimposition.
This volume gently nudges us towards a different way of thinking of heritage. It is a way that repudiates the logic of inheritance in favour of what we might call perdurance. This is to treat heritage not as a legacy from the past but as an intergenerational life process, in which older and younger generations can once again work together in coproducing the future. It makes no more sense, in this view, to ask how old a path is, than it would do to ask the age of the wind, the river or the mountain. The path never grows older, never recedes from its point of origin, precisely because it is originating all the time, for as long as people of different generations wind along together. Here, generations are not stacked vertically but align longitudinally. Like the twisted strands of a rope, new people enter the weave even as old ones give out. Instead of layering the present over the past, it is by introducing the young into old ways that we can best restore hope of renewal for generations to come.
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