To live, every being must put out a line, and in life these lines tangle with one another. This book is a study of the life of lines. Following on from Tim Ingold's groundbreaking work Lines: A Brief History, it offers a wholly original series of meditations on life, ground, weather, walking, imagination and what it means to be human.



In the first part, Ingold argues that a world of life is woven from knots, and not built from blocks as commonly thought. He shows how the principle of knotting underwrites both the way things join with one another, in walls, buildings and bodies, and the composition of the ground and the knowledge we find there. 


In the second part, Ingold argues that to study living lines, we must also study the weather. To complement a linealogy that asks what is common to walking, weaving, observing, singing, storytelling and writing, he develops a meteorology that seeks the common denominator of breath, time, mood, sound, memory, colour and the sky. This denominator is the atmosphere. 


In the third part, Ingold carries the line into the domain of human life. He shows that for life to continue, the things we do must be framed within the lives we undergo. In continually answering to one another, these lives enact a principle of correspondence that is fundamentally social. 


This compelling volume brings our thinking about the material world refreshingly back to life. While anchored in anthropology, the book ranges widely over an interdisciplinary terrain that includes philosophy, geography, sociology, art and architecture.

The Life of Lines

What would it mean to understand nationalism as an atmosphere? This article makes a theoretical contribution to cultural geographical works on ‘affective atmospheres’ as well as to critical approaches to the study of nationalism by addressing this question. It examines how nationalism operates affectively and atmospherically through a discussion of the event of the London 2012 Olympic Games and the ‘happy atmospheres’ of being together that circulated in the course of those Games. The key claim of the article is that addressing the nation’s affective, emotional and atmospheric resonances is critical for understanding how nationalism endures and, furthermore, how it appears especially difficult to critique. As such, the article points to different ways in which thinking about nationalism as an ‘affective atmosphere’ builds upon the notion of ‘everyday nationalism’ but also takes it further by inviting an attentiveness to the different tonalities and intensities of nationality and shifting the focus from a ...

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The affective atmospheres of nationalism

https://eprints.ncl.ac.uk/file_store/production/215258/4E2651E5-C1DE-4E71-87B2-504B347F4493.pdf

Beyond Night-Time Economy: Affective Atmospheres of the Urban Night

This paper argues for expanded listening in geography. Expanded listening addresses how bodies of all kinds, human and more-than-human, respond to sound. We show how listening can contribute to research on a wide range of topics, beyond enquiry where sound itself is the primary substantive interest. This is demonstrated through close discussion of what an amplified sonic sensibility can bring to three areas of contemporary geographical interest: geographies of landscape, of affect, and of geotechnologies.

/pdf/listening-geographies-landscape-affect-and-geotechnologies-5899yw9mde.pdf

Listening geographies: Landscape, affect and geotechnologies

This paper makes several moves towards the study of geographies of security through notions of atmosphere. Two related claims circulate through this paper: that security is becoming attuned to what we might call affective atmospheres, whilst it is itself becoming atmospheric. The paper proceeds to develop, first, a correlation of ideas across concepts of security, power, and affective atmospheres. The following section sees security understood atmospherically, before it goes on to explore how security is increasingly attuned to affective atmospheres as its object-target. Finally, by way of conclusion, the paper offers several manners of contestation and critique. Throughout, the paper draws on a variety of secondary literature as well as primary documentary research and analysis, focusing empirically upon a set of counterinsurgency practices known as ‘atmospherics’.

Security Atmospheres or the Crystallisation of Worlds

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00978316/document

Patrick Murphy

Papers

‘Pour votre tranquillité’: Ambiance, atmosphere, and surveillance