Breaking down borders between academia and the rest of the world: A conversation with Tim Ingold and his co-authors
On 22 October 2024 Scottish Universities Press (SUP) published its first open access book, Conversations with Tim Ingold: Anthropology, education and life by Tim Ingold, Robert Gibb, Philip Tonner and Diego Maria Malara. The book offers a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the work of Tim Ingold, one of the leading anthropologists of our time, through a set of lively and engaging interviews.
We were delighted to be joined by the authors to launch the book at an online fireside chat on 24 October, along with colleagues from around the globe and from a variety of backgrounds with interests in anthropology, libraries, open access and more. It was truly a great way to start a conversation. You can watch the full recording here: https://youtu.be/NeGZpak9BJU.
In this blog post we summarise some of the questions asked at the launch, considering open access as part of a broader ecology of dissemination, the benefits of the unorthodox interview format and anthropology’s enduring relevance in addressing pressing global challenges.
In the book, Tim talks about demolishing the walls that divide the land of academia from the rest of the world, which could be a description for the overarching aim of open access publishing too. Could you begin by telling us about your decision to publish open access?
Tim Ingold: I actually began as an open access sceptic. It seemed to be a ruse by which the big publishing corporations were holding the academic world to ransom while making megabucks for themselves. I thought it was a trap and that gullible academics, fired by noble ideals about making knowledge available to all, had walked right into it.
These big corporations are strangling genuine scholarship. They regard publication as the output end of a massive knowledge production industry. But what's the point of having open access if the stuff coming out at the end is garbage?
It seems to me now, however, that the real issue is not about open access itself; it's about how to break the monopoly power of these big publishing corporations. And university presses like SUP, and a few other small independent publishers which are doing open access, like Punctum, could potentially subvert the business model of the big corporations by playing them at their own game. So now I think that's the way forward.
Why did you choose to publish with SUP specifically?
Diego Maria Malara: When I saw the email announcing the launch of SUP I was immediately intrigued. We had been searching for publishers and had already discussed how, given the relevance of Tim’s work to so many timely public debates, we wanted the book to be published as open access. But there were several reasons why we eventually decided on SUP.
For me, one of the most compelling was that SUP operates on a specific not-for-profit model and invests any surpluses back into the press. I also hold our colleagues at the University of Glasgow Library in extremely high regard. They're doing a terrific job year after year, often under very challenging conditions. The fact that SUP is a library-led initiative run by people whom I know are dedicated to the public circulation of knowledge, rather than top-down commercial enterprises, played a key role in our decision.
Finally, there is something that Tim mentioned in the book that made me reflect more deeply about Glasgow and Scotland, where I live and work. Tim told us that some of his colleagues viewed Aberdeen and its university as academically peripheral due to its geographical location. However, Tim argues that far from being academically remote and isolated, Aberdeen is central to a network of institutions spanning northern Europe and far beyond. I have often heard similar remarks about Scotland’s being on the academic periphery. Personally I am not persuaded by them. Working with a Scottish network like SUP felt like an attractive and exciting way to challenge the trope of remoteness.
We know that there are still people out there who are reticent about open access, and there are still quite a lot of misconceptions around what it means to publish open access. Do you have any advice or tips for colleagues who might be considering this publishing option?
Diego Maria Malara: This is a much more complex question. I would encourage colleagues to read widely about open access and to reflect critically on how even the seemingly benign model, just as Tim was saying, might reinforce our disciplinary dependence on a handful of large commercial publishers. There are however open access initiatives that prioritise sustainability and fairness. I think these deserve more consideration by authors and should be actively supported in any way possible.
Another important aspect to consider is the kind of audience that we want to reach when we launch an open access book into the world. It is one thing to publish the work; quite another thing to ensure that the public beyond the narrow academic community is even aware of the work's existence and can engage with it.
We've had a very important discussion with SUP about organising an event in a public library to promote the book and facilitate conversations with extramural audiences. These conversations are different from the academic debates we're used to. I might be wrong here, but this aspect of open access is particularly important in the hyper-commercialised academic landscape we see in the UK, where the division between universities and the communities around them often feels so entrenched and debilitating. If our aim is to engage with broader publics, maybe we can think about open access less as an end in itself, and more as part of a broader ecology of dissemination.
Where did the idea for the book come from?
Philip Tonner: There are lots of good reasons to write with Tim, about Tim and his work. What I found in this work was just the right balance of anthropology, philosophy, archaeology, and evolutionary questions that really made it essential to engage with.
When I came to Glasgow, I discovered that the Glasgow Anthropology Network, which Diego and colleagues had organised, were going to be interviewing Tim, so I volunteered to take part. We conducted the first interview right at the start of lockdown. Talking with Tim in that process, and engaging more widely with his writings, really convinced me that an introduction to Tim’s work, on which I had already started, would be better done collaboratively. It seemed a natural step for me to ask Robert and Diego if they would be interested in asking Tim to participate in a further series of interviews with a view to turning them into a book, something along the lines of an introduction to his thought, to his life and work.
What did the interview format bring to the writing of the book?
Robert Gibb: In response to the opening question of the very first conversation, Tim explains that sometimes being interviewed has helped him clarify his own thinking. Philip, Diego and I thought from the outset that an interview or a series of interviews could be extremely useful to readers, too, in helping them to learn more about a particular scholar and their work. So, we felt that the question-and-answer format would be an engaging and accessible way of presenting key arguments and ideas. We look forward to feedback from readers of the book about whether this has worked for them.
Tim, in the book you mention cautioning students against approaches to research involving large scale transcription exercises. Transcription might well have been one challenge with the interview format, but were there others, either from the interviewee or interviewer perspective?
Tim Ingold: As Robert said, the interview format was very helpful for me in clarifying what I thought about various things. It was challenging in the sense that usually, if I'm writing something, I'm asking my own questions and I'm setting my own agenda and responding to that. In an interview format, you're responding to somebody else's agenda, which is a challenge because you're having to reformulate things in such a way as to press different buttons.
But I've always emphasised in my own work the importance of conversation as a basic democratic procedure of scholarship. The fact that this book is called ‘Conversations’ is itself very important to me. I did find it challenging, having to think on my feet all the time. It always happens, in this kind of situation, that an hour or two afterwards you come to think of what you really ought to have said, or meant to say, or words you should have used. That’s why it took so much work to edit the transcripts afterwards.
Did any of the questions take you somewhere unexpected, Tim?
Tim Ingold: I was prepared in the sense that Robert, Philip and Diego very kindly provided me with an agenda in advance for each session, so I could be prepared for it. But I surprised myself in two respects. First, there was a lot of discussion about politics. People often say there is no politics in my work. And it’s true that I don’t write much about politics. But I would argue that the politics lies in the writing itself. It is a political act. We had quite a lengthy discussion abut the politics of writing, and where the politics lies in what I've written, which probably took me a little outside my comfort zone. But I got a lot out of it.
The second thing that took me by surprise, and which I owe to Philip, is theology. I would never have imagined when I set out on my academic career, growing up in a thoroughly atheistic household and with no religious affiliation whatever, that I would find myself engaging with such questions as the existence of God. This surfaced once or twice during the conversations in ways that took me by surprise, again in a very positive way.
Do you have any specific thoughts about what a more general audience might take from the book?
Diego Maria Malara: That's such a great question! It's also a very difficult question to answer because Tim's work is very diverse and relevant to so many public and urgent debates. I was reflecting on this a few days ago when I had a conversation with my neighbour, who is a retired journalist from the Scottish Islands. He emphasised that outlines, paths and traces, which are key topics in Tim's work, are central to everyone in his region, thinking about movement, land, but also belonging. He immediately found a resonance with his experience, and it made complete sense to him.
It resonated with broader histories of possession in Scotland, and particularly the so-called enclosures, which consolidated private properties and privileged wealthy landowners at the expense of communal land and family-operated farms. It strikes me that every enclosure starts with a line of violent demarcation. How painfully timely this topic is, in today's world! A compelling aspect of this demarcation lies in the ways in which we stubbornly divide humans from nature. Tim’s critique of these ways will appeal to many readers.
As you can imagine, when you're working with young students, you constantly hear concerns about the climate crisis, accompanied by a growing sense of the urgent need find creative ways of rethinking how we position ourselves as humans within the environment, and so on. These concerns overlap with Tim's more recent work on generations, in which – to simplify a quite complex argument – he argues against viewing successive generations as self-contained social strata layered upon one another like pasta in a lasagne. Tim highlights instead how generations overlap along their length, entwined around one another in time. I believe this perspective manages to capture both the frictions and continuities between generations in a time of crisis, which speaks directly to the concerns of our students.
I am convinced that the unorthodox conversation format and prose style of the book allows for an informal and accessible discussion of topics and arguments which are very, very difficult, very intricate, making the book more digestible for general readers than the usual kind of academic text. In a sense, this book is a very bold vindication of anthropology’s enduring relevance in addressing pressing global challenges. I'm sure it will capture the interest of a young readership.
Do you see the future of academic texts in an endeavour to make them more accessible to wider audiences? Might we see a day when concepts and theories are presented in a manner that everyone can read, or is that not the goal of academia?
Tim Ingold: It should indeed be the goal of academia to produce texts that other people can read! But we are far from achieving it. Indeed, I believe we are currently witnessing something of a crisis in academic publishing. Much of what is published is devoid of any kind of authorial voice. Some journals actually refuse to publish anything that might reveal what you feel personally about things, lest it might compromise the authority and objectivity of the work. We are required to write in a kind of language that protects the boundaries of the academy. This is something I've been trying to resist.
If only we could find a way of scholarly writing which does not continually resurrect this boundary between the academy and the rest of the world! Writing should be accessible, but there is a key difference between accessible writing and popular writing. Popular writing works on the principle of advertising. If you want to advertise a product, you need a good nose for what people already want, and then you serve it up with a twist of novelty. A great deal of writing in popular science follows this formula. But a book can be accessible without being popular in this sense. Take Darwin's Origin of Species, for example. This was not written as a popular book. Indeed, it presented ideas and argument that fundamentally challenged the orthodoxy of their time. Yet anyone could read and understand it. Darwin’s writing was, and remains, highly accessible.
I think we could take this as a model of how to write in a way that is rigorous, disciplined, vivid, alive and poetic. But we need to recognise, too, that writing doesn’t only serve to communicate readymade thoughts. It is itself a way of thinking. Through writing, you can draw readers into your own thinking process, almost as if you were conversing with them. It is a challenge for us all to write in ways that draw our readers into our own processes, rather than putting them off or talking down to them, as if they were too stupid to understand.
Thank you so much to the authors for sharing their insights and their experiences writing Conversations with Tim Ingold. Please do download and share the book and participate in extending this conversation!
If you are interested in learning more about publishing with SUP, please visit our website or get in touch.