Tim Ingold

Tim Ingold FBA FRSE (born 1 November 1948) is a British anthropologist, and Chair of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen.

Background

He was educated at Leighton Park School in Reading, UK and his father was the world-renowned mycologist Cecil Terence Ingold. He attended Churchill College, Cambridge, initially studying natural sciences but shifting to anthropology (BA in Social Anthropology 1970, PhD 1976). His doctoral work was conducted with the Skolt Saami of northeastern Finland, studying their ecological adaptations, social organisation and ethnic politics. Ingold taught at the University of Helsinki (1973–74) and then the University of Manchester, becoming Professor in 1990 and Max Gluckman Professor in 1995. In 1999 he moved to the University of Aberdeen. He has four children.

Contributions

His interests are wide ranging and his scholarly approach is individualistic. They include environmental perception, language, technology and skilled practice, art and architecture, creativity, theories of evolution in anthropology, human-animal relations, and ecological approaches in anthropology.

University of Aberdeen

Coordinates: 57°09′54″N 2°06′00″W / 57.165°N 2.100°W / 57.165; -2.100

The University of Aberdeen is a public research university in the city of Aberdeen, Scotland. It is an ancient university founded in 1495 when William Elphinstone, Bishop of Aberdeen, petitioned Pope Alexander VI on behalf of James IV, King of Scots to create King's College. This makes it Scotland's third-oldest university (after the University of St Andrews and the University of Glasgow) and fifth-oldest in the English-speaking world. The university as it is today was formed in 1860 by a merger between King's College (which had always referred to itself as the University of Aberdeen) and Marischal College, a second university founded in 1593 in Aberdeen city centre as a Protestant alternative to King's College. Today, the University of Aberdeen is consistently ranked among the top 200 universities in the world and is one of two universities in Aberdeen, the other being The Robert Gordon University.

Social anthropology

Social anthropology is the dominant constituent of anthropology throughout the United Kingdom and Commonwealth and much of Europe (France in particular), where it is distinguished from cultural anthropology. In the USA, social anthropology is commonly subsumed within cultural anthropology (or under the relatively new designation of sociocultural anthropology).

In contrast to cultural anthropology, culture and its continuity (including narratives, rituals, and symbolic behavior associated with them) have been traditionally seen more as the dependent 'variable' (cf. explanandum) by social anthropology, embedded in its historical and social context, including its diversity of positions and perspectives, ambiguities, conflicts, and contradictions of social life, rather than the independent (explanatory) one (cf. explanans).

Topics of interest for social anthropologists have included customs, economic and political organization, law and conflict resolution, patterns of consumption and exchange, kinship and family structure, gender relations, childbearing and socialization, religion, while present-day social anthropologists are also concerned with issues of globalism, ethnic violence, gender studies, trans nationalism and local experience, and the emerging cultures of cyberspace, and can also help with bringing opponents together when environmental concerns come into conflict with economic developments. British and American anthropologists including Gillian Tett and Karen Ho who studied Wall Street provided an alternative explanation for the financial crisis of 2007–2010 to the technical explanations rooted in economic and political theory.