Lecture "Earth, Sky and the Ground Between" by British anthropologist Tim Ingold

During the lecture, Tim Ingold will propose to consider the transformations around us, looking at landscapes as a testament to the relentless flow of time and the memories of its past.

Human beings are terrestrial creatures; they live and move over the surface of the ground. But what kind of surface is this? For those who make a living from the land, following the rhythms of the agricultural cycle, the ground lies and all that grows on it is formed in the meeting of earth and sky, where wind and weather mingle with soil and water in the renewal of life.
But with the advent of the territorial state, the ground takes on a quite different significance, as a solid substrate, separating the earth below from the sky above, upon which are forcibly imposed the political designs of the present. Renewal, then, comes not from turning but from resurfacing – that is, by laying a new substrate that erases the old, in a cycle of airborne destruction and earth-born construction.
What does this mean for practices of burial, commemoration and excavation? Can the past ever be obliterated for good, or is it bound to come up again as the earth is once more exposed to the erosive force of the elements?

Tim Ingold – Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen, Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Ingold is recognized for his studies on human-animal interactions, the anthropology of technology and language, and the perception of the environment. He examined the relationship between anthropology, architecture, art, and design.