Parallel lines and forking paths: reflections on the work of Tim Ingold

To speak of existential anthropology is to make a commitment to engage directly with life as it is lived, in all its empirical diversity and complexity, and to reflect that life in one's writing. Tim Ingold's work exemplifies this view and implies a critique of an idealist anthropology centred on disembodied and decontextualized concepts of culture, while offering us a pragmatist method for avoiding the impasse of abstract theory on the one hand and models of material determinism on the other.