377Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 34 (2008) 371–392

Tim Ingold, Lines: a Brief History, London,Routledge, 2007, 186 pages, £19.99paperback.

‘What do walking, weaving, observing, sing-ing, storytelling, drawing and writing have incommon?’ (p. 1), asks Ingold. The answer ofcourse is that they all proceed along lines.This is the history of the humble line, repletewith an enchanting collection of diagrams,photographs and illustrations.

Ingold’s journey into the history of lines be-gins with a problem: the distinction betweenspeech and song. This is an exploration intothe essence of language, music and notation,where the line provides a series of fundamen-tal connections in narrative, performance andinscription. In the second chapter Ingold seeksto develop a ‘taxonomy of lines,’ an analysisof the relations between lines and surfaces,and their transformations. He identifies twoclasses of line, threads and traces. Threadsare filaments, which have the capacity to be-come entangled with themselves or each other,or suspended in space. They have surfaces;they are not drawn on surfaces. Conversely,traces are marks left in or on a surface bya continuous movement. Examples froma multitude of anthropological activities areused to illustrate these distinctions and theirtransformations, from mazes, loops and de-signs, to knotting, weaving, brocade andtext. As Ingold himself acknowledges, not alllines fit neatly into these categories. Insteadperhaps, they provide a broad frameworkfor working through some of the myriadways in which lines are implicated in ourworld.

Chapter three takes as a point of referencethe distinction made by the artist Paul Klee inNotebooks Vol. 1, between ‘lines that go fora walk’ (Klee 1961: 105) and lines that ‘aremore like a series of appointments’ (p. 73).

The line that ‘goes for a walk’ develops freely,can go where it will and in its own time. Con-versely, there is another kind of line that is al-ways in a hurry, shifting from one location toanother in a point-to-point sequence. Whilethe former is active and dynamic, the latteris ‘the quintessence of the static’ (Klee 1961:109) (p. 73). Ingold’s argument is that the dy-namic character of the line has gradually beeneroded by the course of history: ‘Once thetrace of a continuous gesture, the line hasbeen fragmented – under the sway of moder-nity – into a succession of points or dots’(p. 75). This fracturing effect is highlightedby Ingold in three related domains: in travel,where traditional wayfaring has been replacedby destination-oriented transport; in map-ping, where the gestural sketch map hasbeen replaced by the route-plan; and in tex-tuality, where storytelling has been super-seded by the pre-composed plot. Ingoldargues that these changes have also trans-formed our understanding of place, froma knot of tangled strands of movement, toa ‘node in a static network of connectors’(p. 75). Yet life is, according to Ingold,a ‘meshwork of habitation’ (p. 103). Althoughthese transformations in travel, mapping andtextuality seek to limit or contain our being,life will not be contained.

These themes are explored further in chap-ter four, ‘The genealogical line’, which focuseson the history of the family tree and the devel-opment of Darwinist evolution. Ingold con-cludes with a critique of the genealogicalmodel of evolution, presented as a series oflines of transmission that are strictly distin-guished from the ‘lines of action mapped outin individual life-cycles’ (p. 115). The genea-logical line is particularly ineffective and inap-propriate as a model of cultural transmission.Drawing on Bergson’s Creative Evolution(1911), Ingold suggests that a different view

Daniel Gorman, Imperial Citizenship: Empireand the Question of Belonging, Manchester,Manchester University Press, 2006, xi þ 243pages, £55 hardback.

The legacies of Empire, like the poor, are al-ways with us. Some, however, resonate moreclearly in the present day than others. In thisscholarly and closely-argued addition to JohnMackenzie’s ‘Studies in Imperialism’ series,Daniel Gorman explores one such relativelyshort-lived aspect of Empire: ‘imperial citizen-ship’. For a brief span during the late Victorianand highEdwardian periods, this idea lay at theheart of the debate between Britain and its col-onies over nationhood and the bonds of Em-pire. Constitutionally, the concept was anoxymoron. The Empire was not a state per se,and the ties that bound its variously

378 Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 34 (2008) 371–392

of evolution is required, ‘an open-ended wayof thinking about the history of life, asa trans-generational flow in which peopleand their knowledge undergo perpetual for-mation’ (pp. 117–118).

Returning to some of the issues raised inchapter one, Ingold’s fifth chapter is con-cerned with drawing, writing and calligraphy.‘Where does drawing end and writing begin?’he asks (p. 120). He presents a critical reviewof four ways in which writing and drawingare commonly distinguished: as notation,art, technology and linearity. This wide-rang-ing discussion includes an analysis of hiero-glyphs, iconography, fine art, Chinesecalligraphy, printing and engraving, and the‘invention’ of writing itself.

The final chapter of the book focuses on‘how the line became straight’ in Western so-ciety. The straight line is ubiquitous, seeneven when it does not really exist; the ‘straightline has emerged as a virtual icon of moder-nity’ (p. 152), from plotlines to guidelines,the modern assembly line, lines of musical no-tation, the scientific graph, architecture andgeometry. The essence of Ingold’s argumentis that a new line has emerged in postmoder-nity. This is a fragmented line, it progresses‘from one point of rupture to another’ (p.167).

As onemight expect, Ingold provides a seriesof rich ethnographic case studies to expandhis theses. Illustrating two opposing lines oftravel – lines of wayfaring and lines of trans-port – Ingold draws upon the Orochon, wildreindeer hunters of north-central Sakhalin inthe Russian Far East. Making their kills inmeandering paths across the landscape bysaddle, the Orochon hunt in ‘lines of wayfar-ing’; collecting their kill in straight, directroutes from kill-to-kill by sledge, they retrievetheir kill in ‘lines of transport’. Similarly, inchallenging the conventional hub-and-spokesdepiction of place in western cartography,

Ingold explains how the Walbiri of CentralAustralia create lines with their fingers in thesand to tell of the journeys of their ancestorsin the Dreaming. Places are like vortices in per-petual movement as the flow of life itself circlesa focal point. The circular lines drawn to con-vey place are not containers and the lines be-tween do not connect them. Instead they aretraces of the gestural movements of the inscrib-ing hand as it depicts the paths of the ancestors.

By taking the line as his point of departure,Ingold demonstrates some of the opportunitiesthat can be opened up by working across tem-poral, cultural and disciplinary divides.Whether convinced or not by Ingold’s analo-gies and conclusions, this book will certainlycause readers to think differently about thehumble line.

Lisa HillUniversity of Oxford, UK

doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2008.01.009