The Weather

Yolanda wonders, as I think others did, about Ingold’s claim that:

Between mind and nature, persons and things, and agency and materiality, no conceptual space remains for those very real phenomena and transformations of the medium that generally go by the name of weather (73)

It is good to wonder.

Always.

All Ingold is pointing out is that our atmosphere, the stuff between earth and sky, is treated as something immaterial. As without much substance. And as something immaterial it is thought not to have agency, to not really matter so very much. Partly, for someone like Ingold and the sorts of academic targets he picks (self satisfied theories that think they can account for the relations of people to places and things), because all that matters to people is thought to be made or caused or the consequence of the social. So if the world is defined and made possible by social ‘forces’, ‘actions’, ‘powers’, ‘relations’ etc then how on earth can such thinking include weather? Which is, rather obviously, not caused by the social. So he is, in his characteristic dry wit, pointing out that such thinking cannot actually say anything of value about something as common, everyday, and obviously fundamental to our world as the weather. And if it can’t do that, then, really, what use it it out in the real world?

Or, to flip it. The weather has obvious agency and is a medium we as humans move through, not in. In let’s us treat it as infinite, consumable, usable. Through makes us recognise it as our habitat, and that is a very very different relation and obligation.