Tim Ingold:
Three Moments in the Birth of Marble: Ocean, Quarry, Workshop

Before us stands a marble sculpture. We ask: how old is it? Were we to ask the same question of a fellow human, we would count the years since he or she was born. From what moment, then, should we count the birth of the statue? Was it born in the workshop, where a master sculptor and his apprentices would have laboured to grind and polish a rough-hewn block of stone so as to bring out a surface texture as soft and smooth as a baby’s skin? Or was it born amidst the anarchy and violence of the quarry site, when the block was forcibly hewn from the hillside, leaving it broken and scarred? Or should we date its birth to many million years before, in the gradual deposition of detritus from the microfauna of ancient seas, and the subsequent metamorphosis of the resulting sediment under pressure from the earth’s continental crust above, and heating from its magma chambers below? The very word ‘marble’ echoes to the shine and murmur of ocean, as if the material itself was sea-swell turned to stone. And if the sculpture has three births, then it must likewise partake of three lives, respectively geological, mineralogical, and monumental. Rather than following one another in sequence, these lives are concurrent. How, then, do they bear upon one another? 

Tim Ingold is Professor Emeritus of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. He has carried out fieldwork among Saami and Finnish people in Lapland, and has written on environment, technology and social organisation in the circumpolar North, on animals in human society, and on human ecology and evolutionary theory. His more recent work explores environmental perception and skilled practice. Ingold’s current interests lie on the interface between anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. His books include The Perception of the Environment (2000), Lines (2007), Being Alive (2011), Making (2013), The Life of Lines (2015), Anthropology and/as Education (2018), Anthropology: Why it Matters (2018), Correspondences (2020), Imagining for Real (2022) and The Rise and Fall of Generation Now (2024). Ingold is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 2022 he was made a CBE for services to Anthropology.

This event is part of the Network Meeting of the DFG Scientific Network 'Ecologies of Marble: A Diachronic Perspective' 23-25 March 2026. 
More information on the network: https://www.nerema.org/ecologies