Swimming in an ocean of materials

“Human beings swim in an ocean of materials.” With this sentence, anthropologist Tim Ingold announced his crusade against the abstract concept of “materiality” that had taken the academic world by storm. In his text Materials against Materiality, Ingold argues how the discrepancy between mind and matter has clouded thinking in social sciences and humanities, necessitating the concept of agency—that “magic mind-dust”—to set things into motion. However, if we think of the world only as matter,...