CONCEPT
Correspondence (Ingold)
Ingold's central concept for the mutual, ongoing responsiveness between maker and material — not communication between parties but the continuous attunement through which skilled practice unfolds.
Correspondence is Ingold's replacement for the information-transmission model of making. Where communication implies a message sent from a determinate source to a determinate receiver, correspondence implies a sustained mutual attentiveness between two parties, each adjusting in real time to what the other does. The potter corresponds with clay. The weaver corresponds with thread. The hunter corresponds with the landscape through which she moves. In each case, the knowledge that develops is not stored in the practitioner's mind and deployed when needed — it lives in the relationship itself. Sever the relationship and the knowledge does not migrate to the practitioner's brain. It ceases to exist. This framing, developed across four decades of ethnographic fieldwork and given its definitive statement in Ingold's 2021 book Correspondences, dissolves the conventional picture of skill as a personal possession and relocates it in the ongoing engagement between a living being and a responsive world.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept emerges from Ingold's refusal of the sender-receiver model that