CONCEPT

Attending (Ingold)

Ingold's most fundamental concept — the <em>receptive-and-active presence</em> of the maker to the unfolding work, distinct from both passive observation and active control, and the core capacity that distinguishes the maker who follows from the maker who directs.

Attending is the least technical and most load-bearing term in Ingold's vocabulary. It names the mode of engagement in which the practitioner is present to her work in a way that is simultaneously receptive and active: receptive to what the material offers and the situation reveals, active in her ongoing response to what is received. The hunter attends to the landscape. The potter attends to the clay. The weaver attends to the developing fabric. Attending is not the same as perceiving, which can be passive, nor the same as acting, which can be oblivious. It is the specific integration of perceiving-and-responding that skilled practice requires and develops. The concept organizes Ingold's account of the difference between attending and directing: directing requires clarity of purpose, decisiveness, the ability to specify an outcome and drive toward it, while attending requires the relinquishment of predetermined outcomes, the willingness to be surprised, the trust that the process will produce something worth producing if

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