At the heart of Ingolds positioning of anthropology next to art, is Ingolds’ understanding of otherness. Otherness is seen as ‘ever emergent from within the matrix of relations within which all are immersed.’ (Deleuze- French Post Marxist/ post structuralist). ‘That is to say, it is a function of ontogenesis, the becoming of being. Here, differentiation is prior, alterity derivative’. People are different not because we live in a world of radically other beings (Levinas), but because like voices in a conversation, ever differentiating themselves from one another even as they emerge and go along together. People are different not because they belong to other worlds but because they are fellow travelers in the same world, a world, nonetheless, of inexhaustible and interminable differentiation. Saying people belong to other worlds marginalises the other. Contextualistion (placing people in historical, social and cultural context) also marginalises the other. It neutralises the force of their presence, subjects them to analysis. Thus understood and accounted for, disarmed and embedded, laid to rest, we are no longer troubled to attend to them or what they have to tell. It does not bring people forth to be themselves, but refers them back. When anthropology joins with art, is to decontextualise, to peel away the layers of interpretive context so as to restore our work in presence, in a world that is ours as well, so that we can once again feel its force and correspond with it.
