Paper short abstract:

Ravelling/unravelling: being-in-the-world and falling-out-of-the-world

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I aim to rethink how anthropologists understand Heidegger's claim that human's are 'being-in-the-world' with reference to Tim Ingold's description of lives as lines entangled and enmeshed in the lines of other lives. I turn to ethnographic accounts from the city of Basra in Iraq to supplement the theoretical picture and to show its limitations. Following the ethnographic accounts I move to introduce a greater sense of dynamism within the 'meshwork' by drawing attention to how lives are able to fall-out and become disembedded from their entanglements. Thus, by highlighting the contingent nature of our social 'enmeshment' I suggest that entangling and disentangling should be thought of as intimately tied to one another or even as part of the same life-movements.