Abstract
The introduction, Thinking about lines: a new research field, asks how lines, i.e., something so seemingly simple, so common, and so widely used, can be analysed: it does not ask what a line is, but rather what lines are to us. Lines may be conceptualized as cultural techniques, but they can also call into question the (Western) dichotomy between culture and nature. They share many features with such media as writing or images, but they are also more than that: concrete practices linked to a certain knowledge and, in mathematics, they are specific concepts. Away from mathematics, the concept of the line is epistemically polyvalent, i.e., it cannot be clearly separated from metaphor. Our proposal is to study lines as elementary ways of world-understanding and world-making. To this end, our book presents texts that think about lines in five different fields: philosophy, mathematics, ethnology/anthropology, geography/cartography, the theory and the history of art. Each of the five chapters contains an essay on the significance of lines in the given field and presents pertinent texts accompanied by a short introduction and research references.
