ABSTRACT
Some years after the anthropological debate on ‘aesthetics as a cross-cultural category’, Ingold famously wrote that social scientists treated culture as though it hovered above the material world, but did not permeate it (1996). Substitute ‘colour’ for ‘culture’ and you have the way that colour is approached by such scholars. That is, as I’ll argue in this chapter, colour is a culturally constructed concept – but there it hovers above things, things that are often described as though they were colourless. Colour does not suffuse them.
