The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and SkillIn this work Tim Ingold offers a persuasive new approach to understanding how human beings perceive their surroundings. He argues that what we are used to calling cultural variation consists, in the first place, of variations in skill. Neither innate nor acquired, skills are grown, incorporated into the human organism through practice and training in an environment. They are thus as much biological as cultural. To account for the generation of skills we have therefore to understand the dynamics of development. And this in turn calls for an ecological approach that situates practitioners in the context of an active engagement with the constituents of their surroundings. The twenty-three essays comprising this book focus in turn on the procurement of livelihood, on what it means to ‘dwell’, and on the nature of skill, weaving together approaches from social anthropology, ecological psychology, developmental biology and phenomenology in a way that has never been attempted before. The book is set to revolutionise the way we think about what is ‘biological’ and ‘cultural’ in humans, about evolution and history, and indeed about what it means for human beings – at once organisms and persons – to inhabit an environment. The Perception of the Environment will be essential reading not only for anthropologists but also for biologists, psychologists, archaeologists, geographers and philosophers. This edition includes a new Preface by the author. |
From inside the book
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... (Figure 1.1). The anthropologist, surveying the tapestry of human cultural variation, is like the visitor to the art gallery – a'viewer of views'. Perhaps it is no accident that both perspective painting and anthropology are products of ...
... figures made any reference to the other's work, there are some superficial resemblances between their respective ... (Figure 1.2). It is by these interior patterns that the mind possesses knowledge of the world outside. If, in the ...
... Figure 1.2 'Day and night' (1938), a woodcut by the Dutch artist M. C. Escher, aptly illustrates, in visual form, the way in which the mind – according to Lévi-Strauss – works upon the data of perception. Drawing upon a selection of ...
... Figure 1.4 is a reproduction of what he put in his notebook. Now these musical sketches are no mere mechanical record of the sounds as they impinged on his ears. For Janáček is not just hearing, he is listening. That is to say, his ...
... figure of the 'primitive' hunter-gatherer seems to reflect the ambivalent status of this figure, within the discourse of Western science, as transitional between the conditions of nature and humanity (see Figure 2.1). Economic man ...
Contents
northern Quebec | |
Dwelling | |
Introduction to Part III | |
Society nature and the concept of technology | |
Work time and industry | |
On weaving a basket | |
skill and the construction of artefacts | |
The dynamics of technical change | |
Western Desert | |
the concept of the anatomically modern human | |
The temporality of the landscape | |
the topology of environmentalism | |
Solofra | |
maps wayfinding and navigation | |
Stop look and listen Vision hearing and human movement | |
Skill | |
Speech writing and the modern origins of language origins | |
from technology language and intelligence to craft song and imagination | |
Notes | |
References | |
Index | |
Other editions - View all
The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill Tim Ingold Limited preview - 2000 |
The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill Tim Ingold Limited preview - 2000 |
The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill Tim Ingold Limited preview - 2000 |