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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... activity, I show that the work people do does not make plants and animals, but rather establishes the conditions for their growth and development. The distinctions between gathering and cultivation, and between hunting and animal ...
... activity. In Chapter Seven I turn from science to art. Whereas science is often supposed to be a specific historical ... activities leading to the production of what we in the West would call 'art' should be understood not as ways of ...
... activity towards the animals enhances the readiness with which they give themselves, or are given by God, to hunters' (Scott 1989: 204). And for the Mistassini Cree, Adrian Tanner reports that the events and activities of the hunt ...
... activities of theriomorphic beings, ancestral to humans as well as to all other living things, who roamed the ... activities. (1986: 49–50) Such features are more than mere marks, however, for in their activities the ancestors did not ...
... activities. Though the paths they take are not constrained to the lines of ancestral travel, in following tracks (as in ... activity made that place. That is why, as Myers notes (1986: 50), 'it is not unusual... to hear people describe ...
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 |