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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... already tired of them. For the writer, a book demands completion, yet thought carries on regardless. No sooner is one book finished, then, than another is on the way. With The Perception of the Environment, however, my experience did ...
... already existed a considerable literature taking up what I would call a relational view of the organism, and that sets out expressly to break the stranglehold that neo-Darwinian theory has tended to exert, up to now, on mainstream ...
... already appeared in conference publications. Naturally, the form and substance of each essay have to some extent been dictated by the needs of the occasion for which it was originally prepared. All were written, however, with the ...
... already structural. And it can only do so in as much as the mind, the body to which the mind belongs, and the things which body and mind perceive, are part and parcel of one and the same reality' (1974: 21). Figure 1.2 'Day and night ...
... beings within a world and as beings without it. Moreover we tend to think of nature as external not only to humanity, as I have already observed, but also to history, as though the natural world provided an enduring backdrop.
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 |