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
Results 1-5 of 74
... Building, dwelling, living: how animals and people make themselves at home in the world 11 The temporality of the landscape 12 Globes and spheres: the topology of environmentalism 13 To journey along a way of life: maps, wayfinding.
... tree 10.3 Ant, bark-boring beetle and oak tree 10.4 The Mbuti Pygmy camp of Apa Lelo 10.5 Building plans of three periods from the Mesopotamian site of Tell es-Sawwan 10.6 The first hut 10.7 The 'stone circle' from Bed I of Olduvai Gorge.
... building plan, a bio-logos, given independently and in advance of its development in the world. Indeed the possibility of such a context-independent specification is an essential condition for Darwinian theory, according to which it is ...
... build an alternative to the standard anthropological account of environmental perception as a cultural construction of nature, or as the superimposition of layers of 'emic' significance upon an independently given, 'etic' reality ...
... building plan, nature is the building; but whence come the raw materials? There must indeed be a physical world 'out there', beyond the multiple, intentional worlds of cultural subjects, otherwise there would be nothing to build with ...
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 |