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 82
... example of the blind man's cane (1973: 434). Do we draw a boundary around his head, at the handle of the cane, at its tip, or halfway down the pavement? If we ask where the mind is, the answer would not be 'in the head rather than out ...
... example of what I mean, taken from an essay by my favourite composer, Leoš Janáček. Here, Janáček writes of how, on one occasion, he stood on the seashore and notated the sounds of the waves. The waves 'shout', 'bubble', and 'yell ...
... example in mind, and for this purpose I turn briefly to ethnographic material that Winterhalder himself presents, gathered through fieldwork among Cree people of Muskrat Dam Lake in northern Ontario. The Cree draw for their subsistence ...
... example of an older style of doing things: although the journey from the village to the start of the trail was made by snowmobile, during the hunt itself the companions proceeded on snowshoes. Hunters of the younger generation are ...
... example? Although in the account the hunter is described as having made a number of decisions – to shoot this animal, pass up another, lay a trap for a third, and so on – the model would imply that in reality, the scope of his autonomy ...
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 |