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 97
... hunter-gatherer as economic man and as optimal forager 2.2 Alternative foraging strategies in a patchy environment 3.1 'Non-Western' and 'Western'intentional worlds compared 3.2 Western anthropological and hunter-gatherer economies of ...
... hunters and gatherers – a decision I have never regretted. At last I could move on, unfettered by expectations from the past. To anyone who asked me to give a lecture or write a book chapter on a subject relating to hunters and ...
... hunter-gatherers with the world as a mode of cultural construction of it have had the effect of perpetuating a naturalistic vision of the hunter-gatherer economy. This vision of hunters and gatherers as 'living in nature' is closely ...
... hunters and prey are based on a principle of trust, constituted by a combination of autonomy and dependency. The human–animal relationship under pastoralism, by contrast, is based on a principle of domination. The transition from ...
... hunters and gatherers depict animals, in painting, drawing and sculpture, I show that activities leading to the production of what we in the West would call 'art' should be understood not as ways of representing the world of experience ...
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 |