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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... present the 2003 Rhind Lectures of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland gave me the opportunity to adumbrate a kind of anthropological archaeology of the line (Ingold 2007a). Artists and architects, of course, also work with lines. As ...
... present volume. Chapter One was originally presented in the series of Linacre Lectures at the University of Oxford, and I thank Sir Bryan Cartledge for the invitation to deliver the lecture. It was first published in Mind, brain and ...
... present volume, and is published here for the first time. A preliminary sketch for the essay that appears as Chapter Seven was presented to the Seventh International Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies, held in Moscow in ...
... present volume. Chapter Nineteen overlaps, in part, with a paper presented to a seminar on 'The Anthropology of Technology', sponsored by the Amerind Foundation and held in Dragoon, Arizona, in October 1998. I am grateful to the ...
... present view of the centrality of skilled practice. In my work on the history of theory I focused on the way in which the notion of evolution has figured in the writings of anthropologists, biologists and historians from the late ...
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 |