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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... question of how to live, in a way that would offer hope to future generations. We will have our work cut out, in coming years, to resolve it. Tim Ingold Aberdeen, May 2021 Preface to the 2011 reissue It usually happens with books.
... question was at the top of our agenda when, in 2005, we hosted the annual conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and the Commonwealth at the University of Aberdeen, on the theme of Creativity and Cultural ...
... question the idea of landscape in a more fundamental sense, particularly through a focus on wind and weather (Ingold 2007c, 2010). The world we inhabit, I would now argue, is not a landscape but a world of earth and sky – a weather ...
... question to which I sought an answer was how, if at all, the concept of evolution was to be separated from that of history. I did not resolve this question to my satisfaction, and it has remained at the top of my agenda. I believe now ...
... questions of how people interact, practically and technically, with the resources of their environment in obtaining a ... question if we are to get to the bottom of people's own perceptions of the world. Starting from the premise that ...
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 |