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 89
... speaking of a climate emergency. Those who predicted, with near certainty, that rampant economic growth would crash headlong into the realities of climate breakdown, or that the collision would unleash a global pandemic, were not heeded ...
... speaking of the self, the person, mind or consciousness, its immersion in the manifold is precisely the source of its own differentiation (Ingold 2005a: 114–15). Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, a more friendly critic, similarly ...
... speak of 'inhabiting' rather than 'dwelling'. Another word that figures prominently in Perception, but with which I am no longer entirely comfortable, is 'taskscape'. It is curious how this word, which I coined as long ago as 1991, has ...
... speak, 'pinned on', and that together constitute a specific cultural worldview or cosmology (Wilson 1988: 50). In other words, cultural forms would be encoded in the landscape just as, according to the standard semiological approach to ...
... speaking as if the individual had selected what in fact is built into its modus operandi by countless generations of natural selection of which its own constitution is the latest product. The metaphor may have its uses, affording a kind ...
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 |