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In 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.
List of contents
Part I: Livelihood 1. Culture, nature, environment: steps to an ecology of life 2. The optimal forager and economic man 3. Hunting and gathering as ways of perceiving the environment 4. From trust to domination: an alternative history of human-animal relations 5. Making things, growing plants, raising animals and bringing up children 6. A circumpolar night's dream 7. Totemism, animism and the depiction of animals 8. Ancestry, substance, memory, land Part II: Dwelling 9. Culture, perception and cognition 10. Building, dwelling, living: how animals and people make themselves at home in the world 11. The temporality of the landscape 12. Globes and spheres: the topology of environmentalism 13. To journey along a way of life: maps, wayfinding and navigation 14. Stop, look and listen! Vision, hearing and human movement Part III: Skill 15. Tools, minds and machines: an excursion in the philosophy of technology 16. Society, nature and the concept of technology 17. Work, time and industry 18. On weaving a basket 19. Of string bags and birds' nests: Skill and the construction of artefacts 20. The dynamics of technical change 21. 'People like us': the concept of the anatomically modern human 22. Speech, writing and the modern origins of 'language origins' 23. The poetics of tool-use: from technology, language and intelligence to craft, song and imagination
About the author
Tim Ingold is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. He is the author of many books, including Lines, Making, Imagining for Real and Being Alive.
Summary
In this work Tim Ingold offers a persuasive new approach to understanding how human beings perceive their surroundings. This book is essential reading not only for anthropologists but also for biologists, psychologists, archaeologists, geographers and philosophers.
