thebookshelfmonster's review
4.0
British anthropologist Tim Ingold’s The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling, and Skill addresses in its various chapters the often discussed dichotomy of nature and culture in studies of human societies, and its various articulations in Western thought about the world. He argues that these dichotomies are in fact far removed from the realities of lived experience and suggests instead the need to focus on the phenomenological understanding of the human mind in the world. His book covers various themes like sentient ecology, evolutionary ecology, embedded perception of environment, trust between hunters and prey, raising plants, animals, and children, poetics of dwelling, landscape and temporality, human beings and their environment, etc. His discussion of the category of environment in each of these themes not only highlights the relative nature of the term environment but also embeds the relational way in which the environment exists and functions. However, to the author, environment and nature are conceptually not the same, and nature represents a distanced perspective of viewing the environment that has its genesis in western intellectual history.
Ingold's key contribution in this book is his treatment of the dichotomy of nature and culture as part of the legacy of Cartesian dualism in Western thought, and argues that the underlying fracture of nature and culture on which he claims Western modernity is built is fundamentally flawed. From this premise, he further argues that “the essence of western thought (...) is the subordination of nature by humans powers of reason”. He sets about linguistically extracting modes of reasoning about environmental perception involving Cartesian dualisms and offers an alternative vision of viewing humans as a whole in the practices by which they dwell in and incorporate the landscapes and “taskscapes” around them. Ingold identifies his understanding of dwelling and incorporation as influenced by the works of James Gibson, a pioneer of ecological psychology, and influenced by the writings of the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, whose view that the mind “is not limited by the skin”. This ecological perspective is something that the author whishes to apply as a link between “the biological life of the organism in its environment and the cultural life of the mind in society.”
It is important for Ingold to centre the ecological perspective precisely because of the ironic detachment and instrumental attitude that anthropocentrism has counterintuitively begotten. He identifies this “anthropocircumferentialism” as an attitude of withdrawing human life from active participation in the environment, which is what anthropocentrism has come to be associated with. Humanity divorced from a place of active belonging and engagement with its lived environment signals an expulsion of humanity from that environment. To Ingold this is different from how many pre-modern and non-Western cosmologies were anthropocentric in a way that placed that human at the hub of the world they dwelled in, “a centre of embodied awareness that reaches out, through the activity of the senses, into its surroundings”. He offers the flip side of “anthropocircumferentialism” as ecocentrism which, whether Ingold means to or not, threatens to circle back to the binary that he sought to break between nature and culture. The nuance seems to lie not in viewing these categories as monolithic entities, but as a set of interactions between humans and their environment differentiated by the awareness of perspective. The importance of the category of ecocentrism is also particularly time-sensitive, since The Perception of the Environment was first published in the year 2000, at a time when the impact of human activities on the environment was becoming increasingly discussed with more and more urgency in the public sphere.
Ingold's key contribution in this book is his treatment of the dichotomy of nature and culture as part of the legacy of Cartesian dualism in Western thought, and argues that the underlying fracture of nature and culture on which he claims Western modernity is built is fundamentally flawed. From this premise, he further argues that “the essence of western thought (...) is the subordination of nature by humans powers of reason”. He sets about linguistically extracting modes of reasoning about environmental perception involving Cartesian dualisms and offers an alternative vision of viewing humans as a whole in the practices by which they dwell in and incorporate the landscapes and “taskscapes” around them. Ingold identifies his understanding of dwelling and incorporation as influenced by the works of James Gibson, a pioneer of ecological psychology, and influenced by the writings of the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, whose view that the mind “is not limited by the skin”. This ecological perspective is something that the author whishes to apply as a link between “the biological life of the organism in its environment and the cultural life of the mind in society.”
It is important for Ingold to centre the ecological perspective precisely because of the ironic detachment and instrumental attitude that anthropocentrism has counterintuitively begotten. He identifies this “anthropocircumferentialism” as an attitude of withdrawing human life from active participation in the environment, which is what anthropocentrism has come to be associated with. Humanity divorced from a place of active belonging and engagement with its lived environment signals an expulsion of humanity from that environment. To Ingold this is different from how many pre-modern and non-Western cosmologies were anthropocentric in a way that placed that human at the hub of the world they dwelled in, “a centre of embodied awareness that reaches out, through the activity of the senses, into its surroundings”. He offers the flip side of “anthropocircumferentialism” as ecocentrism which, whether Ingold means to or not, threatens to circle back to the binary that he sought to break between nature and culture. The nuance seems to lie not in viewing these categories as monolithic entities, but as a set of interactions between humans and their environment differentiated by the awareness of perspective. The importance of the category of ecocentrism is also particularly time-sensitive, since The Perception of the Environment was first published in the year 2000, at a time when the impact of human activities on the environment was becoming increasingly discussed with more and more urgency in the public sphere.
rach_lind's review against another edition
5.0
This book is breathtaking. Every chapter is enthralling and filled with enriching new perspective and lessons we can learn from relationship(s) hunter-gatherers have with their life world and environment. One of my favorite books on this planet. It has changed everything for me.
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