1st Edition
The Perception of the Environment Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill
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
Biography
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.
"Tim Ingold's rigorous and imaginative approach to modes of perception as practices involving entire organisms in relations with others is unmatched in contemporary anthropology. This work, drawing on scholarship from across the arts and sciences, addresses foundational questions within and well beyond anthropology’s four fields. His new preface outlining some of the ways he has since developed these ideas is inspirational."
Gillian Feeley-Harnik, University of Michigan, USA"The Perception of the Environment is a formidable work in terms of its intellectual breadth ... its sheer volume ... and methodical consistency and clarity."
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
" ... this is an extremely significant book and quite possibly lives up to its promise "to revolutionize the way we think". The book's power lies in its ability to push readers to places previously unimagined ... it is imperative that this book be read by as many people from as broad an audience as possible."
Anthropological Forum
