Tim Ingold: The Perception of the Environment General Introduction Ingold should have gone to university to read natural

l science He was seeking a discipline where there was more room to breathe There was a fracture in our view, looked from side to side. These fractures ultimately seem to derive from a single, underlying fault upon which the entire edifice of separates the "two worlds# of humanity and nature His aim has always been to bring the two sides of anthropology together The fact that human beings are the bearers of geneses whose specific combination is a product of variation under natural selection does not mean that they cannot also be the bearers of cultural traditions that may be passed on by a process of learning in some ways analogous to, but by the same token fundamentally distinct from, the process of genetic replication. culture of genes ! learning of techni$ues is not always necessary instinct He wanted to bring anthropology and biology together ! but the criticism was %ust: there would seem to be no way of piecing together the two halves of anthropology, the biophysical and socio&cultural, without taking a look through psychology. 'ibson: wanted to know how people come to perceive the environment around them. (t this time, psychoanalysts assumed that people did so by constructing representations of estern thought and science has been build ! namely that which

the world inside their heads. )ata comes from outside through the senses and the mind put it together like a computer 'ibson approach was different. The mind was not inside but outside. The critical task for anthropology was to understand the reciprocal interplay between the two kinds of systems, social and ecological The organism and the person could not be one and the same ! slice up layers "relational thinking# against "populations thinking# ! *ow so long as the organism and the person are conceived as separate components of the human being, one could perhaps think about the former in population terms and the latter in relational terms, without fear of contradiction. +elational thinking must be applicable right across the continuum of organic life Hans ,onas: The Imperative of +esponsibility: In -earch of Ethics for the Technological (ge (nimal and Human +elationship 'ibsonian ecological psychology. .oth approaches take as their point of departure the developing organism&in&its& environment. (n organism is the calculated output of an intelligent design, because its variation and therefore behaviour are passed from one generation to the ne/t and therefore the content of ac$uired tradition Intelligent )esign vs. )arwinism +eligion +elations among humans, who we are accustomed to calling social, are but a sub&set of ecological relations.

 in

estern view of hierarchy: Ecological anthropology of relation our genes 0ulture1Humanity -ociety1People

.ehaviour1Inter Personal12amily .ehaviour1Intra Personal Livelihood 2ocus is on the way in which human beings relate to components of their environment in the activities of subsistence procurement Culture, nature and environment The +eindeer stops and stares in the face of the hunter1wolves .iologists e/plained this behaviour as an adaptation to predation by wolves The bodily substance of the caribou is not taken, it is received Putting the act of hunting and killing into relationship with se/ual intercourse -cience and indigenous knowledge (nimals offering themselves make perfectly good sense if we start from the assumption that the entire world ! and not %ust the world of human persons ! is saturated with powers of agency and intentionality. (nimal anima 3 soul .iologist study organic studies nature "as it ways really in is#, the the

anthropologist

the

diverse

which

constituents of the natural world figure in the imagined or so& called "cognised# world of cultural sub%ects

 )istinction between so&called "etic# 4observer from outside ! cultural neutral5 and "emic# 4with the eyes of the insider ! culture&specific5 The view from outside on the two worldviews can lead to the problem of hierarchy and dominance who observes whom6 7ind and *ature: .ateson and 89vi&-trauss .ateson: his ob%ection to mainstream natural science lay in its reduction of "real# reality to pure substance, thus relegating form to the illusion or epiphenomenal world of appearances. This he saw as the inevitable conse$uence of the false separation of mind and nature. .ateson thought that mind should be seen as immanent in the whole system of organism& environment relations in which we humans are necessarily enmeshed, rather than confined within our individual bodies as against a world of nature "out there#. (s he declared, the mental world ! the mind ! the world of information processing ! is not limited by the skin. The ecosystem was nevertheless envisaged as two&faced: matter : energy and pattern : information 2or 89vi&-trauss too, the mind is a processor of information, and information consists in patterns of significant difference. ;nlike .ateson, he anchors the mind very firmly in the working of the human brain. The mind acts more like a kaleidoscope, casting them into patterns whose oppositions and symmetries reflect underlying universals of human cognition. If the senses transmit information to the mind, it goes on working out structurally what at the outset was already

structural. 0ombines it with known structures to frame our vision. 2or 89vi&-trauss ecology meant "the world outside#, mind meant "the brain# 89vi&-trauss 7ind 3 .rain < Ecology 3 orld

2or .ateson both mind and ecology were situated in the relations between the brain and the surrounding environment. .ateson .rain < &&&&&& 4ecology of mind5 < The Ecology of 8ife .iology is the science of living organisms =rganic life is active rather than reactive ! against )arwinian theory Thus the organism is specified genotypically> the environment is specified as a set of physical constraints, in advance of the organisms that arrive to fill it. Ecology is where the organism and the environment are brought together ! "=rganism plus environment# ! but Ingold argues that it is more like the indivisible totality Environment: o 2irst, environment is a relative term ! my environment is the world as it e/ists and takes on meaning in relation with me o -econdly, the environment is never complete. It is in a process of growth and development Problem of observer and observed ! the illusion that it is unaffected by his presence Heisenberg?s uncertainty theory 0ommunication and revelation orld

 His father educated him by giving him to try, smell and taste. ,ust like indigenous people do as well. .y letting children e/periencing and telling them stories, the truths are gradually revealed to him, as he proceeds from the most superficial, "outside# level of knowledge to deeper "inside# understanding. Putting spirit and meaning into matter ! Theodor (bt .ut information, in itself, is not knowledge, nor do we become any more knowledgeable through its accumulation. therefore we have to sense it The task of a novice is not to decode it, rather to discover for himself the meaning that lies within it. It is therefore to develop and sense different keys and therefore have more tools to use in different situations. 2orming and feeling E/ample of the music by ,an@Aek ! is not %ust hearing, he is listening rather then reactive he is proactive 0onclusions: Towards a sentient ecology Bnowledge not of a formal, authorised kind, transmissible in conte/ts outside of practical applications. =n the contrary, it is based in feeling consisting in the skills, sensitivities and orientations that have developed through long e/perience of conduction one?s life in particular environment. (nother word for this kind of sensitivity and responsiveness is intuition emerging from traditional and long time learning Intuitive understanding, in short, is not contrary to science or ethics, nor does it appeal to instinct rather than reason, or to supposedly "hardwired# imperatives of human nature. The

sentient ecology is thus both pre&ob%ective and pre&ethical Theodor (bt