The Perception of the Environment

Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill

Tim Ingold

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032052274
• eBook ISBN: 9781000504668
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Part I Livelihood

DOI: 10.4324/9781003196662-2

Introduction

My focus, in the essays making up this part, is on the ways in which human beings relate to components of their environment in the activities of subsistence procurement. I draw, in particular, on ethnographic studies of people who make their living primarily by hunting and gathering. In the existing anthropological literature on hunting and gathering societies, questions of how people interact, practically and technically, with the resources of their environment in obtaining a livelihood tend to be treated separately from questions of how their lifeworld is imaginatively ‘constructed’, in myth, religion and ceremony. The former are typically addressed in naturalistic terms, often by way of comparison with the foraging behaviour of non-human animals, and drawing on the same frameworks of concepts and theory as have been employed by animal ecologists. The latter, by contrast, are considered suitable topics for cultural analysis, concerned as it is with the ways in which the environment, and people’s relations with it, are represented in consciousness. I believe that this division between naturalistic and ‘culturalogical’ accounts is unfortunate, in that it takes for granted precisely the separation, of the naturally real from the culturally imagined, that needs to be put into question if we are to get to the bottom of people’s own perceptions of the world. Starting from the premise that ways of acting in the environment are also ways of perceiving it, these essays suggest how the division might be overcome.

I set the scene, in Chapter One, by comparing the accounts that Western biologists and indigenous hunters give of the behaviour of caribou during episodes of predation. I show that the scientific authority of the former account, as well as the anthropological understanding of the latter as fitting within a culturally specific cosmology, depend on a two-step movement of disengagement that cuts out first nature, then culture, as objects of attention. I then set out to retrace these steps in the reverse direction, in an attempt to replace the dichotomy of nature and culture with the synergy of organism and environment, and thereby to regain a genuine ecology of life. The inspiration for this move comes from the work of Gregory Bateson, whose ideas are introduced through a contrast with those of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Both authors set out to demolish the distinction between mind and nature, but whereas for Lévi-Strauss the mind recovers information from the world through a process of decoding, for Bateson it is opened out to the world in a process of revelation. This contrast is linked to two senses in which it might be said that novices, in learning to perceive the world around them, are furnished with ‘keys to meaning’. The key could be a cipher or a clue. I argue that sensory education consists in the acquisition of clues, not ciphers, and that songs and stories – including stories of how animals respond to the presence of the hunter – give shape to a perception of the world guided by this education. The knowledge grounded in such perception, I conclude, amounts to what may be regarded as a ‘sentient ecology’.

In the following two chapters I argue, first, against the naturalisation of the hunter-gatherer economy under the rubric of ‘foraging’, and secondly, against the complementary claim that in the eyes of the people themselves, the environment they inhabit is culturally constructed. Chapter Two is a critique of attempts, under the guise of ‘human evolutionary ecology’, to apply models designed for the study of non-human foraging behaviour to the analysis of human hunting and gathering. This application results from a conflation of rational choice theory, drawn from classical microeconomics, with the theory of natural selection, drawn from evolutionary biology. In the one case hunter-gatherers are likened to ‘economic men’ who can work out their strategies for themselves. In the other they are seen as ‘optimal foragers’ whose strategies have been worked out for them by natural selection. These two characters fall on opposite sides of an overriding opposition between reason and nature, or freedom and necessity. A properly ecological account of hunting and gathering requires however that we dissolve this opposition, showing how people develop their skills and sensitivities through histories of continuing involvement with human and non-human constituents of their environments. For it is by engaging with these manifold constituents that the world comes to be known by its inhabitants.

In Chapter Three, I contrast this view, that hunter-gatherers’ perception of the environment is embedded in practices of engagement, with the more conventional alternative that such perception results from the reconstruction of naturally given realities in terms of metaphors drawn from the ideal realm of culture. I develop this contrast through a review, first, of how certain tropical hunter-gatherer peoples perceive their forest environment. Secondly, I look at the way northern hunters, particularly the Cree of northeastern Canada, understand their relations with the animals they hunt. Thirdly, drawing on ethnographic material from Aboriginal Australia and subarctic Alaska, I consider how hunters and gatherers perceive the landscape. I conclude that anthropological attempts to depict the mode of practical engagement of hunter-gatherers with the world as a mode of cultural construction of it have had the effect of perpetuating a naturalistic vision of the hunter-gatherer economy. This vision of hunters and gatherers as ‘living in nature’ is closely tied to a certain notion of history, as a process in which human beings have gradually risen above, and brought under control, both their own nature, in the process of civilisation, and the nature around them, in the domestication of animals and plants. In Chapters Four and Five, I revisit this Western historical narrative of the human conquest of nature, and seek to replace it with an alternative more in keeping with indigenous understandings.

Chapter Four focuses on the history of human–animal relations, and on the transformation of these relations entailed in the shift from hunting to pastoralism. I argue that relationships between hunters and prey are based on a principle of trust, constituted by a combination of autonomy and dependency. The human–animal relationship under pastoralism, by contrast, is based on a principle of domination. The transition from hunting to pastoralism, therefore, is marked not by the replacement of wild by domesticated animals, but by the movement from trust to domination in the principles of human beings’ relations with them. Chapter five continues the critique of the notion of domestication, and with it the dichotomy between collection and production, entailed in the notion of history as the human transformation of nature. In terms of this dichotomy, growing crops and raising animals are viewed as instances of production in the same way as is the manufacture of artefacts. In every case, things are ‘made’. Drawing on ethnographic studies of how people who actually live by tilling the soil or keeping livestock understand the nature of their activity, I show that the work people do does not make plants and animals, but rather establishes the conditions for their growth and development. The distinctions between gathering and cultivation, and between hunting and animal husbandry, thus hinge on the scope of human involvement in establishing these conditions. Moreover, growing plants and raising animals are not so different, in principle, from bringing up children. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that not only animals and plants but also children are ‘made’, through domestication and socialisation, I conclude that children, animals, plants and even – in a sense – artefacts as well, are ‘grown’.

I return, in Chapter Six, to the theme of engagement, and to the different approaches to environmental understanding of indigenous hunters and modern science. There is, as I show, a paradox at the heart of science. For while, on the one hand, it asserts that human beings are biological organisms, composed of the same stuff and having evolved according to the same principles as organisms of every other kind, on the other hand the very possibility of a scientific account rests on the separation of humanity from organic nature. To resolve the paradox I suggest an alternative mode of understanding based on the premise of our engagement with the world, rather than our detachment from it. I do this by drawing on one anthropological study of how people in a non-Western society perceive themselves and the world around them. This is A. Irving Hallowell’s classic study of the Ojibwa, indigenous hunters and trappers of the Canadian boreal forest. For the Ojibwa, knowledge is grounded in experience, understood as a coupling of the movement of one’s awareness to the movement of aspects of the world. Experience, in this sense, does not mediate between mind and nature, since these are not separated in the first place. It is rather intrinsic to the process of being alive to the world. This is linked to a view of personhood in which the self is seen to inhere in the unfolding of the relations set up by virtue of its positioning in an environment. The essay explores the implications of this view of the self and experience for our understanding of animacy, metamorphosis, dreaming and speech. I conclude that what the Ojibwa have arrived at is not an alternative science of nature but a poetics of dwelling. Far from having been superseded, in the West, by the rise of modern science, such poetics is the necessary ground for all scientific activity.

In Chapter Seven I turn from science to art. Whereas science is often supposed to be a specific historical achievement of the Western world, art is commonly regarded as one of the hallmarks of humanity, revealing a universal capacity to represent experience in symbolic media. I argue against this view. Focusing on the ways in which hunters and gatherers depict animals, in painting, drawing and sculpture, I show that activities leading to the production of what we in the West would call ‘art’ should be understood not as ways of representing the world of experience on a higher, more symbolic plane, but of probing more deeply into it and discovering the significance that lies there. The argument is developed by way of a comparison between two distinct traditions, of ‘painting the ancestors’ among Australian Aboriginal peoples and of ‘carving the spirits’ among the peoples of the circumpolar North. The differences between these traditions reflect contrasting understandings of the relationships between human beings, animals and the land, which I call respectively totemic and animic. The fundamental difference between the totemic and animic depiction of animals is that the former focuses on morphology and anatomy, whereas the latter focuses on posture, movement and behaviour. But while hunters and gatherers have been painting and carving figures of one kind or another for thousands of years, only recently have they begun to engage in the production of ‘art’. To understand the original significance of what they were doing, I argue, we have to cease thinking of painting and carving as modalities of the production of art, and view art instead as a historically specific objectification of painting and carving.

Now it is conventional to describe hunters and gatherers as indigenous inhabitants of the lands in which they live. But precisely what it means to be ‘indigenous’ is a matter of some controversy. According to one definition, indigenous peoples are the descendants of those who inhabited a country when colonists arrived from elsewhere. Yet while habitation of the land is taken to be the source of indigenous identity, the claim that this identity can be passed on by descent implies that it is no longer drawn from the land at all, but from one’s genealogical ancestors. I take up this paradox in Chapter Eight. It hinges, as I show, on the interpretation of five key terms: ancestry, generation, substance, memory and land. I show that the conventional meanings of these terms are linked through their common grounding in what I call the ‘genealogical model’. After spelling out the elements of this model, and the assumptions it entails, I argue that it fundamentally misrepresents the ways in which peoples whom we class as indigenous constitute their identity, knowledgeability, and the environments in which they live. I suggest an alternative, relational approach to interpreting the key terms which is more consonant with these people’s lived experience of inhabiting the land. In this approach, which ties together many of the key arguments of the preceding chapters while laying the groundwork for the ecological and developmental perspectives to be elaborated in Parts II and III, both cultural knowledge and bodily substance are seen to undergo continuous generation in the context of an ongoing engagement with the land and with the beings that dwell therein. I conclude that it is in articulating their experience in a way that is compatible with the discourses of the state that people are led to lay claim to indigenous status, in terms that nevertheless invert their own understandings.

Chapter 1Culture, nature, environmentSteps to an ecology of life

DOI: 10.4324/9781003196662-3

As a social anthropologist whose ethnographic interests lie in the northern circumpolar regions, I should like to begin with an observation drawn from my own field experience of mustering reindeer in Finnish Lapland. When pursuing reindeer, there often comes a critical point when a particular animal becomes immediately aware of your presence. It then does a strange thing. Instead of running away it stands stock still, turns its head and stares you squarely in the face. Biologists have explained this behaviour as an adaptation to predation by wolves. When the reindeer stops, the pursuing wolf stops too, both of them getting their breath back for the final, decisive phase of the episode when the deer turns to flight and the wolf rushes to overtake it. Since it is the deer that takes the initiative in breaking the stalemate, it has a slight head start, and indeed a healthy adult deer can generally outrun a wolf (Mech 1970: 200–3). But the deer’s tactic, that gives it such an advantage against wolves, renders it peculiarly vulnerable when encountering human hunters equipped with projectile weapons or even firearms. When the animal turns to face the hunter, it provides the latter with a perfect opportunity to take aim and shoot. For wolves, deer are easy to find, since they travel with the herd, but hard to kill; for humans, to the contrary, deer may be hard to find, but once you have established contact, they are rather easy to kill (Ingold 1980: 53, 67).

Now the Cree people, native hunters of northeastern Canada, have a different explanation for why reindeer – or caribou as they are called in North America – are so easy to kill. They say that the animal offers itself up, quite intentionally and in a spirit of goodwill or even love towards the hunter. The bodily substance of the caribou is not taken, it is received. And it is at the moment of encounter, when the animal stands its ground and looks the hunter in the eye, that the offering is made. As with many other hunting people around the world, the Cree draw a parallel between the pursuit of animals and the seduction of young women, and liken killing to sexual intercourse. In this light, killing appears not as a termination of life but as an act that is critical to its regeneration.¹

Science and indigenous knowledge

Here, then, we have two accounts – one coming from biological science, the other from indigenous people – of what happens when humans encounter reindeer or caribou. My initial question is: how are we to understand the relation between them? Wildlife biologists are liable to react to native stories about animals presenting themselves of their own accord with a mixture of cynicism and incredulity. The cynical view would be that such stories provide a very handy way of dodging the ethical issues surrounding hunting and killing that cause such anxiety for many people in Western societies. For hunters, it is most convenient to be able to transfer responsibility for the death of animals onto the animals themselves. What the Western scientist finds hard to believe is that anybody should be taken in by patently fanciful excuses of this kind. The fact of the matter, surely, is that caribou are being tracked down and killed. Could any intelligent person seriously think that animals actually offer themselves to hunters as recounted in the stories of the Cree? Are the folk who tell these stories mad, lost in a fog of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Preface to the 2021 reissue
• Preface to the 2011 reissue
• Acknowledgements
• General introduction
• PART I Livelihood
• PART II Dwelling
• 13 To journey along a way of life: maps, wayfinding and navigation
• PART III Skill
• Notes
• References
• Index