The perception of the environment: essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill

tags

Phenomenology

Notes

Book Cover

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Title

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Contents

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List of figures

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Acknowledgements

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General introduction

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I was appalled by the extent to which science had reneged both on its sense of democratic responsibility and on its original commitment to enlarge the scope of human knowledge, and had allowed itself to become subservient to the demands of the military-industrial complex.

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as a professional scientist one could never be more than a small cog in a huge juggernaut of an enterprise.

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a single, underlying fault upon which the entire edifice of Western thought and science has been built – namely that which separates the ‘two worlds’ of humanity and nature.

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essential complementarity of the biogenetic and sociocultural dimensions of human existence.

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Perception, Gibson argued, is not the achievement of a mind in a body, but of the organism as a whole in its environment, and is tantamount to the organism’s own exploratory movement through the world. If mind is anywhere, then, it is not ‘inside the head’ rather than ‘out there’ in the world.

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calls for a kind of ‘relational thinking’ that goes right against the grain of the ‘population thinking’ that has been de rigueur

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The characteristics of organisms, they argue, are not so much expressed as generated in the course of development, arising as emergent properties of the fields of relationship set up through their presence and activity within a particular environment.

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much if not all of what we are accustomed to call cultural variation in fact consists of variations of skills.

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reason why we cannot escape ‘the West’, or avoid the anxieties of modernity. It is that our very activity, in thinking and writing, is underpinned by a belief in the absolute worth of disciplined, rational inquiry. In this book, it is to this belief that the terms ‘Western’ and ‘modern’ refer. And however much we may object to the dichotomies to which it gives rise, between humanity and nature, intelligence and instinct, the mental and the material, and so on, the art of critical disputation on these matters is precisely what ‘the West’ is all about.

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Introduction to PART I

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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.

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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.

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what the Ojibwa have arrived at is not an alternative science of nature but a poetics of dwelling.

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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.

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Culture, nature, environment: steps to an ecology of life

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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.

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explaining the behaviour of caribou is none of their business. Their concern is rather to 4 show how hunters’ direct experience of encounters with animals is given form and meaning 5 within those received patterns of interconnected images and propositions that, in anthro- 6 7 pological parlance, go by the name of ‘culture’.

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What the anthropologist calls a cosmology is, for the 6 people themselves, a lifeworld.

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double disengagement of the observer from the world. The first sets up a division between humanity and nature; the second establishes a division, within humanity, between ‘native’ or ‘indigenous’ people, who live in cultures, and enlightened Westerners, who do not.

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a kind of knowledge that is fundamentally resistant to 20 transmission in an authorised textual form, independently of the contexts of its instanti- 1 ation in the world.

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Bateson’s famous collection of essays.

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he seemed unable to shake off the most fundamental opposition 7 of all, between form and substance.

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the ecosystem, taken in its totality, was nevertheless envisaged as two- 6 faced. One face presents a field of matter and energy, the other presents a field of pattern 7 and information; the first is all substance without form, the second is all form detached 8 from substance.

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For Lévi-Strauss, too, the mind is a processor of information, and information consists in patterns of significant difference.

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Lévi-Strauss anchors the mind very firmly in the workings of the human brain.

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structured through and through,

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The point about movement is critical. For Lévi-Strauss, both the mind and 30 the world remain fixed and immutable, while information passes across the interface 1 between them. In Bateson’s account, by contrast, information only exists thanks to the 2 movement of the perceiver relative to his or her surroundings.

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we draw distinctions, in the sense not of representing them graphi- 7 cally, but of ‘pulling them out’.

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inclined to impute the principles of their science to the organisms themselves, as though each embodied a formal specification, programme or building plan, a bio-logos, given independently and in advance of its devel- opment in the world.

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life- history could be nothing more than the realisation or ‘writing out’ of a programme

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Life, in this view, is not the realisation of pre-specified forms but the very process wherein forms are generated and held in place.

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‘organism plus environment’ should denote not a compound of two things, but one indivisible totality. That totality is, in effect, a developmental system (cf. Oyama 1985), and an ecology of life – in my terms – is one that would deal with the dynamics of such systems.

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what we may call mind is the cutting edge of the life process itself, the ever-moving front of what Alfred North Whitehead (1929: 314) called a ‘creative advance into novelty’.

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But information, in itself, is not knowledge, nor do we become any more knowledgeable through its accumulation. Our knowledgeability consists, rather, in the capacity to situate such information, and understand its meaning, within the context of a direct perceptual engagement with our environments. And we develop this capacity, I contend, by having things shown to us.

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What each generation 2 contributes to the next, in this process, is an education of attention

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Langer contends that the meaning of art should be found 2 in the art object itself, as it is presented to our awareness, rather than in what it might be 3 supposed to represent or signify.

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art gives form to human feeling; it is the shape that is taken by our perception of the world,

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Janáček is not just hearing, he is listening. That 2 is to say, his perception is grounded in an act of attention. Like watching and feeling, 3 listening is something people do

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sound, 9 as Janáček wrote, ‘grows out of our entire being . . . There is no sound that is broken away 20 1 from the tree of life ’

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in telling in this other sense, he is no more 3 aiming to produce a record or transcription of what happened than was Janáček, when 4 he wrote down the sounds of the waves.

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an intelligence that was completely detached from the conditions of life in the world could not think the thoughts it does.

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we do not reject our intuitions but rather change the principles, so that they will generate results which conform more closely to what we feel is right.

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The optimal forager and economic man

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seeks to understand the behaviour of so-called primitive people – or more specifically, hunters and gatherers – not through a direct extension of the principles of formal economics, but through a rather more indirect route.

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reproduces in an inverted form the dichotomy between reason and nature

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What, then, of non-human animals? They, too, seem to come out with strategies of 8 resource procurement which would look eminently rational, had they worked these strategies 9 out for themselves. But of course, you say, they have not. The animals have had their 20 strategies worked out for them in advance, by the evolutionary force of natural selection.

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Is the human hunter-gatherer, then, a version of economic man or a species of optimal forager?

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The rationality of the optimal forager, by contrast, is installed at the very heart of nature, while the specifically human domain of society and culture is seen as a source of external normative bias

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contradiction between the notions, on the one hand, that the forager’s ‘strategy of adjustment’ is the result of a series of choices about where to go and what to procure, and on the other hand, that as an ‘adap- tive pattern’ it is the product of an evolutionary process.

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the Cree hunter is unlikely ever to encounter the same conditions from one year to the next

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It is not so clear, however, that the pattern has ‘evolved’ in the Darwinian sense, or that its emergence has anything to do with the process of natural selection.

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I know of no recent author who has seriously suggested that the behavioural 9 variability apparent from ethnographic studies of human hunter-gatherers might be attrib- 40 uted to inter-populational genetic differences. Instead it is proposed that the instructions 1 underwriting human foraging behaviour are cultural

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merely applying a set of deci- sion rules acquired more or less unselfconsciously from his seniors, and whose prevalence in the society is due not to their perceived efficacy but to the fact that they served his predecessors well,

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genuine choices may still have to be made. But they are made within a received strategic framework, they are not about what framework to adopt.

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Observing that human behaviour often seems far from optimal, the blame for the discrepancy is placed squarely upon culture itself !

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cultural heritage, far from underwriting his ability to come up with an effective strategy, is actually liable to prevent him from recognising the best course of action

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optimal foraging theorists are trying to have it both ways,

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Bettinger fails to explain what he means by ‘metaphorical choices’. We can only surmise that he has in mind the common habit that neo-Darwinian biologists have of speaking as if the individual had selected what in fact is built into its modus operandi

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He could not have chosen to do other than what he actually does, any more than the muskrat could have chosen not to enter the trap, or the warbler not to migrate. For as a product of ‘encul- turation’, the hunter is as stuck with his heritage as are the muskrat and the bird with their respective sets of genes.

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that a prerequisite for any theory of calcu- lative adaptation is an account of human nature which must necessarily be couched in populational terms.

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if we want to explain where these beliefs and preferences came from in the first place – if, that is, we seek the source of human intentions – then we have to show how they may have emerged through a history of natural selection.

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evolutionary ecology seeks to 4 show how behaviour is sensitively responsive to variations in the environment, but lacks 5 a coherent account of human nature; evolutionary psychology seeks to construct just such 6 an account, but in doing so is insensitive to the fine-tuning of human behaviour to environ- 7 mental conditions.

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problem lies at the heart of the Darwinian paradigm itself.

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Given that social learning occupies such a central place in their theory – as central, 5 indeed, as genetic replication – it is rather surprising that evolutionary ecologists have 6 devoted almost no attention to how it occurs.

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a whole inventory of rules 30 and representations is miraculously downloaded into the passively receptive mind of the 1 novice.

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practical skills of this kind, as I show in Chapter Nineteen, are just not amenable to codification in terms of any formal system of rules and representations.

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not possible, in practice, to separate the sphere of the novice’s involvement with other persons from that of his involvement with the non-human environment.

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to observe is actively to attend to the movements of others; to imitate is to align that attention to the movement of one’s own practical orientation towards the environment.

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what is involved, as I showed in the last chapter, is not a transmission of representations, as the enculturation model implies, but an education of attention.

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it makes no sense to speak of ‘culture’ as an independent body of context-free knowledge,

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The accomplished hunter consults the world, not representations inside his head. The implications of this conclusion cannot be overemphasised, since they strike at the very core of neo-Darwinian theory itself.

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in reality the forms and capacities of organisms are the emergent properties of developmental systems

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They appear to stand, thus, on opposite sides of an overriding division between reason and nature, freedom and necessity, subjectivity and objectivity.

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Hunting and gathering as ways of perceiving the environment

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systematically reject the ontological dualism of that tradition of thought and science which – as a kind of shorthand – we call ‘Western’, and of which the dichotomy between nature and culture is the prototypical instance.

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the world can only be ‘nature’ for a being that does not inhabit it, yet only through inhabiting can the world be constituted, in relation to a being, as its environment.

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distinguish between two kinds or versions of nature: ‘really natural’ nature (the object of study for natural scientists) and ‘culturally perceived’ nature (the object of study for social and cultural anthropologists).

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the basic contrast between physical substance and conceptual form, of which the dichotomy between nature and culture is one expression, is deeply embedded within the tradition of Western thought.

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take as ‘given’ the very concepts that, in the first part of the statement, are said to be historically relative.

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infinite regress: if the opposed categories of 6 ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ are themselves cultural constructs, then so must be the culture that 7 constructs them,

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hunter-gatherers do not, as a rule, approach their 1 environment as an external world of nature that has to be ‘grasped’ conceptually and 2 appropriated symbolically within the terms of an imposed cultural design,

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follow the lead of 4 hunter-gatherers in taking the human condition to be that of a being immersed from the 5 start, like other creatures, in an active, practical and perceptual engagement with 6 constituents of the dwelt-in world.

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The contrast, I repeat, is not between alternative views of the world; it is rather between two ways of apprehending

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Bird-David argues that hunter- gatherer perceptions of the environment are typically oriented by the primary metaphor ‘forest is as parent’, or more generally by the notion that the environment gives the where- withal of life to people – not in return for appropriate conduct, but unconditionally.

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cultivators, by contrast, the environment is likened to an ancestor rather than a parent, which yields its bounty only reciprocally, in return for favours rendered.

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similarly unconditional transactions that take place among the people of a community,

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on what grounds can we claim that the usage is metaphorical?

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assumed separation between two domains: the domain of human persons and social relations, wherein parenting and sharing are matters of everyday, commonsense reality; and the domain of the non-human environment, the forest with its plants and animals, relations with which are understood by drawing, for analogy, on those intrinsic to the first domain.

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Parenting is not a construction that is projected onto acts of this kind, it rather subsists in them,

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actions that in the sphere of human relations would be regarded as instances of practical involvement with the world come to be seen, in the sphere of relations with the non-human environment, as instances of its metaphorical construction.

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In their account (lower diagram) there are not two worlds, of nature and society, but just one, saturated with personal powers, and embracing both humans, the animals and plants on which they depend, and the features of the land- scape in which they live and move.

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hunters and gatherers consider time devoted to forays in the forest to be well spent, even if it yields little or nothing by way of useful return: there is, as Bird-David puts it, ‘a concern with the activity itself ’

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only catch an animal when the animal is given to them.

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‘respectful activity towards the animals enhances the readiness with which they give themselves,

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partners with humans in an encompassing ‘cosmic economy of sharing’.

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Underwriting the Western view of the uniqueness of the human species is the fundamental axiom that personhood as a state of being is not open to non-human animal kinds.

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always appropriate to ask ‘who did it?’ and ‘why?’ rather than ‘how does that work?’

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‘human persons are not set over and against a material context of inert nature, but rather are one species of person in a network of reciprocating persons’

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‘reinter- preted’ as anthropomorphic beings

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This does not mean, of course, that they fail to differentiate between humans and animals. To the contrary, they are acutely concerned about such differences.

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implication that in modern biology appears in the guise of the doctrine of genetic preformation. With this view, personal powers – of awareness, agency and intentionality – can form no part of the organism as such, but must necessarily be ‘added on’ as capacities not of body but of mind,

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‘the term pimaatisiiwin, “life”, was translated by one Cree man as “continuous birth”’

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Far from revealing forms that are already specified, life is the process of their ongoing generation. Every living being, then, emerges as a particular, positioned embodiment of this generative potential. Hence personhood, far from being ‘added on’ to the living organism, is implicated in the very condition of being alive: the Cree word for ‘persons’, according to Scott, ‘can itself be glossed as “he lives”’

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consciousness is not supplementary to organic life but is, so to speak, its advancing front

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A creature can have a point of view because its action in the world is, at the same time, a process of attending to it.

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In short, animals do not participate with humans qua persons only in a domain of virtual reality, as represented within culturally constructed, intentional worlds, superim- posed upon the naturally given substratum of organism–environment interactions. They participate as real-world creatures, endowed with powers of feeling and autonomous action, whose characteristic behaviours, temperaments and sensibilities one gets to know in the very course of one’s everyday practical dealings with them. In this regard, dealing with non-human animals is not fundamentally different from dealing with fellow humans.

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If persons inscribe their identities into the landscape as historically constituted, it is from the transhistorical level of the Dreaming that these identities are initially derived. Thus each person takes his or her primary identity from a particular named place, and is regarded as the incarnation of the ancestor whose activity made that place. That is why, as Myers notes (1986: 50), ‘it is not unusual . . . to hear people describe actions of the Dreaming in the first person’. For in speaking about my ancestor, I am speaking about myself.

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When social relations are spoken of, as they often are, in terms of relations between places, the comparison does not draw a parallel across separate domains of society and the physical world, but rather reveals that – at a more fundamental ontological level – these relations are equivalent. That level is the Dreaming.

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‘the Koyukon must move with the forces of their surroundings, not attempting to control, master or fundamentally alter them’

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we find a complete inversion, such that meanings that the 3 people claim to discover in the landscape are attributed to the minds of the people them- 4 selves, and are said to be mapped onto the landscape. And the latter, drained of all 5 significance as a prelude to its cultural construction, is reduced to space, a vacuum to the 6 plenum of culture.

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New knowledge comes from creative acts of discovery rather than imagining, from attending more closely to the environment rather than reassembling one’s picture of it along new conceptual lines.

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Do not these stories, along with the accompanying songs, designs, sacred objects and the like, amount to a kind of modelling of reality, a representation of the world that native people might consult as Westerners would consult a map? I think not. People, once familiar with a country, have no need of maps, and get their bearings from attending to the landscape itself rather than from some inner representation of the same. Importantly, Myers notes that among the Pintupi the meanings of songs remain obscure to those who do not already know the country,

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Hunters and gatherers are said to be distinctive, however, insofar as they do not seek physically to reconstruct the landscape to conform with their cosmological conceptions, but rather find these conceptions ‘ready made’ in the world as given. On these grounds they are supposed still to occupy a ‘natural’ rather than an ‘artificial’ or ‘built’ environment.

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the lands of the Koyukon, according to Nelson, ‘are no more a wilderness than are farmlands to a farmer or streets to a city dweller’

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amount not to a metaphorical representation of the world, but to a form of poetic involvement.

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Hunter-gatherers, in their practices, do not seek to transform the world; they seek revelation.

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the Dreaming is transhistorical, not prehistorical.

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From trust to domination: an alternative history of human-animal relations

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the domain in which human persons are involved as social beings with one another cannot be rigidly set apart from the domain of their involvement with non-human components of the environment. Hence, any qualitative transformation in environmental relations is likely to be manifested similarly both in the relationships that humans extend towards animals and in those that obtain among themselves in society.

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the proper destiny of human beings is to overcome the condition of animality

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hunters and gatherers exploit ‘wild’ or non-domesticated resources, whereas farmers and herdsmen exploit domesticated ones

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depicted as though engaged, like other animal predators, in the continual pursuit of fugitive prey, locked in a struggle for existence which – on account of the poverty of their technology – is not yet won.

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fundamental metaphysical dualism – one that seems peculiar to the discourse which, as a convenient shorthand, we can call ‘Western’, to the extent of being its defining feature. This is the separation of two, mutually exclusive domains of being to which we attach the labels ‘humanity’ and ‘nature’.

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when we speak of domestication as an intervention in nature, as we are inclined to do, humanity’s transcendence over the natural world is already presupposed.

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In order to produce, humans have to achieve such command or mastery over nature as to be able to impress their own, calculated designs upon the face of the earth. Thus ‘the further removed men are from animals, . . . the more their effect on nature assumes the character of premeditated, planned action directed towards definite preconceived ends’

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Human beings, as social persons, can own; animals, as natural objects, are only ownable. Thus the concept of appropriation, just as the concept of intervention, sets humanity, the world of persons, on a pedestal above the natural world of things.

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Unlike the individual in modern Western society who always wants more than he can get, however well-off he may be, the wants of the hunter-gatherer, Sahlins argued, are very limited. What one has, one shares, and there is no point in accumulating material property that would only be an impediment, given the demands of nomadic life.

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There is no concept of scarcity.

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an apparent lack of foresight, or of concern for the future.

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The important thing, for them, is that food should ‘go round’ rather than that it should ‘last out’.

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hunter-gatherers treat the environment itself as their storehouse, rather than setting aside supplies

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The major distinction is between what he calls immediate-return and delayed-return economies.

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what it suggests about peoples’ commitments both to the non-human environment and to one another.

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‘people are not dependent on specific other people,

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people have to look after or care for the country

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animals will not return to hunters who have treated them badly

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This emphasis on the careful and prudent use of resources, and on the avoidance of waste, seems a far cry from the image, presented by Sahlins, of original affluence,

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success in present hunting depends on personal relationships built up and maintained with animal powers through a history of previous hunts,

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the meat that the hunter obtains now is a return on the investment of attention

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there is no way in which native people can be accommodated within schemes of scientific conservation except as parts of the wildlife, that is as constituents of the nature that is to be conserved. They cannot themselves be conservers, because the principles and practice of scientific conservation enjoin a degree of detachment which is incompatible with the kind of involvement with the environment that is essential to hunting and gathering as a way of life.

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caring for an environment is like caring for people: it requires a deep, personal and affectionate involvement,

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a hunt that is successfully consummated with a kill is taken as proof of amicable relations

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the encounter, at the moment of the kill, is – to them – essentially non-violent.

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This principle which, I maintain, inheres equally in the activities of sharing and in those of hunting and gathering, is that of trust.

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The essence of trust is a peculiar combination of autonomy and dependency.

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Although you depend on a favourable response, that response comes entirely on the initiative and volition of the other party. Any attempt to impose a response, to lay down conditions or obligations that the other is bound to follow, would represent a betrayal of trust and a negation of the relationship.

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hunter-gatherers assume the providence of nature and do not consider the possibility of starvation.

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The animals in the environment of the hunter do not simply go their own way, but are supposed to act with the hunter in mind. They are not just ‘there’ for the hunter to find and take as he will; rather they present themselves to him.

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why hunters aim to take only what is revealed to them and do not press for more. To describe this orientation as ‘opportunism’ is misleading, for it is not a matter of taking what you can get but of accepting what is given.

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Woodburn’s error, as we can now see, was to assume that dependency on specific other people entails loss of autonomy. This is not necessarily so, for it is precisely in relations of trust that autonomy is retained despite dependency.

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That is why hunters attach such enormous importance to knowledge and its acquisition. This is not knowledge in the natural scientific sense, of things and how they work. It is rather as we would speak of it in relation to persons: to ‘know’ someone is to be in a position to approach him directly with a fair expectation of the likely response, to be familiar with that person’s past history and sensible to his tastes, moods and idiosyncrasies. You get to know other human persons by sharing with them, that is by experiencing their companionship.

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Herdsmen do indeed care for their animals, but it is care of a quite different kind from that extended by hunters. For one thing, the animals are presumed to lack the capacity to reciprocate.

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They are cared for, but they are not themselves empowered to care.

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the relationship of pastoral care, quite unlike that of the hunter towards animals, is founded on a principle not of trust but of domination.

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the use of force is predicated on the assumption that the slave is a being with the capacity to act and suffer, and in that sense a person.

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In those societies of the ancient world in which slavery was the dominant relation of production, the parallel between the domestic animal and the slave appears to have been self-evident.

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although the relations pastoralists establish with animals are quite different from those established by hunters, they rest, at a more fundamental level, on the same premise, namely that animals are, like human beings, endowed with powers of sentience and autonomous action which have either to be respected, as in hunting, or overcome through superior force, as in pastoralism.

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domestication of creatures that were once wild, should rather be described as a transition from trust to domination.

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neither trust nor domination is in any sense more or less advanced than the other.

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Trust, as I have shown, is a relation fraught with risk, tension and ambiguity.

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The underside of trust, as Hallowell shows so clearly, is chronic anxiety and suspi- cion.

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When hunters became pastoralists they began to relate to animals, and to one another, in different ways. But they were not taking the first steps on the road to modernity.

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no essential difference between the ways one relates to humans and to non-human constituents of the environment.

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transition from hunting to pastoralism led to the emergence, in place of egalitarian relations of sharing, of relations of dominance and subordination between herding leaders and their assistants

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anthropology, as an intellectual product of the Western tradition, has sought to contain the damage by relativising the indigenous view and thereby neutralising the challenge it presents

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Making things, growing plants, raising animals and bringing up children

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idea of production as making, I argue, is embedded in a grand narrative of the human transcendence of nature,

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basically just two ways of procuring a livelihood from the natural environment, conventionally denoted by the terms collection and production.

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distinctively human: ‘The most that the animal can achieve is to collect; man produces, he prepares the means of life

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The human, by contrast, always has an end in mind.

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notion of food-production as the singular achievement of human agriculturalists and pastoralists has become part of the stock-in-trade of modern prehistory.

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decisive moment at which humanity transcended nature, and was set on the path of history.

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Hunter-gatherers have a history, but theirs is a history that is written neither in the pages of documents nor upon the surface of the land.

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The more that the material world is subordinated to the ends of art, the more the world of ideas is rendered in physical form, the less clearcut the nature/culture distinction appears to be

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for most non-Western people, ‘the idea of a transformation of nature by human beings has no meaning’

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peoples of the past who were initially responsible for domesticating plants and animals must have had quite different ideas about what they were doing.

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the essence of the kind of thought we call ‘Western’ is that it is founded in a claim to the subordination of nature by human powers of reason.

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fulcrum of Marx’s theory of value, according to which it was the work of shaping up the material from its raw to its final state that bestowed value on what was already ‘given’ in nature.

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such making is not the equivalent but the very opposite of production, just as artisanship is the opposite of agriculture.

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The farmer, and for that matter the raiser of livestock, submits to a productive dynamic that is immanent in the natural world itself, rather than converting nature into an instrument to his own purpose.

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Even were it technically possible to transform nature, the very idea would have been regarded as an impiety

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‘The artisan is not in command of nature; he submits to the requirements of the form. His function and his excellence is . . . to obey’

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Motherhood, however, also extends to a woman’s relations with the plants she grows in her garden. She has, as it were, two sets of offspring,

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the forest is itself a huge garden, albeit an untidy one, and the relations between its constituents are governed by the same principles of domesticity that structure the human household, yet on a superhuman scale.

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The antithesis of mbo is rømi. This latter term is used for things or powers that lie beyond the reach of human nurture.

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at first glance, the terms mbo and rømi seem to have their more or less exact equivalent in our conventional notions of ‘wild’ and ‘domestic’

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Completely absent from the Hagen conception, however, is the notion of a domestic environment ‘carved out’ from wild nature.

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The child does not begin as rømi, and become mbo. It is mbo from the outset, by virtue of its planting within the field of human relationships.

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maintenance of the village depends upon a continual inflow of vital force from the bush, which is worn 8 down and used up in the process.

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the cultivated fields and gardens are sites of consumption rather than production, where vital force is used up.

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the farmer is called upon to assist in the animals’ labour much as a midwife assists at a birth. But the ultimate source of the ‘strength’ or ‘force’ (la fuerza) that enables people to work, animals to reproduce and crops to grow lies in the land itself.

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I believe this modern emphasis on production as making accounts for the special signif- icance that tends to be attached to the so-called ‘artificial selection’ of plants and animals

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in many parts of the world, both in the past and still today, people are apparently engaged in the husbandry of plants and animals that do not differ appreciably from their wild counterparts.

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does not literally make plants and animals, but rather establishes the environmental conditions for their growth and development.

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growing plants and raising animals are not so different, in principle, from bringing up children.

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‘the child grows into social maturity rather than being trained into it’

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trees do not fit at all comfortably within the terms of the orthodox distinction between the wild and the domesticated, which may account for the curious fact that despite their manifest importance to people (as our Dogon example shows), they are all but absent from archaeological and anthropological discussions of the nature and origins of food production.

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human beings do not so much transform the material world as play their part, along with other creatures, in the world’s transformation of itself

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Marx’s celebrated yet enigmatic remark that ‘history itself is a real part of natural history – of nature developing into man’

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The orthodox Western account, as we have seen, extends the idea of making from the domain of inanimate things to that of animate beings. I want to suggest, quite to the contrary, that the idea of growing might be extended in the reverse direction, from the animate to the inanimate. What we call ‘things’, too, are grown.

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A circumpolar night's dream

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is an organism a thing or a being?

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think of the organism not as containing life, or expressing it, but as emergent within the life process itself.

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build on the premise that all organisms, including human ones, are not things but beings.

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Persons, in the Ojibwa world, can take a great variety of forms, of which the human is just one.

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this capacity for metamorphosis is one of the key aspects of being a person, and is a critical index of power: the more powerful the person, the more readily a change of form may be effected.

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what distinguishes the Thunder Bird from any ordinary hawk is nothing like what, for us, distinguishes the Wolf of Little Red Riding Hood from the wolf of the forest. The distinction is not between animals of fantasy and of fact, but rather between animals that are persons and animals that are not.

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the description of metamorphosis as an enclothing of the soul, far from being a peculiar response to ontological disjuncture, is very widely reported in the ethnography of native Amerindian peoples.

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clothing does not cover up the body, it is a body

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if I were to report, in all sincerity, having encountered such a character as Puck or Iron Maker in real life, I doubt whether much credence would be given to my claims. People would say that if I was not actually lying, then I must be suffering from delusions, leaving me incapable of telling fact from fantasy, or reality from dreams. Yet these are precisely the sorts of claims that Ojibwa make. Are they, then, lying or deluded?

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willing suspension of disbelief.

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I once asked an old man: Are all the stones we see about us here alive? He reflected a long while and then replied, ‘No! But some are.’

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the categorical distinction between animate and inanimate is not one that Ojibwa articulate themselves,

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Animacy, in other words, is a property not of stones as such, but of their positioning within a relational field which includes persons as foci of power.

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The nature of the things one encounters, their essence, is not given in advance but is revealed only ‘after-the-fact’,

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This Ojibwa way of dealing with percep- tion is, as Black puts it, fundamentally antitaxonomic,

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If 8 we were to consider the sun in abstraction from its observed movement across the sky, then it would indeed appear to be a mere physical body, and its movement a mechanical displacement. But this is not how it is presented to us in immediate experience. Rather, the movement is as much a part of the way the sun is as my own habitual movements are of the way I am.

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living beings do not move upon the world, but move along with it.

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‘the crucial test is experience’

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It is experience that mediates between the two worlds,

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knowledge does not lie in the accumulation of mental content. It is not by representing it in the mind that they get to know the world, but rather by moving around

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the kind of knowledge it yields is not propositional, in the form of hypothetical statements or ‘beliefs’ about the nature of reality, but personal – consisting of an intimate sensitivity to other ways of being,

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not easily articulated in propositional form, and would seem to be devalued by any attempt to do so

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forbidden under normal circumstances to speak of his experience

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encouraged to think of dreams as hallucinations,

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This is not to say that Ojibwa confuse dream experiences with those they have while wide awake. The difference is that in dreams, the vital essence of the person – the self – is afforded a degree of mobility, not only in space but also in time, normally denied in waking life. While the body of the sleeper is readily visible at some fixed location, the self may be roaming far afield

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The dreaming mind, far from cutting its already tenuous and provisional connection with the real world, is able to penetrate that world to the point where mind and world become indistinguishable.

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How are we to respond to the objections of the sceptic to the effect that whatever people may say, humans cannot really turn into eagles or bears, or thunder into a kind of hawk, or vice versa? From an Ojibwa perspective, this objection is not so much false as beside the point. Metamorphosis may not occur in ordinary waking life, but it certainly occurs in dreams. And as Hallowell is at pains to stress, ‘there is nothing psychologically abstruse about the incorporation of dreams into the category of self-related experiences’ (CE, p. 96). The awareness of the self is as phenomenally real when one is dreaming as when one is awake, and these dream experiences are built into the constitution of the self by memory processes that are no different from those working on the experiences of waking life.

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it makes no difference whether the boy was awake, day-dreaming or actually asleep. He still saw the bird, was moved to wonder by its presence, and remembered the encounter for the rest of his life.

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Far from covering over a solid substrate of literal reality with layer upon layer of illusion, what dreams do is to penetrate beneath the surface of the world, to render it transparent, so that one can see into it with a clarity and vision that is not possible in ordinary life.

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An old man and his wife are sitting in their tent, and a storm is raging outside. There is thunder and lightning. The thunder comes in a series of claps. The old man listens intently. Then he turns to his wife and asks, quite casually and in a matter-of-fact tone of voice, ‘Did you hear what was said?’ ‘No’, she replies, ‘I didn’t catch it’

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When I speak, or for that matter when I clap, it is because I have an idea. My concern is to communicate that idea, and I do so by means of coded signs or signals which travel in the medium of sound. By converting ideas in the mind into physical impulses in the world, information is trans- mitted. But the thunder is not transmitting a message.

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this model does not posit the self in advance of the person’s entry into the world; rather, the self is constituted as a centre of agency and awareness in the process of its active engagement within an environment. Feeling, remembering, intending and speaking are all aspects of that engagement, and through it the self continually comes into being.

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different view of speech, not as the outward expression of inner thoughts, but as one of the ways in which the self manifests its presence in the world. Thus when I speak or clap, I myself am not separate from the sound I produce – of my voice or the mutually percussive impact of my hands. These sounds are part of the way I am, they belong to my being as it issues forth into the environment. In other words, speech is not a mode of transmitting information or mental content; it is a way of being alive.

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under no circumstances can the inner essence of the person, the soul, be a direct object of visual perception. ‘What can be perceived visually is only that aspect of being that has some form or structure . . . The only sensory mode under which it is possible to directly perceive the presence of souls . . . is the auditory one’

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Responding to that presence with sensitivity and understanding is not therefore a matter of translation. It is more a matter of empathy.

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Animism, he writes, is ‘a kind of objectification of nature [which] endows natural beings not only with human dispositions, granting them the status of persons with human emotions and often the ability to talk, but also with social attributes – a hierarchy of positions, behaviours based on kinship, respect for certain norms of conduct’

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Whereas animism takes the relational character of the world as an ontological a priori, against which the ‘naturalness’ of beings – the material forms in which they appear – stands out as unstable and problematic, naturalism takes it for granted that nature really exists, as an ontological domain of order and necessity where things are what they are, in themselves.

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place the mode of under- standing of Western science within the context of the primary existential condition, revealed in Ojibwa thought and practice, of being alive to the world.

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I suggested that what the Ojibwa have arrived at is not an alternative science of nature but a poetics of dwelling. In the past, there has been a tendency to write off such poetics as the outpourings of a primitive mentality that has been superseded by the rise of the modern scientific worldview. My conclusion, to the contrary, is that scientific activity is always, and necessarily, grounded in a poetics of dwelling. Rather than sweeping it under the carpet, as an embarrassment, I believe this is something worth celebrating, and that doing so will also help us do better science.

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Totemism, animism and the depiction of animals

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Obviously, to say of a figure that it depicts an animal is to suggest that it bears some iconic resemblance to the creature in question. It does not necessarily follow, however, that the one represents the other

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association of clans with species is a corollary of a more fundamental set of linkages between people, land and ancestral beings.

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forms life takes are already given,

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life is itself generative of form.

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the powers that bring forth life, instead of being concentrated in the land itself, are rather distributed among the mani- fold beings that inhabit it. There is no power source, analogous to the totemic ancestors of Aboriginal cosmology, that subtends the life process itself.

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People of course have to hunt (as well as gather) to secure a livelihood, but the actual pursuit of animals lacks cosmological significance.

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In an animic system, on the other hand, hunting effects the circulation of vital force between humans and animals and thus contributes directly to the regeneration of the lifeworld of which both are part.

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The connection, in other words, lies in the essential consubstantiality of members of the human group, and of the animal species, all of whom derive the lineaments of their being from the same place in the landscape in which is deposited the creativity of the kangaroo ancestor.

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Ancestry, generation, substance, memory, land

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Does not the conflation of the two terms, indigenous and aboriginal, merely perpetuate a thoroughly Eurocentric image of the precolonial world as a mosaic of cultures and territories that was already fixed in perpetuity before history began?

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On what grounds can contemporary generations partake of the ‘originality’ of their predecessors?

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the genealogical model fundamentally misrepresents the ways in which the peoples whom we class as indi- genous – that is, who are regarded as such from a sympathetic, anthropologically informed perspective – actually constitute their identity, knowledgeability, and the environments in which they live.

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both cultural knowledge and bodily substance are seen to undergo contin- uous generation in the context of an ongoing engagement with the land

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it is in confronting the need to articulate their experience in an idiom compatible with the dominant discourses of the state that people are led to lay claim to indigenous status, in terms that neverthe- less systematically invert their own understandings.

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formal attempts to define the indigenous can only be understood in the political context

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an example of a way of thinking about what it means to be indigenous which, I believe, is symptomatic of more fundamental patterns of thought.

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THE GENEALOGICAL MODEL

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Concern for the heritage of indigenous peoples is thus tempered by a perception that they, in turn, represent an essential part of the heritage of global humanity. Their place is understood to lie at the foot of the tree of human culture.

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Land is there to be occupied, but does not itself contribute to the constitution of its occupants. It therefore lies outside of history.

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the essential or substantive components of personhood are ‘handed on’, fully-formed, as an endowment from predecessors. Their origins, in other words, lie in the completed past, rather than in the present lives of recipients.

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Introduction to PART II - Dwelling

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the dwelling perspective. By this I mean a perspective that treats the immersion of the organism-person in an environment or lifeworld as an inescapable condition of existence.

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the world continually comes into being around the inhabitant, and its manifold constituents take on significance through their incorporation into a regular pattern of life activity.

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Culture, perception and cognition

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Take people from different backgrounds and place them in the same situation; they are likely to differ in what they make of it. Indeed such difference is something that every anthropologist experiences in the initial phases of fieldwork. But why should this be so? How do we account for it?

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ECOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY

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perceptual activity consists not in the operation of the mind upon the bodily data of sense, but in the intentional movement of the whole being (indissolubly body and mind) in its environment.

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for Gibson, sensations do not, as such, constitute the data for perception (Gibson 1979: 55). Rather, what the perceiver looks for are constancies underlying the continuous modulations of the sensory array as one moves from place to place.

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to perceive an object or event is to perceive what it affords. Perhaps the most fundamental contribution of Gibson’s approach to perception lay in his insight that the information picked up by an agent in the context of practical activity specifies what are called the ‘affordances’ of objects and events in the environment

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contrary to the axioms of cognitive anthropology, the communion of experience that lies at the heart of sociality does not depend upon the organisation of sensory data, initially private to each perceiver, in terms of an objective system of collective representations. Rather, sociality is given from the start, prior to the objectification of experience in cultural categories, in the direct, perceptual involvement of fellow participants in a shared environment

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PHENOMENOLOGY

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Building, dwelling, living: how animals and people make themselves at home in the world

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The most fundamental thing about life is that it does not begin here or end there, but is always going on.

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CONSTRUCTING ENVIRONMENTS AND MAKING WORLDS

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The difference between the lodge and the house lies, I argued, not in the construction of the thing itself, but in the origination of the design that governs the construction process.

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They are only being made, I claimed, when they are constructed in the imag- ination prior to their realisation in the material

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Without altering the stone in any way, you have made a hammer out of it.

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the stone was co-opted, rather than constructed, to become a hammer.

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I concluded that ‘making is equivalent to the cultural ordering of nature – the inscription of ideal design upon the material world of things’ (Ingold 1989: 506). This statement, I confess, is now a source of considerable embarrassment.

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THE BUILDING PERSPECTIVE

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THE SEARCH FOR ORIGINS

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THE DWELLING PERSPECTIVE

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what does it take for a house to be a home

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encompassed the whole manner in which one lives one’s life on the earth; thus ‘I dwell, you dwell’ is identical to ‘I am, you are’. Yet bauen has another sense: to preserve, to care for, or more specifically to cultivate or to till the soil. And then there is the third sense: to construct, to make something, to raise up an edifice.

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‘We do not dwell because we have built, but we build and have built because we dwell, that is because we are dwellers . . . To build is in itself already to dwell . . . Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build

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THE HOUSE AS ORGANISM

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The temporality of the landscape

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Globes and spheres: the topology of environmentalism

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To journey along a way of life: maps, wayfinding and navigation

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INTRODUCTION

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the native inhabitant may be unable to specify his location in space, in terms of any independent system of coordinates, and yet will still insist with good cause that he knows where he is.

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places do not have locations but histories. Bound

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COGNITIVE MAPS

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wayfinding is understood as a skilled performance in which the traveller, whose powers of perception and action have been fine-tuned through previous experience, ‘feels his way’ towards his goal, continually adjusting his movements in response to an ongoing perceptual monitoring of his surroundings. What the first approach explains through positing an isomorphism between structures in the world and structures in the mind, the second explains as the unfolding of a field of relations established through the immersion of the actor-perceiver within a given environmental context.

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goes beyond the simple computational operations described by cogni- tive map theorists. For the environment within which people find their way about is not, as Tolman would have it, a ‘great God-given maze’, with all its landmarks, routes, open- ings and obstructions already laid out in advance. It is rather an immensely variegated terrain of comings and goings, which is continually taking shape around the traveller even as the latter’s movements contribute to its formation.

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WHAT IS A MAP ANYWAY?

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define the map as ‘any system of spatial knowledge and/or beliefs which takes the form of non-token-indexical statements about the spatial locations of places and objects’

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the difference between the image and the map comes to hinge on the criterion of the indexicality or non-indexicality of its tokens.

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mere possession of a map, whether mental or artefactual, will not help you to find your way around unless you can use it to generate location-specific images for comparison with immediate perceptual experience.

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what the map affords is a representation of things in space that is independent of any particular point of view.

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every map is necessarily embedded in a ‘form of life’. And to the extent that it is so embedded, it must fail on the criterion of non-indexicality.

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The expert mariner has committed to memory an entire compendium of star courses, each unique to a particular pair of islands, and it is in this compendium, according to Gell, that his ‘map’ consists.

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here is the paradox: actual maps are made to appear indexical with regard to cultural tradition only by a rendering of culture as non-indexical with regard to locality.

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what maps index is movement, that the vision they embody is not local but regional, but that the ambition of modern cartography has been to convert this regional vision into a global one,

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HOW TO SEE THE WORLD FROM EVERYWHERE AT ONCE

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It is not a view from ‘up there’ rather than ‘down here’, but one taken along the multiple paths that make up a country, and along which people come and go in the practical conduct of life. Our perception of the environment as a whole, in short, is forged not in the ascent from a myopic, local perspective to a panoptic, global one, but in the passage from place to place, and in histories of movement and changing horizons along the way.

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KNOWING AS YOU GO

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difficulty in Turnbull’s argument. For while on the one hand, he insists that a common characteristic of all knowledge systems is their ‘localness’, he also argues, on the other, that what is critical to the growth and reproduction of any knowledge system is the work that goes into moving its diverse components – including practitioners, their know-how and skills, technical devices and standards of evaluation – from one local site of knowledge production to another

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Much of the labour of science, Turnbull argues, lies in attempts to establish the connectivity and equivalence that would render procedures developed and results obtained in one local context applica- ble in another

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‘all knowing is like travelling, like a journey between the parts of a matrix’ (1991: 35). So what is this matrix? It is, of course, a region in the sense defined above – that is, as the sum of journeys made.

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‘we go from one local knowledge to another rather than from universal theo- ries to their particular instantiations’

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one of the most striking characteristics of the modern map is its elimination, or erasure, of the practices and itineraries that contributed to its production

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MAPPING IS NOT MAPMAKING

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The map, like the written word, is not, in the first place, the transcription of anything, but rather an inscription. Thus mapping gives way to mapmaking at the point, not where mental imagery yields an external representation, but where the performative gesture becomes an inscriptive practice

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regard mapping as the re-enactment, in narrative gesture, of the experience of moving from place to place within a region.

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Undoubtedly the vast majority of maps that have ever been produced in human societies, like those of the Inuit, have been improvised on the spot within a particular dialogic or storytelling context, and without any intention for their preservation or use beyond that context.

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In the course of producing such a map, the mapper takes his interlocutors on a tour of the country, and as he does so his moving hand, which may or may not hold an inscribing implement, traces out the paths taken and the sights or landmarks encountered along the way.

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studies of native North American and Inuit maps have shown that they invariably rest on deictic principles: that is, they point to things, revealing aspects of how they look as one proceeds along a path of observation from ‘here’ to ‘there’

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people continue to describe their environment, to themselves and others, by retracing the paths of movement they customarily take through it rather than by assigning each of its features to a fixed loca- tion in space.

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‘written records were thought of and treated as reminders rather than representa- tions’

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just as the process of its production is eliminated from the final form of the product, so the world it describes is not a world in the making, but one ready-made for life to occupy. It is this, finally, that lies behind the distinction between the map and the picture, as alternative descriptions of the same country.

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to edge art off the map is also to edge human actor-perceivers off the world,

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WAYFINDING IS NOT NAVIGATION

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‘Navigation’, writes Edwin Hutchins, ‘is a collection of techniques for answering a small number of questions, perhaps the most central of which is “Where am I?”’

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according to Hutchins, one must possess some representation of space – a map – whether internal or external, inscribed in the mind or on a sheet of paper, within which every object or feature in one’s environment is assigned a determinate location. One has then to be able to establish a coherent set of correspondences between what is depicted on the map and what is visible in one’s surroundings.

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insist, however, that reduced to its bare essentials, navigation is a cognitive task that all of us face all the time as we find our way about, whether at sea or on land.

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Navigation (or map-using) is, I contend, as strange to the ordinary practices of wayfinding as is cartography (or mapmaking) to ordinary practices of mapping.

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hard to imagine why we should find the navigator’s charts so baffling, or why his skills should be so specialised, if they were but analogues of cognitive structures and capacities that we use all the time.

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For those who know a country, in short, the answers to such basic questions as ‘Where am I?’ and ‘Which way should I go?’ are found in narratives of past movement.

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PATHS, FLOWS AND THE PASSAGE OF TIME

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‘the theory of reversible occlusion’ (1979: 198). In brief, the theory states that one knows the way in terms of the specific order in which the surfaces of the environment come into or pass out of sight as one proceeds along a path.

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Just as with musical performance, wayfinding has an essentially temporal character (1996: 112): the path, like the musical melody, unfolds over time rather than across space.

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the path is specified not as a sequence of point-indexical images, but as the coming-into- sight and passing-out-of-sight of variously contoured and textured surfaces.

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once it is recognised that the wayfinder’s multi- sensory monitoring is of flows, not images, and that flows specify paths and not spatial locations, Gell’s objections to the idea of mapless practical mastery fall away.

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The alleged bearing of the etak does not enter into any numerical computation. Rather, pointing to the etak is the mariner’s way of indicating where he is in terms of the temporal unfolding of the voyage as a whole

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THE WORLD HAS NO SURFACE

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the world is apprehended from within. One makes one’s way through it, not over or across it.

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In short for its manifold inhabitants, journeying along their respective ways of life, the world itself has no surface.

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If a map consists of a network of interconnected lines, each corresponding to a path of movement through the world, there is no necessary reason why these lines should be inscribed on a surface. One could think of the gesturing hand, in mapping, as a weaving hand rather than a drawing hand, and of the result as something more akin to a cat’s cradle than a graph.

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one could construct a route map for the London Underground out of stiff wire, soldered at the intersections, and it would serve just as well as the conventional printed versions. The fact that the map is generally reproduced on paper is a matter of obvious practical conven- ience, but not of logical necessity. The meaning of the map lies entirely in its routes and intersections, whereas the paper surface has no significance whatsoever.

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CONCLUSION

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It is not that the map must leave things out if critical information is not to be drowned in a welter of ever finer particulars. It is rather that the world of our experience is a world suspended in movement, that is continually coming into being as we – through our own movement – contribute to its formation.

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to suggest that what is excluded in the cartographic reduction amounts, in Monmonier’s words, to a ‘fog of detail’ – is perverse, to say the least (Wood 1992: 76). For it is no less than the stuff of life itself.

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Stop, look and listen! Vision, hearing and human movement

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perception is not an ‘inside-the head’ operation, performed upon the raw material of sensation, but takes place in circuits that cross-cut the boundaries between brain, body and world.

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vision and hearing are radically opposed, as different as is standing on the river bank, watching the water flow by, from being tossed in with the current.

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So too, Heidegger would have said, we hear the train before the noise it makes. But this view is not easily reconciled with everyday experience.

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Light and sound are, in essence, the undersides of the experiences of seeing and hearing respectively.

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they are virtually indistinguishable: vision is a kind of hearing, and vice versa. This argument eventually leads me to reject the thesis that attributes the dominance of objective thinking in the West to an obsession with the eye.

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VISION OBJECTIFIES, SOUND PERSONIFIES

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vision, since it is untainted by the subjective experience of light, yields a knowledge of the outside world that is rational, detached, analytical and atomistic. Hearing, on the other hand, since it rests on the immediate experience of sound, is said to draw the world into the perceiver, yielding a kind of knowledge that is intuitive, engaged, synthetic and holistic.

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the denigration of vision is as ancient as is its elevation to the top of the hierarchy of the senses.

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THE WRITTEN WORD AND THE SOUNDS OF SPEECH

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In his influential study, The Gutenberg Galaxy, Marshall McLuhan (1962) argued that the invention of the printing press ushered in an entirely new era in the history of human culture, marked by the absolute dominance of the eye, and with it a bias towards a way of thinking that is objective and analytic, and that follows a linear path of explicit logical connections.

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one of McLuhan’s associates, Walter Ong, sought to derive all the essen- tial characteristics of ‘orally based thought and expression’ from the features that distinguish hearing from vision. Oral culture, he claimed, is aggregating, harmonic and holistic rather than dissecting, analytic and atomistic; concrete and situationally specific rather than abstract and context-independent; and focused on persons rather than things.

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It is in his contention that the listener in a ‘primarily oral’ culture hears words as sound, rather than as images shaped in sound, that Ong takes issue with Saussure

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VISION AND HEARING IN ANTHROPOLOGY

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McLuhan, Carpenter and Ong effectively laid the foundations for a 1 currently vibrant field of inquiry that has come to be known as the anthropology of the 2 senses

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ku-mba, in the Suyá language, translates not only as ‘to hear’ but also as ‘to understand’ and ‘to know’. It is the ability to ‘hear-understand-know’ well that defines the person as a fully social being.

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The sense of sight, to the contrary, is associated in Suyá thinking with morally delinquent, anti-social tendencies.

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The Umeda, like many other peoples of Papua New Guinea, inhabit an environment of dense, and virtually unbroken forest, in which things are visible only at close range, normally within a few tens of metres. Such an environment, Gell argues, ‘imposes a reorganisation of sensibility’, giving pride of place to hearing, along with smell (Gell 1995: 235). Thus out hunting, Umeda walk with their eyes to the ground, listening for game instead of looking for it,

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THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE SENSES: A FIRST CRITIQUE

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these distinctions may reflect more upon the preconceptions of anthropological analysts

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The true ‘seer’ of the Western tradition is the blind prophet: in Seeger’s words, ‘one who physically cannot see’

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In the cosmology of the Yup’ik Eskimos, according to Anne Fienup-Riordan, ‘vision was an act constituting knowledge, and witnessing was a potentially creative act’ (1994: 316). The Eskimo cosmos, it transpires, teems with ever-watchful eyes.

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Yet to the extent that he depends on powers of vision rather than hearing, the Inuit hunter does not, in consequence, find his relation with the world turned inside out. He remains, like his Umeda counterpart, at the centre of a dynamic cosmos, caught up in the process of its perpetual generation. Beings do not, all at once, appear to him inert and thinglike, nor does the hunter feel himself any more an observer, or any less a participant.

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what is at stake is not the priority of vision over hearing, but the understanding of vision itself. Evidently, the primacy of vision cannot be held to account for the objectification of the world. Rather the reverse; it is through its co-option in the service of a peculiarly modern project of objectification that vision has been reduced to a faculty of pure, disinterested reflection, whose role is merely to deliver up ‘things’ to a transcendent consciousness.

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very narrow and impoverished concept of vision to which its enlist- ment in the project of modernity has brought us.

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we know what it means to hear sound but have effectively lost touch with the experience of light.

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THE OPTICS OF DESCARTES

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in the Western philosophical tradition, it is above all to touch rather than hearing that sight has been compared.

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In defence of Descartes, it is important to recognise two aspects of this account which are often overlooked. First, it was plain to him that perception – whether visual or tactile – depended on movement. Were there no movement of the body and its sensory organs relative to the environment, nothing would be perceived. Ironically, this point has been lost in much of the subsequent psychology of vision, only to be rediscovered by advocates of an ecological approach to visual per- ception who adopt an explicitly anti-Cartesian stance.

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Descartes did not, as is commonly supposed, argue that the function of the eyes is to establish internal representations of external objects,

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As a purely cognitive faculty, vision can also work upon the data of touch. Equipped with a stick, or even with bare hands, the blind can see! So can sighted people, walking without a light on a pitch dark night

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vision, now conceived as an exclu- sively intellectual achievement, is no longer conditioned in any way by the embodied experience of inhabiting an illuminated world.

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the eyes, that look but cannot see, hand over to the ‘I’, the Cartesian cogito, who sees but cannot look.

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the superiority of vision over touch is not that of one sense over another, but that of cognition over sensation.

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ON THE MEANING OF LIGHT

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Questions about the meaning of light, as of sound, are surely wrongly posed if they force us to choose between regarding light and sound as either physical or mental phenomena. They are wrongly posed because they continue to regard the organs of sense as gateways between an external, physical world and an internal world of mind.

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Hans Jonas

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The distinctiveness of sight, for Jonas, lies in three properties that are unique to this sensory modality: namely, simultaneity, neutralisation and distance

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what Jonas calls neutralisation, lies in the disengagement between the perceiver and the seen.

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James Gibson

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it is difficult to see how ‘manifestations of light’ can possibly be distinguished from ‘light as such’ without resorting to a highly reductive notion of what light actually is.

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Maurice Merleau-Ponty

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Do you have the impression that you are staring out upon the world through a hole (or perhaps two holes) in the front of your head? Is it as though you were looking through the windows of your unlit house, having opened the shutters?15 Far from it. Rather, it seems that you are out there yourself, shamelessly mingling with all you see, and flitting around like an agile spirit from one place to another as the focus of your attention shifts. It is as if the walls and ceiling of your house had simply vanished, leaving you out in the open. In short, you experience seeing not as seeing out, but as being out

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vision ‘is the means given me for being absent from myself

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we have progressed from a notion of vision as a mode of speculation, to one of vision as a mode of participation, and finally to one of vision as a mode of being.

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THE HEARING EYE AND THE SEEING EAR

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close parallels between the way Zuckerkandl speaks of the musical experience of sound, and the way Merleau- Ponty speaks of the painterly experience of light. These experiences, it turns out, are virtually identical.

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Introduction to PART III

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Tools, minds and machines: an excursion in the philosophy of technology

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Society, nature and the concept of technology

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Work, time and industry

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On weaving a basket

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Of string bags and birds' nests: skill and the construction of artefacts

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The dynamics of technical change

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'People like us': the concept of the anatomically modern human

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Speech, writing and the modern origins of 'language origins'

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The poetics of tool-use: from technology, language and intelligence to craft, song and imagination

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Notes

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References

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Index

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