The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling, and Skill (review)

The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling, and Skill. By Tim Ingold. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Pp. xiv+465. $36.99.

Tim Ingold's work has focused on hunters and gatherers, particularly in reindeer economies, and on pedagogically useful syntheses: a companion encyclopedia and a volume of key debates in his field, anthropology. These parts of his own practice/evolution/history inflect this hefty volume. Here he mounts an expedition to cull linguistically inscribed mind-body dualisms as modes of reasoning about environmental perception and set in their former place the practices by which whole living organisms dwell in and, by dwelling, incorporate the landscapes and "taskscapes" around them.

The reconceptualization that Ingold posits is radical. Bodily incorporation succeeds mindful inscription as the storehouse of perception. Meaning is gathered up from the environment in which the body is immersed, and there recursively regenerated. This sensing body makes meaning directly through its performance in the environment rather than waiting for direction on a categorically ordered cognitive grid of the mind. A generation after the linguistic turn, Ingold's sortie presents a considerable challenge for historians. His intervention may be less unsettling for historians of technology than for our colleagues in social and cultural history, though with that contention he would surely, unequivocally, and thus characteristically disagree.

Generalizing from James Gibson's 1979 Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, Ingold posits persons as organisms whose social relations are but a subset of their ecological relations, their capabilities "of action and perception" inherent in their whole organic being, "indissolubly mind and body" (p. 5), these capabilities continuously regenerated by their engagement with the land and the beings who dwell there. We learn in a specific environment; our life histories are accretions intertwined with others by shared experience in particular places; we do not "build" but dwell; our cultural knowledge is not imported into the settings in which we dwell but developed there as "specific dispositions and sensibilities" that lead us to orient ourselves in relation to our environment "and to attend to its features in particular ways" (p. 153).

This is indubitably not social construction. Drawing on selected strands in the writing of Bourdieu and Merleau-Ponty, Ingold argues that cultural differences arise from different bodily attunings made amid the different environments in which body organisms dwell. Meanings are not attached to the world, by a subjugation of the body to the semantic, but gathered and continually worked out anew in activity and interactivity. The history of these actions is held in the "muscular consciousness" (p. 204) of the body as it is in the traces this physical presence leaves in the landscape and taskscape.

It is easier to feature these bodies intertwined in their environment in groups of hunter-gatherers, or perhaps in the eighteenth-century weavers botanizing on their Sunday walks in the vicinity of their villages, than to make the reach to the concrete, glass, and metal world of urban and industrial environments. Yet the work of Harry Collins on technique in laboratory settings and of Karen Bijsterveld on noise in the city (both published in the February 2001 issue of Social Studies of Science) follow Michael Polanyi's studies of tacit knowledge toward bodily knowledge through practice and habit in ways that Ingold would recognize as "muscular consciousness."

Around the middle of the volume, Ingold turns to sensory anthropology, technology and skill. Here his own history of writing companion volumes and introductions to scholarly debates—tasks where excising his colleagues' work of nuance and caveat is required in order to achieve pedagogical clarity—begins to weaken the usefulness of his analysis for historians of technology who would seek to make common cause with his concerns. David Howes and Constance Classen, in their explorations in sensory anthropology, do not posit thorough and irrevocable successions in the sensorium. The Oxford History of Technology did not—as readers of this journal well...