The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill.
by Yasushi Uchiyamada INGOLD, TIM. The perception of the environment: essays in livelihood, dwelling and skill. xiv, 445 pp., diagr., illus., bibliogr. London, New York: Routledge, 2000. [pounds sterling]21.99 (paper)
The perception of the environment (hereafter PE) is a formidable work in terms of its intellectual breadth (engaging Gibson, Bateson, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Descartes, ethnographies of hunting and gathering, music, paintings, masks, tools, buildings, and more), its sheer volume (with twenty-three chapters in small print), and methodical consistency and clarity (using the method of speculative dialectics in reverse throughout). The problem it proposes to tackle is the nature/culture dichotomy and its variants that haunt modern and Western thought about the world, which, according to Ingold, is far removed from the realities of lived experience. In order to overcome this disabling dichotomy, Ingold introduces a third term, namely the phenomenological understanding of mind out there in the world. In these twenty-three chapters he attempts to synthesize the dichotomized human being--as a social person and a biological organism--via an ecological mind (or via a dwelling perspective or skilled practice) combined with a procedure of reversal. The themes covered by PE are: sentient ecology (chap. 1), evolutionary ecology (chap. 2), embedded perception of environment (chap. 3), trust between hunters and prey (chap. 4), raising plants, animals, and children (chap. 5), poetics of dwelling (chap. 6), from science to art (chap. 7), misleading genealogical models (chap. 8), perception and cognition (chap. 9), the Heideggerian dwelling perspective (chap. 10), landscape and temporality (chap. 11), the earth as a globe (chap. 12), maps (chap. 13), the anthropology of the senses (chap. 14), design and execution (chap. 15), skilled practice (chap. 16), the centrality of task orientation (chap. 17), weaving (chap. 18), the nature of technical skills (chap. 19), technical change and evolution (chap. 20), human beings and environment (chap. 21), language origins (chap. 22), and poetic aspects of tool uses (chap. 23). Chapter 1 provides an overall idea of what the book is about. I found chapters 6, 7, and 8--with rich ethnographic insights--particularly interesting. Yet by the time I arrived at chapters 13 and 14, which are the 'summit' of the book and which are undoubtedly of high quality, I found them (and the subsequent chapters) repetitive in terms of the agenda and the method. Ingold himself notes, 'Everything I have written since [the revelation in 1988] has been driven by this agenda' (3). The clarity of the argument is at once admirable and disturbing.First, let me spell out its blind spot: the political. In the opening paragraph Ingold tells us about his conversion from natural science to social anthropology in Cambridge when he found that the former had reneged democratic responsibility and had become subservient to the military-industrial complex. (This is the only section in which Ingold refers to the political.) I believe that social science departments in the university face exactly the same politics as natural science departments. What concerns me here is the disappearance of the political in the subsequent pages. The political as the blind spot seems to be exerting political effects through the repetition that emphasizes the reversal. I am particularly disturbed by the use of an ahistorical and depoliticized version of Heidegger. (This must have been exacerbated by the use of Hubert Dreyfus's instrumentalist reading of Heidegger.) Yet as Veronique Foti suggests elsewhere, Heidegger is silent about the otherness of the Other and about the death of remembering of the Other when he discusses poetry. Heidegger's dwelling, too, forecloses the existence of the Other in the Black Forest. Merleau-Ponty was sensitive to natural, social, historical, and political aspects of the world. Yet his political sensitivity does not find a place in PE. Ingold employs Deleuze and Guattari's A thousand plateaus to defend his 'relational model' (chap. 8), which is ineffective, for the rhizome logic is incompatible with the Hegelian triangle even when put in reverse. Neither the political problematic of their works, nor their methodological radicalism (which is anti-Hegelian) supports the method, and hence the thesis, of PE. Moreover, the realities of lived experience, which Ingold unproblematically refers to as the basis of his speculative synthesis in reverse, are not merely natural and social, but also historical and political (and even 'biopolitical'). A synthesis that excludes the political is therefore untenable. Similarly a critique of modernity that focuses on modern rationality but excludes the modern state is politically blind. These limited cases point to the same blind spot--the ...
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