Table of Contents

Part I: Livelihood 1. Culture, nature, environment: steps to an ecology of life 2. The optimal forager and economic man 3. Hunting and gathering as ways of perceiving the environment 4. From trust to domination: an alternative history of human-animal relations 5. Making things, growing plants, raising animals and bringing up children 6. A circumpolar night's dream 7. Totemism, animism and the depiction of animals 8. Ancestry, substance, memory, land Part II: Dwelling 9. Culture, perception and cognition 10. Building, dwelling, living: how animals and people make themselves at home in the world 11. The temporality of the landscape 12. Globes and spheres: the topology of environmentalism 13. To journey along a way of life: maps, wayfinding and navigation 14. Stop, look and listen! Vision, hearing and human movement Part III: Skill 15. Tools, minds and machines: an excursion in the philosophy of technology 16. Society, nature and the concept of technology 17. Work, time and industry 18. On weaving a basket 19. Of string bags and birds' nests: Skill and the construction of artefacts 20. The dynamics of technical change 21. 'People like us': the concept of the anatomically modern human 22. Speech, writing and the modern origins of 'language origins' 23. The poetics of tool-use: from technology, language and intelligence to craft, song and imagination

About the Author

Tim Ingold is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. He is the author of many books, including Lines, Making, Imagining for Real and Being Alive.

Reviews

"Tim Ingold's rigorous and imaginative approach to modes of perception as practices involving entire organisms in relations with others is unmatched in contemporary anthropology. This work, drawing on scholarship from across the arts and sciences, addresses foundational questions within and well beyond anthropology's four fields. His new preface outlining some of the ways he has since developed these ideas is inspirational."

Gillian Feeley-Harnik, University of Michigan, USA"The Perception of the Environment is a formidable work in terms of its intellectual breadth ... its sheer volume ... and methodical consistency and clarity."Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute" ... this is an extremely significant book and quite possibly lives up to its promise "to revolutionize the way we think". The book's power lies in its ability to push readers to places previously unimagined ... it is imperative that this book be read by as many people from as broad an audience as possible."Anthropological Forum