Abstract
Where to place culture in the nexus of human–environment relations has long been a problem for ecological anthropology. The theory of affordances offers a possible resolution. It shows how the meanings of things, far from being assigned to them by human minds equipped with the concepts and categories of a tradition, can be discovered directly through immediate perceptual exploration. Cultural difference, then, lies in variations in skills of perception and action, developed through prior experience. Yet while the theory accords an active role to the perceiver, who lives, learns, and moves around, it treats the environment as already built. To rebalance the ecological equation, we need to acknowledge that environments, too, are always in formation. Thus, the world is not ready and waiting for the perceiver; the perceiver also has to wait upon the world. These correspond to two sides of attention: attunement and exposure. Their alternation is fundamental to life. Situating perceivers as participants in a worlding world offers a way to reconnect perception and imagination and opens affordance to pure possibility.
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Notes
- 1.
Perhaps the most famous articulation of the anthropological debate was by Marshall Sahlins, in his Culture and Practical Reason (Sahlins, 1976). Sahlins took the side of culture.
- 2.
Reed’s (1988) study, James J. Gibson and the Psychology of Perception, remains definitive.
- 3.
Spot the difference between this: “No animal could exist without an environment surrounding it. Equally … an environment implies an animal (or at least an organism) to be surrounded” (1979: 8), and this: “The organism depends on the environment for its life, but the environment does not depend on the organism for its existence” (1979: 129).
- 4.
This argument is developed at length in several of the constituent essays of my book The Perception of the Environment (Ingold, 2000).
- 5.
These correspond to the three kinds of signs, respectively indexical, iconic, and symbolic, which Peirce identified in his inquiry.
- 6.
In his last collection of essays, semiotician Thomas Sebeok declared the “two cardinal and reciprocal axioms of semiotics” to be that “all life is semiosis,” and that “semiosis presupposes life” (Sebeok, 2001: 10).
- 7.
From the Latin ex- (“out”) plus -positio (“position”). “To open our eyes is to get a look at what is evident,” writes philosopher of education Jan Masschelein; “it is, as I would like to say, about being or becoming attentive, it is to expose oneself” (Masschelein, 2010: 46).
- 8.
For a fuller discussion of kairos, see Hawhee (2004).
- 9.
According to philosopher Jacques Derrida, to anticipate is “to take the initiative, to be out in front, to take (capere) in advance (ante)” (Derrida, 1993: 4).
- 10.
In an essay first published in 1940, Jean-Paul Sartre had made an identical point: “No matter how long I may look at an image, I shall never find anything in it but what I put there.” Herein, he continued, lies the essential difference between an image and a perception, for in the latter “there is always, at each and every moment. Infinitely more than we see” (Sartre, 1972: 7–8).
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Ingold, T. (2022). Anthropological Affordances. In: Djebbara, Z. (eds) Affordances in Everyday Life. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08629-8_6
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