AustLit

'In his book The perception of the environment (2011), anthropologist Tim Ingold critiques a paradigmatic opposition that has long underpinned modern understandings of western civilisation: the opposition of practices of food production (agriculture) to practices of food collection (hunting and gathering). He points out that underlying this opposition ‘is a master narrative about how human beings, through their mental and bodily labour, have progressively raised themselves above the purely natural level of existence to which all other animals are confined, and so doing have built themselves a history of civilisation' (Ingold 2000: 78). While we now recognise the racist logic of modern evolutionist thought, the systematic domination of land and animals remains central to western schema of modernisation. Consequently, we tend not to see the practices of peoples who survived according to a land-based ethic of interdependency and stewardship as equally constitutive of human history. The central injunction of Ingold’s book, one informed by anthropological analyses of many kinds of societies and that applies to both sides of this opposition, is that we properly recognise the ecological character of human ontology. Notwithstanding our cognitive capacity to objectify and set ourselves apart from our world, our subjectivity is formed through our interrelatedness with the human, non-human and material components of our environment. This means that rather than viewing human history as a process by which we have asserted our reason and will upon nature and the other materials of the earth, Ingold urges us to see history as ‘the process wherein both people and their environments are continually bringing each other into being’ (2000: 87).' (Introduction)