Using hunter-gatherers to bridge the nature-culture gap

This book brings together 23 of Tim Ingold's essays from the past 15 years, a collection completed as he finished his move from Manchester University's department of social anthropology to a chair at the University of Aberdeen. Most have been previously published in one form or another, while two have been written for this volume. The collection is an opportunity to draw breath and take stock before moving on again. And certainly, looking over the range of subjects covered and the level of erudition in this volume, a pause is more than necessary to assess Ingold's contribution to anthropology and to the analysis of human-environment relations more broadly.

An immediately striking aspect of the collection is the consistency of Ingold's conceptualisation and argument. While there has certainly been revision, it is clear that Ingold's approach to his main concern - how to understand and study human involvement with the environment - is at once sustained, flexible and rich. Ingold can date the day when he realised that another approach was needed to grasp the complexity of this topic - a Saturday morning in April 1988. Walking for a bus, he realised that the dualism that defines, generates and separates so many positions within the study of human-environment relations - that a human being is made up of two distinct components, one biological and one socio-cultural, each of which requires discrete study - is, a priori , an insufficient conceptualisation. It is insufficient because the outcome of this division is to render the human an entity apart, neither quite of the world nor quite in the world. And so, throughout the volume, Ingold works empirically and theoretically to traverse the deep epistemological schisms within western thought that give rise to and reinforce this dualism, constantly pointing out the developmental and dynamic aspects of human and non-human existence that are ruled out in advance by the idealisation of either biological or social structure. In this manner, he sets the stage for redescribing the tasks and objects of the anthropologist and redistributing modes of explanation away from the securities and reifications of either neo-Darwinism or social constructivism.

Of course, as Ingold readily acknowledges, his insight into the insufficiency of contemporary ways of framing the human vis-a-vis the environment is not new. The essays in this volume are underpinned by a careful and critical exposition of the environmental psychology of J. J. Gibson and the phenomenology of Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, an exposition that makes sense only together with the practical understanding Ingold has gained from his sustained involvement in the lives of hunter-gatherers. Indeed, it is Ingold's investigation and valorisation of the practical and of practice, of the non-representational, and of ways of being-in-the-world that form the critical departure point for all his essays. Throughout, Ingold offers a sustained critique of approaches that seek to frame the lived and living environment as "nature"; something that humans must reconstruct through metaphors and myths drawn from the realm of culture. His is a doubly articulated critique that exposes at once the presuppositions bound up with the constructivist idea of a nature infinitely separated from meaning and the biological presuppositions, that this nature is knowable "as it really is" through applying abstract reason. Working between these positions, Ingold draws attention to the involved way in which environment and organism are bound up in historical developmental processes. This discussion takes place across an array of case studies mainly drawn from studies of hunter-gatherers, examples that incessantly point out the middle ground between nature and culture, the human and the non-human, mind and world.

Impatient readers may cast Ingold as a postmodernist, as one who introduces a not-so-subtle critique of science through a loose, interdisciplinary holism. Indeed, there is a slight danger of romanticism in a number of Ingold's accounts, and the Heideggerian conceptualisation of dwelling that is mobilised throughout the text should perhaps be subjected to more critical attention. However, to accuse Ingold of being anti-science is to fail to pay attention to his investigations. This is a perceptive work of epistemological questioning, one that promises to open new fields for inquiry through the dissolving of apparently intractable dichotomies. This collection is a major contribution to anthropology. It marks an opportunity for those involved in such investigation to pause and to reconsider how they should continue.

Paul Harrison is lecturer in geography, University of Durham.