Beyond Perception by Caroline Gatt

Beyond Perception by Caroline Gatt

This book showcases the way a range of scholars have engaged with Tim Ingold’s opus since the publication of his ground-breaking The Perception of the Environment in 2000. Ingold’s work has become key for a variety of disciplines ranging from anthropology, archaeology, and human geography to art, architecture, design and studies of material and visual culture. As set out in The Perception of the Environment and subsequent publications, Ingold proposed an understanding of the world that placed sentient, remembering and imagining organisms, or inhabitants, some of them human, at the heart of an extensive field of socio-ecological relations. In this work, Ingold develops broad-ranging analyses of personhood, knowledge and skills, among many other topics. This volume sets out to synthesize critical scholarship drawing on Ingold’s work, to lay out its principles, methods and results, and to demonstrate its contribution to reshaping both contemporary anthropology and wider intellectual terrains. By bringing together chapters from a variety of scholars, all critically furthering Ingold’s proposals, the book advances a paradigm change occurring in various academic disciplines from “fixist” to “emergence” onto/epistemologies.

“Beyond Perception is a loving and creative analysis of the main themes so caringly and revealing explored throughout Ingold’s oeuvre –a wayfaring of sorts by the chapter authors, woven of Ingoldian lines and threads: embodiment, movement, place, landscape, history, becoming, knowledge, enskillment, art, education, ecology, sentience, even theologyIt richly displays the enormous significance of Tim Ingold’s philosophical anthropology for understanding our existential predicaments, for it is, ultimately, about life itself, and about worldmaking and design writ large. This superb collection vividly shows why Ingold’s work is fundamental to a much-needed transition of the human sciences towards relational ontologies of emergence. Above all, Beyond Perception is a celebration of the rich intellectual journey through the landscapes of life and thought by one of today’s wisest elders of an alternative West.”

- Arturo Escobar, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA

“This utterly inspiring book is a must-read for anyone studying more-than-human perception and complex learning ecologies. Each chapter offers fascinating detail of relational worlds made all the more alive by the far-reaching insights of Tim Ingold.”

- Elizabeth de Freitas, Adelphi University, USA

“Beyond Perception, a collection of essays on one of the most important anthropologists of our time, is not hagiographic in any sense – which would be utterly inappropriate – but wild: like Ingold’s own work, it assembles a wide range of diverse topics and methodologies, constantly reflecting on our relation to the natural world without necessarily conforming to disciplinary divisions. The book is an exercise in thinking from and with Ingold, in drawing out lines that he started, in communicating, collaborating, and developing perspectives that sometimes diverge from Ingold but retain a distinctive feel, a methodological and philosophical freedom that he practiced and engendered. The reader has a sense of being welcomed into a unique community of looking, listening, and thinking.”

- Christian Grüny, State University of Music and Performing Arts Stuttgart, Germany

Caroline Gatt is a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology at the University of Graz, Austria.

Jan Peter Laurens Loovers is an independent researcher and curator based in Aberdeen, UK.