This course explores Tim Ingold’s radical challenge to the nature-culture divide that shapes Western thought. Through The Perception of the Environment–what may be anthropology’s most important work on human-environment relations–we’ll discover why dwelling skillfully in a more-than-human world requires abandoning the assumptions that separate humans from their surroundings.
About The Perception of the Environment
The Perception of the Environment presents 23 essays organized into three parts: Livelihood (human-environment engagement), Dwelling (perception and landscape), and Skill (making and technology). This foundational anthropological text challenges the nature-culture divide and argues that humans are organisms-in-the-world who develop skills through practice in their environments.
Tim Ingold’s work stands as one of the most beautiful and challenging texts in anthropology. Rather than treating humans as separate from nature–minds imposing culture onto a passive environment–Ingold reveals how we are always already embedded in our surroundings through skilled practice, movement, and dwelling.
I first encountered this book twenty years ago in 2005, when I assigned it not knowing what I was getting into. It was challenging–one student memorably wrote ‘Burn Ingold’ on every question of their teaching evaluation. But enough students connected with it that I kept teaching it across different courses: Contemporary Issues Seminars, Honors courses, Cultural Ecology, and History of Anthropological Thought. The book shaped how I teach anthropology and how I think about dwelling in the world. My physical copy has literally fallen apart from use–sections come loose, pages are dog-eared. After teaching Imagining for Real in 2025, I’m returning to Perception one more time for Spring 2026. Following Ingold’s original three-part structure (Livelihood, Dwelling, Skill) rather than my previous thematic reorganizations, this final engagement honors both the book’s brilliance and its limitations as a text from “the strange world of the 1990s.”
Video Lectures on The Perception of the Environment
These lectures were recorded for History of Anthropological Thought 2022 and cover key chapters from The Perception of the Environment alongside discussions of dwelling, skill, and human-environment relations:
Course Structure
PART I: LIVELIHOOD
Chapter One: Culture, nature, environment: steps to an ecology of life (13-26)
Chapter Two: The optimal forager and economic man (27-39)
Chapter Three: Hunting and gathering as ways of perceiving the environment (40-60)
Chapter Four: From trust to domination: an alternative history of human-animal relations (61-76)
Chapter Five: Making things, growing plants, raising animals and bringing up children (77-88)
Chapter Six: A circumpolar night’s dream (89-110)
Chapter Seven: Totemism, animism and the depiction of animals (111-131)
Chapter Eight: Ancestry, generation, substance, memory, land (132-151)
PART II: DWELLING
Chapter Nine: Culture, perception and cognition (157-171)
Chapter Ten: Building, dwelling, living (172-188)
Chapter Eleven: The temporality of the landscape (189-208)
Chapter Twelve: Globes and Spheres (209-218)
Chapter Thirteen: To journey along a way of life (219-242)
Chapter Fourteen: Stop, look and listen!
Not taught in Spring 2026–this chapter has always been too difficult for me to teach
PART III: SKILL
Chapter Fifteen: Tools, minds and machines (294-311)
Chapter Sixteen: Society, nature and the concept of technology (312-322)
Chapter Seventeen: Work, time and industry (323-338)
Chapter Eighteen: On weaving a basket (339-348)
Chapter Nineteen: Of string bags and birds’ nests (349-361)
Chapter Twenty: The dynamics of technical change (362-372)
Chapter Twenty-one: ‘People like us’: the concept of the anatomically modern human (373-391)
Chapter Twenty-two: Speech, writing and the modern origins of ‘language origins’ (392-405)
Not taught in Spring 2026–this chapter is fascinating but too far afield from “Cultural Ecology”
Chapter Twenty-three: The poetics of tool-use (406-419)
Previous Course Iterations
Cultural Ecology 2017: Paired Ingold’s Perception of the Environment with Hugh Brody’s Maps & Dreams, Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think, and Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World. I reorganized Ingold’s chapters thematically around three questions: Who are we? (Nature and Culture), What are we doing? (Living in the World), and Where are we going? (Salvation and Damnation).
Cultural Ecology 2020: Paired Ingold with Carolyn Finney’s Black Faces, White Spaces and Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. The course was modified mid-semester for coronavirus and used the same thematic reorganization as 2017.
My more recent versions of Cultural Ecology–Human Adaptability 2023 and Anthropological Optimism 2024–moved in more practical directions, but I’m returning to The Perception of the Environment for Spring 2026.
Related Content
Environmental Engagements Hub: Connects Ingold’s dwelling perspective to contemporary environmental challenges and Indigenous knowledge systems
This course is part of the larger Living Anthropologically framework bridging Trouillot’s political economy with Ingold’s phenomenological perspective. For more on this synthesis, see the Teaching Anthropology Hub
In spring 2025 I taught a course based on Imagining for Real, Ingold’s most recent work: