Tim Ingold - From Complementarity to Obviation [Dissolving the Boundaries Between Social and Biological Anthropology, Archaeology, And Psychology]

19 From Complementarity to Obviation: On Dissolving the Boundaries betweenSocial and Biological Anthropology, Archaeology, and Psychology

The roots of what I have to say in this chapter goback to concerns that originally led me, as an un-dergraduate at Cambridge in the late 1960s, totake up the study of anthropology. I had justcompleted my first year as a student of naturalscience and was profoundly disillusioned. It wasnot that I was any less fascinated by the phe-nomena of nature. My disenchantment stemmedrather from a dawning realization that the sci-entific establishment was so heavily institution-alized, internally specialized, and oppressivelyhierarchical that the most one could achieve as aprofessional scientist would be to become a verysmall cog in a huge juggernaut of an enterprise—one moreover that seemed to have lost touchboth with its sense of social responsibility andwith its original mission to enlarge the scope ofhuman knowledge, and to have become largelysubservient to the military-industrial complex.Looking around for something else to study, Iwanted a discipline that would help to reconnectthe sense of intellectual adventure associated withscientific inquiry with the realities of human ex-perience in a world increasingly ravaged by mas-sive technological intervention. Anthropologyseemed, at the time, to fit the bill. Indeed, the rea-sons why I took up anthropology then are stillthe reasons why I continue to study it, though Imight now express them in rather different terms.I believe that the discipline has a critical contri-bution to make to the way we understand theprocess of human being-in-the-world which isbadly needed in an intellectual, political, and eco-nomic climate that has always tended to divorcehuman affairs from their bearings in the contin-uum of organic life.

Since embarking on my studies in anthropol-ogy I have never looked back. I have, however,often looked from side to side, observing withmounting despair how it has been torn apart bythe very divisions I thought it existed to over-come. These divisions ultimately seem to derivefrom a single, master dichotomy that underpins

the entire edifice of Western thought and sci-ence—namely, that between the “two worlds” ofhumanity and nature. For this is what has givenus the overriding academic division of labor be-tween those disciplines that deal, on the onehand, with the human mind and its manifold lin-guistic, social, and cultural products, and on theother, with the structures and composition of thematerial world. And it also cleaves anthropologyitself into its sociocultural and biophysical divi-sions, whose respective practitioners have less tosay to one another than they do to colleagues inother disciplines on the same side of the academicfence. Social or cultural anthropologists wouldrather read the work of historians, linguists, phi-losophers, and literary critics; biological or phys-ical anthropologists prefer to talk to colleagues inother fields of biology or biomedicine.

I am not content to live with this situation. Itwas, in part, the challenge of closing the gap be-tween the arts and humanities on the one hand,and the natural sciences on the other, that drewme to anthropology in the first place, and I stillbelieve that no other discipline is in a better po-sition to accomplish it. In this article, I present a program for how this might be done. My ar-gument, in a nutshell, hinges on a distinctionbetween two approaches to thinking about therelations between those aspects of human exis-tence that have conventionally been parceled outbetween different disciplines (or, in the case ofanthropology, subdisciplines) for separate study.For convenience, I call these the complementar-ity and obviation approaches, respectively. Thefirst regards every aspect as a distinct, substantivecomponent of being. It admits that the study ofeach component is bound to yield only a partialaccount, but promises that by putting these ac-counts together it should be possible to produce asynthetic account of the whole. These synthesesare characteristically denoted by such hybridterms as biosocial, psychocultural, or even biopsy-chocultural. The obviation approach, by contrast,

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is intent on doing away with the boundaries bywhich these components have been distinguished.It claims that the human being is not a compositeentity made up of separable but mutually com-plementary parts, such as body, mind, and cul-ture, but rather a singular locus of creativegrowth within a continually unfolding field of re-lationships. In what follows, I argue for an obvi-ation approach.

Before proceeding further, I should add a noteabout the terms I use for the different fields of an-thropology. For a start, I do not deal here withthe distinction between social and cultural an-thropology: I believe this distinction is alreadywidely regarded as obsolete, and I have no inten-tion of reinstating it. So when I place the wordsocial before anthropology, I mean it as a short-hand for social-cultural. Likewise, I am not con-cerned with the distinction between biologicaland physical anthropology. To my ear, the latterdesignation has a rather archaic ring, suggestinga preoccupation with measuring skulls and exca-vating for fossil bones. I prefer the designationbiological, since it suggests a more rounded con-cern with the conditions of human life, both nowand in the past. Finally, I shall make no attemptto distinguish between archaeology and prehis-tory, and will use the first term indiscriminatelyto cover both.

Social and Biological Anthropology

It is notoriously di≤cult to explain, to those newto the subject, what anthropology is all about.What, they might ask, is this being, this anthro-pos, from which our discipline takes its name? Itis one thing, it seems, to ask what is a humanbeing, quite another to ask what is human being.The first question is an empirical one, the secondis a question of ontology. A modern evolutionarybiologist, for example, might describe a humanbeing as an individual of a species with a suite ofbuilt-in characteristics that owe their origin to aprocess of variation under natural selection. To

this, however, the philosopher might respondwith the observation that the very possibility ofsuch a description is only open to a creature forwhom being is knowing, one that can so detachits consciousness from the tra≤c of its bodily in-teractions with the environment as to treat thelatter as the object of its concern. It is in this tran-scendence over nature, our philosopher mightisist, that the essence of our humanity resides. In short, the human being can only appear as anaturally selected, empirical object in the eyes of the rationally selecting epistemic subject.

This paradox, that accounting for our exis-tence in nature means taking ourselves out of it,runs like a thread through the entire history ofWestern thought and science. And it lies at theroot of the idea that humans—uniquely amonganimals—exist simultaneously in two parallelworlds, respectively of nature and society, in thefirst as biological individuals (organisms), in thesecond as cultural subjects (persons). As organ-isms, human beings seem inescapably bound tothe conditions of the natural world. Like othercreatures, they are born, grow old and die; theymust eat to live, protect themselves to survive andmate to reproduce. But as persons, humans seemto float aloof from this world in multiple realmsof discourse and meaning, each constitutive of aspecific historical consciousness. From this ex-alted position they are said to transform nature,both ideationally through the imposition ofschemes of symbolic representation and practi-cally through the application of technology,thereby converting it into the object of relationsamong themselves, relations that are taken tomake up the distinct domain of society.

Now a complementarity approach would ac-cept this division between the organism and theperson, and would aim to put together the partialaccounts of human life obtainable on each of thetwo planes, of nature and society, to produce acomplete “biosocial” picture. The obviation ap-proach, by contrast, would reject the comple-mentarity assumption, that human existence canbe neatly partitioned into its biophysical and so-

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ciocultural components, not, however, by simplycollapsing one side of the dichotomy into theother as in the more extreme forms of sociobiol-ogy and social constructionism, but by doingaway with the dichotomy itself. Whereas an ad-vocate of complementarity might assert that thehuman being is not merely a biological organismnor merely a social person, but the compound ofone thing plus the other, the obviation approachasserts that humans are indeed all organism, asindeed they are all person, for in the final analy-sis organism and person are one and the same,and there is nothing mere (that is, residual or in-complete) about either (Ingold 1990: 220). By thesame token, this approach would reject the ideathat there is an essence of humanity that sets usradically apart from all other creatures whoselives are wholly contained within the world ofnature, and with it the possibility of a purely ob-jective account of the human being as a naturallyexisting, evolved entity. We may of course imag-ine ourselves to be suspended in a world of inter-subjective meaning, over and above that of ourmaterial life, but such imaginings can only be car-ried on by a being who is already positioned inthe world and, by virtue of that fact, alreadycommitted to relations with determinate compo-nents of the environment. You have to be in aworld to imagine yourself out of it, and it isthrough this being-in-the-world that you becomewhat you are.

Let me briefly compare the two approaches as they might be applied to one of the classicfields of anthropological inquiry, namely kinship.The complementarity approach would rejectboth the radical sociobiological thesis, that kin-ship can be reduced to a calculus of genetic re-latedness, and the equally radical humanisticalternative, that it is an arbitrary social constructthat bears no relation to genetic connection at all.Rather, it would suggest that for a complete un-derstanding of human kinship we need to recog-nize not only how individuals may be innatelypredisposed to behave in certain ways towardthose to whom they have a close genetic link,

but also how such ways of behaving are chan-neled, evaluated and made meaningful, and thepersons to whom they are directed categorized, in terms of culturally specific, representationalschemata. An obviation approach to the study of kinship, on the other hand, would begin byrecognizing that behavioral dispositions are nei-ther preconstituted genetically nor simply down-loaded onto the passively receptive individualfrom a superior source in society, but are ratherformed in and through a process of ontogeneticdevelopment within a specific environmental con-text. Kinship is about the ways in which others inthe environment contribute—through their pres-ence, their activities and the nurturance theyprovide—to this process.1 Thus, insofar as it con-cerns the growth of the organism-person within afield of ongoing relations, kinship is indissolublybiological and social. But the biology pertains todevelopment, not genetics; and the social to thedomain of lived experience rather than its cate-gorical representation.

The contrast between the two approaches maybe illustrated by way of one other example. Bi-pedal locomotion, the capacity to walk on twofeet, is generally assumed to be one of the hall-marks of our species, and as such to form part ofan evolved human nature. Yet as we all know,and as Mauss famously observed in his essay of1934 on body techniques (Mauss 1979: 97–123),people in different cultures are brought up towalk in very different ways. These ways areacquired, or as Mauss put it (p. 102), “there is no‘natural way’ [of walking] for the adult.” Howwould a complementarity approach deal withthis? It would argue—very much, in fact, asMauss did—that although the body is innatelypredisposed to walk, it is also educated by a re-ceived social tradition, transmitted orally or byother means, consisting of certain ideal rules andconventions that lay down standards of propri-ety, perhaps specific to age, sex or gender, thatwalkers are enjoined to follow, and in terms ofwhich their performance is evaluated and inter-preted. Thus, while the capacity to walk is a bio-

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logical universal, particular ways of walking areexpressive of social values.

But the obviation approach can readily findfault with this argument. For a start, humanbabies are not born walking; rather, the ability towalk is itself an acquired skill that develops in anenvironment that includes walking caregivers, arange of supporting objects, and a certain terrain.How, then, can one possibly separate learning towalk from learning to walk in the approved man-ner of one’s society? Surely, the development ofwalking skills is just one aspect of the growth of the organism-person within a nexus of envi-ronmental relations, and as such is closely boundup with kinship. Walking is certainly biological,in that it is part of the modus operandi of thehuman organism, but it is also social—not be-cause it is expressive of values that somehowreside in an extrasomatic domain of collectiverepresentations, but because the walker’s move-ments, his or her step, gait and pace, are contin-ually responsive to the movements of others inthe immediate environment. It is in this kind ofmutual responsiveness or “resonance” (Wikan1992), not in the subjection of behavior to cate-gorical rules, that the essence of sociality resides.

Body, Organism, and Development

Clearly, the problem with the complementaritythesis is that it is unable to offer a coherent ac-count of ontogenetic development. Human be-ings are supposed to be in part preconstitutedgenetically, in part moulded through the super-imposition (through enculturation or socialisa-tion) of ready-made structures. Real humans,however, grow in an environment furnished bythe presence and activities of others. It is preciselybecause the dynamics of development lie at theheart of the obviation approach that it is able todispense with the biological/social dichotomy.And it leads, naturally, to a focus on issues of em-bodiment. By this I do not mean that the humanbody should be understood as a site or mediumfor the inscription of social values. I would ratheruse the term to stress that throughout life, the

body undergoes processes of growth and decay,and that as it does so, particular skills, habits,capacities, and strengths, as well as debilities and weaknesses, are enfolded into its very con-stitution—in its neurology, musculature, even itsanatomy. To adopt a distinction suggested byConnerton (1989: 72–73), this is a matter of in-corporation rather than inscription. Thus walk-ing, for example, is embodied in the sense ofbeing developmentally incorporated throughpractice and training in an environment. Thesame, indeed, goes for any other practical skill.

Having said that, however, I must admit to agrowing unease with the fashion for the “body”in current social anthropology, and indeed withthe very notion of embodiment. Advocates of the“paradigm of embodiment,” such as Csordas(1990), have drawn inspiration from the philoso-phy of Merleau-Ponty (1962) in treating the bodyas the form in which the human person, qua cul-tural subject, is intentionally present as a being-in-the-world. One of their aims in doing so is tobreak away from the Cartesian bias, still domi-nant in mainstream psychology, toward treatingthe body as the executive arm of a disembodiedmind that, sheltered from direct contact with theexternal world, is presumed to organize the dataof experience and to be the ultimate source of allmeaning and intention. I sympathize with thisaim, but I am not sure that the best way to over-come the troublesome mind/body dichotomy isby dropping the former term and retaining thelatter. It would seem just as legitimate to speak ofenmindment as of embodiment, to emphasize theimmanent intentionality of human beings’ en-gagement with their environment in the course ofperception and action. The distance between aMerleau-Pontyan phenomenology of the bodyand what Bateson (1973) christened the “ecologyof mind” is not as great as might first appear.

Perhaps this is merely an issue of semantics.Behind it, however, there lies a more fundamen-tal question. How, if at all, are we to distinguishthe body from the organism? One answer mightbe that the body is a discrete object composed oforgans and tissues, like as not dead or at least

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anesthetized, as it might appear before the sur-geon in the operating theatre, whereas the organ-ism is a living being, situated and functioning inits proper environment. But neither Merleau-Ponty nor those who have followed his lead meanthe body in this sense. They are rather referringto “the living body . . . with feelings, sensations,perceptions and emotions” (Ots 1994: 116), orwhat is known in German as Leib (as opposed toKörper). Yet in their determination to treat theleibly body as the subject of culture, anthropolo-gists such as Jackson (1989: 119) and Csordas(1990: 5) cannot avoid the implication that thereexists some kind of biological residuum that isobjectively given, independently and in advanceof the cultural process.2 Culture and biology re-main as far apart as ever, only the body has beenrepositioned: formerly placed with the organismon the side of biology, it has now reappeared withthe person on the side of culture. Hence the bodyas subject is split off from the organism as object,leaving the latter bodiless, reduced to an inchoatemass of biological potential. The embodiment ofculture leads to nothing less than the disembodi-ment of the organism!

It seems to me that the theoretical gainsbrought by the paradigm of embodiment will bemore apparent than real, so long as we fail totake one final, and crucial step, which is to recog-nize that the body is the human organism, andthat the process of embodiment is one and thesame as the development of that organism in itsenvironment. Once this step is taken, then one orother of the two terms, body and organism, be-comes effectively redundant. Given the choice ofwhich term to retain, I would opt for the latter,since it better conveys the sense of organizedprocess, of movement, connectivity, and relation-ality, that I take to be fundamental to life. Substi-tuting life for mind, and organism for body, thenotion of a mindful body may be replaced by thatof living organism, a substitution that has theeffect both of restoring human beings to theirproper place within the continuum of organiclife, and of laying the Cartesian dualism finally torest. Most social anthropologists, however, even

those committed to phenomenological or ecolog-ical approaches, are markedly reluctant to go thisfar. Their hesitation may be attributed in part tothe continuing influence of dualistic thinking, butin part—too—to a certain nervousness about theimplications of the position set out earlier for thedistinction between culture and biology.

These implications are indeed radical. If, as Ihave suggested, those specific ways of acting, per-ceiving, and knowing that we have been accus-tomed to call cultural are incorporated, in thecourse of ontogenetic development, into the neu-rology, musculature, and anatomy of the humanorganism, then they are equally facts of biology.Cultural differences, in short, are biological. Nowof course, it was precisely on the premise that cul-tural variation is independent of biology thatanthropologists could claim to have refuted theraciology of the early decades of this century(Wolf 1994). In 1930, no less an authority thanBoas had declared that “any attempt to explaincultural form on a purely biological basis isdoomed to failure” (Boas 1940: 165). From thenon, the biophysical and sociocultural divisions ofanthropology have proceeded along markedly di-vergent paths. It is no wonder that contemporarysocial anthropologists should be fearful of goingback on such a fundamental tenet of disciplinaryintegrity.

I believe this is an issue that has to be con-fronted. How can we rest secure in the convictionthat raciology has long since been expurgatedfrom the discipline, now that the premises onwhich this was done seem increasingly shaky, ifnot downright incoherent? Evidence of this in-coherence is not hard to come by, for example in the “statement on race” recently endorsed bythe International Union of Anthropological andEthnological Sciences. Article 10 of this state-ment begins with the well-worn claim that “thereis no necessary concordance between biologicalcharacteristics and culturally defined groups,”and ends by asserting that “it is not justifiable toattribute cultural characteristics to the influenceof genetic inheritance” (IUAES 1996: 19–20).What is striking here is the implicit attribu-

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tion of “biological characteristics” to “geneticinheritance”—and this despite the recognition,elsewhere in the document, that “biological dif-ferences . . . are strongly influenced by nutrition,way of life and other aspects of the environment”(Article 4). To return to my earlier example: con-sider a culturally specific way of walking. Is thisnot a property of the organism, the outcome of aprocess of development, and hence fully admis-sible as a “biological characteristic”? DespiteBoas’s strictures, there is nothing wrong with ac-counting for this or any other aspect of culturalform on a “purely biological basis,” so long asthe biology in question is of development, notgenetics.

Evidently, the real source of the problem is notthe identification of the social or cultural with thebiological, but the assignment of the biological tothe genetic.3 For it is the latter assumption, whichstill lies unquestioned at the heart of much an-thropological theory as well as in the discipline’spublic pronouncements, that forces us to choosebetween treating, say, a locally specific way ofwalking either as basically nonbiological or ex-trasomatic, governed in its bodily execution by ascheme of acquired mental representations, or asbiological but genetically inherited. The first al-ternative reinstates the Cartesian antinomies ofmind and body; the second takes us right back toraciology. Breaking the link between biologicalform and genetic inheritance, however, is easiersaid than done, for this link underpins the entireedifice of modern evolutionary theory and justi-fies the fundamental precept on which it rests,namely that the life history of the individual or-ganism, its ontogenetic development, forms nopart of the evolution of the species to which itbelongs.4

The Myth of the Genotype

In brief, what is supposed to evolve is not the or-ganism itself or its manifest capabilities of action,but rather a formal design specification for theorganism known as the genotype. The evolution

of this specification takes place over numerousgenerations, through changes brought about bynatural selection in the frequency of its informa-tion-bearing elements, the genes. Development is then understood to be the process whereby thegenotypic specification, by definition context-independent, is translated within a particular en-vironmental context into the manifest form of thephenotype. In this standard account, the geno-type is privileged as the locus of organic form,while the environment merely provides the mate-rial conditions for its substantive realisation. Tobe sure, an organism may develop different fea-tures in changed environments, but these differ-ences are regarded as no more than alternativephenotypic expressions of the same basic design.Only when the design itself changes does evolu-tion occur.

Let me return for a moment to the example of walking. According to orthodox evolutionarybiology, bipedal locomotion is one of a suite ofanatomical and behavioral characteristics thathave emerged in the course of human evolution.It—or, rather, a program for its development—must therefore form part of the species-specificgenotypic endowment that each one of us re-ceives at the point of conception. It is in this sensethat human beings are said to be universallyequipped, as part of their evolved makeup, withan innate capacity to walk on two feet, regardlessof how they walk in practice, or of whether theywalk at all—or go everywhere by car! Specificways of walking have not themselves evolved,they are just alternative phenotypic realizationsof an evolved, genotypic trait. By the same token,we should all be genotypically endowed with thecapacity to rest for long periods in a squattingposition, yet this is something that I (along withfellow Westerners) am quite unable to do, since Ihave been brought up in a society where it is nor-mal to sit on chairs. As this example shows, thenotion of capacity is almost totally vacuous un-less it refers back to the overall set of conditionsthat must be in place, not only in the individual’sgenetic constitution but also in the surrounding

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environment, to make the subsequent develop-ment of the characteristic or capability in ques-tion a realistic possibility (Ingold 1996a). Onewould otherwise have to suppose that human be-ings were genotypically endowed, at the dawn ofhistory, with the capacity to do everything thatthey ever have done in the past, and ever will doin the future—not only walk and squat but alsoswim, ride bicycles, drive cars, fly airplanes, carryout scientific research, and so on (the list wouldbe endless).

What this means, in general terms, is that theforms and capacities of human and other organ-isms are attributable, in the final analysis, not togenetic inheritance but to the generative poten-tials of the developmental system (Oyama 1985),that is, the entire system of relations constitutedby the presence of the organism in a particularenvironment. This is not to deny that every or-ganism starts life with—among other things—itscomplement of DNA in the genome. Orthodoxevolutionary theory has it that this DNA encodesthe formal design specification. Because, how-ever, there is no reading of the genetic code thatis not itself part of the process of development, itis only within the context of the developmentalsystem that we can say what any particular geneis for. It follows that there can be no specificationof the characteristics of an organism, no design,that is independent of the context of develop-ment. The genotype simply does not exist. And sotoo, in the case of human beings, there is no suchthing as “bipedal locomotion” apart from themanifold ways in which people actually learn towalk in different communities (Ingold 1995a).

Now if, as I have argued, organic form is aproperty not of genes but of developmental sys-tems, then to account for its evolution we have tounderstand how such systems are constituted andreconstituted over time. This conclusion hasthree major implications. First, far from being atangential offshoot of the evolutionary process,ontogenesis is the very crucible from which it un-folds. Second, because organisms, through theiractivity, can influence the environmental condi-

tions for their own future development and thatof others to which they relate, they figure not as passive sites of evolutionary change but as cre-ative agents, producers as well as products oftheir own evolution. Third, and most cruciallyfor my present purposes, this applies equally tohuman beings. “Our basic image of human on-togeny,” as Robertson (1996: 595) insists,“should therefore be that of a lifespan set be-tween an ascendent and a descendent generation,linked by the process of begetting and being be-gotten.” Human lives overlap: fashioned withincontexts shaped by the presence and activities ofpredecessors, they in turn affect the conditions ofdevelopment for successors. There is nothingstrange about this idea; on the contrary it sumsup the process we are used to calling history. Soconceived, however, history is not so much amovement in which, as Maurice Godelier puts it(1989: 63), human beings “produce society inorder to live,” as one in which, in the course oftheir social lives, they grow one another, estab-lishing by their actions the conditions for eachother’s development. But taken in this sense, his-tory is no more than a continuation, into the fieldof human relations, of a process that is going onthroughout the organic world. That process isone of evolution. The distinction between historyand evolution is thus dissolved (Ingold 1995a:210–211).

Anthropology and Archaeology

Between Evolution and History

This is where prehistoric archaeology comes in.Do archaeologists study human history or hu-man evolution? So long as the distinction remainsin place, archaeology seems to fall awkwardly be-tween the two stools. An indicator of this predic-ament is the fact that while there has long been astrongly held view in social anthropology thatthere is little to distinguish it from the disciplineof history, and despite the rather obvious links

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between history and archaeology (in that bothstudy the lives of people in the past), the majorityof social anthropologists insist that their subjecthas little or nothing to do with archaeology. Ofcourse, this was not always so. The evolutionaryanthropologists of the nineteenth century werekeen to study allegedly primitive peoples becauseit was thought that their present existence couldilluminate the earlier conditions of humankind inthe spheres of social and intellectual life, just asarchaeology could reveal the early stages of ma-terial culture. But the subsequent rejection of thiskind of progressive evolutionism broke the linkbetween social anthropology and archaeology,and at the same time ruled out of order any sug-gestion that humans might be more or less cul-tural, or that they might be further along or lagbehind in the course of history.

So far as most contemporary social anthropol-ogists are concerned, living beings either inhabita historically constituted world of cultural mean-ing or they do not: all human beings do, other an-imals do not. There are no differences of degree.Yet the very idea that humans inhabit separate,cultural worlds implies that at some point, thehistory of culture must have lifted off from abaseline of full-blown, evolved human capacities.Short of supposing some kind of unfathomablequantum leap, there is no alternative but to imag-ine a historical trajectory that rises inexorablyfrom a point of emergence or origin. Figure 19.1shows an early example of just such a view, takenfrom Kroeber’s classic paper of 1917 on the su-perorganic (Kroeber 1952: 50). Here, the historyof culture is seen taking off from organic evolu-tion at point B; by point C we have the rudimen-tary culture of “primitive man,” while by point D(the present) the origins of culture have been leftfar behind. Present-day social anthropologistsmay well frown at this picture, and scoff at its in-vocation of progressive development, but theythemselves have nothing better to offer. And oneof the reasons why they tend to steer clear of pre-historic archaeology, I suggest, is that it throwsthe spotlight on just those awkward questions

that they would rather not have to think about. Ifhuman history has a point of origin, what couldit mean to have been living close to that point, oreven at the crucial moment of transition itself ?Were such people semicultural, gearing up forhistory? How can one conceivably distinguishthose actions and events that carried forward themovement of human history from those that setit in motion in the first place?

In recent years archaeologists have expended agreat deal of effort in revealing the origins of cul-ture and history in what has come to be called the“human revolution” (Mellars and Stringer 1989).This is now supposed to have taken place duringthe Upper Palaeolithic, though archaeologistsremain perplexed by the apparent fact that so-called modern humans—that is, beings equippedwith the full suite of evolved capacities needed toset the cultural ball rolling—arrived on the scenea good hundred thousand years before we findany evidence for the sorts of things with whichculture is usually associated: burials, art, complexand regionally diverse toolkits, language, and soon. Indeed, the alleged revolution seems to havetaken about twice as long as the fifty-thousand-year history it is supposed to have inaugurated!Be that as it may, the argument I have set outabove suggests that the entire project of searchingfor the genesis of some essential humanity is seri-

Figure 19.1Organic evolution and the history of culture (afterKroeber 1952: 50). “In this illustration,” Kroeber ex-plains, “the continuous line denotes the level inorganic;the broken line the evolution of the organic; the line ofdots, the development of civilisation. Height above thebase is degree of advancement.” A marks “the beginingof time on this earth,” B “the first human precursor,” C“primitive man,” and D “the present moment.”

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ously misguided. We look in vain for the evolu-tionary origins of human capacities for the simplereason that these capacities continue to evolve inthe very historical unfolding of our lives.

Of course, even an orthodox evolutionary the-orist would have to admit that the evolution ofhumankind did not exactly stop once history andculture were underway. However the conven-tional view, exemplified in Kroeber’s diagram(figure 19.1) and reiterated by countless authorsever since, is that by comparison with the rate ofhistorical change, this evolution has continued atsnail’s pace, so that to all intents and purposes,contemporary human beings may be regarded asnot significantly different from their predecessorsof the Upper Palaeolithic.5 They are equippedwith the same basic morphology, capacities anddispositions that, packaged in the genotype, havebeen passed on down the generations for tens ofthousands of years. To be sure, the amount ofgenetic change in human populations over thisperiod may have been relatively small. My con-tention, however, is that in their dispositions andcapacities, and to a certain extent even in theirmorphology, the humans of today are not at alllike their predecessors. This is because these char-acteristics are not fixed genetically but emergewithin processes of development, and because thecircumstances of development today, cumula-tively shaped through previous human activity,are very different from those of the past.

It is, I believe, a great mistake to populate thepast with people like ourselves, equipped with theunderlying capacities or potentials to do every-thing we do today, such that history itself appearsas nothing more than the teleological process oftheir progressive realization. Indeed the very no-tion of an origin, defined as the point at whichthese capacities became established, awaitingtheir historical fulfilment, is part of an elaborateideological justification for the present order ofthings and, as such, but one aspect of the intensepresentism of modern thought. In so far as thetask of archaeology is to illuminate the pastrather than legitimate the present, archaeologists

should be foremost in combating the pretensionsof the origin-hunters. And they should help us torecognize that our humanity, far from havingbeen set for all time as an evolutionary legacyfrom our hunter-gatherer past, is something thatwe continually have to work at and for which weourselves must bear the responsibility. There is,in short, no way of saying what a human being isapart from the manifold ways in which humanbeings become. “Modern humans” have not orig-inated yet, and they never will.

Landscape and Environment

This recognition that the forms of human being,and the capacities they entail, are continuallyevolving as life goes on, helps to put paid toanother dichotomy which has been particularlytroublesome for archaeology. This is between thenatural and the artificial, and it lies at the sourceof the idea that archaeologists study artifacts.Now the very notion of artifact implies the work-ing up of some raw material to a finished form,corresponding to a preconceived design in themind of the artisan. Only once it has first beenmade, in this sense, can it be brought into play inthe ordinary business of life, in the course ofwhich it is used. This distinction between mak-ing and using is fundamental to what I haveelsewhere (Ingold 1995b) called the “buildingperspective”: the idea that life goes on withinstructures that have been constituted in advance,rather than these structures arising within the lifeprocess itself. Adopting such a perspective, it iseasy to imagine that the forms of objects recov-ered from archaeological sites correspond to de-signs that were originally in the heads of theirone-time makers.

However as Davidson and Noble (1993: 365)have pointed out, it is a fallacy—and one that isfound very frequently in archaeological writing—to suppose that objects are ever finished in thissense. For one thing, their forms are not imposedby the mind, but arise within the movement ofthe artisan’s engagement with the material; for

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another, in the course of being used for onepurpose, objects may undergo further modifica-tion that make them peculiarly apt for another.Whether, at any moment, we say the object isbeing used or made depends entirely on whetherthe reference is to a present or future project. Al-though at a certain point, the artisan may claimto have completed his work, that is certainly notthe end of the object he has produced. Indeed, an artifact can never really be said to be finisheduntil it is of no further use to anyone and is finallydiscarded. The lesson to be learned from this isthat the objects around us have histories which,in certain respects, are not unlike the life historiesof persons. Just as persons continually come intobeing through their involvement in relationshipswith other persons and objects in their environ-ments, so the forms and meanings of objects aregenerated within the contexts of their involve-ment in the diverse life-projects of the beings(human and nonhuman) with which they are sur-rounded. In this respect they are never made butalways in the making.6

We cannot, then, make a hard and fast distinc-tion between one class of things that are ready-made in nature, and another class of things thathave been made through the shaping of a nat-urally given raw material into a finished arte-factual form. Nor can we adopt an analogue of the complementarity thesis, and suppose that ob-jects, like persons, are in part naturally preconsti-tuted, and in part molded through the impositionof cultural design. Just such an analogue is impli-cated in the unfortunate designation of artifactsas objects of “material culture,” suggesting as itdoes that to make an artifact you first take an ob-ject with certain intrinsic material properties andthen add some culture to it. I noted earlier that acritical weakness of the complementarity thesis,applied to persons, is that it cannot offer a realis-tic account of ontogenetic development. In pre-cisely the same way, an approach that stresses thecomplementarity of natural and artificial—orbuilt—components of the environment cannotbegin to grasp the ways in which environments

enfold, into their very formation and consti-tution, the lives and works of their inhabitants(Ingold 1993b: 156–157). To appreciate what isgoing on here, we need to adopt a different per-spective, one that recognizes that the forms peo-ple make or build, whether in their imaginationor on the ground, arise within the current of theirinvolved activity, in the specific relational con-texts of their practical engagement with their sur-roundings. Building, in short, is encompassed bydwelling, making by use. I call this the “dwellingperspective” (Ingold 1995b).

Alongside the relatively recent anthropologicalrecognition, discussed earlier, that the human in-tentional presence in the world is an embodiedpresence, there has been a remarkable upsurge of interest in the landscape. This is already prov-ing to be a particularly fruitful area of collabora-tion between anthropologists and archaeologists(for example, Bender 1993; Tilley 1994). Thoughthe precise meaning of “landscape,” as that of“body,” continues to be the subject of intensecontroversy, there is a clear connection betweenthe two concerns. For if persons inhabit inten-tional worlds, and if bodies inhabit landscapes,then to reunite persons with their bodies is also torestore their intentional worlds to the landscape.But this raises a parallel problem, too. How, if at all, are we to distinguish landscape from envi-ronment? Just as the body has come to be identi-fied with the cultural subject, and the organismwith the residual biological object, so there is a temptation to treat the landscape as an inter-subjectively constituted, existential space, whilereducing the environment to a mere substrate of formless materiality. In this vein, Weiner(1991: 32) speaks of how the bestowal of placenames intentionally transforms “a sheer physicalterrain into a pattern of historically experiencedand constituted space and time,” thereby creating“existential space out of a blank environment”(my emphases).

Once again, the division between the sociocul-tural and the biophysical is reproduced ratherthan dissolved. This, in my view, is a retrograde

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step. The environment of persons is no more re-ducible than is their organic existence to pure mo-lecular substance. It is not merely physical, and itis certainly not blank. For example, the ground Iwalk on is surely a part of my environment, butin a physicalist description the ground, as such,does not exist; there are only packed molecules ofcarbon, nitrogen, silicon, and so on. As Reed haseloquently put it, “it is the earth on which wewalk, and the soil in which we plant, that is rele-vant for us as perceiving and acting creatures; notthe molecules discovered by scientists” (Reed1988: 111). The environment, in short, is not thesame as the physical world; that is to say, it is notdescribable in terms of substance. Rather, the en-vironment is the world as it exists and takes onmeaning in relation to the beings that inhabit it(Gibson 1979: 8). As such, its formation has to beunderstood in the same way that we understandthe growth of organisms and persons, in terms ofthe properties of dynamic self-organization of re-lational fields. But precisely because environmentdoes not stand as material substance to the im-material forms of landscape—because it under-goes a continual process of formation with, andaround, its inhabitants—I see no basis on whichthe two terms, environment and landscape, maybe distinguished.

Earlier, I suggested that the concept of the“mindful body” should be replaced by that of“living organism.” But the formulation remainedincomplete, since neither the body nor the organ-ism, however conceived, can exist in isolation.We can now complete it with the proposition thatthe mindful body in a landscape be replaced bythe living organism in its environment. And this,to conclude, offers the basis for a real synthesis ofarchaeology and anthropology. Instead of beingseparated by contrived divisions between pastand present, or between artifacts and bodies, wemight say that where anthropology studies theconditions of human living in the environment—or of what phenomenological philosophers call“being-in-the-world”—archaeology studies theformation of the environment of our living-in,

our dwelling. In practice, of course, one cannotdo one without the other, nor can either be donewithout regard to the inherent temporality of theprocesses both of ontogenetic development andenvironmental formation. I have already shownhow we can dispense with the distinction betweensocial and biological anthropology. It is now pos-sible to see how the anthropology/archaeologydistinction might be thrown out as well.

Psychology and Anthropology

One of the reasons why, up to now, it has provedso di≤cult to effect a reintegration of the subdivi-sions of anthropological inquiry, and particularlyof its social and biological components, lies in thefact that in the conventional complementarity ap-proach, the necessary link between the individualorganism and the cultural subject can only beestablished by way of a third term, namely whatis called the “human mind.” The discipline thatexists to study the human mind is, of course, psy-chology. Thus for advocates of the complemen-tarity approach, psychology would have to bealong in any complete, synthetic account ofhuman existence. The synthesis would not be“biosocial” but “biopsychosocial.” As Mauss putit, an exclusive focus on the relations between thebiological and the sociological “leaves but littleroom for the psychological mediator.” An ac-count of walking, for example, that rested solelyon an anatomical or physiological base, or evenon a psychological or sociological one, would beinadequate. “It is the triple viewpoint, that of the‘total man,’ that is needed” (Mauss 1979 [1934]:101, my emphasis). In what follows I propose toargue, to the contrary, that the human mind—conceived as some kind of structured entity—isas much an invention of modern science as is thehuman genotype. Mind, as I have already sug-gested with acknowledgment to Bateson (1973),is not in the head rather than out there in theworld, but immanent in the active, perceptual en-gagement of organism-person and environment.

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As the study of the conditions of such engage-ment, psychology should be no different fromanthropology.

To begin, we have to consider why a psycho-logical mediator should be deemed necessary atall. The reason lies in the fact that the classicaldivision between the biological and the social isnot based on one opposition but is a compoundof two: between body and mind, and between the individual and the collectivity. Thus psychol-ogy has traditionally shared with biologicalanthropology an exclusive focus on the individ-ual, and with social anthropology a focus onmental rather than bodily states. I have alreadyaddressed the problem of the mind/body dichot-omy, but it remains to deal with that of individ-ual versus collectivity. This latter dichotomy restson a hierarchical conception of the relationsbetween parts and wholes that is very deeplyembedded in the structure of our thought. An-thropologists have always professed their com-mitment to a holistic approach, but they havetended to take this to mean a focus on wholes—conceived as total societies or cultures—as op-posed to their parts or members, individualhuman beings. Following principles set out byDurkheim a century ago, it has generally beenconceded that as the whole is more than the sumof its parts, so “society is not the mere sum ofindividuals, but . . . a specific reality which has itsown characteristics” (Durkheim 1982 [1895]:128–199).

Now the very logic of summation invoked hereentails that every part is a self-contained, indivis-ible, naturally bounded unit whose integrity andconstitution are already given, independently andin advance of any relations it may enter into withothers of its kind. These relations, in short, haveno bearing upon the constitution of the individ-ual parts themselves, but are rather constitutiveof a distinct entity, namely society, located at a higher level of abstraction. This Durkheimianview has long underwritten the academic divisionof labor between psychology and social anthro-pology: whereas the former is said to study the

mind of the individual, the latter is concernedwith the collective mind of society. Much recentwork in social anthropology, however, haspointed to the inadequacy of the classical indi-vidual/society dichotomy (Strathern 1996). Wehave begun to recognize (see, for example, Toren1993) that those capacities of conscious aware-ness and intentional response normally bracketedunder the rubric of mind are not given in advanceof the individual’s entry into the social world, but are rather fashioned through a lifelong his-tory of involvement with both human and non-human constituents of the environment. We haverealized, too, that it is through the situated, inten-tional activities of persons, not through their sub-jugation to the higher authority of society, thatsocial relationships are formed and reformed.

With this, the hierarchical conception of part/whole relations simply collapses. Every particularperson, in so far as it enfolds in its constitutionthe history of its environmental relations, gathersthe whole into itself.7 But that whole, so con-ceived, is not an entity but a movement or pro-cess: the process of social life. Persons come intobeing, with their specific identities, capacities,and powers of agency, as differentially positionedenfoldments of this process, and in their actionsthey carry it forward. Consciousness and socialexistence, though they appear at any particularmoment to offer alternative perspectives on theperson, respectively inward-looking and out-ward-looking (Ingold 1983: 9), turn out in theirtemporal unfolding to be one and the same, likethe single surface of a Möbius strip. Taking thisview, I can see no further intellectual justificationfor continuing to uphold the boundary that hastraditionally divided psychology from social an-thropology. The discipline that will be broughtinto being through the dissolution of this bound-ary, whatever we choose to call it, will be thestudy of how people perceive, act, feel, remem-ber, think, and learn within the settings of theirmutual, practical involvement in the lived-inworld. In the following paragraphs I should liketo review some of the consequences of this per-

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spective in three areas that have traditionallybeen central to psychological inquiry: perception,memory, and learning.

Perception

Why do people perceive the world in the particu-lar ways that they do? Mainstream psychologyhas long regarded perception as a two-step oper-ation: in the first, sensory data are picked upfrom the environment by means of the receptororgans of the body; in the second these data are processed by a range of devices in the mind,to generate images or representations, internalmodels of an external reality. This processing isknown as cognition. By and large, psychologistshave been concerned to discover universals ofcognition, which are attributed to structures es-tablished in the course of human evolution.Anthropologists, by contrast, have wanted to ex-plain why people from different cultural back-grounds perceive the world in different ways.They have done so by suggesting that humancognized models are constructed on the basis ofprograms or schemata that are acquired as partof a tradition, and vary from one culture to an-other. What people see will therefore be relativeto their particular framework for viewing theworld. At first glance, the universalistic claims of psychology seem incompatible with the rela-tivistic stance adopted by social anthropology.But as several authors have pointed out (e.g.,D’Andrade 1981; Sperber 1985; Bloch 1991), the two perspectives are, in fact, perfectly com-plementary. For unless innate processing mech-anisms are already in place, it would not bepossible for human beings to acquire the pro-grams for constructing their culturally specificrepresentations from the data of experience.

I will spell out the logic of this argument lateron, because it bears on the issue of learning. Mypresent concern is with the way in which the ap-proaches outlined above, both in psychology andanthropology, reproduce the Cartesian duality ofmind and body, removing the former from the

contexts of human engagement with the environ-ment while treating the latter as no more than a kind of recording instrument, converting thestimuli that impinge upon it into data to beprocessed. One of the most powerful critiques ofthis view has come from advocates of so-calledecological psychology, who have drawn inspi-ration above all from the pioneering work ofGibson on visual perception (Gibson 1979).Ecological psychologists reject the information-processing view, with its implied separation ofthe activity of the mind in the body from the re-activity of the body in the world, arguing insteadthat perception is an aspect of functioning of thetotal system of relations constituted by the pres-ence of the organism-person in its environment.Perceivers, they argue, get to know the world di-rectly, by moving about in the environment anddiscovering what it affords, rather than by repre-senting it in the mind. Thus meaning is not theform that the mind contributes, by way of its ac-quired schemata, to the flux of raw sensory data,but is rather continually being generated withinthe relational contexts of people’s practical en-gagement with the world around them.

It follows from this approach that if peopleraised in different environments perceive differentthings, this is not because they are processing thesame sensory data in terms of alternative repre-sentational schemata, but because they have beentrained, through previous experience of carryingout various kinds of practical tasks, involvingparticular bodily movements and sensibilities, toorient themselves to the environment and to at-tend to its features in different ways. Modes ofperception, in short, are a function of specificways of moving around—of walking, of sitting or squatting, of tilting the head, of using imple-ments, and so on, all of which contribute to whatBourdieu (1977: 87) would call a certain “bodyhexis.” And as we have already seen, these formsof motility are not added to, or inscribed in, apreformed human body, but are rather intrinsicproperties of the human organism itself, develop-mentally incorporated into it modus operandi

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through practice and training in a particular en-vironment. Hence capacities of perception, as ofaction, are neither innate nor acquired but un-dergo continuous formation within processes ofontogenetic development. This result is clearly inline with the conclusions to be drawn from an ob-viation approach to the relation between socialand biological phenomena. In their rejection, onthe one hand, of the Cartesian view of action asthe bodily execution of innate or acquired pro-grams, and on the other hand, of the cognitivistview of perception as the operation of the mindupon the deliverance of the senses, the obviationapproach in anthropology and the ecologicalapproach in psychology find common cause.Both take the living-organism-in-its-environmentas their point of departure. This is why (contraBloch 1991) I believe that an anthropology thatsets out from this point has more to gain from analliance with ecological psychology than from analliance with cognitive science.

Memory

Another way of expressing the difference betweencognitivist and ecological approaches is in termsof a contrast suggested by Rubin (1988). Onemay understand what is going on, he writes, interms of one or other of two alternative meta-phors. The first is a complex structure metaphor,the second a complex process metaphor. Theformer, which is dominant in cognitive psychol-ogy, works by converting what is observed in the world into a formal account, whether envis-aged as a script, schema, grammar, program, oralgorithm, and then has that account copied intothe mind so that the observed behavior can besimply explained as the expression of this mentalblueprint. The latter, the dominant metaphor in ecological psychology, imputes little or nostructured content to the mind. Instead, behav-ior is explained as the outcome of a complexprocess set in train by virtue of the immersion of the practitioner, whose powers of perceptionand action have been fine-tuned through previ-

ous experience, within a given environmentalcontext. Let me clarify the contrast by means of a simple analogy. Suppose I play a record of oneof Bach’s suites for unaccompanied cello. Anexceedingly complicated pattern is engraved onthe otherwise blank surface of the disc, but themechanical processes—of rotation and amplifi-cation—involved in the operation of the recordplayer could hardly be more simple. Now sup-pose I pick up my cello to perform the suite my-self. In this case, the music issues directly frommy own movement, a movement that involves thewhole of my being indissolubly coupled with theinstrument. The process of playing a musical in-strument like a cello is enormously complex, andcalls for embodied skills that take years to ac-quire. But whether the music exists at all as astructure in the head or mental score, indepen-dently of the activities of practice and perfor-mance, is a moot point.

Now in introducing his distinction betweencomplex structure and complex process meta-phors, Rubin was actually concerned with thepsychological study of memory. His point wasthat in mainstream cognitive psychology, it isusual to regard memory as a kind of mental store,in which past experiences and received informa-tion are engraved and filed, as on the grooves andbands of a record (or, to adopt a more contem-porary analogy, a computer disc). Rememberingis then a rather simple process of searching orscanning, across a complexly structured cognitivearray. It is, moreover, a purely mental, inside-the-head operation. Once a particular memory is re-trieved, it may or may not be expressed in overt,bodily behavior. But every behavioral expression,like every playing of a record, is no more than areplica run off from a preexisting template. Witha complex process model, by contrast, remem-bering is itself a skilled, environmentally situatedactivity. It is in playing the Bach suite that I re-member it; the processes of remembering andplaying are one and the same. It follows thatevery performance, far from being a replica, is it-self an original movement in which the music is

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not so much reproduced as created anew. Moregenerally, remembering is a matter not of discov-ering structures in the attics of our minds, but of generating them from our movements in theworld.

Armed with this contrast, let me now turn tothe role of remembering in social life. It is re-markable that the two pioneering figures in thestudy of social memory, Halbwachs and Bartlett,took opposite sides on the issue. Halbwachs, acommitted Durkheimian, identified memory withthe very framework of collective representationsthat are supposed to give order and meaning tothe otherwise chaotic influx of raw sensation. Ifmemory is social rather than individual, it is be-cause the complex structures that underwrite thehuman capacity for recollection have their sourcein a collective tradition. “Our recollections,”Halbwachs wrote, “depend on those of all ourfellows, and on the great frameworks of the mem-ory of society” (1992: 42). For Bartlett, to thecontrary, what counted was not the structure ofmemory, but the process of remembering. Thisprocess, he argued, depends upon an organiza-tion of what he called “schemata.” Ironically,though it was Bartlett who introduced the con-cept of schema into psychology, he did not like it,and warned explicitly against regarding schemataas static, maplike structures—which is preciselyhow they are understood by most cognitive psy-chologists and cognitive anthropologists today.According to Bartlett, the schema is an active or-ganization of past reactions or experiences, whichis continually brought to bear, and at the sametime continually evolves, in the complex pro-cess of our engagement with the environment(Bartlett 1932: 201).8 And it is because this islargely an environment of other persons that re-membering is social.

Clearly, without the ability to remember,human beings would be unable to learn anythingat all. But there is a world of difference betweenlearning as adding more to one’s internal, repre-sentational structure, and learning as the devel-opment of a skill (Rubin 1988: 379–380). Bartlett

preferred the approach of skill (one of his exam-ples was of strokes in tennis or cricket). Howeveras Connerton has pointed out (1989: 28), the cog-nitivist emphasis on looking for structures in themind, and the concomitant reduction of action toa simple process of mechanical execution, has leftno conceptual space for the investigation ofbodily enskilment, or what he calls “habit mem-ory.” It is true that most social anthropologicalwork on memory has actually been about com-memoration—the present reenactment of pastevents in ritual practice, storytelling, writing, andthe like. And commemoration needs to be distin-guished from memorization: the developmentalincorporation of specific competencies (such asplaying a musical instrument) through repeatedtrials. While the relation between memorizationand commemoration has yet to be fully unraveled(Ingold 1996b: 203), the essential point to recog-nize is that the one cannot occur without theother. To commemorate the music of Bach, forexample, it must be possible to perform it, onecannot perform it without skill, and the develop-ment of skill implies memorization (Connerton1989: 5).9

Learning

This is the point at which to return to the psy-chological version of the complementarity thesis,namely that the acquisition of culture is possiblethanks to innate mental processing devices. It isperfectly true that if culture consisted of a corpusof transmissible knowledge, or in the words ofQuinn and Holland (1987: 4), of “what [people]must know in order to act as they do, make thethings they make, and interpret their experiencein the distinctive way they do,” then the mindwould have to be pre-equipped with cognitive de-vices of some kind that would allow this knowl-edge to be reassembled inside every individualhead through a processing of the raw input ofsensory data. In other words, the programs orschemata that enable people to construct theirculturally specific representations of the world,

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and to deliver appropriate plans of action, wouldthemselves have to be constructed from the ele-ments of experience, on the basis of certain rulesand principles. So how were these acquired?Perhaps in the same way, through the processingof experiential input according to yet anotherprogram. “You can learn to learn,” Johnson-Laird explains, “but then that learning would de-pend on another program, and so on. Ultimately,learning must depend on innate programs thatmake programs” (Johnson-Laird 1988: 133).Whence, then, comes the information that speci-fies the construction of the innate devices, with-out which, it would seem, no learning could takeplace at all?

By and large, in the literature of cognitive psy-chology, the postulation of innate structures istaken to require no more justification than vaguereferences to genetics and natural selection. Thusit is assumed that the design specifications forwhat is often called the mind’s “evolved archi-tecture” (Cosmides, Tooby and Barkow 1992: 5)must form one component of the human geno-type. I have already shown, however, that it isimpossible to derive a design specification for theorganism from its genetic constitution alone, in-dependently of the conditions of its developmentin an environment. For cognitive psychology thisproblem is further compounded, for if the theoryof learning as the transmission of cultural infor-mation is to work, the requisite cognitive devicesmust already exist, not merely in the virtual guiseof a design, but in the concrete hardwiring ofhuman brains. Somehow or other, in order tokick-start the process of cultural transmission,strands of DNA have miraculously to transformthemselves into data processing mechanisms.This is rather like supposing that merely by repli-cating the design of an aircraft, on the drawingboard or computer screen, one is all prepared fortakeoff.

Attempts in the literature to resolve this prob-lem, insofar as it is even recognized, are confusedand contradictory. To cut a rather long and tan-

gled story short, they boil down to two distinctclaims. One is that the concrete mechanismsmaking up the evolved architecture are reliablyconstructed, or wired up, under all possible cir-cumstances. The other is that these universalmechanisms proceed to work on variable inputsfrom the environment to produce the diversity ofmanifest capabilities that we actually observe.Consider the specific and much-vaunted exampleof language acquisition. Here, the alleged univer-sal mechanism is the so-called language acquisi-tion device (LAD). It is assumed that all humaninfants, even those (hypothetically) reared in so-cial isolation, come equipped with such a device.During a well-defined stage of development, thisdevice is supposed to be activated, operating onthe input of speech sounds from the environmentso as to establish, in the infant’s mind, the gram-mar and lexicon of the particular languagespoken in his or her community. It would thusappear that language acquisition is a two-stageprocess: in the first, the LAD is constructed; inthe second, it is furnished with specific syntacticand semantic content. This model of cognitivedevelopment is summarized in figure 19.2. Noticehow the model depends on factoring out thosefeatures of the environment that are constant, or reliably present, in every conceivable devel-opmental context, from those that represent asource of “variable input” from one context toanother. Only the former are relevant in the firststage (the construction of “innate” mechanisms);only the latter are relevant in the second (the ac-quisition of culturally specific capabilities).

For comparative analytic purposes, it is some-times helpful to sift the general from the partic-ular, or to establish a lowest common denomina-tor of development. But real environments arenot partitioned in this way. Let me continue for amoment with the example of language learning.From well before birth, the infant is immersed in a world of sound in which the characteristicpatterns of speech mingle with all the othersounds of everyday life, and right from birth it is

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surrounded by already competent speakers whoprovide support in the form of contextuallygrounded interpretations of its own vocal ges-tures. This environment, then, is not a source ofvariable input for a preconstructed device, butrather furnishes the variable conditions for thegrowth or self-assembly, in the course of early de-velopment, of the neurophysiological structuresunderwriting the child’s capacity to speak. As theconditions vary, so these structures will takemanifold forms, each differentially tuned both tospecific sound patterns and to other features oflocal contexts of utterance. These variably at-tuned structures, and the competencies they es-

tablish, correspond of course to what appear toobservers as the diverse languages of the world.In short, language—in the sense of the child’scapacity to speak in the manner of his or hercommunity—is not acquired. Rather, it is con-tinually being generated and regenerated in thedevelopmental contexts of children’s involvementin worlds of speech. And if language is not ac-quired, there can be no such thing as an innatelanguage-learning device.

What applies specifically in the case of lan-guage and speech also applies, more generally, toother aspects of cultural competence. Learning towalk in a particular way, or to play a certain mu-

Figure 19.2The two stages of cognitive development according to the complementarity model. In the first stage the human geno-type interacts with the constant component of the environment to produce the universal mechanisms of the mind’sevolved architecture. In the second, this architecture operates on variable environmental inputs to produce cultur-ally specific capabilities.

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sical instrument, or to practice a sport like cric-ket or tennis, is a matter not of acquiring froman environment representations that satisfy theinput conditions of preconstituted cognitive de-vices, but of the formation, within an environ-ment, of the necessary neurological connections,along with attendant features of musculature andanatomy, that underwrite the various skills in-volved. This conclusion is once again concordantwith the obviation approach developed earlier,and it undermines one of the key ideas of thecomplementarity thesis—that cultural learning islike filling a universal, genetically specified con-tainer with culturally specific content. The notionthat culture is transmissible from one generationto the next as a corpus of knowledge, indepen-dently of its application in the world, is untenablefor the simple reason that it rests on the impossi-ble precondition of a ready-made cognitive ar-chitecture. In fact, I maintain, nothing is reallytransmitted at all. The growth of knowledge inthe life history of a person is a result not of infor-mation transmission but of guided rediscovery,where what each generation contributes to thenext are not rules and representations for the pro-duction of appropriate behavior but the specificconditions of development under which succes-sors, growing up in a social world, can build uptheir own aptitudes and dispositions.

The process of learning by guided rediscoveryis most aptly conveyed by the notion of showing.To show something to someone is to cause it tobe made present for that person, so that he or shecan apprehend it directly, whether by looking, lis-tening, or feeling. Here the role of the tutor is toset up situations in which the novice is affordedthe possibility of such unmediated experience.Placed in a situation of this kind, the novice is in-structed to attend to this or that aspect of whatcan be seen, touched or heard, so as to get the feelof it for him- or herself. Learning in this sense istantamount to what Gibson (1979: 254) called an“education of attention.” Gibson’s point, in linewith the principles of his ecological psychology,was that we learn to perceive by a fine-tuning or

sensitization of the entire perceptual system,comprising the brain and peripheral receptor or-gans along with their neural and muscular link-ages, to particular features of our surroundings.Through this process, the human being emergesnot as a creature whose evolved capacities arefilled up with structures that represent the world,but rather as a center of awareness and agencywhose processes resonate with those of the envi-ronment. Knowledge, then, far from lying in therelations between structures in the world andstructures in the mind, mediated by the person ofthe knower, is immanent in the life and con-sciousness of the knower as it unfolds within thefield of practice set up through his or her presenceas a being-in-the-world.

The three topics I have reviewed above—of per-ception, memory, and learning—are of courseclosely connected. All of them could be addressedin terms of a complex structure metaphor, byimagining the world of our experience to be de-composed into a myriad of ephemeral fragments,unit events, samplings of which the mind has thento piece together into some coherent pattern bymeans of totalizing frameworks of social ratherthan individual provenance. I have argued, bycontrast, for an approach that starts from rela-tions and processes rather than structures andevents. Whether our concern be with perceiving,remembering, or learning, the workings of mindare to be found in the unfolding relations be-tween organism-persons and their environments.There is no way of saying what the human mindis, or of specifying its essential architecture, out-side of this unfolding. For the forms of humanknowledge do not stamp themselves upon thesubstance of human experience, but themselvesarise within the complex processes of people’s en-gagement with their surroundings. In short, thephenomena of mind are as much ecological andsocial as they are psychological. To conclude thissection I should like to show why the approachadopted here promises to shed an entirely freshlight on one of the most neglected areas of an-

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thropological inquiry, namely the knowledge andactivities of children.

Children

In a paper presented some twenty years ago,Theodore Schwartz spoke of his “sudden and be-lated realization . . . that anthropology had ig-nored children in culture while developmentalpsychologists had ignored culture in children”(Schwartz 1981: 4). There are signs, today, of achange of heart in both disciplines. The reasonsfor the anthropological neglect of children, how-ever, do not lie merely in a certain observationalblindness—the failure of ethnographers in thefield to notice children, or to pay attention totheir activities and what they have to say. Nor dothey stem from the real di≤culties, practical aswell as ethical, of collaborating with children inethnographic research. To bring children back towhere they belong—at the center of our inquiries,just as they are at the center of social life—willrequire more than just a different attitude on the part of ethnographers. For what is at stake is the very framework of theory and concepts that we bring to our scientific project. Onceagain, the source of the problem lies in the thesisof complementarity. Developmental psycholo-gists could afford to ignore culture, so long as they concerned themselves with supposedlyuniversal mechanisms of acquisition, whosestructure and functioning were conceived to beindifferent to the specificities of the acquired con-tent. But conversely, social anthropologists couldafford to ignore children, so long as they were re-garded as incomplete adults whose personhoodwas not yet fully formed and who had still to takeon the total complement of cultural knowledgefrom their predecessors.

In a sense, anthropology would have rathernot had to deal with children for the same reasonthat it has shunned inquiry into human origins.In both cases, the received theoretical wisdomimplies a transition from an initial state of bio-logical existence, defined in terms of naturally

evolved potentials, to a final state of full-blowncultural life, but nevertheless cannot countenancethe possibility of a form of life that is semicul-tural, betwixt and between nature and history.Substitute “ancestral hominid” for “infant,” andthe following characterization of childhood of-fered by Goldschmidt (1993: 351)—“the processof transformation of the infant from a purelybiological being into a culture-bearing one”—would serve equally well to define the so-calledhuman revolution. And just as it is di≤cult to seehow the events of this prehistoric revolution canpossibly be distinguished from those of the his-tory it is alleged to have inaugurated, so too,there seems to be no obvious way of telling apartthe experiences, supposedly constitutive of child-hood, that make a human being ready for his-tory, from those that belong to the historicalprocess itself. An obviation approach, however,enables us to dispense with such troublesome dis-tinctions. The infant, who admittedly starts life asa “purely biological being,” remains so for therest of his or her life. Yet right from the momentof conception, this being is also immersed at thecenter of a world of other persons—a socialworld—and participates in the historical processof its unfolding (Toren 1993: 470). Surroundedby its entourage of adults, the infant con-tributes—by way of its presence and activities—to the latter’s growth and development, just asthey contribute to its own.

To be sure, children are different. For onething, they are physically smaller, so that theenvironment affords them possibilities of actionthat are not available to grownups, and of courseconstrains what they can do as well—especially ifit is full of structures built to adult dimensions. Itis reasonable, too, to distinguish degrees of ma-turity in the life histories of organism-persons.Neurophysiologically, the brain of the adult hu-man is more complex than that of the small child.It is not reasonable, however, to equate smallnessor immaturity with a state of incompletion.Persons, as I have shown, are never complete,never finished, but undergo continual develop-

274 Tim Ingold

ment within fields of relationships. The image ofthe child as an incomplete person has its source inthe complementarity thesis, with its assumptionthat humans come into the world with their ca-pacities already in place, waiting to be filled upwith cultural content. A classic statement to thiseffect comes from Geertz (1973: 50): “Betweenwhat our body tells us and what we have to knowin order to function, there is a vacuum we mustfill ourselves, and we fill it with information (ormisinformation) provided by our culture.” Theimplication is that children’s ability to function inthe world is at best imperfect. Yet as Toren hasrightly observed, “children have to live their livesin terms of their understandings just as adults do;their ideas are grounded in their experience andthus equally valid” (1993: 463). Adults and chil-dren may, then, function differently from oneanother, but no better or worse.

The complementarity approach, in effect, hideschildren from view behind a category of child-hood which marginalizes them, or even excludesthem altogether, from full participation in sociallife. The obviation approach, by contrast, bringschildren out into the open, but it does so by dis-solving the categorical distinction between child-hood and adulthood. Children and adults are nolonger conceived to stand on either side of aboundary between becoming a person and beingone, between undergoing socialization and par-ticipating in social life, between acquiring cul-tural knowledge and applying it in practice, or inshort, between learning and doing. Children arepersons just as adults are, and their knowledgeand skills are likewise developed through partici-pation both with other children and with adultsin the joint practical activities of social life. Thisis not to say, however, that children and adultsare the same. It is possible to speak of childrenwithout a special category of childhood, simplyin recognition of the inherent temporality of hu-man life, of the fact that organism-persons growolder, increasing in skill and maturity—and inthat sense also in knowledge—as they do so. In the course of this aging process, one grows

out of certain ways of doing things, and growsinto others. But no one has ever grown out ofbiology, nor has anyone grown into society orculture.

Conclusion

Throughout this chapter, I have argued againstthe idea that human beings participate concur-rently in two distinct worlds, of nature andsociety, figuring as biological individuals in theformer and as cultural subjects in the latter. In-stead, I propose that we consider humans asindistinguishably organisms and persons, partici-pating not in two worlds but in one, consisting ofthe entire field of their environmental relations.Figure 19.3 illustrates schematically the contrastbetween these two views. Needless to say, theenvironment of a person will include beings ofmany kinds, both human and nonhuman, towhich that person will relate in different ways de-pending on their particular qualities and charac-teristics, and on the project in hand. As onepasses from relations with humans to relationswith nonhuman animals, plants, and inanimateobjects, there is no Rubicon beyond which wecan say of any relation that it is directed towardthings in nature rather than persons in society.For as the edge of nature is an illusion, so too isthe image of society as a sphere of life that existsbeyond it (Ingold 1997: 250). But by the sametoken, in the project of scholarly research, therecan be no absolute division of method and objec-tive between studying the lives and works of hu-mans and of nonhumans. Why, then, should theparticipatory and interpretative approaches ofthe arts and humanities be limited to the study ofhuman subjects? And why, conversely, should theobservational and explanatory approaches of sci-ence be limited to the domain of nonhuman “na-ture”? Why, indeed, should these approaches beseparated at all?

Ever since its relatively recent inception, thecredibility of “social science” has been compro-mised by the recognition that the observer of hu-

From Complementarity to Obviation 275

Figure 19.3A schematic comparison of the complementarity and obviation approaches (after Ingold 1996c: 127). In the com-plementarity approach (upper diagram), every human being is, in part, a person in society and, in another part, anorganism in nature. In the obviation approach (lower diagram), the human being is a person-organism situated inan environment of human and nonhuman others.

276 Tim Ingold

man behavior is necessarily a participant in thefield of observation. In this vein, numerous criticshave pointed out that participant observation,the methodological crux of social anthropologi-cal inquiry, is a contradiction in terms. To partic-ipate, it is said, is to swim with the current, toobserve is to stand on the bank: how can one pos-sibly do both at once? Now it is doubtless truethat scientific inquiry of any kind depends uponobservation. But there is more to observationthan mere spectating. A disinterested bystanderwho did not, in some way, couple the movementof his or her attention to the surrounding cur-rents of activity, who failed to watch what wasgoing on, would see much, but observe nothing.Observation, in short, is itself an environmentallysituated activity that requires the observer toplace himself or herself, in person, in a relation ofactive, perceptual engagement with the object ofattention. It is from this kind of sensory parti-cipation, proceeding against the background ofinvolved activity in the wider environment ofhuman and nonhuman others, that all scientificknowledge grows.

Thus, whether our concern be with humans ornonhumans, there can be no observation withoutparticipation, no explanation without interpreta-tion, no science without engagement. As one suchscience, I believe that anthropology is destined to take its place as part of a broader ecologicalstudy of the relations between organism-personsand their environments, premised on the inescap-able fact of our involvement in the one world in which we all live (Ingold 1992: 693–694). Anydivisions within this field of inquiry must be rela-tive rather than absolute, depending on what isselected as one’s focus rather than on the a prioriseparation of substantive, externally boundeddomains. I hope, in this chapter, to have givensome idea of how we might proceed with recon-structing the discipline along these lines.

I would like to end, however, with a wordabout the teaching of anthropology. I haveshown that the forms of human knowledge arenot made by society, and handed down to its in-

dividual members for them to use in their every-day lives, but are rather generated and sustainedwithin the contexts of people’s engagements withone another and with nonhuman components ofthe environment. If this applies to knowledge ingeneral, in must apply to anthropological knowl-edge in particular. In the field, anthropologistslearn; in the classroom they teach. This does notmean, however, that they are receiving knowl-edge in the first case and transmitting it in thesecond. For in both, whether with local people orwith students, they collaborate in the dialogicprocesses of its creation. It is through bringingthe two dialogues, in the field and the classroom,into a productive interplay that anthropologicalknowledge is generated. It follows that the dia-logue in the classroom is as important, and asintegral to the anthropological project, as thedialogue in the field. Belatedly, we have begun to recognize the contribution that local collabo-rators—erstwhile “informants”—have made tothe advance of our subject. It is high time we rec-ognized the contribution of students as well.

Notes

1. Because these others may be nonhuman as well ashuman, there is nothing strange about the extension of kinship relations across the species boundary that is commonly taken for granted among non-Westernpeoples.

2. This position is beautifully epitomized, and paro-died, in the title of a recent article by Morton, “Theorganic remains” (Morton 1995).

3. In this vein, for example, Goldschmidt (1993: 355)writes of the “dynamic relation between the genetic andthe cultural, between biology and anthropology.” Hisequation of biology with genetic programming leadshim to the bizarre thought that even the human em-bryo, to the extent that its development is affected byenvironmentally specific “intra-uterine experiences,”could not be “purely biological” since it would alreadyhave acquired a modicum of culture (1993: 357, n. 19).

4. While recognizing that these processes, of individualontogeny and evolutionary phylogeny, are distinct, bi-ologists do not deny that there are connections between

From Complementarity to Obviation 277

them. Thus the circumstances of ontogenetic devel-opment, insofar as they affect genetic replication, mayexert an influence on evolution; conversely the evolvedgenetic specification is supposed to establish a schedulefor development (Hinde 1991: 585).

5. As Kroeber wrote, “All evidence directs us to theconviction that in recent periods civilization has racedat a speed so far outstripping the pace of hereditaryevolution, that the latter has, if not actually standingstill, afforded all the seeming, relatively, of making noprogress” (1952: 51).

6. The “finished artifact fallacy” has its precise coun-terpart in standard notions of socialization or encultur-ation as the working up of human raw material intofinished forms, ready for entry into social life.

7. I am compelled here to use the neuter pronoun “it,”with regard to persons, rather than “he/she,” in recog-nition of the fact that gendering is itself an aspect of theway in which relations are enfolded in the conscious-ness and identity of the self.

8. “What is very essential to the whole notion,”Bartlett writes, is “that the organised mass results ofpast changes of position and posture are actively doingsomething all the time; are, so to speak, carried alongwith us, complete, though developing from moment tomoment” (Bartlett 1932: 201). There are, I think, strik-ing similarities between Bartlett’s notion of schema andBourdieu’s (1977) of habitus. Both terms suggest an ac-tive, dynamic organization of past experience, ratherthan a passive, static framework for accommodating it.

9. Connerton prefers the notion of habit to that ofskill, arguing that as a habit becomes established,“awareness retreats,” leading ultimately to bodily au-tomatisms (1989: 93–94). I do not think it is right to de-scribe the movements of the musician or craftsman ashabitual in this sense. In such skilled activity, awarenessdoes not retreat but becomes one with the movement it-self. This movement, far from being automatic, carriesits own immanent intentionality (Merleau-Ponty 1962:110–111).

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