Taskscape

About: Taskscape is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 72 publications have been published within this topic receiving 8053 citations.

The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill

Abstract: In this work Tim Ingold offers a persuasive new approach to understanding how human beings perceive their surroundings. He argues that what we are used to calling cultural variation consists, in the first place, of variations in skill. Neither innate nor acquired, skills are grown, incorporated into the human organism through practice and training in an environment. They are thus as much biological as cultural. To account for the generation of skills we have therefore to understand the dynamics of development. And this in turn calls for an ecological approach that situates practitioners in the context of an active engagement with the constituents of their surroundings. The twenty-three essays comprising this book focus in turn on the procurement of livelihood, on what it means to ‘dwell’, and on the nature of skill, weaving together approaches from social anthropology, ecological psychology, developmental biology and phenomenology in a way that has never been attempted before. The book is set to revolutionise the way we think about what is ‘biological’ and ‘cultural’ in humans, about evolution and history, and indeed about what it means for human beings – at once organisms and persons – to inhabit an environment. The Perception of the Environment will be essential reading not only for anthropologists but also for biologists, psychologists, archaeologists, geographers and philosophers.

The temporality of the landscape

Abstract: Landscape and temporality are the major unifying themes of archaeology and social‐cultural anthropology. This paper attempts to show how the temporality of the landscape may be understood by way of a ‘dwelling perspective’ that sets out from the premise of people's active, perceptual engagement in the world. The meaning of ‘landscape’ is clarified by contrast to the concepts of land, nature and space. The notion of ‘taskscape’ is introduced to denote a pattern of dwelling activities, and the intrinsic temporality of the taskscape is shown to lie in its rhythmic interrelations or patterns of resonance. By considering how taskscape relates to landscape, the distinction between them is ultimately dissolved, and the landscape itself is shown to be fundamentally temporal. Some concrete illustrations of these arguments are drawn from a painting by Bruegel, The Harvesters.

These Boots Are Made for Walking...: Mundane Technology, the Body and Human-Environment Relations

Abstract: This article begins with a consideration of the `pure' unmediated relation between the human body and nature, exemplified, in different ways, by environmental expressivism, and Ingold's subtle analysis of affordance and the taskscape. It is argued that perspectives fail properly to incorporate the role of mundane technology in the mediation of human-nature relations. Drawing upon the work of Michael Serres, and, in particular, his concept of the parasite, I explore how these mundane technological artefacts - specifically, walking boots - intervene in the circuits of communication between humans and the natural environment. This re-orientation traces how the local relation between bodies and environments is a complex movement between the material and semiotic, the local and the global. In the process, I draw upon four aspects of walking boots: first, there is the role of boots as mechanical technologies that can cause pain, dissolving identity and the relation between humans and nature; second, there is the role of boots as signifying style and identity; third, there is the role of boots as embodiments of procedures of standardization and objectification; and fourth, there is the role of boots as technological means of damage to nature. Finally, in concluding, I tentatively consider some of the political implications of this way of theorizing the relation between bodies and environments.

Local Clay Sources as Histories of Human–Landscape Interactions: a Ceramic Taskscape Perspective

Abstract: In this paper, we argue that pot-making should be considered in its broader landscape to reveal not only its articulation with the many other quotidian tasks undertaken by a community but also how ancient people oriented themselves in that landscape. We address this point in the context of two small Neolithic communities in southern Calabria, Italy, by treating archaeological ceramics as congealed taskscapes and implementing a novel methodology to unravel the interactions among people, materials, and landscapes. We examine how clay sources are distributed in the local landscape, what the qualities of the clays within them are, and what specific materials the Neolithic potters used in making their pots. We ask not only where in the landscape potters went to get their raw materials but also where they did not go. Their selective engagement with the landscape reveals a social understanding of parts of the landscape considered “appropriate” and “relevant” to pot-making (inland areas) and parts that were not (coastal areas). We also ask what other tasks potters could have undertaken while collecting clays. The co-occurrence of resources in the landscape highlights the need to consider the interlocking of various daily tasks and reveals which tasks could have been perceived as socially related. By explicitly considering the task of pot-making in its landscape, this paper reveals the relational and mutually constitutive articulation of both in everyday life.