Ecology of culture Imaginative approaches in modes of perception

Ecology of culture Imaginative approaches in modes of perception Mohamed Ali [email protected] #Cognitive Sciences cognitive sociology Theories of communication Abstract Ingold's research unfolds from an ecological point of view, reading investigative objects as parts of a network of interactions that articulate, structure and influence each other and recursively. Firstly, individuals are not the result of the transcription of a prefixed set of "Traits" - genetic or sociocultural - but they are always growing entities, whose configuration is the outcome meeting with the environment as a context for their development. It is also important to consider individual development, as the organism is a node in a morphogenetic field. Ingold's naturalist approach allows us to abandon a deterministic conception that based on the idea of the program, pre-built and pre-given information, proposed for the biological organism’s that for artifacts, made - according to this vision - by executing a project. There Ingold's ecological perspective is a dynamic interweaving of genotype and phenotype, design and artifact, design and execution, an interweaving that takes into account the variety aspects, process and contingency that are revealed in the ontogenesis of the organism and in its being situated in social and environmental interaction. There are three main aspects of Ingold's thought: • • • Formal approach, that is, for forms & patterns. Temporality approach: dynamic, non-static entities. Relationality approach: internal and external, subject and object co-evolve. Ingold's ideas frighten with those of cognitive sciences, which presuppose machines that they process information, store and manipulate symbolic representations in a language of thought on the basis of a program that constitutes its syntactic rules. Cognitive psychology concerns the theory of complementarity, which sees man as the sum of body, mind and culture. Ingold instead emphasizes that the individual is rooted in the environment through local practices, as concrete matrixes of a set of specific abilities (skills), understood as a knowing to be silent and incorporated. Shortly, the systems that concretely generate expert activity are not circled as in a hardware but are assembled in a flexible way. According to the author, the genotype understood as a specific model independent of the context does not exist. This means that the forms and the capacities of human beings and other organisms are ultimately attributable not to inheritance genetics but to the generative potentialities of the evolutionary system, that is the whole system of relationships constituted by the presence of the organism, including its genes, in a particular environment. Every generation, the apprentice learns by means of his being situated in his contexts in which the what to do and what to pay attention to when dealing with certain tasks is shown. But nevertheless, this is he who will later develop his own abilities. Learning, in this sense, is what Gibson he called "attention education". The apprentice does not acquire culture, but embarks on a process called " understanding in practice ". The skillful practice is not the mechanical application of an external force but involves the quality of care, judgment and dexterity. The operator he looks and feels while he is at work. Innovation and improvisation are two sides of a process of learning that could be summarized as a guided rediscovery. Taking the animals into consideration, some experiments showed that private birds of the opportunity to practice and suitable materials are unable to build adequate nests, or even to build it at all. The skills of a weaver bird, just like those of a basket maker, develop through the exploration of the possibilities offered by the environment. Not is an idea, a design to generate the form, but rather a uniform series of regular movements; there dexterity and mastery of this movement is a function of the abilities (skills) that are evolutionarily embodied in the operational modes “modus operandi” of the bird's body as a man through the practice in a certain type of environment. Culture: it cannot be considered as super-organic or over-organic-. It is not something added to individuals, but a measure of the difference between them. Difference that depends precisely from relationships and the environment. For Ingold, body and mind are not separate things but ways of describing the same process, that is, the same activity of the organism-person in its own environment. Lamark first invented the concept of biology, distinguishing between non-living things and living being. Biology was called bottom-up, from bottom to top, including humanity as an expression of the highest step of the scale of living beings. With Darwinism, all living things have two properties. The first is their variety, such that no individual is identical to another. The second is that they can transmit the characters that make up this variety through reproduction. These populations will go under natural selection that will give rise to a third property, namely that each inherits a program, a model of development. Weismann, instead proposed the thesis that every living being consists of two parts: • • The Germplasm and; Somatoplasm. The germoplasm is the hereditary part that contains all the necessary instructions to the assembly of the organism, somatoplasm which responds passively to the instructions of the first. Only somatoplasm is in direct contact with the environment. Today the theories of Weismann find widespread approval and most researches speak of genotype and phenotype. The dichotomy between phenotype and genotype, along with the categorical negation of the possibility that the phenotype may somehow influencing the genotype, establish the conceptual basis for the complete separation of ontogenesis & phylogeny. In these terms, studying the development of an organism epigenesis is quite another thing do not study its evolution. Goodwin speaks of "morphogenetic field" defining it as a spatial domain in which each part is in a state that is determined by the state of the neighboring parts, so that the whole has one specific relational structure. Living beings can both reproduce and repair themselves in the event of damage or disturbance from the outside. Since each part inflates (enfolds) the whole, it is possible, through an inverse movement of explication and unfolding, to reconstruct everything a start from the part. For Ingold, therefore, both organism and environment emerge from a continuum development process and their domains are not separated, since involved in the organism itself is the whole history of its environmental relationships. Together with the genes, called replicators, memes are also transmitted, the basic unit of diffusion of the cultural trait. For modern biologists, behavior is the combined product of both factors innate than environmental. But behavior is not a simple effect of endogenous causes exogenous, Ingold argues, rather it unfolds in a continuous process of development within a relational field whose result is mutual integration and complementarity of person and environment. Perspective of living: the world becomes a context rich in meaning for its being inhabited, and not for its being built according to lines of a formal design. Dawkins coined the term "extended genotype" refers to the genetic effects that go beyond the body of the organism and, for example, the beaver's lair is part of the extended beaver genotype. But is there difference between the construction of the beaver and the human one? Ingold criticizes the idea that there is some Essential "threshold" between a kingdom of nature (with animals that build habitation and artifacts based on inherited genetic programs) and a realm of culture (in which they would instead be human beings, who build architectural works based on mental projects influenced by own cultures). Kroeber wonders how to convert a beaver into a worker or an engineer. He claimed that human beings, instead, learn through practice, example and a good dose of ingenuity, beyond their ability to transmit the know-how acquired from generation to generation and to preserve it in long-term memory, they have learned a lot of trades. However, the perspective of living says that people do not care about their ideas, projects or mental representations in the world, for precisely that world is the homeland of their thoughts. Only because they already live-in world, they can think about the thoughts they think. Ingold also names the tools. Normally it is said that the tools are built where there is an image is made before their material execution, that is to say a mental design. But there it can be limited to a conscious design, as a flat stone can act as a hammer against a nail, without the stone being altered in any way. This type of situation takes the cooptation name. Likewise, natural selection can only work on a stock of materials already at arrangement. So, changing the environmental conditions, the structures that have come adapting to a certain type of function is co-opted for completely different functions, for which they return good. Like the feathers of birds with their aerodynamic properties, derived from the hair that originally used for thermal insulation. This process is called exaptation. Returning to the idea of design, taking into consideration the design of the shell of one snail, we can say that there is no "design". Its shape emerges through a process of growth within what is technically known as the "morphogenetic field" - that is, the system of total relationships that is established by virtue of the presence of the organism that develops in its environment. The role of genes in the morphogenetic process is not to specify the form, but to establish the parameters, such as the direction and angle of the spiral. Growth in organisms as in the artifacts, can be defined as autopoiesis. The word technology is composed of two Greek words, tekhne, which means type of art or skill, and logos, which refers to a framework of rational principles. Technology is the application of natural mechanisms, discovered through reasoning scientific, for the purpose of producing artifacts. Technology and society: In the history of anthropology there are two distinct ways of understanding the relationship between technology and society: • • technological determinism; technological possibilities. Technological determinism claims that the institutional forms of society are dictated by the demands of functioning of a technological system, for which social change is in turn dictated and instigated, indeed dependent on technological change. Technological possibilism, claims that technology does not exerts or influence on the forms of society, except by placing external limits on the space of human action. Within these limits, society and culture follow their historical course, regardless of the nature and complexity of the technological system. Not for Ingold they can separate the notions of society and technology, because the technical relationships are imbricate in social relationships, and can only be understood as an aspect of sociality human. Human beings are not two things but one, not an individual and a person, but one body. As the person is an aspect of the organism, so social life is an aspect of organic life in general, so it can be said that it has a biological basis. Technology and language: There are two ways to formulate the link between technology and language:• • The first suggests that both language and technology are based on a cognitive substrate essential. The second hypothesizes that both language and technology have evolved under the same type of selective pressure. (Ingold however disagrees with neither approach) Neuropsychology studies have shown how the neural mechanisms engaged both in linguistics production which can be located in the same dominant hemisphere as the manual skillful brain operations, which suggests a connection between language and preference for using right hand. Also damage to the brain that interfere with the patient's ability to issue one coherent linguistic production also seem to hamper its ability to perform sequences ordered of shares. This type of patient can produce and understand single words but fails organize them in a sentence; vice versa they can perform each single action perfectly, but they cannot organize them in a complete technical operation. Measure technological complexity: One of the first attempts was made by Oswalt, who defined the complexity of a tool from the number of "technical units" that make it up. A technical unit is a physically distinct part that contributes distinctly and specifically to the whole operation technique. For Ingold, measurements of this type are misleading. To evaluate the technical refinement, we must not concentrate on the observation of tools, but on "knowledge". The tools do not have any utility if you do not know how to use them. I would affirm that Tim Ingold's rigorous and imaginative approach to modes of perception as practices involving entire organisms in relations with others is unmatched in contemporary anthropology. This work, drawing on scholarship from across the arts and sciences, addresses foundational questions within and well beyond anthropology’s four fields. His new preface outlining some of the ways he has since developed these ideas are inspirational.