Tim Ingold English anthropologist working at the University of Aberdeen. Country: Great Britain

Biography of Tim Ingold

Tim Ingold is an English anthropologist working at the University of Aberdeen. He conducted ethnographic fieldwork among the Skolt Saami people living in northeastern Finland for his doctoral research in 1971-1972. The result of this work was his monograph "The Skolt Lapps Today" published in 1976. In the 1990s, Ingold's research interests shifted towards the field of ecological anthropology. Influenced by the work of James Gibson on perception systems, he sought to integrate an ecological approach into anthropology and psychology. Ingold criticizes the traditional approach to the analysis of environmental perception, which is based on evolutionary biology and cognitive sciences. He argues for the dependence of the dynamics of perception and activity on social and landscape environments in his book "The Perception of the Environment" published in 2000.

At the University of Aberdeen, Ingold explores the connection between the perception of the environment, modes of pedestrian movement, skills, and the linearity of writing. By skills, Ingold refers not only to the technique of bodily operations but also to the inherent ability of the human existence, which is seen as a whole, to engage in activity and cognition within a structured environment. In his work "The Perception of the Environment" (2000), Ingold claims that the synthesis of social anthropology, ecological psychology, developmental biology, and phenomenology forms the methodological basis for studying the cognitive interaction between humans and the environment.