Transcript Tim Ingold From Complementarity to Obviation

Tim Ingold
From Complementarity to
Obviation
Par
Luc Faucher
Heidegger dans la nature
« You have to be in a world to imagine
yourself out of it, and it is through this
being-in-the-world that you become
what you are. » (257)
L’objectif d’une vie

« It was, in part, the challenge of closing
the gap between the arts and
humanities on the one hand, and the
natural sciences on the other, that drew
me to anthropology in the first place,
and I still believe that no other discipline
is in a better position to accomplish it. »
(255)
Une distinction

« Complementarity » vs « Obviation »
 Méthode analytique: considère éléments
séparément et en fait la synthèse (biosocial,
psychoculturel, biopsychoculturel).
 Méthode holiste (?): pas d’éléments séparés,
mais un « singular locus of creative growth
within a continually unfolding field of
relationships. » (256)
Deux images de l’homme
Classique: l’homme existe
simultanément dans deux mondes
parallèles (et irréductibles): la nature et
la culture. En tant que personnes, les
humains « flottent sans ancrage» audessus de la nature.
 Nouvelle: Sont à la fois des organismes
et des personnes.

Deux positions

Accepter la dichotomie, remettre ensemble
les points de vue partiels provenant des deux
plans (complementarity).
 Rejeter la dichotomie,sans tomber dans le
réductionnisme ou le constructionnisme
social (obviation).
 Avantage est de réinsérer la culture dans la
nature (p. 257)
Exemple du parentage (kinship)

Complementarity: à la fois composante
innée (comportement) et la façon dont
ces comportements sont canalisés en
termes de représentations culturelles
spécifiques.
Exemples du parentage
Obviation: “ … would begin by recognizing
that behavioral dispositions are neither
preconstituted genetically nor simply
downloaded onto passively receptive
individual from superior source in society, but
are rather formed in and through a process of
ontogenetic development within a specific
environmental context.” (257)
 Biologique (développement) et social
(expériences vécues, pas représentations).

Exemple du bi-pédisme
« For a start, human babies are not
born walking: rather, the ability to walk
is itself an acquired skill that develops in
an environment that includes walking
caregivers, a range of supporting
objects, and a certain terrain. » (258)
 Plus grande plasticité du
développement.

Développement
Complementarity: image incohérente du
développement (partie génétiquement
préconstituée, partie moulée par la
culture).
 Obiviation: les humains se développent
dans un environnement constitué
d’autres humains. Élimine la
dichotomie.

Incorporation
“… throughout life, the body undergoes
processes of growth and decay, and as it
does so, particular skills, habits, capacities,
and strengths, as well as debilities and
weaknesses, are enfolded into its very
constitution …” (258)
 Insatisfait avec Merleau-Ponty qui reprend la
dichotomie (?)

Final step for embodiment
“… the body is the human organism,
and that the process of embodiment is
one and the same as the development
of that organism in its environment.”
(259)
 Human as a “living organism”.

Mythe du génotype

Programme développementaux font partie du
génotype.
 Mais rend le concept vide(?): « One would
otherwise have to suppose that human
beings were genotypically endowed, at the
dawn of history, with the capacity to do
everything that they ever have done in the
past, and ever will do in the future … » (261)
 Adaptation vs exaptation: systèmes
développementaux mettent-ils cette
distinction en péril?
Solution: non-fixité
« We look in vain for the evolutionary
origins of human capacities for the
simple reason that these capacities
continue to evolve in the very historical
unfolding of our lives. » (263)
 Pas de point d’origine de nos capacités
qui après-coup n’auraient qu’à être
activées.


«… the humans today are not like their
predecessors. This is because these
characteristics are not fixed genetically but
emerge within processes of development,
and because the circumstances of
development today, cumulatively shaped
through previous human activity, are very
different from those of the past. » (263)
Paysage et environnement
Lewontin, pas d’environnement fixe.
 Appliquée aux artefacts. Pas de sens
indépendant du contexte d’usage (projets de
vie).
 « We cannot,…, make a hard and fast
distinction between one class of things that
are ready-made in nature, and another class
of things that have been made through the
shaping of naturally given raw material into a
finished artefactual form. » (264)

Gibson

The environment, in short, is not the same as
the physical world…. Rather, the environment
is the the world as it exists and takes on
meaning in realtion ot the beings that inhabit
it. As such, its formation has to be understood
in the same way that we understand the
growth of organisms and persons, in terms of
the properties of dynamic self-organization of
relational fiedls. » (265)
Psychologie et anthropologie

Psychologie comme terme intermédiaire
entre la biologie et la culture (Mauss).
 Mais l’esprit indépendant est une invention.
 Fait le pont entre corps et esprit (biologie vs
anthropologie et psychologie) et individu et
collectivité (biologie et psychologie vs
anthropologie).
Solution

Abolir barrière séparant psychologie et
disciplines sociales: « The discipline
that will be brought into being through
the dissolution of this boundary,
whatever we choose to call it, will be the
study of how people perceive, act, feel,
remember, think, and learn within the
settings of their mutual, practical
involvement in the live-in world. » (266)
Perception
Classique: les sens-data sont produits
par les organes récepteurs en réponse
aux stimuli de l’environnement; puis ces
sens-data sont traités pour générer une
image du monde extérieur.
 Anthropologie s’intéresse à l’influence
de la culture sur la construction des
modèles.

Gibson

Perception différente est due, non au
traitement différent des mêmes sensdata, mais plutôt aux différences dans
l’entraînement à des tâches pratiques
variées « … involving particular bodily
movements and sensibilities, to orient
themselves to the environment and to
attend to its feature in different ways. »
(267)
Perception directe
• “What is ‘direct’ visual perception? I argue that the seeing of
an environment by an observer in that environment is direct in that
it is not mediated by visual sensations or sense data. ... Direct
perception is not based on the having of sensations.” (Gibson, ‘A
theory of direct visual perception’, 1974, p. 215)
• “In my theory, perception is not supposed to occur in the brain but
to arise in the retino-neuro-muscular system as an activity of the
whole system.” (1974, p. 217)
• “I shall suggest that natural vision depends on the eyes in the head
on a body supported by the ground, the brain being only the central
organ of a complete visual system.” (1979, p. 1)
Mémoire
Mémoire comme entrepôt vs mémoire
comme ‘skill’.
 CD vs performance de la pièce.
 Entrepôt: « Remembering is then a
rather simple process of searching or
scanning, across a complexly structured
cognitive array. » (268)

Skill: « … remembering is itself a skilled,
environmentally situated activity. …
remembering is a matter not of discovering
structures in the attics of our minds, but of
generating them from our movements in the
world. » (268-9)
 Mémoire est le produit d’un schéma qui est
réajusté à la lumière des expériences.

Apprentissage en deux temps

Obligation de poser des structures innées
pour permettre l’apprentissage de
l’information ou les représentations
culturelles.
 LAD: « It would thus appear that langage
acquistion is a two-stage process: in the first,
the LAD is constructed; in the second, it is
furnishd with specific syntactic and semantic
content. » (270)
Apprentissage maillé

« The environment, …, is not a source
of variable input for a preconstructed
device, but rather furnishes the variable
conditions for the growth or selfassembly, in the course of early
development, of the neurophysiological
structures underwrting the child’s
capacity to speak. » (270)
Informations culturelles

« The notion that culture is transmissible from
one generation to the next as a corpus of
knowledge, independently of its application in
the world, is untenable for the simple reason
that it rests on the impossible precondition of
a ready-made cognitive architecture. » (272)
 Pas transmission, mais « guided
rediscovery ». Apprentissage est éducation
de l’attention.
Enfants

Psychologie développementale a ignoré
culture pour mécanisme universel
d’acquisition; anthropologie ignore enfant,
puisque adultes incomplets.
 Enfants représentent le degré zéro de la
culture, le biologique à l’état pur, peuvent
donc être négligés par l’anthropologie.
 Approche Obviation brise dichotomie enfantadulte, comme celle entre nature et culture.
Enfants et la vérité
Affordances différentes.
 Les enfants ne sont pas des personnes
incomplètes.
 ‘Children have to live their lives in terms
of their understandings just as adults
do; their ideas are grounded in their
experience and thus equally valid.’
(Toren, cité p. 274)

Conclusion

« Any divisions within this field of inquiry
[of the relations between organismpersons and their environments] must
rather than absolute, depending on
what is selected as one’s focus rather
than on the a priori separation of
substantitive, externally bouded
domains ». (276)