ABSTRACT
Common sense rests upon a profound tension between academic and popular knowledge in English society. Common sense is not just a form of knowledge that is non-academic, but – and this was confirmed by numerous informants – it is thought to be something that arises organically, without needing to be formally taught. Tim Ingold’s work in Perception helps to understand the cultural underpinnings to common sense in Broadland, by raising a series of important questions. In many respects, vernacular common sense differs from the “Western” outlook identified by Ingold – it presumes precisely the kind of “active, practical, and perceptual engagement” with natures’ “affordances” that Ingold so vividly describes in non-Western contexts. Invocations of common sense by land managers clearly chime with Ingold’s exhortation to embrace actual, perceptual engagement with a shared taskscape, even if that taskscape is more haphazard, tense and gap-riddled, than a holistic plenum would be.
