ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book finds a way of comprehending how human beings relate to their environments, in the tasks of making a living, that does not set up a polarity between the ecological domain of their relations with non-human ‘nature’ and the cognitive domain of its cultural construction. It explores the implications of the position that awareness and activity are rooted in the engagement between persons and environment for the understanding of perception and cognition, architecture and the built environment, local and global conceptions of environmental change, landscape and temporality, mapping and wayfinding, and the differentiation of the senses. The book inserts a note about the use of the concepts of ‘the Western’ and ‘the modern’, and these concepts have been the source of no end of trouble for anthropologists.
