ABSTRACT
Drawing on Ingold’s notion of skills, as being attained by an education of attention within and through particular environments, this chapter explores skilled practice and communication beyond the purely human realm. The chapter will show how Ingold’s work (from early on) has contributed to bridging conceptual divides in our understanding of humans and other living beings as well in the split of academic labour between the natural sciences on the one hand, and the social sciences and humanities on the other. In doing so, the chapter connects Ingold’s ecological approach to human/animal relations to ongoing debates in anthropology in particular and related fields such as the environmental humanities more broadly. The chapter will explore these themes through an ethnography of falconry practice, that traces the processes of co-learning and enskilment in which both falconers and falcons are involved. Based on Ingold’s idea of the living organism as a ‘hive of activity’ the chapter outlines a movement-oriented approach to more-than-human meaning-making, situated within the sensory, bodily and affective dimensions of trans-species communication.
