p.2 [James] Gibson wanted to know how people come to perceive the environment around them.

p.3 Perception, Gibson argued, is not the achievement of a mind in a body, but of the organism as a whole in its environment, and is tantamount to the organism's own exploratory movement through the world. If mind is anywhere, then, it is not 'inside the head' rather than 'out there' in the world. To the contrary, it is immanent in the network of sensory pathways that are set up by virtue of the perceiver's immersion in his or her environment.

p.5 the study of skill demands a perspective which situates the practitioner, right from the start, in the context of an active engagement with the constituents of his or her surroundings. I call this the 'dwelling perspective'.

p.11 For the Ojibwa, knowledge is grounded in experience, understood as a coupling of the movement of one's awareness to the movement of aspects of the world.

p.18 while Bateson shared with Levi-Strauss the notion of mind as a processor of information, he did not regard processing as a step-by-step refinement or repackaging of sensory data already received, but rather as the unfolding of the whole system of relations constituted by the multi-sensory involvement of the perceiver in his or her environment.

p.19 Bateson's question: what is this 'organism plus environment'? ...A properly ecological approach... is one that would take, as its point of departure, the whole-organism-in-its-environment. In other words, 'organism plus environment' should denote not a compound of two things, but one indivisible totality. That totality is, in effect, a developmental system (cf. Oyama 1985), and an ecology of life - in my terms - is one that would deal with the dynamics of such systems... what we may call mind is the cutting edge of the life process itself, the ever-moving front of what Alfred North Whitehead (1929:314) called a 'creative advance into novelty'.

p.35 For Winterhalder, skill evidently means an ability to produce rapid solutions to ostensibly rather complex problems posed by specific conjunctions of environmental circumstances. Elsewhere, Smith and Winterhalder (1992:57) suggest that this is done by means of 'rules of thumb'.

p.35-36 The power and utility of rules of thumb... rest on the fact that they are inherently vague, specifying little or nothing about the concrete details of action... Invoked against the background of involvement in a real world of persons, objects and relations, rules of thumb... once launched into action itself they must necessarily fall back on... developmentally embodied and environmentally attuned capacities of movement and perception. Rules of thumb, as Suchman (1987: 52) puts it, serve 'to orient you in such a way that you can obtain the best possible position from which to use those embodied skills on which, in the final analysis, your success depends'. In no sense, however, do they substitute for these skills.

p.63 Since my body inhabits the world... I can always consult the world to orient my movements, rather than an internal cognitive representation.

p.97 the power concentrated in persons enlivens that which falls within its sphere of influence.

p.99 For the Ojibwa, however, knowledge does not lie in the accumulation of mental content. It is not by representing it in the mind that they get to know the world, but rather by moving around in their environment, whether in dreams or waking life, by watching, listening and feeling, actively seeking out the signs by which it is revealed. Experience, here, amounts to a kind of sensory participation, a coupling of the movement of one's own awareness to the movement of aspects of the world. And the kind of knowledge it yields is not propositional, in the form of hypothetical statements or 'beliefs' about the nature of reality, but personal - consisting of an intimate sensitivity to other ways of being, to the particular movements, habits and temperaments that reveal each for what it is. Indeed such knowledge, closely analogous to that which the skilled craftsman has of his raw material, is not easily articulated in propositional form, and would seem to be devalued by any attempt to do so - to disembed it from its grounding in the context of the knower's personal involvement with the known.

p.101 for the Ojibwa, the world is opened up to the dreamer, it is revealed. This is why they attach such a tremendous importance to dreaming as a source of knowledge, for the knowledge revealed through dreams is also a source of power.

p.105 for a being who is alive to its surroundings, experience does not mediate between things in the world and representations in the mind, but is intrinsic to the sensory coupling, in perception and action, of the awareness of the self to the movement of those features of the environment selected as foci of attention. This view of experience calls for a quite different understanding of vision. It would be premised on the notion of the perceiver as an active participant in an environment rather than a passive recipient of stimuli, one whose vision penetrates the world rather than holding up a mirror to it.

p.145 Knowledge, from a relational point of view, is not merely applied but generated in the course of lived experience, through a series of encounters in which the contribution of other persons is to orient one's attention... along the same lines as their own, so that one can begin to apprehend the world for oneself in the ways, and from the positions, that they do.

p.153 The chapters in this part explore various aspects of what I have called the dwelling perspective. By this I mean a perspective that treats the immersion of the organism-person in an environment or lifeworld as an inescapable condition of existence. From this perspective, the world continually comes into being around the inhabitant, and its manifold constituents take on significance through their incorporation into a regular pattern of life activity.

p.155 In wayfinding, people do not traverse the surface of a world whose layout is fixed in advance - as represented on the cartographic map. Rather, they 'feel their way' through a world that is itself in motion, continually coming into being through the combined action of human and non-human agencies.

p.162 Pierre Bourdieu... has attempted to show how cultural knowledge, rather than being imported by the mind into contexts of experience, is itself generated within these contexts in the course of people's involvement with others in the practical business of life. Through such involvement, people acquire the specific dispositions and sensibilities that lead them to orient themselves in relation to their environment and to attend to its features in the particular ways that they do. These dispositions and sensibilities add up to what Bourdieu calls the habitus (1990: 52-65).

p.178 the perceiver has to reconstruct the world, in the mind, prior to any meaningful engagement with it.

p.188 Building, then, is a process that is continually going on, for as long as people dwell in an environment. It does not begin here, with a pre-formed plan, and end there, with a finished artefact. The 'final form' is but a fleeting moment in the life of any feature, when it is matched to a human purpose, likewise cut out from the flow of intentional activity. As the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once remarked, 'from the moment of birth we are immersed in action, and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought' (1938:217). And this applies, with equal force, to 'taking thought about building', the definitive characteristic of the architectural attitude. We may indeed describe the forms in our environment as instances of architecture, but for the most part we are not architects. For it is in the very process of dwelling that we build.

p.190 Telling a story... is... a way of guiding the attention of the listeners or readers into it. A person who can 'tell' is one who is perceptually attuned to picking up information in the environment that others, less skilled in the tasks of perception, might miss, and the teller, in rendering his knowledge explicit, conducts the attention of his audience along the same paths as his own.

p.195 It is to the entire ensemble of tasks, in their mutual interlocking, that I refer by the concept of taskscape.

p.196 the way we perceive the temporality of the taskscape.... we do so not as spectators but as participants, in the very performance of our tasks.

p.196 Merleau-Ponty: 'the passage of one present to the next is not a thing which I conceive, nor do I see it as an onlooker, I effect it' (1962:421).

p.197 As Langer puts it: 'life is always a dense fabric of concurrent tensions, and as each of them is a measure of time, the measurements themselves do not coincide' (1953:113). Thus the temporality of the taskscape, while it is intrinsic rather than externally imposed (metronomic), lies not in any particular rhythm, but in the network of interrelationships between the multiple rhythms of which the taskscape is itself constituted.

p.197 the forms of the taskscape, like those of music, come into being through movement.

p.198 Thanks to their solidity, features of the landscape remain available for inspection long after the movement that gave rise to them has ceased. If, as Mead argued (1977 [1938]: 97), every object is to be regarded as a 'collapsed act', then the landscape as a whole must likewise be understood as the taskscape in its embodied form: a pattern of activities 'collapsed' into an array of features.

p.199 the landscape seems to be what we see around us, whereas the taskscape is what we hear. To be seen, a thing need do nothing itself, for the optic array that specifies its form to a viewer consists of light reflected off its outer surfaces. To be heard, on the other hand, a thing must actively emit sounds or, through its movement, cause sound to be emitted by other objects with which it comes into contact... the taskscape exists not just as activity but as interactivity.

p.200 the very notion of animacy. I do not think we can regard this as a property that can be ascribed to objects in isolation

p.208 Meaning is there to be discovered in the landscape, if only we know how to attend to it. Every feature, then, is a potential clue, a key to meaning rather than a vehicle for carrying it. This discovery procedure, wherein objects in the landscape become clues to meaning, is what distinguishes the perspective of dwelling. And since, as I have shown, the process of dwelling is fundamentally temporal, the apprehension of the landscape in the dwelling perspective must begin from a recognition of its temporality. Only through such recognition, by temporalising the landscape, can we move beyond the division that has afflicted most inquiries up to now, between the scientific study of an atemporalised nature, and the humanistic study of a dematerialised history.

p.220 the designs to which mapping gives rise - including what have been variously categorised as 'native maps' and 'sketch maps' - are not so much representations of space as condensed histories. Thus, to put my thesis in a nutshell, knowing is like mapping, not because knowledge is like a map, but because the products of mapping (graphic inscriptions), as those of knowing (stories), are fundamentally un-maplike.

p.220 wayfinding is understood as a skilled performance in which the traveller, whose powers of perception and action have been fine-tuned through previous experience, 'feels his way' towards his goal, continually adjusting his movements in response to an ongoing perceptual monitoring of his surroundings.

p.225 The reality is that no map, however 'modern' or sophisticated the techniques of its production, can be wholly divorced from the practices, interests and understandings of its makers and users.

p.230 one of the most striking characteristics of the modern map is its elimination, or erasure, of the practices and itineraries that contributed to its production (Turnbull 1996:62).

p.230 My contention... is that people's knowledge of the environment undergoes continuous formation in the very course of their moving about in it... this is to account for such knowledge in terms of the generative potentials of a complex process rather than the replication of a complex structure. That process consists in the engagement of the mobile actor-perceiver with his or her environment.

p.230-231 The traveller or storyteller who knows as he goes is neither making a map nor using one. He is, quite simply, mapping. And the forms or patterns that arise from this mapping process, whether in the imagination or materialised as artefacts, are but stepping stones along the way, punctuating the process rather than initiating it or bringing it to a close.

p.230,242 we know as we go, not before we go... ambulatory knowing... the world is not ready-made for life to occupy... It is rather laid down along paths of movement, of action and perception... To find one's way is to advance along a line of growth, in a world which is never quite the same from one moment to the next, and whose future configuration can never be fully known. Ways of life are not therefore determined in advance, as routes to be followed, but have continually to be worked out anew. And these ways... are the very threads from which the living world is woven.

p.233 Undoubtedly the vast majority of maps that have ever been produced in human societies, like those of the Inuit, have been improvised on the spot within a particular dialogic or storytelling context, and without any intention for their preservation or use beyond that context.

p.354 It is because practitioners' engagement with the material with which they work is an attentive engagement, rather than a mere mechanical coupling, that skilled activity carries its own intrinsic intentionality, quite apart from any designs or plans that it may be supposed to implement

p.369-370 Whether accidental or premeditated, the majority of innovations will probably turn out in practice to be useless or even detrimental. A small proportion, however, bring evident benefits. Variants that work well in the particular conditions prevailing in the environment will tend to 'catch on', through extensive replication, while others will dwindle and disappear. Thus in the long run, the more successful technical designs will undergo a kind of adaptive radiation, splitting into diverse forms suited to specific contexts of use, while others may become effectively extinct.

p.417 Human beings do, of course, solve puzzles: witness the chess-player devising a strategy of future moves, or the 'cellist working out the fingering for a difficult passage. How, from the point of view of a dwelling perspective, is this kind of puzzle-solving to be understood? And how would our account differ from the rationalist argument that regards every solution as the output of a cognitive device, an intelligence, located somewhere within the organism? [JLJ - Ingold follows an alternative spelling for cello, which uses an apostrophe at the front to substitute for the missing characters of violoncello, the Italian term which means "little violone". One who plays a 'cello in Ingold's mind, is a 'cellist.]

p.417-418 what kind of activity does not involve a palpable engagement in the world? The answer is that it is activity of the special kind we call imagining. This is what the chess-player is up to when, sitting apparently immobile and without touching the pieces on the board, he nevertheless proceeds to work out a strategy... there are three points I wish to make about this kind of activity. The first is that imagining is an activity: it is something people do. And as an activity it carries forward an intentionality, a quality of attention that is embodied in the activity itself... Where this process of imagination differs from other forms of activity, and what makes it so special, is that attention is turned inwards on the self: in other words, it becomes reflexive. I dwell, in my imagination, in a virtual world populated by the products of my own imagining.
 The second point... is that whatever we call these products - whether plans, strategies or representations - their forms are generated and held in place only within the current of imaginative activity. The same, moreover, is true of material forms generated in the practical activity of craftsmanship... The reality is more complex, since both the image of the projected form and the material artefact in which it subsequently comes to be embodied are independently generated and 'caught' within their respective intentional movements, of imagination and practice. The problem, then, is to understand the relationship between these two generative movements, a relationship that might be characterised, provisionally, as rehearsal. One may, in imagination, 'go over' the same movement as a preparation or pre-run for its practical enactment. But the enactment no more issues from the image than does the latter from an image for imagining.
 The third point is that imagining is the activity of a being who nevertheless dwells in an actual world. However much he may be 'wrapped up' in his own thoughts, the thinker is situated in a time and place and therefore in a relational context.

p.418 Here, then, we have the final, essential difference between intelligence and imagination. The former is the capacity of a being whose existence is wrapped up within a world of puzzles, the latter is the activity of a being whose puzzle-solving is carried on within the context of involvement in a real world of persons, objects and relations. [JLJ - italics mine]