Reply To: Mon 14 Apr: The Perception of the Environment

Reflection by Yaqi Fu 2014-04-14 seminar

In the chapter 8, Ingold examined the idea of indigenous people, and upon which he posed some categories that can be used to distinguish these indigenous people, like ancestry, generation, substance, memory and land. These categories are interesting and on the other side, I would say, are quite common. Actually, I bear these characters. Then I think, maybe all human can be called indigenous to certain land, or landscape in a sense. If everyone can be an indigenous as I would suppose, what is the meaning of indigenous study? The meaning may lie in the land, or landscape. Every indigenous person has, or imagines a specific land from its own living trial. Land is maybe the foremost character that can distinguish people. From chapter 8 I going to the chapter 11, what I find is exactly Ingold’s idea about land, and landscape. The temporality of landscape is what I find en interesting idea. Landscape is always changing, but indigenous people’s image of their land would not change so fast. How to reconcile with this contrast? Maybe the indigenous people’s land exists only in mind. When they come out of their land, the image would be frozen, and last whenever. So here what I reflect is that land or landscape is one thing, and people’s self identity would be another thing, which mostly based on the memory of land, but not changed as landscape’s variation.