Anthropological Affordances

Where to place culture in the nexus of human–environment relations has long been a problem for ecological anthropology. The theory of affordances offers a possible resolution. It shows how the meanings of things, far from being assigned to them by human minds equipped with the concepts and categories of a tradition, can be discovered directly through immediate perceptual exploration. Cultural difference, then, lies in variations in skills of perception and action, developed through prior experience. Yet while the theory accords an active role to the perceiver, who lives, learns, and moves around, it treats the environment as already built. To rebalance the ecological equation, we need to acknowledge that environments, too, are always in formation. Thus, the world is not ready and waiting for the perceiver; the perceiver also has to wait upon the world. These correspond to two sides of attention: attunement and exposure. Their alternation is fundamental to life. Situating perceivers as participants in a worlding world offers a way to reconnect perception and imagination and opens affordance to pure possibility.