Summary
‘Education of attention’ is the anthropologist Tim Ingold’s account of how knowledge passes between generations: by showing newcomers what to notice, not by handing down information. He takes the phrase from the ecological psychologist James Gibson (1979) and develops it in a paper of 1997, against the view that culture is mental content copied from head to head. What each generation gives the next, he concludes, is “not an accumulated stock of representations but an education of attention”.
On this view we aren’t filled up with culture; we’re tuned to our surroundings by practising alongside the skilled. Ingold’s experienced woodsman “consults the world, not a picture in his head”.
Rationale
A challenge to our own vocabulary: Ingold wants ‘enskilment’ where Part 2 says enculturation. We keep the word and accept the correction; one of our approaches, “Helping people notice deep dispositions”, is attention work.