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Both the haunting memories of our earliest ancestors recorded on ancient cave paintings around the world and close ethnographic studies of human relationships with specific animals, reveal that humans have never been alone. This history is one of cooperation as well as of violence, and while the shadow side of that history should not be either under- or overplayed, a detailed discussion on this is deferred to the second volume. Humans are sometimes known as the hyper-cooperative species, but how might those cooperative tendencies play out in relation to other animals? Using work by anthropologists who have begun to analyse the lives of other animals using anthropological tools through ethno-primatology and ethno-hyenaology, and ethno-elephantology, the case is made for common occurrence of human/other animal entanglements. The theoretical resources for this work stem from an evolutionary approach called the extended evolutionary synthesis or niche construction theory. The philosophical basis for this work draws on biosocial anthropological theories developed by Tim Ingold. It is also useful to distinguish between ‘hidden’ multispecies associations in the microbiome and that which is played out through gradually more explicit responses between different species. All form closely interlaced relationships that contribute to the niche in which these relationships are embedded.

The chapter alternates between a reading of Certeau’s L’Invention du quotidien centred on the practice and the issue of the image, and a wider theoretical reflection on the image’s agency vis-à-vis analytical categories through which we engage with the real of modernity. The image possesses agency in that it brings about a ‘rectification’ of prevailing representations of the everyday, by means of a holistic and therapeutic rationale that is distinctive. The mobility of forms that is the basis of Certeau’s vindication of the image is compared with the work of several more recent anthropologists, namely Tim Ingold, Philippe Descola and Eduardo Kohn, in whose writings comparable figures are subsumed into what can be termed an anthropology of sustainability.

In this chapter, an alternative understanding of justice is provided, one that bears on indigenous views as connected closely with restoration of relationships. The case is also made for the virtues of compassion, wisdom, and justice to be essential in consideration of how individuals are related to each other in a multispecies community. All three were likely to have been important in the evolution of cooperation that eventually led to domestication and, engaging with the work of Tim Ingold, the author argues against those who claim that the movement from hunting to domestication was necessarily a step back in human-animal relationships. Comparative examples from the domestication of bees and the domestication of horses is used together with studies of horse-human psychology in Western contexts in comparison with some ethnographic work by Marcus Baynes-Rock with Oremo communities in Ethiopia. Also explored are indigenous traditions on the domestication of wolves, dingos, and the evolution of dog domestication. While the link between compassion for humans and that towards other animals has a rich and ancient history, including biblical traditions, there is some resistance to the ethical importance of compassion for other animals. These objections are considered before arguing that both love and compassion are important, if not exclusive, elements in building a theoretical ground for animal ethics.

Chapter One focuses on human-environment relations and opens with a description of what it means to ‘work the ground’ when fishing off the coast of Scotland. Through detailed ethnography and James Gibson’s and Tim Ingold’s conception of ‘affordances’, it shows how productive grounds are created through the labour of fishers. The chapter explores people’s personal relations to grounds, sensory techniques for ‘feeling’ the grounds, and the historical development of new tools to explore grounds. The chapter describes how fishermen saw themselves as contributing to the productivity of grounds - in contrast to the conventional view of fishermen as destroying the ocean environment. Drawing on Marx, ‘labour’ is explored as both a material metabolism with nature and as a subjective activity. Understandings and experiences of labour are shown to be contradictory – at times relational, productive, alienated, and destructive – reflecting people’s real and conflicted relations too their environment and their own labour. The need for ethnographic investigations of the subjective experience of labour in ‘the West’ is emphasised. A labour-centered approach to human-environment relations can ensure analysis is both materially grounded and sensitive to people’s subjective relations to environments, machines, and markets.

This chapter focuses not on literary objects as such but on the thought-worlds of two anthropologists (Ingold, Barber) and an archaeologist with strong anthropological leanings (Malafouris). It engages with some of their arguments on the nature of artefacts, in particular those made with language. It is highly selective, focusing on theories that are directly relevant to the concerns of the book, and it makes no attempt to cover the issues at length. It adds some proposals for a broad definition of the term ‘affordance’ as it is used in this study; and it also comments briefly on the notion of ‘construction’ and its theoretical constraints. These commentaries are designed to provide a conceptual perspective that complements the imaginative perspective of Chapter 1 and to prepare the ground for what follows.

This chapter presents the work of cultural anthropologist Tim Ingold (on grounded and ungrounded being) and of linguistic anthropologist Stephen Levinson (on spatial frames of reference). Both authors provide the reader with new ways to think about the object being cut at Măgura: the ground. Discussion of Ingold’s work examines his thinking on the shift from a groundless existence in modernity (imposed by shoes, roads, cars, etc., which separate us form the ground), and comment on Levinson’s investigation of the distinction among three ways that people understand where they are in the world (relative, intrinsic, and absolute frames of spatial referencing). The chapter concludes with a proposal that the reader will benefit from thinking about the Măgura pit-houses in terms of an absolute grounded existence.

Chapter Four continues the discussion of techniques and technologies with a focus on orientation and navigation. The chapter draws on Tim Ingold’s and James Gibson’s descriptions of orientation as a process of movement through the landscape to find affordances. The chapter describes the techniques used locally for finding position from the 1960s onwards: dead-reckoning, and the use of radar, depth sounders, Decca, and GPS. Challenging anthropological accounts of ‘Western’ navigation that assume Westerners always rely on charts and instruments and that these alienate people from direct relations with their environment, the GPS chartplotter shows the perpetual importance of the subjective and experiential aspects of orientation in a digital age. The chapter argues that alienation is instead produced by relations of ownership and exploitation, and that the chartplotter facilitates the centralisation of fishing knowledge with the skipper and the employment of low-waged migrant workers as crew. While authors such as Edwin Hutchins describe navigation as answering the absolute question ‘where am I?’, the chapter proposes that the aim of navigation is usually to answer the relational question ‘where is that?’

Accounts of geometry are caught between the demands of history and philosophy, and are difficult to reduce to either. In a profoundly influential move, Plato used geometrical proof as one means of bootstrapping his Theory of Forms and what came to be called metaphysics, and the emergence of ontological modes of thinking. This has led to a style of thinking still common today that gets called ‘mathematical Platonism’. By contrast, the sheer diversity of mathematical practices across cultures and time has been adduced to claim their historical contingency, which has recently prompted Ian Hacking to question why there is philosophy of mathematics at all. The different roles assigned to geometrical diagrams in these debates form the focus of this chapter, which analyses in detail the contrasting discussions of diagrams, and of the linearization and spatialization of thinking, by Plato (especially Meno and the Republic), by the cognitive historian Reviel Netz, the media theorist Sybille Krämer, and the anthropologist Tim Ingold.

The chapter focuses on human-environment relations. It begins with a description of how place names are used during a fishing trip, and how they are marked in digital GPS chartplotters and discussed amongst fishermen. Most of the names discussed are of places at sea not marked by anything visible from the sea’s surface. An account of the working day of a trawler fisherman shows how the intensive sociability of fishing skippers transcends their isolation on different boats. Discussions among skippers are focussed on the material results and affordances of fishing in places and names are generated in these discussions, reflecting Marnie’ Holborow’s Marxist analysis of language. The chapter builds on Tim Ingold’s analysis of place by demonstrating that place names reflect subjective the experience of working in them, as well as searing events of social history and changing fishing practices. An examination of places that are remembered but no longer in use shows that the same location can become a different place. The chapter concludes by emphasising how places are generated through conversations amongst people involved in developing their affordances, and how names for places incorporate many aspects of life experience and resonate through collective social experience.