Home - A Territory Full Of Purpose, Connection, And Meaning
For hunter-gatherers – our ancestors as well as those that still exist – home was and is more than a place to live. It is a territory whose every feature is “familiar and alive and full of purpose, connection and meaning.”
By The Empty Square
Photo: Jonathan Borba/Unsplash
For hunter-gatherers – our ancestors as well as those that still exist – home was and is more than a place to live. It is a territory whose every feature is “familiar and alive and full of purpose, connection and meaning.”*
To the hunter-gatherers, the landscape, flora, and fauna are deeply intertwined with their past and with the stories and myths that define them. When children are taught how to live and survive, they are not only being informed. According to British social anthropologist, Tim Ingold, there is a ‘show-and-tell’ form of teaching that instils a particular kind of knowledge and attention that provides not only information but also awareness.
Can we introduce an education of awareness in our school system? One that combines learning, doing, living, and understanding? That gives our children a sense of ancestry and belonging and being literally in touch with the world?
Among hunter-gatherers, the children are placed in specific situations and instructed to feel and sense and watch out for this and that. Through the fine-tuning of perceptual skills, meanings immanent in the environment “are not so much constructed as discovered”.
Imagine an everyday life where we don’t have to look for and construct meaning all the time but are able to discover it right there in front of us. Imagine homes, schools, communities, and cities full of purpose, connection and meaning.
What do we have to change to get there?
* Quote from Carolyn Steel’s marvelous book Sitopia (Chattus & Windus, London, 2020), p.91