An affordance, in the work of the American psychologist James J. Gibson (1904 to 1979), is what the world offers a particular creature, what it makes possible for good or ill, and he held that creatures perceive these possibilities directly, so that the world arrives already meaningful, not as bare shapes that the mind has to interpret. Therapeutic Shamanism shares his picture of a perceiver already in contact with a living world, and asks, beyond what the world offers, what we give back.
Who was J. J. Gibson? #
An American psychologist, born in Ohio in 1904, who taught first at Smith College and then for the rest of his life at Cornell University. In the Second World War he led a unit of the Army Air Forces’ Aviation Psychology Program, studying how flying affects what pilots see and helping to devise visual tests for choosing them. His three books, The Perception of the Visual World (1950), The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (1966) and The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979), founded what is now called ecological psychology. His wife, Eleanor J. Gibson, was a leading psychologist in her own right, best known for the ‘visual cliff’ experiments on how infants perceive depth.1
What is an affordance? #
A word Gibson made up from the verb ‘to afford’, first used in his book of 1966.2 His best-known definition comes from the 1979 book: “The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill.”3
An affordance belongs to neither side alone. Affordances are always relative to a particular kind of creature, with its own body and its own way of life, and yet they are real features of the world, not meanings the perceiver adds. In Gibson’s words, an affordance “cuts across the dichotomy of subjective-objective”. It is a fact about the environment and a fact about behaviour at once, and it is not bestowed on a thing by an observer’s need. Among the richest affordances of all, he noted, are other animals, which offer a whole range of interactions, among them nurturing, fighting, playing, cooperating and communicating.3
What did Gibson mean by direct perception? #
That creatures do not live behind a screen of mental pictures. The usual account in psychology held that the senses deliver thin, ambiguous signals, and the brain must build an inner model of the world by inference. Gibson held that the light, sound and textures around a moving animal are already rich in information that specifies the world, and that a creature picks this up directly as it moves.4
Learning, on this account, is not adding more ideas to an impoverished input. In a paper of 1955, Eleanor and James Gibson described perceptual learning as an improvement in discrimination, not association or inference, a matter of learning to notice differences that were there all along.5
Later researchers have carried this forward. The psychologists Andrew Wilson and Sabrina Golonka point to a baseball fielder running to catch a high ball. The fielder does not work out where it will land and then run there in a straight line; they run so that the ball’s path, as they see it, stays steady, and their own movement creates the information that guides them. In their words, the ball’s ‘catchableness’ is “continuously and directly specified by the visual information”.6 The philosopher Joel Krueger has applied affordances to music, as the movements and feelings a piece of music invites.7
Is direct perception accepted? #
It remains a live disagreement. In 1981 the philosophers Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn objected that Gibson’s account “is empty unless” its key notions, picking up information directly and the ‘invariants’ that carry it, are tightly constrained, and that the only way to constrain them brings back the mental inference Gibson rejected.8 The same year the psychologists Michael Turvey, Robert Shaw, Edward Reed and William Mace replied that perception is a direct relation between creature and environment, made possible by lawful links between affordances and the information that specifies them, and that the inference-based alternative “takes out a loan on intelligence that science can never repay”.9
Gibson’s word has also travelled far from his meaning. In 1988 the design writer Donald Norman took it into the design of everyday objects and computers, as the uses a thing visibly suggests, which is narrower than Gibson’s sense of what the world really offers, whether or not anyone notices.10
How do affordances connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
In the claim that perceiving is contact with a world, not reading pictures inside the head, and in what that means for learning. The two hemispheres of the brain work together all the time, but they perceive different things and value them differently, one in terms of logic, practicality and separation, the other in terms of empathy, emotion and connection. What people are conscious of is largely what they have been trained to focus on. The right hemisphere’s empathic, interconnected, shamanic perceptions are going on all the time; the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer was not their shutting down but a shift of attention away from them. So learning shamanism is learning to value and pay attention to something already going on, and always there.11 That has the same shape as the Gibsons’ perceptual learning, not adding something new, but noticing more of what is already present. See Who is Iain McGilchrist, and what do the two halves of the brain have to do with animism?
Gibson’s insistence that each creature’s world is measured by its own body and life also sits close to the humility the teaching asks for. Scientists have tended to design tests of consciousness around the human kind, self-awareness, and then find that only creatures like us pass; other Peoples have a different kind of consciousness, not a lesser one.12 See What is an umwelt, and what does it tell us about how animals experience the world?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
In who the world is. Gibson’s affordances describe the world from the point of view of what it offers a perceiving animal. Other animals are perceivers too, and among the world’s richest affordances, but the trees, rivers and stones appear in his account as surfaces, substances and places that offer things, not as beings who perceive in their turn. In Therapeutic Shamanism everything is made of Spirit, Spirit is conscious, and so everything is conscious, each thing in its own way.13 The tree that affords shelter is also a Plant Person with its own life.
That changes the question. Since agriculture began, people have largely treated the natural world and the beings in it as commodities to be used and exploited. For hunter-gatherers everything was alive and conscious and to be treated with respect, and humans were no better than any of the other Peoples; life-force and health came from being connected to that web of life.14 Gibson’s account of the world as full of offers, for good or ill, is a careful description of perception, not a programme of use, and he did not say otherwise. Therapeutic Shamanism adds the other half of the relationship. What is offered calls for gratitude and something given back. See What does it mean to say the world is alive and full of persons?
