Mind, Gaze and Engagement

Abstract

A range of works on people’s understandings of their surroundings express a recurring assumption that, as societies become more urban and capitalist, people are decreasingly likely to engage in practical and material ways with their surroundings, and are consequently more likely to stand at a distance from those surroundings culturally. This assumption implies that practical engagement is the only form of engagement that leads people to meaningful and consequential relationships with their surroundings, that the alternative to such engagement is something like the tourist gaze or the flâneur. Using a study of some environmental activists, this article raises questions about this assumption.