Paper short abstract:

How is wilderness – as an environmental domain that humans do not engage with perceptually – imagined and represented in oral narratives? Two case studies about humanlike figures from Italy and India will elucidate the local relationships and engagements between humans and wilderness.

Paper long abstract:

In his 2000 book “The Perception of the Environment”, the anthropologist Tim Ingold describes the perception of an organism – both human and nonhuman – as directly tied to the presence of an environment of other living and non-living beings that surrounds and interacts with them. In this regard, he mentions repeatedly the concept of “perceptual engagement with the environment”, mostly referring to humans who need to deal with their environment and its sensorial perception for their living processes.

Despite the undeniable anthropic influence on the world that we inhabit, wilderness is still a crucial element of our planet and biosphere. Wilderness, in this sense, can be defined as an environmental domain that humans do not engage with perceptually, due to physical distance or geographical barriers. Conversely, wilderness is a consistent part of human imagination and narrative.

In this paper, two case studies – from the Italian Alps and from the Karbi Indigenous community of Northeast India – will illustrate how wilderness has been imagined and represented through humanlike figures within local narratives, namely the Italian “uomo selvatico” and the Karbi “Kenglong-Po”. Both figures are connected to wilderness and the idea of wild in the respective geographical areas, articulating the relationship between humans and the wild environments that they cannot access physically and/or perceptually.