Action in perception? When perception and action slip out of alignment in Arctic environments

Abstract This article revisits Alva Noë’s claim that perception is a skilful activity enacted through sensorimotor engagement, asking what happens when the temporal conditions that scaffold such skill become unstable. Drawing on ethnographic material from Sámi reindeer herding and Inuit hunting and herding practices in Arctic environments, I argue that action and perception can slip out of alignment under three conditions: technological mediation, collective redistribution of vigilance, and long timescale ecological change. To analyse these dynamics, I introduce two concepts: (i) Temporal affordances describe opportunities for action whose viability depends on relatively stable environmental rhythms. (ii) Rhythm repair captures the practices through which individuals and collectives stabilise, stretch, or recombine these rhythms when volatility disrupts them. I further argue that anthropogenic climate change generates a structural mismatch between embodied perception, calibrated to immediate events, and ecological processes unfolding across decades and centuries, a condition I term Anthropocene blindness . But rather than rejecting enactivism, the article extends it by showing that perception is not only enacted individually but recalibrated collectively, technologically, and imaginatively across nested temporal scales. The Arctic cases thus offer a temporal vocabulary for understanding how perception remains viable under ecological volatility.