Overview

Combining historical, literary and ethnographic approaches, Calling the Station Home draws a fine-grained portrait of New Zealand high-country farm families whose material culture, social arrangements, geographic knowledge, and linguistic practices reveal the ways in which the social production of space and the spatial construction of society are mutually constituted. The book speaks directly to national and international debates about cultural legitimacy, indigenous land claims, and environmental resource management by highlighting settler-descendant expressions of belonging and indigeneity in the white British diaspora.

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9780742509528

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Reviews

In this book I discovered the virtue of anthropology as an academic discipline, searching for realities among appearances, sifting what people say and do for cultural patterns and thereby enabling others to catch a glimpse of the depth and complexity of relationships among high-country people and between these people and landscape.--Robyn McPhail, Editor Rural Network News

Dominy uses classical and contemporary ethnographic skills to maximum effect. Calling the Station Home is soundly researched and attractively presented. Michele Dominy has done an excellent job and provides an interpretation which is critically informed, sensitive and perceptive. Destined to achieve classic status. Journal Of Historical Geography In this book I discovered the virtue of anthropology as an academic discipline, searching for realities among appearances, sifting what people say and do for cultural patterns and thereby enabling others to catch a glimpse of the depth and complexity of relationships among high-country people and between these people and landscape. -- Robyn McPhail, Editor Rural Network News Calling the Station Home is an important contribution to debates about identity and indigeneity in the Pacific, today and in the past. It will resonate in discussions far beyond the high country, and contribute to new understandings of very difficult issues. -- R. Gerard Ward Journal Of Pacific History This is an important and thoughtful book which must be read by anyone interested in rural New Zealand, the pursuit of sustainable forms of land use, an our ongoing search for a more distinctive national identity. -- Tom Brooking New Zealand Journal Of History Dominy's sympathetic intelligence and astute ethnographic skills have yielded a fascinating and important work, rich in detail, perceptive in judgment and well worth the attention of those interested in the social construction of space, the spatiality of society, and such issues as cultural legitimacy, indigenous land claims, environmental management and the complex, dynamic and diachronic interplay of cultural and environmental systems . Pacific Affairs A ground-breaking and scholarly ethnographic study of Pakeha New Zealanders. Oceana Dominy provides a sensitive account of gender as it relates to everyday work, the homestead and surrounds, and, especially, generational succession. American Ethnologist Dominy's research provides a very detailed and absorbing account of the processes by which the high country settler descendants establish a self-defining indigeneity...I hope that the book attracts the attention it deserves so that the relationship of Pakeha to the land become a more widely accepted subject for research and political debate. Oceana Dominy's book provides a stimulating addition to the growing body of work examining the contours of post-colonial European identities in Aotearoa/New Zealand, not in a spirit of denouncement, but rather in hope of a reflective understanding that starts to explore the myriad relations and fractures characterizing such identities. In this sense, the book's wider importance lies in the understandings it can bring to the construction of settler identities in a post-colonial world. Cultural Geographies This is an important and courageous book that deserves a wide readership. American Anthropologist Dominy's book is useful for complementing anthropological work on indigenous people's relationship with their environs with a description of what are, after all, commercial pastoralists in a capitalist society. Royal Anthropological Institute Of Great Britain and Ireland This ethnography would make a fine addition to any applied anthropology syllabus, and will reward all readers with an interest in exploring the ways in which an environment is known and valued by those who have learnt to call it home. Anthropological Forum

Author Information

Michèle Dominy is Professor of Anthropology at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

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