Overview

Anthropologists have traditionally viewed land as a resource, emphasizing its ecological setting, its technical transformation and legal appropriation. Recent trends in landscape studies, however, have begun to introduce a more cultural perspective. This volume takes issue with the ""idealist"" approach in which land and landscape - places and space - are read as purely expressive and ultimately poetic. It argues that too much emphasis on the subjective construction of land obscures the fundamentally meaningful sense in which land is also used and appropriated: while land may have some subjective, ideological meaning, it exists, also, as a practical resource. Focusing on postcolonial legacies of land law, contemporary disputes and land claims surrounding ancestral lands, conservation issues and road protests, the contributors to this volume explore the dialectical interplay of these relations in a diverse range of geographic and cultural settings in Western and Eastern Europe, West Africa, the Caribbean, Australia and the Pacific, Malagasy, and India and Indonesia. The book extends the study of landscape into areas of key practical importance, offering a cross-cultural understanding of the ways in which property, land and identity are inextricably tied together.

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9780745315706

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This book presents a fascinating array of land-related issues from an anthropological perspective. (It) is particularly valuable as an interdisciplinary tool. This is an intriguing glimpse into non-legal factors that affect how and why laws evolve in the land relations area. Legal scholars interested in land title issues and native land rights will find this book immensely instructive. These essays, written by scholars in the social sciences compiled with a wide range of views and geographic areas of interest, and insightful and thought provoking. The book is a marvelously designed reference manual. It contains a detailed topical index, including cross-references, and marvelous bibliographic resources. In addition, extensive references are cited at the end of each essay, allowing interested readers to pursue their particular area of study further. I commend this book to the attention of legal scholars, social scientists, and other readers interested in native land rights. It will provoke readers to consider this topic from perspectives they otherwise might not. -- Journal of Legal Studies, United States Air Force Academy

'...By stressing both the cultural and economic significance of land this book succeeds in mirroring the complexities surrounding the control of land and how its use is defined' -- Environmental Politics 'Anyone who reads this collection will be impressed not only by its breadth of coverage, but also by the interesting social and cultural practices it reveals' -- James G Carrier, JRAI

Author Information

Allen Abramson is a lecturer in Social Anthropology at University College London. He is the author of Land, Law and Environment (Pluto Press, 2000). Dimitrios Theodossopoulos is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology and Director of the Centre for Ethnographic Research at the University of Kent. He is the author of Land, Law and Environment (Pluto Press, 2000) and Exoticisation Undressed (Manchester University Press, 2016).

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