Land, law and environment : mythical land, legal boundaries / edited by Allen Abramson and Dimitrios Theodossopoulos.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Abramson, Allen.

Theodossopoulos, Dimitrios.

Series:

Anthropology, culture, and society

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Human geography.

Landscape assessment.

Landscape changes.

Land settlement patterns.

Land tenure--Law and legislation.

Land tenure.

Physical Description:

v, 224 pages ; 22 cm.

Place of Publication:

London ; Sterling, Va. : Pluto Press, 2000.

Summary:

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.

Contributors to this volume take issue with this idealist approach, in which land and landscape -- place and space" -- are read as purely expressive and ultimately poetic. They argue 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. Attitudes toward the land, in other words, are naturally dialectic, combining elements of myth and legal title.

Focusing on postcolonial legacies in land law, contemporary disputes and 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. The settings include Western and Eastern Europe, West Africa, the Caribbean, Australia and the Pacific, Malagasy, India, and Indonesia. Mythical Lands, Legal Boundaries 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.

Contents:

1. Mythical Land, Legal Boundaries: Wondering about Landscape and Other Tracts / Allen Abramson 1

2. Whose Forest? Whose Myth? Conceptualisations of Community Forests in Cameroon / Philip Burnham 31

3. The Land People Work and the Land the Ecologists Want: Indigenous Land Valorisation in a Greek Island Community Threatened by Conservation Law / Dimitrios Theodossopoulos 59

4. Tract: Locke, Heidegger and Scruffy Hippies in Trees / Paul Durman 78

5. Not So Black and White: The Effects of Aboriginal Law on Australian Legislation / Veronica Strang 93

6. The Appropriation of Lands of Law by Lands of Myth in the Caribbean Region / Jean Besson 116

7. Mythic Rites and Land Rights in Northern India / Kusum Gopal 136

8. Politics, Confusion and Practice: Landownership and De-collectivisation in Ukraine / Louise Perrotta 156

9. The Re-appropriation of Sakai Land: The Case of a Shrine in Riau (Indonesia) / Nathan Porath 176

10. Bounding the Unbounded: Ancestral Land and Jural Relations in the Interior of Eastern Fiji / Allen Abramson 191.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0745315755

0745315704

OCLC:

43894073