Uncommon Ground: Landscape, Values and the Environment

Description

* What makes people care about the environment? * Why and how do different cultural groups value land in different ways? With increasing international concern about green issues, and the apparent failure of mechanistic solutions to complex problems, Uncommon Ground provides a timely understanding of the cultural values that underpin human-environmental relations. Through a comparison of two very different groups, the Aboriginal people and the white cattle farmers in Far North Queensland, Uncommon Ground explores how the human-environmental relationship is culturally constructed. This highly topical study also examines the long-term conflicts over land in Australia, which have brought to the surface each group's environmental values. The author considers how these values are acquired, and the universal and cultural factors that lead to their development. Major emphasis is put on the cultural forms that create and express environmental values for the Aborigines and the white pastoralists, such as: * historical background * land use and economic modes * socio-spatial organization * language, knowledge and methods of socialization * oral and visual representation * cosmological beliefs and systems of law This book is very accessible and should be widely used on anthropology, environmental studies and geography courses.]

Veronica Strang is Professor of Social Anthropology, The University of Auckland.

'I find her timely study very important grounding work in analysing and understanding relationships to land.' Canberra Anthropology 'An absorbing account of the ways in which Aboriginal people and White pastoralists living in the lowlands east of northern Australia's Gulf of Carpentaria symbolically construct their surroundings... A solid, informative, and creative ethnography. The language is clear and accessible, and Strang excels at making detail engrossing rather than burdensome. Because of its subjects and its many good qualities this is a book that should interest a wide audience.' American Anthropologist