This book takes issue with the ‘idealist’ approach in which land and landscape are read as purely expressive and ultimately poetic.
The authors 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.
The essays focus on postcolonial legacies in land law, contemporary disputes and land claims surrounding ancestral lands, conservation issues and road protests. Areas covered include Western and Eastern Europe, West Africa, the Caribbean, Australia and the Pacific, India and Indonesia.
Зміст
1. Mythical Land, Legal Boundaries: Wondering About Landscape and Other Tracts by Allen Abramson
2. Whose forest? Whose myth? Conceptualisations of Community Forests in Cameroon by Philip Burnham
3. The land people work and the land the ecologists want: indigenous land valorisation in a Greek island community threatened by conservation law by Dimitrios Theodossopoulos
4. Tract: Locke, Heidegger and scruffy hippies in trees by Paul Durman
5. Not So Black and White: the effects of Aboriginal Law on Australian Legislation by Veronica Strang
6. The Appropriation of Lands of Law: Lands of Myth in the Caribbean Region by Jean Besson
7. Mythic Rites and Land Rights in Northern India by Kusum Gopal
8. Politics, Confusion and Practice: Land ownership and de-collectivisation in Ukraine by Louise Perrotta
9. The re-appropriation of Sakai Land: the case of a Shrine in Riau (Indonesia) by Nathan Porath
10. Bounding the unbounded: ancestral land and jural relations in the interior of eastern Fiji by Allen Abramson
Index
Про автора
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).