Bush Base, Forest Farm : Culture, Environment, and Development

ISBN-13: 9780415066563 / Angielski / Twarda / 1992 / 276 str.

Elisabeth Croll;David Parkin;Elisabeth Croll

Opis

The relationships between humans and their natural surroundings is paradoxical. They impose knowledge and action on the world around them, yet at the same time subscribe to myths and beliefs which portray them and their natural suroundings as inseparable, with neither more powerful than the other. This paradox is explored in the essays in Bush Base: Forest Farm, which uses an anthropological perpective to direct new light on development and environmental studies. The contributors, all anthropologists who have had practical experience of development programmes, present case studies drawn form Africa and Asia, and reflect upon their theoretical implications. They reject the traditional sharp dichotomies of human settelemnt and external natural environment - farm of camp on the one hand, and forest or bush on the other - and suggest instead that the people, their indigenous knowledge and their forests or bush exist within each other. They argue that although the concept of sustainable development takes greater cognisance of the environment there is still a need to place at their centre and appreciation of people's cosmologies and cultural understandings.

Taking a unique anthropological apprach, Bush Base: Forest Farm explores the management of resources in third would development programmes. The contributors, all distinguished anthropologists with practical experience of development projects, focus on the role of human cultural imagination in the use of environmental resources. They challenge the traditional sharp distinction between human settlement and natual environment (farm or camp, forest or bush), and argue that development programmes should place at their centre an appreciation of people's cosmologies and cultural understandings.

Spis treści

Part I Bush base: forest farm 1 Anthropology, the environment and development 2 Cultural understandings of the environment Part II Ecocosmologies 3 Culture and the perception of the environment 4 The Dogon and their trees 5 Women’s crops in women’s spaces: Gender relations in Mende rice farming 6 Ideas and usage: Environment in Aouan society, Ivory Coast 7 Ritual topography and ecological use: The Gabbra of the Kenyan/Ethiopian borderlands Part III Changing to order 8 People’s participation in environmental projects 9 Intolerable environments: Towards a cultural reading of agrarian practice and policy in Rwanda Johan Pottier and August in Nkundabashaka 10 Cows eat grass don’t they? Evaluating conflict over pastoral management in Zimmbabwe 11 From sago to rice: Changes in cultivation in Siberut, Indonesia 12 ‘Nature’, ‘culture’ and disasters: Floods and gender in Bangladesh 13 ‘Arctic ethno-ecology’: Environmentalist debates in the Soviet North 14 Landscape and self-determination among the Eveny: The political environment of Siberian reindeer herders today

O autorze

Elisabeth Croll and David Parkin are members of the Department of Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.