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

ISBN-13: 9780415066570 / Angielski / Miękka / 1992 / 280 str.

E. Croll; Elisabeth J. 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.

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.