Grand Valley State University

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

eng

Includes bibliographical references and index

Land, law, and environment

43894073

edited by Allen Abramson and Dimitrios Theodossopoulos

Anthropology, culture, and society

mythical land, legal boundaries

Annotation, 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 Cari

Mythical land, legal boundaries : wondering about landscape and other tracts / Allen Abramson -- Whose forest, whose myth : conceptualisations of community forests in Cameroon / Philip Burnham -- The land people work and the land the ecologists want : indigenous land valorisation in a Greek island community threatened by conservation law / Dimitrios Theodossopoulos -- Tract : Locke, Heidegger and scruffy hippies in trees / Paul Durman -- Not so black and white : the effects of aboriginal law on Australian legislation / Veronica Strang -- The appropriation of lands of law by lands of myth in the Caribbean Region / Jean Besson -- Mythic rites and land rites in northern India / Kusum Gopal -- Politics, confusion and practice : landownership and de-collectivisation in Ukrain / Louise Perrotta -- The re-appropriation of Sakai Land : the case of a Shrine in Riau (Indonesia) / Nathan Porath -- Bounding the unbounded : ancestral land and Jural relations in the interior of eastern Fiji / Allen Abramson