ABSTRACT
Anthropologists are apt to point out that the people with whom they work see the world in different ways. Our descriptions attempt to make the logic of these other visions apparent. Yet the logic of these descriptions, reliant as they often are upon a rational, hierarchical, historical, and so on, integration of elements, have their own scaling and organizing effects, one of which is to make the location of ‘the field’ seem a clearly geographical issue. Knowledge of how to make effective use of the particular properties and aspects of land is a matter of long-term discovery. Spirits and their powerful names are handed down over generations. Yet they are also being dreamed into existence as time moves on. Myths relate how all the important knowledge in the world – the cultivation of crops, the building of houses, even the separation of genders – was discovered in the landscape somewhere.
