ABSTRACT
How can anthropology improve our understanding of the interrelationship between nature and culture?- What can anthropology contribute to practical debates which depend on particular definitions of nature, such as that concerning sustainable development?Humankind has evolved over several million years by living in and utilizing 'nature' and by assimilating it into 'culture'. Indeed, the technological and cultural advancement of the species has been widely acknowledged to rest upon human domination and control of nature. Yet, by the 1960s, the idea of culture in confrontation with nature was being challenged by science, philosophy and the environmental movement. Anthropology is increasingly concerned with such issues as they become more urgent for humankind as a whole. This important book reviews the current state of the concepts of 'nature' we use, both as scientific devices and ideological constructs, and is organised around three themes:- nature as a cultural construction;- the cultural management of the environment; and- relations between plants, animals and humans.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|176 pages
Nature as a Cultural Concept
chapter Chapter 3|27 pages
A Poetics of Place: Ecological and Aesthetic Co-evolution in a Papua New Guinea Rainforest Community
chapter Chapter 4|27 pages
A Church Too Far Near a Bridge Oddly Placed: The Cultural Construction of the Norfolk Countryside
part II|251 pages
Relations Between Specific Domesticates and Human Populations
chapter Chapter 8|17 pages
Glutinous-Endosperm Starch Food Culture Specific to Eastern and Southeastern Asia
chapter Chapter 9|36 pages
Creating Landrace Diversity: The Case of the Ari People and Ensete (Ensete ventricosum) in Ethiopia
chapter Chapter 11|28 pages
Agrarian Creolization: The Ethnobiology, History, Culture and Politics of West African Rice
chapter Chapter 13|29 pages
Domestic Animal as Serf: Ideologies of Nature in the Mediterranean and the Middle East
part III|171 pages
Nature, Co-evolution and the Problem of Cultural Adaptation