ABSTRACT
This chapter concludes the study with a discussion of the historical construction of social and environmental organisation and its consequences today. The chapter summarises frontier thinking as resulting in strict distinctions between artificially distinguished spheres, which result in dislocations of nature from culture, the social from the economic, and the social from the state. These, in turn, lead to the individual being imagined as a solitary, non-social being from whom a wide range of needs and understandings are defined away or detached. These conceptions of separation are largely founded on theoretical constructions of ideas about humans, society and nature rather than on organically developed, socially embedded conceptions of in-environment livelihood and use. The chapter discusses the ways in which these conceptions continue to exist and gain effect even today, and suggests a need to reassess the different conceptions that may exist in different parts of the world in relation to how they may contradict frontier thinking.
