Land, Law and Environment

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. This volume takes issue with the "idealist" approach in which land and landscape - places and space - are read as purely expressive and ultimately poetic. It argues 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. Focusing on postcolonial legacies of land law, contemporary disputes and land 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 in Western and Eastern Europe, West Africa, the Caribbean, Australia and the Pacific, Malagasy, and India and Indonesia. The book extends the study of landscape into areas of key practical importance, offering a cross-cultural understanding of the ways in which property, land and identity are inextricably tied together.