Landscape Ethnoecology : Concepts of Biotic and Physical Space (Environmental Anthropology and Ethnobiology)

[The editors] have brought together many of the most innovative thinkers and field workers to ponder how local communities make sense of the landscapes in which they live, and upon which they depend. This volume is rich with insights about how cultures perceive the spaces, landforms and habitats which nourish them. Gary Paul Nabhan, PhD., author, Singing the Turtles to Sea and Cultures of Habitat This landmark volume is bound to become a theoretical touchstone and wellspring for assessing the unity and diversity of human conceptualizations of landscape. It deftly combines a rigorous review of cross-cultural theories of landscape perception and classification with richly-detailed ethnographic examples of landscape ethnoecology. Thomas F. Thornton, School of Geography and Environment, University of Oxford This edited collection gives an important and thought provoking overview of recent debates and work united under the rubric of cultural landscape research. The eleven substantive case studies, taken primarily from indigenous societies across North and South America, each provide a strong argument for questioning or better specifying definitions on the meaning of place for various societies...a suggestive collection that I would recommend highly. Anthropos Although anthropologists and cultural geographers have explored "place" in various senses, little cross-cultural examination of "kinds of place," or ecotopes, has been presented from an ethno-ecological perspective. In this volume, indigenous and local understandings of landscape are investigated in order to better understand how human communities relate to their terrestrial and aquatic resources. The contributors go beyond the traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) literature and offer valuable insights on ecology and on land and resources management, emphasizing the perception of landscape above the level of species and their folk classification. Focusing on the ways traditional people perceive and manage land and