Gleaning Place, Territory and Local Knowledge

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In my institutional days my primary academic interest was in critical and applied approaches to medical anthropology,  ethnoecology and political ecology (specifically with regards to environmentally resonant indigenous resistance movements). That was then, this is now – but I’m still very interested in those subjects, always trying to learn more about human behavior, identity, meaning-making, and how people carve out existences within particular biosocialcultural niches.

The ebook and paper linked below explicitly deal with understanding humans in particular environments and the different ways we understand our place in the world.

First, Johnson’s recently published book is a detailed study of traditional environmental knowledge  (TEK) among Gitksan, Witsuwit’en and Dene peoples. It is a fantastic resource for those interested in anthropological approaches to ecology and traditional (alternative) knowledge. It can be rather technical at times, but well worth the read for any of you anthro and environmental studies students.

Trail of Story, Traveller’s Path: Reflections on Ethnoecology and Landscape

by Leslie Main Johnson (2010)

In this volume, the author begins by examining key concepts, including ethnoecology, landscape and landscape ecology and a range of approaches that people have taken in approaching the domain of cultural knowledge of land and landscapes. In a series of chapters, she addresses: Gitksan ethnoecology, and the linkage of landforms and overall orientation systems to social structure and the storied landscape; Witsuwit’en landscape ethnoecology; people and landscape in northwest British Columbia, with focus on a key ecological type, the berry patch; the ethnoecology of Dene (Athapaskan speakers) in northern Canada, including Kaska and Gwich’in landscape knowledge, with consideration of commonalities and contrasts in Dene ethnoecology; named places; and the contrasts between indigenous landscape ethnoecology and the classification of habitats and landscapes in Western scientific thought, and the implications of these differences for how knowledge about landscape is presented and apprehended. In her concluding chapter, she reflects on landscape ethnoecology and on its potential to inform social and ecological sciences, land management, and contemporary political debates.

Read the Entire eBook @ Athabasca University Press

The second offering is from Stuart Elden, professor of political geography at Durham University, in the UK and author of the Progressive Geographies weblog. The paper is not open access, but, again, for those of you interested it looks to be an interesting read so you may want to access it somehow. [h/t to Peter Gratton of Philosophy in a Time of Error for bringing this to my attention]

Land, Terrain, Territory
by Stuart Elden

This paper outlines a way toward conceptual and historical clarity around the question of territory. The aim is not to define territory, in the sense of a single meaning; but rather to indicate the issues at stake in grasping how it has been understood in different historical and geographical contexts. It does so first by critically interrogating work on territoriality, suggesting that neither the biological nor the social uses of this term are particularly profitable ways to approach the historically more specific category of ‘territory’. Instead, ideas of ‘land’ and ‘terrain’ are examined, suggesting that these political-economic and political-strategic relations are essential to understanding ‘territory’, yet ultimately insufficient. Territory needs to be understood in terms of its relation to space, itself a calculative category that is dependent on the existence of a range of techniques. Ultimately this requires rethinking unproblematic definitions of territory as a ‘bounded space’ or the state as a ‘bordered power container’, because both presuppose the two things that should be most interrogated, space and boundaries. Rather than boundaries being the distinction between place and space, or land or terrain and territory, boundaries are a second-order problem founded upon a particular sense of calculation and concomitant grasp of space. Territory then can be understood as a political technology: it comprises techniques for measuring land and controlling terrain, and measure and control – the technical and the legal – must be thought alongside the economic and strategic.

Learn More @ Sage Journals Online