Bush Base, Forest Farm

Taking a unique anthropological apprach, Bush Base: Forest Farm explores the management of resources in third would development programmes. The contributors, all distinguished anthropologists with practical experience of development projects, focus on the role of human cultural imagination in the use of environmental resources. They challenge the traditional sharp distinction between human settlement and natual environment (farm or camp, forest or bush), and argue that development programmes should place at their centre an appreciation of people's cosmologies and cultural understandings.

Part I Bush base: forest farm 1 Anthropology, the environment and development 2 Cultural understandings of the environment Part II Ecocosmologies 3 Culture and the perception of the environment 4 The Dogon and their trees 5 Women's crops in women's spaces: Gender relations in Mende rice farming 6 Ideas and usage: Environment in Aouan society, Ivory Coast 7 Ritual topography and ecological use: The Gabbra of the Kenyan/Ethiopian borderlands Part III Changing to order 8 People's participation in environmental projects 9 Intolerable environments: Towards a cultural reading of agrarian practice and policy in Rwanda Johan Pottier and August in Nkundabashaka 10 Cows eat grass don't they? Evaluating conflict over pastoral management in Zimmbabwe 11 From sago to rice: Changes in cultivation in Siberut, Indonesia 12 'Nature', 'culture' and disasters: Floods and gender in Bangladesh 13 'Arctic ethno-ecology': Environmentalist debates in the Soviet North 14 Landscape and self-determination among the Eveny: The political environment of Siberian reindeer herders today