A Place Against Time: Land and Environment in the Papua New Guinea Highlands

by Paul Sillitoe

Overview

A Place Against Time is an ethnographically focused environmental study of Montane, New Guinea, where people were among the world's first to cultivate crops some ten millennia ago, and where today an enduring agricultural condition continues. It arranges its account of climate, vegetation topography and geology according to their relationship with the soils of the region occupied by Wola speakers in the Southern Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea, in the Western Pacific. This book breaks new intellectual ground as an ethno-environmental investigation with a soils perspective, ethno-pedology being a little researched topic to date.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783718659258
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	01/15/1997
Series:	Studies in Environmental Anthropology , #1
Pages:	464
Product dimensions:	6.88(w) x 9.69(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Paul Sillitoe

Table of Contents

I: Introduction; 1: Environmental Ethnoscience: Land Use, Soils and Society; 2: Rotating Land not Crops: Shifting Cultivation and Sweet Potato; II: The Climate Factor; 3: Ethnometeorology: The Climate; 4: Coping with Climatic Variations: The Spectre of Famine; III: The Land Resources Factor; 5: Ethnogeoscience: Topography and Geology; 6: Living with Land Loss: The Costs of Erosion; IV: The Biotic Factors; 7: Ethnobotany: Plants and Vegetation Communities; 8: Contending with Forest and Fallow: Demons to Regrowth; 9: Into the Soil: Nutrient Cycling and Decomposition; V: The Soil; 10: Ethnopedology: The Soils; 11: Keeping Up with Soil Status: The Implications of Variability; 12: Out of the Soil: Fertility Under Cultivation; VI: Conclusion; 13: Mounds of Soil: Grounds for Sound Land Resource Management; 14: Racing with Time: Degradation or Conservation?

Editorial Reviews

'Probably the most comprehensive, ethnographically rich environmental anthropology book ever written. It has the scope of classic works by Malinowski, with a much greater knowledge of ecology. I do not recall being as impressed by the ethnographic depth and the sophistication of environmental expertise in decades.' - Emilio Moran, Indiana University in American Anthropologist

From the Publisher