Cultural Geography

Humans, animals, spirits, and several geophysical

agents are perceived to have qualities of personhood.

All persons engage in a reciprocally communicative

reality. Human persons are not set over and against a

material context of inert nature, but rather are one

species of person in a network of reciprocating persons.

These reciprocative interactions constitute the events of

experience. (1996: 72–3)

In characterizing what a non-anthropocentric

cosmos looks like, D. Rose discusses the land

ethic of Ngarinman and Ngaliwurru people from

the Northern Territory in Australia. In contrast to

Passmore’s (1995: 140) denial of reciprocity,

Ngarinman people say ‘human life exists within

the broader context of a living and conscious

cosmos’ (D. Rose, 1988: 379). Williams (cited in

Langton, 1998: 27) also argues that ‘Aboriginal

people regard the environment as sentient and as

communicating with them.’ These statements fly

directly in the face of all those knowledges

which are based on a belief in the universal

application of classifications based on the fact

that only humans are conscious beings.

Many Aboriginal people have relationships

with specific species of animals at personal and

tribal scales. These relationships are based on an

underlying understanding that through creation

animals and humans were, are and will be inter-

related. Dreaming stories inform relationships

between humans and animals whereby responsi-

bility to country is based on a common heritage

and kinship (D. Rose; Bennett, 1983): ‘Animals,

they’re related to us ... Animals were human

before’ (Napranum elders in Suchet, 1996: 211).

Many indigenous people in Canada also relate to

‘animals’ in mutually conscious and reciprocal

relationships. In Cree notions of knowing, signing

and making meaning, animals are an integral part

of knowledge systems:

Animal actions, particular qualities and features in the

bodies of animals, weather, dream images and events,

visions, and religious symbols all fall within the Cree

notion of ‘sign’, with signs constituting knowledge or

guidance for actors. Not only humans, but animals and

other nonhuman persons send, interpret and respond to

signs pertinent to various domains of human action:

hunting success or failure, birth and death, and, implicit

to these, the circumstances of reciprocity between

persons in the world. (Scott, 1996: 73)

In Africa, the Ju/’hoansi of Nyae Nyae in north-

eastern Namibia engage in a dialogue with

elephants in which elephants:

must participate in the planning for the harvesting of

Marula[a tree fruit] ... ‘We share the resource with

elephants and we have decided together, that is the

elephants and us, which tree is to be used by the

Ju/’hoansi and which by the elephant.’ (/Ai!ae/Oma,

cited in Powell, 1998: 47)

African discourses also unsettle the naturaliza-

tion of the categories wild, domestic and tame:

Animals have always helped us, and they still do ...

The wild animals and the tame ones are the same to us.

(respected elder Baha Mhlanga from Mahenye, cited in

Hove and Trojanow, 1996: 22–9)

Treating binaries such as society/nature,

human/animal and domestic/wild as self-evident

epistemological givens, naturalizes assertions

and impositions of power and control. The ‘epis-

temological transformation’ (Esteva, 1987: 138)

that occurs when nature, wildlife and ‘wild

humans’ are constructed as resources, legitimates

the assertion and imposition of Eurocentric prac-

tices of management – intervening, taming,

domesticating, controlling, subduing and domi-

nating the wild-wildlife-wilderness. Managerial

intervention, however, is not how all people

interact with worlds. D. Rose (1988) argues that

Ngarinman and Ngaliwurru people are hesitant

to intervene in ecological processes. She notes

that for many people ‘non-intervention is fre-

quently a virtue’. A survey of perceptions of

Aboriginal people in Central Australia similarly

highlights knowledges that are not based on

beliefs in intervention and overt control:

Many people expressed a sense of loss that the [locally

extinct ‘native’] animals were no longer around but

there was also a pervading sense of passive acceptance

about what had happened. Rather than question why the

animals had gone and then attempt to act to bring them

back, Aboriginal people accept what they perceive as a

change in circumstances which is beyond their control.

(B. Rose, 1995: 95)

In Canada, what scientists perceive as population

declines are understood very differently by the

Inuit:

Elders say that any kind of animal moves away for a

while but, according to the government, animals are in

decline. To the Inuit, they have moved, but not

declined. (Peter Alogut, cited in Freeman, 1999: 8)

[M]any Inuit do not believe that ‘wildlife’ can be ‘har-

vested’, ‘managed’ or ‘conserved’ as ‘stocks’ or ‘popu-

lations’. Many of these concepts have no basis in Inuit

reality. (Stevenson, 1996: 8)

Aboriginal people at Napranum on Cape York

Peninsula insist they have their own way of relat-

ing to country, and this may or may not fit into

Eurocentric ideas about what land and resource

management should be. They often express

anger and frustration at not having their ways

recognized and respected by other people and

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