UDTR — Radar mondial des droits de la Nature

Creating Africas: struggles over nature, conservation and land. By Knut G. Nustad

Identification

Clé publique

doi:10.1111/1468-2346.12584

Auteurs

Maano Ramutsindela

Année déclarée

2016

Langue déclarée

en

Type source

book-review

Première détection

2026-11-09T19:19:35.093241+00:00

Dernière observation des métadonnées

2026-11-09T19:19:35.093241+00:00

Dernière vérification HTTP

Non effectuée

Institutions déclarées par la source

University of Cape Town

Résumé documentaire — langue originale

The ongoing concerns with global environmental change and the concomitant call to observe the limited carrying capacity of the Earth so as to avoid the collapse of our ecological systems have huge implications for how we think about humans and nature. Of course, humans are to blame for environmental problems, but solutions to these problems have raised heated debates, as was evident at the recent Conference of the Parties (COP) held in Paris in December 2015. Even more heat is generated when resolutions adopted at global meetings of this nature are to be translated into practice. This is easy to see in nature conservation, where solutions to globally defined environmental problems meet complex local realities that challenge dominant conceptions of nature. Knut Nustad captures this global—local interplay in Creating Africas. He draws on the work of Tim Ingold and on the broad social science research on nature and society to argue that ‘the separation between society and nature underlies the environmental problems that now threaten all of us’ (p. 8) and that this ‘separation of people and environments, conceptually and in policies, is a part of the problem to be dealt with’ (p. 32). The logic here is that transcending the society—nature dualism in theory and in practice is an important step towards finding solutions to environmental problems. The three parts of the book are devoted to developing this argument. In the first part (chapters one and two), Nustad challenges two theories, namely cultural relativism and social constructivism, for entrenching the society—nature dualism even as they seek to critique conceptions of nature. In his view, cultural relativism—the assumption that people experience the world through culturally given categories—is problematic, first, in that ‘it implies that humans are disengaged from a reality that all other non-humans belong to’ and second, in that it subscribes to ‘disengagement within humanity, between so-called “native” or “indigenous” people who perceive the world culturally, and westerners who do not’ (p. 39). Nustad is of the view that, like cultural relativism, social construction ‘presupposes an independently existing singular reality’ (p. 40) from which multiple representations of nature emanate. He argues that representations of nature reflect multiple realities and that these multiple realities constitute different versions of Africa.

Identifiants

OPENALEX

W2328476379

DOI

10.1111/1468-2346.12584

Repères documentaires

Famille documentaire

Doctrine

Types déclarés par les sources

book-review

Les mentions d’entités ne constituent pas une preuve de reconnaissance juridique. La juridiction étudiée est distincte du pays d’affiliation des auteurs.

Sources

OpenAlex · Document 1 · Document 2

• DOI · https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2346.12584
• OpenAlex · https://openalex.org/W2328476379

Statut documentaire

Publication académique détectée

Bibliothèque

Cette identité n’est pas encore intégrée à la Bibliothèque juridique.