Nothing Ever Changes’
Historical ecology, causality and climate change in Arnhem Land, Australia
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20051957 |
|---|---|
| Authors | M Barber (0000-0002-7735-008X, Townsville Hospital, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2011 |
| Publication date | 2011-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | CHAPTER |
| Publisher | ANU Press (PUBLISHER • AU) |
| DOI | 10.22459/epak.03.2011.06 |
| OpenAlex | W2817734493 |
| ISBN | 9781921666964 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 7 |
has maintained a longstanding research interest in questions of human ecology, subsistence and the wider relationships between human beings and their environments, even as, over the course of his long career, interest in that area within anthropology as a whole has waxed and waned. This disciplinary inconsistency with respect to one of his foundational research orientations is perhaps one source of Nic Peterson's healthy personal reserve about adhering to the current anthropological fashion. His primary fieldwork period involved the almost overwhelming physical demands of many months' hunting and gathering in remote Arnhem Land and this suggests that deep empirical and experiential roots underlie his continuing commitments to the material and the ecological in explicating human life as well as to the productive rigour of fieldwork as the central investigative process. His restrained ecological and economic account of what must have been a most intense personal experience early in his life contains its own lesson for a more recent student such as myself enmeshed in the contemporary trends towards phenomenology and textuality: what can seem a compelling intellectual strategy in the current age clearly was not so in the past, and Nic Peterson's physical robustness and textual restraint was part of what positioned him to play such a pivotal role in subsequent Indigenous rights processes, processes in which my work was also involved. Peterson's Arnhem Land research has a number of facets (see Allen and Keen, this volume) but as recent events have demonstrated to us, ecological and environmental questions will remain central to human life in the decades to come, so his interests in how human beings adapt to the world they live in, adapt to changes in that world and what the consequences of this adaptive process are for human social life will continue to reemerge in new forms. In what follows, I explore these questions in relation to my own fieldwork, examining local perceptions of environmental change in Arnhem Land. I offer this account as at least partially suggestive of the productive tensions between empiricism, ecology, phenomenology and environmental change that Nic Peterson knowingly and unknowingly began presenting me with a decade ago. Nothing ever changes. There have never ever been any changes
Archaeology · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Geography · Rigour · Sociology · Subsistence agriculture · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies · Indigenous Studies and Ecology · Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology · Ecology
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,23 |
| Citation span | 2013 - 2025 (13) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |