1st Edition
Frontier Thinking and Human-Nature Relations We Were Never Western
Combining historical, social and regulative analysis, this book builds a compelling critique of ‘frontier thinking’ and demonstrates its pernicious amplification in contemporary human affairs.
This book systematically identifies the ways in which images of nature and society are formed by historically developed frontier-oriented narratives. It illustrates how these narratives have underpinned much Anglo-American and Anglocentric thought, and have even come to form our assumptions about social and environmental organisation – in ways that are relevant not least to the present environmental crisis. The book confronts these conceptions at large, showing that they never held empirically, and contrasts them with the situation in northern Europe, where diverging assumptions are integral to this day. Through this juxtaposition, the book illustrates not only the pervasiveness of structures of understanding in steering policy, but also the varying traditions in different countries regarding how understandings of the environment can be formed.
The study highlights how historical thought patterns, formed for very different reasons than exist today, continue to shape our assumptions – about nature, the relation between urban and rural areas, and our understanding of ourselves in relation to the environmental crisis. The book will be of wide interest to a range of academics and students in the fields of geography, anthropology, environmental studies, sociology, political science and development studies, amongst others.
Chapter 1. Frontier thinking
Chapter 2. Understanding the role of history in the present
Chapter 3. Frontier thinking: Why is a distinction drawn between close-to-nature ‘communities’ and ‘modern civilised’ societies or states?
Chapter 4. The role of frontier thinking in the development of the American state and society
Chapter 5. The following through of frontier myth by Turner and the wilderness movement in the US
Chapter 6. Differences in the historical construction of development in Fennoscandian contexts
Chapter 7. Consequences of frontier thinking - from state to individual levels
Chapter 8. Consequences of frontier thinking on conceptions of the rural – historically and in present day
Chapter 9. Alternative conceptions of rurality in present-day Fennoscandia
Chapter 10. Conclusion: What is the social, and what do we base our policies on?
Biography
E. C. H. Keskitalo is Professor of Political Science at the Department of Geography, Umeå University. She has published widely on Arctic regional development and environmental and natural resource policy.
