ATS2359 Hearing the country: Studies in Indigenous Australian ethnoecology

When you finish this unit, you should be able to:

1. 1

   To explore in depth the way in which people describe their relationship with country.

2. 2

   To explore the way in which environmental and biological knowledge is encoded. 

3. 3

   To study ecological and scientific systems within the context of a culture. 

4. 4

   To explore how language, history, tradition, material culture, spirituality, kinship, emotion and politics are all ways in which people negotiate a relationship with the environment. 

5. 5

   To study the anthropological discourse with landscape and how knowledge about landscapes are encoded. This will involve issues such as kinship and ceremony, language and understanding ethnobiological zoological/botanical taxonomy in comparison to western Linnaean zoological and botanical taxonomy. The course will use actual case studies and will involve manipulating original material collected by the lecturer and other researchers. 

6. 6

   Address the academic debates in relation to ethnoecology from the school of thought which places cognition at the forefront of this discipline to those that believe other issues such as culture, time and concepts such as tradition and religion also influence people and their relationship to the environment.