Customary land tenure and registration in Australia and Papua New Guinea

Description

Anthropologists fifty years ago would probably have regarded a collaborative presentation of essays on indigenous land tenure in Australia and Papua New Guinea (PNG) as a dubious undertaking, if not a category error. Aboriginal and Melanesian systems were functionally distinct, one adapted to the needs of a hunting and gathering economy, the other to sedentary horticulture. Going back another fifty years, such a conjunction would have been intelligible only if its purpose was to exhibit lower and higher stages in cultural evolution. As the authors of the present volume are not motivated by a desire either to overturn functionalism or advance evolutionism, what brings them together in common cause?

Subjects

Series Statement

• APEM Monographs Series

Links

• http://epress.anu.edu.au/customary_citation.html
• Google