Book Review: Land, ecology and resistance in Kenya, 1880-1952

Abstract

quite dynamic, supple and strategic narrative practices, and reinforce the stereotype of changeless Native American beliefs and attachments to the land. Charles Frake’s essay offers a glimpse at an ethnographer’s concern to understand familiar rather than distant cultures. He considers place concepts and references to place among the English, specifically white and rural residents of East Anglia. Clearly the rural landscapes of England are an important part of Englishness, and Frake offers examples in his analysis through the stories of local residents. He explores a variety of themes including toponymy, the writing of place, and the ambiguities of ‘improving’ place, interpreted variously as landscape preservation and development. Like the other contributors, Frake explores the relation of researcher to the studied group, but in this case the central problem is the inadequacy of the ethnographer’s standard lexicon for adequately explaining the familiar. The book concludes with Clifford Geertz’s essay, which should warm the hearts of geographers fond of thick description. For Geertz, place is part of everyone’s existence and thus ‘goes without saying’ (p. 258). Not surprisingly, he leaves little room for the theorization of place. In his conception of the human sciences, the particularism of place is not a bad outcome, but neither Casey nor most geographers would find it a wholly acceptable one.