Anthropologists have traditionally viewed land as a resource, emphasizing its ecological setting, its technical transformation, and legal appropriation. Recent trends in landscape studies, however, have begun to introduce a more cultural perspective.

Contributors to this volume take issue with this idealist approach, in which land and landscape - place and space - are read as purely expressive and ultimately poetic. They argue that too much emphasis on the subjective construction of land obscures the fundamentally meaningful sense in which land is also used and appropriated: while land may have some subjective, ideological meaning, it exists, also, as a practical resource. Attitudes toward the land, in other words, are naturally dialectic, combining elements of myth and legal title.

Focusing on postcolonial legacies in land law, contemporary disputes and claims surrounding ancestral lands, conservation issues, and road protests, the contributors to this volume explore the dialectical interplay of these relations in a diverse range of geographic and cultural settings. The settings include Western and Eastern Europe, West Africa, the Caribbean, Australia and the Pacific, Malagasy, India, and Indonesia. Mythical Lands, Legal Boundaries extends the study of landscape into areas of key practical importance, offering a cross-cultural understanding of the ways in which property, land and identity are inextricably tied together.