“To claim that hunter-gatherers perceive their environment as a “wilderness”—in contrast to a domesticity that one would be hard…
“To claim that hunter-gatherers perceive their environment as a “wilderness”—in contrast to a domesticity that one would be hard put to define—is to deny that they are aware that, in the course of time, they modify the local ecology by their techniques of subsistence. Over recent years, for example, Aboriginals have been protesting to the Australian government against its use of the term “wilderness” to qualify the territories that they occupy and by so doing frequently justifying the creation of natural reserves that they do not want. The notion of a “wilderness,” with all its connotations of terra nullius, of an original and preserved naturalness, an ecosystem to be protected against the degradations liable to be introduced by human beings, certainly runs contrary to the Aboriginals’ own concept of the environment and the multiple relations that they have established with it, and above all it ignores the subtle transformations that they have produced in it. As a leader of the Jawoyn of the Northern Territory said, when part of their land was converted into a natural reserve, “Nitmiluk national park is not a wilderness…, it is a human artefact. It is a land constructed by us over tens of thousands of years through our ceremonies and ties of kinship, through fire and through hunting.” Clearly, for the Aboriginals, as for other hunting peoples, the opposition between wild and domesticated is not very meaningful, not only because of their lack of domesticated animals but above all because they inhabit the entire environment as a spacious and familiar dwelling place, rearranged to suit successive generations with such discretion that the touch of its inhabitants becomes almost imperceptible.”— Philippe Descola - Beyond Nature and Culture