“Everything”: Towards an Ecology of Land Utilization

Abstract

In southeast Angola, there is a rural village known as Cusseque that, similar to many other societies, has developed a particular relationship with the surrounding landscape. In contrast to the prevailing literature on land practices, I attempt to demonstrate that the global circulating concept of “land use”, which assumes the land is a field of human governance, is not appropriate for grasping this relationship. In Cusseque, I encountered a creative system of utilization based on residents’ reliance on the virtues of the land’s ability to self-govern. Therefore, I explore an alternative conceptual tool and demonstrate that, in addition to “land use” and other analytical constructs, we should view human ecology through the lens of land utilization. This perspective, I suggest, functions on the basis of relational complementarity among all the agents on the land as it realizes the living world as integrative. Keywords: