Utilization of pastureland at the foot of Mt. Aso in the modern era: rethinking the man-environment relationship

Abstract

The man-environment relationship of subsistences has been treated mainly as a problem of material culture and subsistence activity in cultural geography. But as Cosgrove notes, the man-environment relationship should be regarded not as a one-way relation from culture to cultural landscape, but as a dialectical relation between consciousness and practice, knowledge and existence. The purpose of this paper is to disclose such dialectical man-environment relationships through the study of utilization of pastureland at the foot of Mt. Aso in the modern era, and to pose the epistemological problem of the geographer's self. The paper deals with the utilization of pastureland in two contexts, the ecological and the social. -from English summary