This Land That was Desolate is Become Like the Garden of Eden: The Instance of the Pennsylvania Dutch

Abstract

<p>Fogelson has noted that what characterized Hallowell's work in ecology was his interest "...in how human beings perceived nature and acted within a culturally constituted behavioral environment... a subbranch of ecological studies that is now being increasingly referred to as ethno-ecology" (1976:xiii). This thesis, it can be said, represents a contribution to the same area of ethnographic inquiry. It is concerned with why the Palatine and his descendants in North America (particularly those of the nineteenth century) perceived the wilderness as they did and how their acts of labor both reflected and expressed this conception of the natural world.</p>