Book reviews

“THE SOUTH SEAS IN TRANSITION” by W. E. H. Stanner. Issued under the auspices of the Australian Institute of International Affairs and the International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Affairs and published by the Australasian Publishing Company. 1953. Pp. viii and 448. Three maps. Australian Published price, 50/‐ net.

SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY EN MELANESIA: A REVIEW OF RESEARCH, by A. P. Elkin. Published under the auspices of the South Pacific Commission. Oxford University Press, London, Melbourne, New York, 1953. Pp. xiii, 166 Maps. Price 27/6.

“THE AUSTRALIAN WAY OF LIFE.” Edited by George Caiger, under the auspices of the Australian Institute of International Affairs. Pp. xvi and 158. Published by William Heinemann Ltd., 1953. Australian price, 15/6.     

The boundary value problem in spatial statistical analysis

"The primary objective of this paper is to investigate procedures for detecting and handling existing border biasing in spatial statistical analysis." Six conventional solutions to the boundary value problem are criticized, and three alternate statistical solutions are proposed.     

Wilderness,Nature and Society: contributions to the history of an environmental attitude

The depth of feeling now seen in the struggle over environmental conservation can, with the aid of scholars in other disciplines, be traced to the central importance of Nature in the ideology of Western Society. The late seventeenth century is seen as the period of an ideological transformation in which Nature, at first under the tutelage of God, came to set the terms for social definition and debate. As a flexible metaconcept, Nature became a weapon of social control for a hegemonic centre and, at the same time, a vehicle of protest for the social periphery. Further ambiguity arises from the intersection of this development with the devaluation of Nature as a commodity within the capitalist system, which intensifies the element of protest in the use of Nature as a social category.