澳大利亚历史书写中的人与自然:以殖民农业史为中心

Man and Nature in Australian Historical Writing: With a Focus on Colonial Agricultural History

殖民农业史提供了考察澳大利亚史学中人与自然关系的可靠视点。澳大利亚历史书写的演变受制于社会发展和学术风向。殖民地时期以来,殖民农业史先后被纳入帝国边疆论、民族主义叙事、殖民批判和人地互动四种主要的研究框架中。在既定框架下,农业开拓议题最初被嵌套进“征服自然”说,又在澳大利亚民族国家建构时期被纳入“利用自然”的民族主义进步书写。面对日益严峻的生态和文化危机,殖民农业史成为澳大利亚历史学界反思殖民进程引发的生态破坏,恢复和重塑少数族裔生态地位的重要步骤。近来它又成为澳大利亚史学超越进步主义与殖民批判语境,反思历史时期人地关系的主要内容。

The study of the history of colonial agriculture offers a reliable perspective through which to examine the relationship between man and nature in Australian history writing.The development of Australian historical writing is subject to social,cultural and academic trends.Since the colonial era,four main research paradigms have framed the study of the history of colonial agriculture,which include the ones based on borderlands theory,nationalist narrative,colonial criticism,and human-land interactive narrative.In the making of colonies,the question of colonial agricultural development was first inscribed into the discourse of “man conquering nature”.Then it was incorporated into the progressive writing of “utilizing nature” in the period of Australian nation-state building.Facing the increasingly grave ecological and cultural crises,the history of colonial agriculture has become an important step for Australian historians to reflect on the ecological destruction caused by the colonial process and to restore and reshape the ecological status of ethnic groups.Recently,it has become the dominant effort in Australian historiography to transcend the discourse of progressivism and the critique of colonialism so much so to rethink the relationship between man and nature within historical contexts.