Linking Culture and the Environment

R. Staiff 223
research to national park management strategies, especially those strategies
that look to nature-based tourism and community stewardship of protected
areas. 15 One of the ways of investigating this relationship, and the way the
nature/ culture/community triad operates with regard to protected areas,
local communities and tourism (and ultimately the way all this can contribute
to a sustainability praxis) is to analyse the relationships in a number of
case studies. However, before turning to the case studies it is necessary to
contextualize these in two ways: briefly reviewing the growing (and already
extensive) literature on the nature/culture relationship and describe, in
more detail, the nature/culture/community model that has informed the
thinking here.
The nature/culture relationship in contemporary western discourse
The discourse that emanates from the nature/culture dualism is not only
complex and deeply philosophical, it has, in the west, a long history that
continues to inform that complexity 16 by drawing upon a whole range of discourses
including the theological, the scientific, the aesthetic, the anthropological,
the literary and the psychological, to mention but six strands. 17 In the
context of the present discussion the relationship can be categorized, very
broadly, into three hugely simplified positions: (i) those that view ‘nature’
(i.e. the biosphere) as being separate from the ‘artifice’ of human actions and
the cultural representations of nature; (ii) those that view ‘nature’ as a cultural
construction so that the two are always co-implicated; and (iii) those
that view the two terms, in their various guises, as always being (re-)negotiated
and, consequently, suggest there is a constant, and inevitable, too-ing
and fro-ing between categories (i) and (ii) within western discourse and environmental
praxis. 18
Irrespective of the philosophical position of various discourses, what
cannot be denied or ignored by national parks management regimes is the
contentious and contested space created by the nature/culture doublet. Nor
can they ignore the analysis that is being generated by the nature/culture
relationship in a wide variety of fora. Despite the arguments mounted by
those committed to the primacy of a ‘purely’ ecological perspective, it would
appear to this writer, at least, that ecology makes no sense outside the social
and cultural habitats of human communities and outside the scientific culture
which produced it. Ultimately, the three positions outlined here are all ideologically
charged, but as the third position suggests, none of them is mutually
exclusive, because circumstances often dictate which position is most useful.
19 In the final analysis, what the intensity and the vastness of the discourse
reveal is that, in the west at least, the dualist split between nature and culture
simply reinforces the very foundational role culture plays with regard to any
sort of environmental praxis. And the logical extension of this argument is
that in every society the physical world is mediated by culture, and vice
versa, in a continuous spiralling and dynamic way reminiscent of the double
helix configuration. 20