Reconciling Nature and Culture in a Global Context? - Rainforest ...

CHAPTER ONE – INTRODUCTIONReconciling Nature and Culture in a Global Context?Lessons from the World Heritage ListOur cultural and natural heritage are both irreplaceable sources of life andinspiration. They are our touchstones, our points of reference, our identity –UNESCO World Heritage CentreFor the past twenty years in Far North Queensland, Aboriginal Traditional Owners haveargued for the acknowledgement of their cultural values in the Wet Tropics World HeritageArea. This two decade-long push for recognition ranges from greater involvement in the dayto-daymanagement of the region, to a call for the renomination of the World Heritage-listedrainforests as a “living cultural landscape” (Wet Tropics Management Authority 2005: 1).This struggle has been framed by, and couched in terms of, a discourse on nature andculture. Trying to understand the terms of this discourse, the nature of people’s engagementwith it, and some of the unintentional effects of it, forms a core element of this comparativestudy of World Heritage 1 . As I argue in this research report, the discursive currency of thisdebate reflects the dominant interpretive paradigm of the World Heritage Convention.As the title suggests, the 1972 United Nations Educational, Scientific and CulturalOrganisation’s (UNESCO) Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural andNatural Heritage enshrines one of the most pervasive dualisms in Western thought – that ofnature and culture (MacCormack and Strathern 1980). As Bloch and Bloch observe, we cantrace the nature-culture idea back to the Enlightenment period when the “notion of anopposition between nature and the state of society […] suddenly gains a great prominence”(1980: 27) 2 . From the 1700s onwards, nature and culture have acquired a range of shiftingmeanings in both Western philosophical traditions and in common usage. For example, theconcept of nature has, among other things, variously referred to a pre-social state, theinternal processes of the human body, the universal order, including the “external world ofplants, animals and the countryside”, and “the way of life of primitive peoples” (Bloch andBloch 1980: 27). Similarly, our ideas about culture are not static, notwithstanding the effortsof anthropologists in the course of the past hundred years to once and for all fix the meaningof this ‘keyword’ (Williams 1976). As Kroeber and Kluckhohn observe in their ‘critical reviewof concepts and definitions’, by the early 1950s, 164 anthropological definitions of ‘culture’existed in the literature (Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952). UNESCO’s World HeritageConvention provides yet another set of criteria for the definition of culture and ourunderstanding of nature.‘Cultural’ and ‘natural heritage’ are defined in Articles 1 and 2 of the Convention. Insummary, ‘monuments’, ‘groups of buildings’ and ‘sites’, the latter being the “works of man orthe combined works of nature and of man” (UNESCO 2005a: 13), are considered as ‘culturalheritage’. ‘Natural heritage’, on the other hand, refers to ‘physical and biological formations’,1 In the course of three months’ research between October 2005 and January 2006, I visited eighteenWorld Heritage properties, including Komodo National Park (listed in 1991), the Historic Centre ofMacau (2005), the Historic Centre of Rome (1980), Val d’Orcia (2004), the Historic Centre of the Cityof Pienza (1996), the Historic Centre of Sienna (1995), the Historic Centre of San Gimignano (1990),the Fortress of Suomenlinna (1991), the Rock Drawings of Alta (1985), Maritime Greenwich (1997),the Tower of London (1988), Westminster Palace, Westminster Abbey and Saint Margaret’s Church(1987), the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (2003), Stonehenge, Avebury and Associated Sites (1986),the City of Bath (1987), Paris, Banks of the Seine (1991), the Statue of Liberty (1984) and the HawaiiVolcanoes National Park (1987).2 However, as Marshal Sahlins points out, Enlightenment ideas about nature and culture can be tracedback to Ancient Greece and the sophist’s opposition of custom (nomos) and nature (physis) (2004:16). Classical Greek ideas about nature and culture “were revived in Western Europe during theseventeenth century” (ibid: 3).1