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

Reconciling Nature and Culture in a Global Context?Lessons from the World Heritage Listwilderness as uninhabited spaces, Deborah Bird Rose speaks of country as “a living entitywith a yesterday, today and tomorrow, with a consciousness and a will towards life” (1996: 7-8). This is a part of what Traditional Owners mean when they speak of a “living” culturallandscape.Judging by the actions of the Australian Government and the World Heritage Committee,however, it seems that non-Aboriginal people interpret statements about ‘living landscapes’and the togetherness of nature and culture to mean that Indigenous people are ‘one withnature’ in an evolutionary display of ecological relicts. This is certainly not the outcomeintended by Traditional Owners in the lead up to the nomination of the wet tropicalrainforests. While not entirely rejecting the proposition that Aboriginal people are ‘one withnature’, Traditional Owners are not, on the other hand, advocating for their inclusion withinsome supra-category of culture, although their push for the renomination of the Wet Tropicsas a cultural landscape could easily be read in these terms. What is clear, however, is thatthe Indigenous idea of ‘no difference between nature and culture’ is often invoked byAboriginal people to signal a history of cultural difference.Aboriginal cultural self-representations both challenge and embrace the commonly held viewof culture as fixed, uniform and unchanging. As Cowan and her colleagues point out,Indigenous people’s appropriation of essentialist views of culture often joins together “aninterest in cultural renaissance with the political constraints of a society willing to recognizeclaims on the basis of cultural authenticity and tradition” (2001: 42). While presenting culturein these terms may be politically effective in certain contexts, in other situations it may denythe interactive and inventive nature of Aboriginal social constructs and actions. As LisaMeekison points out, the ‘boomerang-throwing’ image of Aboriginal culture “tends to reinforcewhat non-Indigenous people think about Indigenous people rather than what the latter thinkabout themselves’ (2000: 11). While there is no denying the fact that Aboriginal culturalidentities are often turned into marketable commodities for tourist consumption or reduced tostereotypical images in the media, contemporary Indigenous representations and forms ofcommunication point to more dynamic and innovative processes at work. Appropriating newtechnologies and drawing upon the inter-connectedness offered by an increasinglyglobalised world, these new cultural forms are often used to revivify “local languages,traditions and histories, and [articulate] community identity and concerns” (Ginsburg 2000:30). In this sense we see how Aboriginal traditions can serve as both “a means andmeasure of innovation” (Sahlins 2000: 512).In light of these comments, we can conclude, along with Arjun Appadurai (1996: 12-13), thatit is perhaps more useful to think of culture as a “heuristic device” to talk about difference,than to focus upon the noun form of culture, so often regarded as an object, thing orsubstance. Rather than trying to define what culture or nature is or is not, a more interestingexercise involves looking at the “relationship between the word and the world” (Appadurai1996: 51). Put another way, the invocation of culture and nature is a far more interestingarea of investigation than its definition.In the post-listing period, it is clear that nature and culture constitute the small-arms fire in thestruggle by Traditional Owners to renominate the World Heritage Area as a “living[Indigenous] cultural landscape” (WTMA 2005: 1). As evident in the opening sections of thisreport, this is also a struggle about the “appropriation of symbols, a struggle over how thepast and present shall be understood and labelled, a struggle to identify causes and assessblame, a contentious effort to give partisan meaning to local history” (Scott 1985: xvii). In theoften lively exchanges which characterise this struggle, it is apparent that nature and cultureare also key terms in the discourse and practices associated with the day-to-daymanagement of the two World Heritage areas in North Queensland, namely, the Wet Tropicsand the Great Barrier Reef. For example, nature and culture form influential terms ofreference among the internationally recognised members of the science community, who73