The cultural context of biodiversity conservation - Oapen

The discursive context
In the same vein, it has been emphasised by Tucker and Grim (2001) that the current
environmental crisis is not only the result of economic, political and social factors. As
it is equally informed by issues of moral and spiritual relevance, problem-solving
strategies require broader philosophical understandings of humans as beings of nature.
In search of more comprehensive ecological worldviews and effective environmental
ethics, they argue that it is inevitable to draw from world religious traditions that have
all provided conceptual frameworks for »interpretive direction, moral foundations for
social cohesion, spiritual guidance for cultural expression, and ritual celebrations for
meaningful life« (2001: xviii). In addressing the moral dilemmas resulting from the environmental
crisis, distinctive ecological attitudes, values and visions for imagining
humans as part of, not apart from, the natural world may provide a meaningful outlook.
Despite abundant scientific knowledge and numerous political and economic
statements, the authors see a lack of »religious commitment, moral imagination, and
ethical engagement to transform the environmental crisis from an issue on paper to
one of effective policy, from rhetoric in print to realism in action« (2001: xix).
The interplay of worldview and ecology, which the above mentioned scholars
have drawn their attention to, will remain of particular interest in the last part of the
discursive context. Many of the presented ideas pertaining to the symbolic sphere of human
experiences with nature will reappear in the following considerations that reveal
different dimensions of indigenous knowledge. Intimately related to the outlined issues
dealing with perceptions of nature and landscape, the topic will be discussed along
four major lines, including questions of conceptual, empirical, symbolic and epistemological
relevance. Again cutting across a number of disciplinary borders, the theme will
be elaborated as a way of presenting the core ideas of anthropologists as to what indigenous
knowledge is. The ways by which they have studied and approached the
topic have changed during the course of the discipline's history and within different
cultural settings. On the grounds of previously outlined anthropological fields, the
chapter concentrates on recent arguments derived from different viewpoints, including
development anthropology, ethnoecology, symbolic and spiritual ecology and anthropology
of science and technology.
85