The cultural context of biodiversity conservation - Oapen

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3.4 Anthropology of indigenous knowledge
The cultural context of biodiversity conservation
Just as there can be no ›nature‹, there can never be just one ›knowledge‹ either. (Gray 2000: 62)
That the ›new biocultural synthesis‹ can be pursued from a variety of perspectives becomes
evident in the field of indigenous knowledge. 37 Since the early 1990s, the
theme emerged as a priority concern on the international development and environment
agenda. It currently appears as a constituent of ongoing debates concerned with
global questions of sustainability and biodiversity conservation. Scientific work in this
domain has nonetheless been ongoing for several decades. Anthropologists within
various subfields dedicated their attention to the subject and thereby contributed to
the emergence of new sub-disciplines. These fields came up in the course of a larger
»transdisciplinary process«, wherein the boundaries between the disciplines are eroding
increasingly (Brosius 1999: 279). The growing appreciation of indigenous knowledge
that emerged primarily in the field of rural development in the 1980s can be interpreted
as a reaction to the previous failure of the grand development theories.
Among others, scholars engaged in development anthropology had criticised externally
introduced top-down policies and uni-directional initiatives that were based on modernisation
and technology transfer and argued in favour of more participatory and
decentralised bottom-up initiatives. 38 The predominant approach perceived development
in terms of a progressive movement towards technologically and institutionally
more complex and integrated forms of ›modern‹ society. This process was maintained
through increasing involvement in commodity markets and a series of interventions
involving the transfer of technology, knowledge resources and organisational forms
from the more ›developed‹ world or sector of a country to the less ›developed‹ parts
(Long 1992: 16ff.). In the frame of top-down policies, organisations often failed to see
or even ignored the value of existing knowledge systems on the basis of their own
›superior‹ development model. Based on scientific paradigms, the conventional approach
saw local knowledge as something to overcome rather than to encourage. As this
ignorance frequently resulted in the failure of projects, professionals gradually came to
consider the until then undervalued local knowledge systems. In search of culturally
appropriate and environmentally sustainable approaches to global issues, knowledge
acquired in local settings had been discovered in the following as a meaningful alternative
to conventional strategies. Increasingly, it became recognised by institutions that
37 For sake of simplicity, the term will be abbreviated hereafter to IK.
38 Since the 2 nd World War, the general course of debates and interpretations on development processes
developed from perspectives based upon the concept of modernisation in the mid-1950s, to dependency
in the 1960s, to political economy in the 1970s and to the post-modernism of the 1980s. While the
former have interpreted development in the latest instance as a process of modernisation, postmodernism
has questioned some of the basic presuppositions of the concept of modernism (Siebers
1994: 210). This latest phase is depicted in many quarters as entailing the deconstruction of previous
orthodoxies. For further discussions on issues related to development theories and paradigmatic
shifts in development practice, see Marglin (1990) and Sillitoe (1998a, 2002a).