The cultural context of biodiversity conservation - Oapen

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The cultural context of biodiversity conservation
atic« (2003: 65). Since a plant for instance can be at times an ancestor, a relative, a deity
or ›simply‹ a plant, Seeland suggests a hermeneutic methodology to overcome »the
artificial making of the indigenous or local knowledge by avoiding objective-oriented research
strategies« (2000: 12). Although ethnobiological configurations are not authentic accounts
from the emic point of view of the concerned culture, they are not simply onedimensional
scientific data sets either. Ethnobiological inquiry goes beyond the reconstruction
of classification schemes in order to explore the origins of the nomenclature
of certain species. The way in which nature is recognised and transformed into a social
order to become the foundation for rituals and symbols where nature and culture become
interchangeable terms is to be seen as the process of classification and an applied
social science approach. The processes of cognition and classification are based
on cosmological, spiritual and philosophical notions and assumptions that refer to the
constitution and confirmation of cultural core terms. The shared worldview of a
community is thus reflected in this »cosmogonic process« which on the surface seems
to be a classification of botanical or animal genera (Seeland 2000: 7ff.).
Increasingly, it became acknowledged that »local people do not think in terms of
soil, crops, fish and forests, but exploit and manage their natural environment as
whole systems« (Sillitoe 2002a: 17). A growing number of studies in the field of ethnoecology
aim to move towards such an expanded understanding beyond common questions
of how natural resources are economically used or taxonomically classified. Research
in this field has widened the scope towards questions of how natural resources
are perceived and endowed with significance. In this way, technical and rational aspects
have been related to behavioural patterns and perspectives. According to Toledo,
the main objective of ethnoecological research can tentatively be considered as
»the exploration of how nature is seen by human groups through a screen of beliefs,
knowledge and purposes, and how in terms of their images humans use, manage and
appropriate natural resources« (1992: 6). Contributions aim at »the ecological evaluation
of the intellectual and practical activities that a certain human group executes during
its appropriation of natural resources« (1992: 10). By focusing on the corpus (the
whole repertory of knowledge or cognitive systems), the praxis (the set of practices)
and the cosmos (the belief system), the discipline offers an integrative approach to the
study of the process of the human appropriation of nature. In this analysis, the dynamics
of the perspective taken by ethnoecologists have been much more receptive to
considering indigenous belief systems than earlier analyses conceded. 53
53 According to Ellen (2003: 49) ethnoecological analysis distinguishes a) classificatory knowledge; b)
knowledge of anatomy, autoecology and processes with respect to individual organisms or groups of
organisms; c) knowledge of ecological systems (plant interaction, dynamics of various kinds of landscape,
seasonality, food chains, pest ecology) and d) knowledge of the general principles of plant and
animal biology. How all this knowledge connects into some larger whole presents analytical difficulties,
since it is more difficult to disaggregate in local emic terms, partly because it is characteristically
intermeshed with symbolic and aesthetic representations. An example of the potential contribution
of ethnoecological knowledge to biodiversity research and conservation has been provided by Zent
(1999). See also the other contributions in Gragson and Blount (1999). Further case studies include