The cultural context of biodiversity conservation - Oapen

The discursive context
Nevertheless, Kalland proposes that resource management regimes should be based
on the knowledge, premises and priorities of local people who depend on natural resources
for their nutritional, economic, social and cultural needs and who have often
developed social institutions and regulations that had positive effects on nature conservation,
although these originally might have been motivated by other considerations
(2003: 172).
3.4.4 The epistemological dimension - indigenous knowledge and science
Current writing pays particular attention to the relationship between ›modern‹ sciencebased
knowledge and ›indigenous‹ or ›traditional‹ knowledge. 56 Among others, Berkes
(1999) discusses complementarity as an increasingly important theme in resource management
and has undertaken to analyse similarities and differences between both
knowledge systems. In general, he argues, both ›Western‹ and indigenous science may
be considered the result of the same »intellectual process of creating order out of disorder«
(1999: 9). For DeWalt, it is important to consider indigenous and scientific
knowledge systems as »complementary sources of wisdom« (1994: 127). Kimmerer
(2002) distinguishes between traditional and scientific ecological knowledge, assuming
that the two have much in common, since both derive from systematic observations
of nature. Accordingly, both knowledge systems yield detailed empirical information
of natural phenomena and relationships among ecosystem components, both have
predictive power and in both intellectual traditions, observations are interpreted
within a particular cultural context. Traditional ecological knowledge encompasses a
wide range of biological information that overlaps significantly with the content of
ecology or conservation biology. Its scope includes detailed empirical knowledge of
population biology, resource assessment and monitoring, successional dynamics, patterns
of fluctuation in climate and resources, species interactions, ethno-taxonomy,
sustainable harvesting, adaptive management and manipulation of disturbance regimes.
57 But TEK, she asserts, also differs from science in a number of ways. First of
all, it is qualitative in its scope and implies a record of observations from a single locale
over a long period of time. Such continuous data contrast with scientific observations
that tend to be quantitative and often represent synchronic data from a wide
range of sites without a long-term perspective. Science is conducted in an academic
culture in which nature is seen objectively. In contrast, ›indigenous science‹ views nature
as subject. Unlike science, it is much more than the empirical information con-
56 In the 1990s, the encounter of anthropology and the field of science and technology studies (STS),
which is centrally concerned with the production of authority structures in scientifically and technologically
advanced societies, led to the formation of a new direction referred to as anthropology of science
and technology. For an introduction into this field based on the assumption that the culture of science
itself is a valid object of study, see Gorenstein (1998).
57 Ellen and Harris (2000: 6ff.) remind to recognise that much scientific knowledge of the natural
world that was constituted during the 18 th and 19 th centuries absorbed pre-existing indigenous
European folk knowledge.
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