The cultural context of biodiversity conservation - Oapen

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The cultural context of biodiversity conservation
cerning ecological relationships; it is, rather, woven into and inseparable from the social
and spiritual context of culture. Thus, it is laden with associated values, while the
scientific community relies upon data that are »value free« (Kimmerer 2002: 433f.). As
it is woven into social structures of a specific culture and bound by time and space, by
contextual and moral factors, indigenous knowledge contrasts according to Banuri
and Apffel Marglin with knowledge derived from science, »which bases its claim to
superiority on the basis of universal validity« (1993: 13). Following Nakashima (1998),
knowledge in ›Western‹ cultures is conceived as an abstract entity and independent of
practice. ›Theory‹ and ›practice‹, like ›science‹ and ›technology‹, are continually differentiated.
In this intellectual tradition, science is considered to be secular and thus
distinct from religion and belief. Scientific reality is supposedly empirical and conceptual
barriers have been erected to exclude the sacred, the spiritual and the intuitive. He
writes that »science remains a powerful institution in today's world and most people
that have received a formal education [...] have been engrained with the idea that
science and scientists represent the absolute and ultimate authority, particularly when
interpreting biophysical reality« (1998: 9). Sahtouris writes on the same issue, suggesting
that scientists »have been given the role of ›official‹ priesthood, with the mandate
to tell us ›how things are‹« (2002: 72). 58
Discussing the inherent ethnocentrism 59 and elitism of global science in late 20 th
century, Ellen and Harris (2000) point critically to the limitations of research methods
and ways of theorising in that they often ignore or undervalue contexts; it is important
to question the extent to which IK can ever be de-coupled from the cultural context.
Despite programmatic rhetoric, they assert that even in anthropological work such as
the contributions in The Cultural Dimension of Development (Warren et al. 1995), IK is almost
placed outside culture. These examples appear to have little to do with the cultural
contexts in which they occur, but rather provide representations of ›indigenous science‹.
By contrast, Agrawal (2002) sees these accounts as crucial to the continuing
vigour of debates about IK after long decades of dismissal of the ›indigenous‹ and
what it signified by attempting to create greater awareness about its significance
among policy makers and neoliberal reformers pursuing privatisation and economic
liberalisation. Elsewhere, in analysing disparities between the two knowledge systems,
Agrawal (1995) argues that IK is essentially a personal, practical knowledge related to
the meeting of individual and community needs. It is immediate and corporate, but
represents a different worldview from science in that it is not constrained by rules and
58 In most writings, ›science‹ or ›scientific thinking‹ is referred to as a rather unspecified domain. Implicitly,
it seems that scholars direct their criticism to the natural sciences on which conventional
conservation and resource management are based. The same authors who emphasise that there exist
diverse indigenous knowledges do not take into account that science itself should also be differentiated;
there are many sciences of which all are based on different principles and assumptions that
need to be distinguished. It should be kept in mind that at least the social sciences, as Long (1992)
suggests, referring to the role of worldviews in the development of science, have always been composed
of a multiplicity of paradigms.
59 The term implies the tendency to interpret other cultures according to the values of one's own culture.