The cultural context of biodiversity conservation - Oapen

The discursive context
for a particular indigenous practice. Consequently, it fails to take into account the many
almost imperceptible variations that a constantly changing context creates. These
considerations lead to his conclusion that the ways in which power works must be critically
examined, just as the relationship between power, development and science
needs to be re-examined in order to realise the aim of working in the interests of indigenous
or other marginal people who have often remained in positions of localised resistance
to effects of power produced by those who possess and apply scientific knowledge,
including the builders of databases (2002: 292ff.).
In a similar way, other authors have emphasised the need to recognise power inequalities,
ethnocentric assumptions and epistemological contradictions that lie at the
heart of efforts to convert the indigenous into the scientific. Ellen and Harris, for instance,
draw attention to this depleted vision of IK inventories as »a convenient abstraction,
consisting of bite-sized chunks of information that can be slotted into
›Western‹ paradigms, fragmented, decontextualized, a kind of quick fix, if not a panacea«
(2000: 15). The notion of a material stock that can be analysed and extracted for
use in any context disregarding the entirety of particular circumstances and the presumed
existence of a definable body of knowledge independent of the context in
which it arises leads them to suggest that it is precisely the local embeddedness of IK
that made it successful. Elsewhere, Ellen argues that the boundaries between science,
scholarly knowledge and folk knowledge are constantly shifting and that the distinctions
themselves are not always helpful: »All knowledges are anchored in their own
particular socio-economic milieu; all are indigenous to a particular context [...]. By presenting
agroecological knowledge as a decontextualized inventory of practices, all
agency and creativity is drained, reducing it to a packageable commodity, secured and
easily transferable from place to another« (2003: 66f.). Or as Antweiler notes, it is
wrongly assumed that indigenous knowledge can be incorporated into measures conventionally
planned and implemented – »like a module« (1998: 484). Examining the
same question, Escobar formulates:
Local, ›indigenous‹ and ›traditional‹ knowledge systems are found to be useful complements to modern
biology. However, in these discourses, knowledge is seen as something existing in the ›minds‹ of individual
persons (shamans or elders) about external ›objects‹ (›plants‹, ›species‹), the medical or economic
›utility‹ of which their bearers are supposed to transmit to us. Local knowledge is seen not as a
complex cultural construction, involving movements and events profoundly historical and relational.
[...] As they are brought into its politics modern science recodifies them in utilitarian ways (1996: 57).
In order to overcome this discussion on the oppositional relationship between IK and
science and to break the »epistemological monopoly« (Toledo 1992: 18) the latter has
imposed, Gorenstein suggests creating a »third space where knowledge traditions can
be performed together« (1998: 4). Likewise, DeWalt proposes more effective and creative
interactions between indigenous and scientific knowledge:
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