The cultural context of biodiversity conservation - Oapen

The discursive context
tions with their holistic approaches that everything is interrelated, which makes it difficult
to predict changes and isolate the reasons for such changes. These different
ways of understanding and interpreting the environment are both rooted in empirical
observations, but whereas science is oriented towards quantification and onedimensional
causality divided into disciplines, local knowledge is behaviour-based,
contextual and to be assessed by a qualitative approach. This acknowledgement leads
to the conclusion that new models incorporating both qualitative and quantitative data
are needed for an exchange of information (Kalland 2000: 326f.).
In the same vein, Kimmerer (2002) emphasises the need for integrative thinking.
In order to encounter the complex issues of sustainability and to develop problemsolving
approaches, a diversity of intellectual traditions is required. She considers an
integration of social and cultural concerns a major new direction for scientists for developing
cross-cultural competency. In search for ways to incorporate IK into mainstream
scientific teaching, its use in education calls for a thoughtful consideration of
the cohesive and internally consistent worldview to which it belongs. This view is also
held by Nakashima and Roué (2002). They suggest appreciating IK not as static information
set to be conserved ex situ and integrated into science but as dynamic components
of indigenous societies that may be protected through the conservation of
languages, ensuring knowledge transmission within the societies themselves and empowering
people to increase their control over the environments upon which they depend.
Even today, Nakashima (1998) affirms, the notion is still held that development
can best be achieved by severing all ties with the past and investing in modernisation
via external inputs of science, technology and formal education. The roots of sustainable
development have to be set within the society itself, in order to allow people to
find their own way between the past and the future, to draw upon resources from inside
as well as outside and to use their own traditions as the foundation for change.
Such a process of cross-cultural understanding should involve a mutual flow of information
and requires »the need for humility, the need to learn from people before
trying to teach them« (Chambers & Richards 1995: xiv).
To sum up this chapter reviewing key aspects of indigenous knowledge, it can be
concluded that although underlying cognitive strategies influence how people construct
what they know about the biological world, most knowledge is culturally transmitted
and shaped by environmental and social forces that vary from place to place.
Or as Arce and Long put it: »knowledge is constituted by the ways in which people
categorize, code, process and impute meaning to their experiences« (1992: 211). This
is as true of scientific and of indigenous knowledge, even though the grounds of belief
and the procedures for validation of knowledge-claims may vary.
Knowledge emerges out of a complex process involving social, situational, cultural and institutional
factors. The process takes place on the basis of existing conceptual frameworks and procedures and is
affected by various social contingencies, such as the skills, orientations, experiences, interests, resources
and patterns of social interaction characteristic of the particular group or interacting set of individuals,
as well as those of the wider audience. Moreover knowledge is constructive in the sense that it is the re-
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