The cultural context of biodiversity conservation - Oapen

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The cultural context of biodiversity conservation
sult of a great number of decisions and selective incorporations of previous ideas, beliefs and images,
but at the same time destructive of other possible frames of conceptualisation and understanding.
Thus, it is not an accumulation of facts but involves ways of construing the world. Nor is knowledge
ever fully unified or integrated in terms of an underlying cultural logic or system of classification.
Rather it is fragmentary, partial, and provisional in nature and people work with a multiplicity of
understandings, beliefs and commitments. (Arce & Long 1992: 212f.)
That knowledges cannot be divorced from the historically specific forms of social intercourse,
communication and organisation has been widely asserted. Among others,
McCarthy (1996) reminds that knowledge itself is a historical construct. She has provided
a definition of knowledges as »any and every set of ideas and acts accepted by
one or another social group or society of people – ideas and acts pertaining to what
they accept as real for them and for others« (1996: 23). Its working premise, she
comments, is that social reality itself is in process and is formed out of the prevailing
knowledges of a society or group of people. In this sense, the next chapter will explore
aspects of relevance within larger social and historical frames. Leaving behind
the highly diverse theoretical ideas, the turn towards the local context again entails different
levels of analysis. Building upon the central attributes of indigenous knowledge
as described above, the following chapter specifically considers the role of national
policies and integrationist objectives that defined the major parameters of the Guatemalan
governments towards the indigenous population in the past. It synthesises
some general ethnological data and explores the influence of dynamic configurations
of state policies and institutional environments. This analysis may provide a matrix of
culture, history, social movements and environmental change that local resource use
patterns are embedded in.