The cultural context of biodiversity conservation - Oapen

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The cultural context of biodiversity conservation
Such world renewal ceremonies, as he continues, are ceremonial cycles based on the
understanding that people have to continue to remember and perpetuate essential
ecological relationships through the life of individual community members and the
generations that will follow. Through the cyclical repetition of rituals, people traditionally
maintain the memory of their cultural worldview, reproducing the relationship
to their places in each generation. Once people break these cycles of remembering,
they tend to forget essential life-sustaining relationships. In his discussion dealing with
perceptions of nature among indigenous peoples throughout the Americas, he refers
to »a dual existence« in the postmodern world, which he further elucidates as follows:
At times, it resembles a kind of schizophrenia characterized by constantly trying to adapt ourselves to
a mainstream social, political, and cultural system that is not our own. We are constantly faced with
living in a larger society that does not really understand or respect our traditional life symbols, our ecological
perspectives, our understandings of relationship to the land, our traditional ways of remembering
to remember who we are (2001: 634).
Among others, the cyclical repetition of the milpa cycle is a way of ›remembering to
remember‹. Milpa farming combines multiple functions. As has been shown, the shifting
cultivation is not only important in economic terms but simultaneously of major
cultural significance because the peasant farmers follow traditional patterns which
provide them with a feeling of belonging and identity. Based on the perception of
maize as essence of life, the local subsistence production provides social security.
Through annual repetition, identity is lived collectively in all daily activities related to
agricultural production and associated processes. In this way, the origin of culture is
retraced and, as Hatse and De Ceuster put it, the world is recreated continually by
humans »in miniature« (2001a: 44). Human society and the agricultural process are
seen as set within and dependent upon the cosmic cycles that ensure the process of
plant fertilisation, ripening, harvest, decay, death and rebirth. This view, as described
by Carrasco, implies that the Maya not only consider the plants and seeds as in need
of regeneration, but that the entire cosmos depends on various processes of rebirth;
the world is in a continual process of sowing and harvesting, which is conceived of as
»a long performance« that hopefully will never end (1990: 98ff.).