The cultural context of biodiversity conservation - Oapen

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The cultural context of biodiversity conservation
ronmental anthropology rests on the tenet that human-nature interaction takes place
via culture. Committed to the paradigm of cultural relativism, anthropologists view
culture as an all-encompassing realm, the elements of which are intrinsically interrelated.
Though a multi-layered concept, anthropologists generally agree in defining culture
as »a socially transmitted system of information, where ›information‹ includes
knowledge, beliefs and values, and which constitutes a blueprint for behaviour«
(Oviedo et al. 2000: 9).
In pleading for an interpretative approach, Geertz considers culture not as »something
to which social events, behaviours, institutions, or processes can be causally attributed«
(1975: 14). For him, it is, rather, a context, something within which these
events and processes can be intelligibly described. In his view, the study of cultures is
directed toward the study of symbolic and signifying systems by means of which humans
communicate, perpetuate and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward
life by means of which a social order is communicated and reproduced. By applying
his concept of culture, which is essentially a semiotic one, I focus in the following
on the ways in which social actors construct a pattern of meanings to their natural
and social surroundings, their own identity and the practices in which these meanings
are historically transmitted. If culture is ›a web of significance‹ humans have spun and
through which they interpret their experience and which guides their action, its analysis
is not an experimental science in search of general law but an interpretative one in
search for meaning. Given this primacy of anthropology as an interpretative discipline,
there are no ultimate laws that determine the ways people behave, for this is the result
of complex interactions on the basis of cultural values. Thus, the question of how the
values of indigenous peoples toward nature are expressed culturally needs to be addressed.
Such values, which are highly variable and difficult to quantify, often contrast
with values illuminated through conventional scientific paradigms, which are the
foundation for most conservation initiatives.
Values are subtle and elusive things: they run like a fine thread through the fabric of culture, weaving
through every form and action, but emerging only in the patterns. Yet, however intangible, they knit
these forms and actions into a cultural whole, shaping the human environmental relationship and
pulling people inescapably into particular kinds of interaction with their material world. While beliefs,
values and cultural schemata may be group-specific, they are built upon the universal process of cognition
through which all human beings ›learn the world‹. […] Beliefs and values received, inculcated
and passed on through a process of socialisation that creates a culturally specific relationship with the
environment. This process consists of several elements: the creation of categories, the learning of language,
and the acquisition and dissemination of cultural knowledge. Each involves an interaction with
the physical, social and cultural environment and contributes to the formation of individual and collective
identity. All are vital to the inculcation of values; but, equally, they are intangibles of culture –
elusive and invisible streams that carry culture forward. (Strang 1997: 173, 178)