The cultural context of biodiversity conservation - Oapen

Local expressions of indigenous knowledge
The farmers we worked with definitely desired to maintain the land for the well-being
of their children and grandchildren. They wanted them to learn how to use the resources
of the surrounding world in a sustainable manner. »If the local resources vanish, the
traditional way of learning will equally cease to exist«, was the comment of a concerned
farmer (field notes, 2003). As Anderson (1996: 79) has observed, not much capital is
invested in the Mayan landscape, but the total investment in labour and learning is incredible.
He asserts that children learn in the process of doing, but admittedly they receive
continual instruction. This means that education is not a mindless matter of just
copying the parents, who work hard to motivate their children. The performative and
implicit character of knowledge transmission becomes particularly evident in the symbolic
realm within which the principles of the indigenous cosmovision and environmental
imagery are transferred intergenerationally through the annual, cyclical repetition
of livelihood activities associated with rituals as a type of communication that
uses visual displays as its language. As with the process of growing up, Anderson emphasises
the realm of rituals, which have a major teaching function:
They involve the Maya emotionally in their agriculture. They mark out stages and processes for all to
see. Children learn the world through ritual and are thus taught not only the facts but how to react to
them. They learn to be grateful to the forces of nature, to God or gods. They learn that their food is
the product of a complex interaction between themselves, the natural world, and whatever powers lie
behind all of this. They learn that food production is serious, indeed passionately and intensely serious.
They learn, above all, to treat resources with respect, and not to use everything up (1996: 82).
The above comment implies that every aspect of learning includes the learning of values.
This notion pertains to the informal way of learning but likewise applies to the official
education system that has been widely established in the rural communities.
While most of our male informants either never entered primary school or completed
just a few years before dropping out, most of their children today complete primary,
secondary and even higher education levels. However, when we joined farmers in
their daily activities, it often occurred that we were accompanied by their sons who
were engaged in the milpa farming even when they normally should have been attending
classes at school. The prevailing low level of school attendance in rural areas of
Alta Verapaz may be explained by the following words of an informant who expressed
his conviction that children should foremost learn to maintain and use the
specific resources their lives immediately depend on: »At school they do not learn what they
need to learn for their future life as peasants. I need them here where they learn what is relevant for
them« (field notes, 2003). He further asserted that the detailed information he felt was
essential, i.e. knowledge of local species and customary practices, is primarily derived
through immediate experience and direct observation. In contrast, the skills taught at
school would lead to an alienation from traditional forms of knowledge. This gap between
what parents want their children to learn and what their children are taught at
school repeatedly became evident in conversations on the issue. The extinction of experience
has much to do with processes of acculturation that promote language shift
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