The cultural context of biodiversity conservation - Oapen

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The cultural context of biodiversity conservation
The aforementioned AIDPI, which emphasises the crucial role of education in the national
peace process, contains measures for reviving and conserving indigenous languages.
It states as follows:
The educational system is one of the most important vehicles for the transmittal and development of
cultural values and knowledge. It must respond to the cultural and linguistic diversity of Guatemala,
recognizing and strengthening the indigenous cultural identity, the Mayan educational values and systems
and those of the other indigenous peoples, the access to formal and non-formal education, and including
in the national study plans the indigenous educational concepts (MINUGUA 2001: 17f.). 77
As has been shown, the context in which socialisation takes place plays an important
role in an individual's use and perception of the environment. Thus, agencies of socialisation
such as the family, the community, informal and formal education need to
be taken into consideration when reflecting on factors that entail changes within processes
of knowledge generation, dissemination and transmission. A loss of knowledge
and a loss of language, it has been objected by Whiston Spirn, »limits the celebration
of landscape as a partnership between people, place, and other life and further reduces
the capacity to understand and imagine possible human relationships with nonhuman
nature« (1998: 23).
Since their livelihoods essentially depend on sophisticated environmental knowledge,
the farmers we worked with in the lowlands are keen observers of their natural
setting and of associated ecological processes. Though they all have migrated to the
area from other parts of the department, they have complex repertoires of knowledge,
including practical and symbolic values and attributes. 78 Nevertheless, a major finding
of our study is that traditional land use practices and accumulated knowledge of domestic
plants have been seriously eroded in the past decades. 79 In interviews, mostly
elderly respondents, men and women alike, frequently expressed their preoccupation
with the perceived erosion of customary practices. As agricultural knowledge combines
the physical and spiritual maintenance of natural resources, this perception also
includes the abandonment of practices and beliefs related to the symbolic realm. On
the whole an acculturation process has developed at diverse levels in different places,
and the situation varies as to the transformation and the continued maintenance of
ancient cultural traits. Most strikingly, longstanding experiences with the cultivation of
77 Since the signing of the peace agreements, the gap between the growth of GDP (gross domestic
product) and public investment in education has increased significantly. Despite the fact that the
budgetary allocation is adequate for the general increase of educational coverage and that the design
of the educational reform responds to the commitments of the agreement, access by the indigenous
peoples to education continues to be deficient (MINUGUA 2001).
78 In his ethnoecological analysis New Lands and Old Traditions, Carter (1969) revealed that Q'eqchi'
migrants from the highlands could successfully move to the lowlands and with a minimum of technical
adjustment establish a productive agricultural system. Because of the simplicity of highland
swidden methods, they could be adapted quickly to the new conditions. Although he concentrated
on technical aspects of the milpa cycle, he observed that one of the effects of migration had been the
lessening of ›supernatural‹ sanctions.
79 This is also a major finding of the fieldwork undertaken by Hatse and De Ceuster (2001b) among
Q'eqchi' communities in rural Alta Verapaz.