The cultural context of biodiversity conservation - Oapen

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The cultural context of biodiversity conservation
sues: the consequences of the civil war and the religious fundamentalism that has
spread in the area more recently. 80
In view of the consequences of the war, different levels of violence may be identified
that affected the population in rural areas throughout Guatemala. In order to regain
control over communities accused of supporting the guerrilla movement, entire
villages were destroyed throughout Alta Verapaz by the military in the 1980s. When
referring to the time of war, the term *nim rahilal is commonly used, which means »the
great suffering« (Flores Arenales 2001: 4). 81 The army attacks led to displacement
from original lands, mass migrations and the abandoning of traditional practices. As
massacres became routine, many people fled their original homelands and lost a large
percentage of their seed stocks, especially for garden crops. 82 Since indigenous knowledge
foremost is learned and updated through direct observation of the environment,
removing people from their ancestral territories may break the intergenerational education
cycle. In particular, the promotion of settlement nucleation and the forced enculturation
of the Mayan groups into the dominant ladino culture have contributed to
the interruption of knowledge transmission. The destruction of social organisation
through relocation had devastating effects. The military concentrated the population
in well-controlled areas to create an »ideologically new« indigenous population, presenting
itself as the »saviour« of the people (Wilson 1990: 25f.). The strategy of clustering
members of different ethnic groups into new settlements had severe effects on
social cohesion within these newly established ›model villages‹. 83 It resulted in the dissolution
of relations of trust between and within communities and left a deep sense of
powerlessness. This issue is crucial as the new communities were highly heterogeneous,
comprised of people from different areas with different customs, even different
languages and religions and different experiences of the violence. Consequently, networks
among peasants through which farmers formerly obtained and exchanged their
seed stocks were disrupted or even destroyed. In the slow process of rebuilding the
village economy, the communities concentrated foremost on re-establishing maize
crops as a central link of social life. Thousands of Q'eqchi', mainly elders, died in this
process and with them valuable knowledge disappeared.
80 The talk was given on the occasion of a workshop on Reflection, Analysis and Proposal of Nature Conservation
among the Maya-Q'eqchi' in which numerous institutions and scientists engaged in the field of
conservation and development in Alta Verapaz participated, 27 May to 1 June 2002, in Cobán.
81 Anthropological perspectives on cultural impacts of the civil war have been complied by Carmack
in Harvest of Violence (1988). Although much has been written about the social effects of the political
crisis during the 1980s, few assessments have been presented concerned with the psychological effects
this period has had on the social relations and cultural patterns of knowledge transmission.
82 In communities that were not affected by the war, Wilson (1995: 42) observed that garden products
were much in evidence and constituted a large percentage of the villagers' diet.
83 In emphasising the relations between space, power and culture, Stepputat (1999) has examined The
Politics of Displacement during the armed conflict. He argues that the army, through the massive displacement
of population and the organisation of civil patrols, produced a dichotomous space of ›villages‹
and ›wilderness‹, and that the reorganisation of space enabled the army to control the conflict.