The cultural context of biodiversity conservation - Oapen

Local expressions of indigenous knowledge
to so much muteness« (2002: 12). In this way, past events in the form of memories
can become lost or fragmented, particularly through dissociate mechanisms such as
psychological trauma. She further writes:
For in a very immediate way, trauma destroys the individual's sense of a safe world in which to live.
It is as though the individual is enabled to live life through being ›held‹ within a containing context
that is both cultural and natural – a ›world‹. This world is the background, and provides a foundation
and a shelter, as it were. One might think of it as a background fabric that holds the individual,
a fabric woven of various contextual threads, from family to community to natural world to divinity,
all imbued with a sense of strength, goodness, and authority, all permeated with the energy of life
(2002: 132).
Among anthropologists who have focused on the cultural effects of the decades of
violence, Wilson (1990) describes the ramifications on traditional religious life as disastrous.
He examines how several decades of civil war and conversion have affected
community-based identity. Since ›sacredness‹ among the Q'eqchi' has a strong situational
aspect, he emphasises that displacement from their original lands has created a
chasm between the people and the mountain deities. Due to its localised nature, the
mountain cult was often abandoned when people moved to other places. Certain
groups that had hid in the mountains where able to maintain their relationship with
the tzuul taq'a, while others could not continue to practice the customary rituals due to
the death of community elders in the counterinsurgency movement and the persecution
of the population. In particular, spiritual leaders were fiercely persecuted. Under
nomadic war conditions, the worship of the tzuul taq'a could not be continued: »Most
of the time was just spent surviving, finding enough to eat and avoiding the military« (1990: 18).
However, individual rituals were more likely to survive than collective offerings because
they require less financial investment, less co-ordination of people or specialist
knowledge. The rituals that survived the repression were those, which were not place
or time specific. In this context, Wilson also observed that traditional healing methods
had not been affected by the repression to the extent that the earth cult was. Other
scholars like Garrard-Burnett (2005: 1067) have suggested that the impacts of the war,
including the physical displacement of the Mayan people from their traditional sacred
landscapes may have opened a social space for Protestantism. 86 In this vein, Secaira,
although not explicitly concerned with patterns of change, comments: »The Q'eqchi'
traditional beliefs around the land and the milpa are part of a respectful attitude toward
nature and it is unfortunate that in the process of migration, conversion to Protestantism
and Ladinization, the Q'eqchi' have started to lose this attitude« (1992: 112).
86 At the beginning of the 20 th century, the Nazarene Church was the first Protestant church established
in Alta Verapaz. It was followed by other congregations that increasingly converted large
numbers of the Q'eqchi' in the 1960s and 1970s (Siebers 1996: 52). The increased religious polarisation
dates back to the years of war, when Catholic lay leaders were being harassed by local military
commanders (Davis 1988: 10).
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