The cultural context of biodiversity conservation - Oapen

Local expressions of indigenous knowledge
on hunting practices, summarised briefly that the conflict was all about the question of
whether the land belonged to the state or the tzuul taq'a (personal comment, 2002).
The same biologist asserted that the long term success of conservation will depend as
much on dialogue as on direct development investments. Thus, it is essential to listen
to the people's opinions, experiences, needs and priorities. In their work the biologists
have undertaken to avoid systemic positivism by not taking for granted the notion
that surface phenomena meeting scientific classification categories of nature, space
and time, are inter-culturally valid. In this respect, they were aware that the encounter
between the two different knowledge systems needs to be understood as a meeting of
cultures. Observing such an encounter on the occasion of the aforementioned workshop
on wildlife management, I realised that the scientists – despite their attentiveness
as to different worldviews and perceptions – could hardly abstract from their own
paradigms to accept other ways of perceiving the world. Combined with an obvious
emphasis on measurement, they read landscape first of all in scientific terms. After all,
biologists reduce the landscape to generic classes of features and resources; it is primarily
a habitat to be assessed in quantitative terms. As their compilation of ecological
data was based on a boundary-dominated view of the land, different scales and ways of
seeing actually came together in this meeting of cultures. The bird's-eye view of the satellite
image clearly illustrates this observation (Fig. 5.23). In following the discussion, I
experienced that people from different cultures or professions, despite being in the
same geographical place, perceive landscapes differently and construct with those perceived
landscapes entirely different environmental relationships.
Fig. 5.23 An interpreter explains the view from a satellite image
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