The cultural context of biodiversity conservation - Oapen

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5.4 Outcomes and prospects
The cultural context of biodiversity conservation
Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. (Geertz 1975: 29)
A central purpose of my investigation has been, in the words of Cajete, »to present a
broader, more inclusive view of the indigenous understanding of the natural world«
(2001: 619). As such, it does not presume to be an ›objective‹ treatise, but rather developed
a ›subjective‹ and culturally contexted perspective of indigenous environmental
relationships. The pivotal importance of context as an analytical device has
been highlighted throughout the thesis. Socio-cultural life, spirituality and biodiversity
combine to provide the context for indigenous knowledge and sustainable production
methods. It is thus that my research emphasises a holistic approach. And holism, as
Grenier (1998) reminds us, is based on the view that systems are more than the sum
of their parts. However, any case study relies at least to some extent on reduction and
simplification. The above comment made by Geertz that cultural analysis always appears
to be partial in a sense of incompleteness also applies to the present work.
However, it has been limited to those themes that seemed relevant to me. Built on
conceptual lines drawn from several strands of anthropological research, I have described
numerous facets of how indigenous knowledge is acquired, represented and
transformed. Moving to the task of examining natural resource use patterns, it became
evident that this was not a question of recording knowledge contents as sets of information;
rather, it became clear that it was more meaningful to describe them in the
relevant framework of social, economic, historical and ecological processes.