The cultural context of biodiversity conservation - Oapen

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The cultural context of biodiversity conservation
were the principal methods applied in the field. Guiding questions were: What are the
important practices relating to natural resource management? What concepts and explanations
do people use for these practices? What are the patterns of knowledge generation,
transmission and transformation? How does indigenous environmental
knowledge interact with external sources of knowledge? Through which means are the
Q'eqchi' related to the elements of the ecosystems around them? During the research,
the inquiry altered from resource use patterns towards internal dynamics such as inherent
values and implicit symbolisms of human-nature relations. When talking about
subsistence patterns, economics and ecology, informants recurrently used religious
symbolism to describe their experiences and referred to spiritual features inherent in
their way of life. They emphasised the importance of ritual practice and their belief in
divine beings, sacred sites and principles of indigenous cosmovision. This led to the
core questions of how nature is socially constructed, how religion and ecology relate
to each other and how cosmological principles reflect the environment and connect
with production methods. The field investigation revealed further that indigenous
knowledge is in constant transition, which suggests the additional consideration of
patterns of cultural change recurrently evoked by internal and external influences.
The theoretical assumptions have been shaped by the fieldwork experiences,
which in turn have given the thesis a conceptual frame different from that initially envisaged.
In this process, the venture to capture the interconnectedness of the seen und
the unseen dimensions of indigenous knowledge became part of a broader landscape
approach. This serves as a meaningful scheme that provides ways of revealing intertwining
aspects and allows for applying a concept of environment that encompasses
biophysical phenomena, social practice and cultural meaning. Most centrally, the present
work emphasises implicit symbolisms of human-nature relations that tend to be
disregarded in the international environmental debate on biodiversity conservation initiatives.
By doing so, it contributes an extended perspective on the interaction between
environmental issues and symbolic patterns that prompted recent anthropological
studies to explore the links between knowledge and belief systems. The convergence
of cognitive and symbolic anthropology assumes that all human populations
apprehend the social in terms of the natural world and the natural in terms of metaphors
drawn from the social world. The two are in Ellen's terms »intrinsically complementary«
(2003: 50). The empirical and symbolic spheres studied by anthropologists
retain their importance and have been used in the present work to make new
connections. Although the determining role of beliefs and worldviews in indigenous
cultures has been highlighted for a long time, their relevance for issues related to development
and conservation has only recently emerged. Increasingly, it has been realised
that the relationship with the natural world as envisaged by religious philosophies
and the manner in which religious thought translates into everyday practice are important
fields to be investigated.