The cultural context of biodiversity conservation - Oapen

Concluding remarks
based on. A cross-cultural concept of conservation to produce more balanced, interactive
and knowledge-enhancing relations needs to be further advanced in future environmental
governance. Finally, we need to develop a mindset »that there is no alternative,
that there can be no retreat from indigenous knowledge. It must always be the point
of departure and the final destination« (Ellen 2002: 256). Regarding future forms of
scholarly engagement with transnational environmental discourse, Brosius (1999) suggests
that anthropology has a critical role to play not only in contributing to understandings
of human impacts on the environment, but also in showing how the environment
is constructed and represented. As environmental concerns have come to
occupy a central place in national and international debates, he points to the need for
critical perspectives focusing on the diverse and often contested visions of the environment
and perceptions as to origins and solutions of environmental problems.
In this way, by applying a concept of culture that allows for an examination of a
particular case in the context of an even greater whole, I applied to phenomenological,
hermeneutic and constructivist paradigms to develop an analytical strategy of contextualisation.
It became obvious that cultural analysis of social processes associated with
environmental issues elicits queries along manifold lines of inquiry. Thus, I did not
propose one grand theory but rather an ensemble of conceptual strands informing
understandings of material and symbolic dimensions of human thought and action. By
combining materialist and idealist approaches, I have taken a middle ground to negotiate
through ›spaces of politics‹, ›spaces of science‹ and ›spaces-in-the-making‹, as
Schumacher (1998) has distinguished these different realms of inquiry. By doing so,
the previous chapters elicited multidimensional dynamics in various scales and diverse
connections between nature and culture, which adopt specific shapes according to the
social, political, historical and geographic context.
My aim was not to elevate precapitalist modes of indigenous lifeways as a panacea
for complex ecological problems, such as the loss of biodiversity, which is rooted in
global developments and economic inequalities. Yet, in documenting the cultural aspects
of landscapes, the study explored the coherence of diverse expressions of
knowledge and intended to remind of alternative worldviews and possibilities that exist
among such cultures as the Q'eqchi', who have imagined themselves more intimately
in their respective ambient world. In this course, I revealed that ›holism‹ is not just an
anthropological device but foremost a particular way of making sense of the world.
The Q'eqchi' do not perceive their lives in terms of social structures, economic systems,
ecological principles, religious beliefs or moral commitments. These concerns cannot
be reduced to a question of theoretical models in which formalist patterns are used to
interpret religious activities or in which highly specialised socio-linguistic ethnographies
are used to describe peoples and their ways of knowing as types to be classified
and catalogued in terms of mere information. It is all about process. And process
means that there is no beginning and no end. Forward-looking, Posey reflects upon
the role of anthropologists, who in his view are still some of the only people
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