The cultural context of biodiversity conservation - Oapen

Introduction
tional perspective, it is assumed that issues of environmental interest at community
level are not to be separated from the larger social background. Thus, the chapter
provides a historical, political and socio-economic backdrop for the data resulting
from the fieldwork. Given these prevailing conditions, the chapter then moves to the
sites of ethnographic inquiry and elicits methodological considerations arising from
the specific locations.
Building on the diverse arrays of global, national, regional and local frames, the
fifth chapter finally integrates the major findings of my field study concerned with local
expressions of indigenous knowledge. It is divided into three major sections related to different
dimensions of human-nature interaction as observed in the peasant communities.
The first part on the empirical dimension explores forms in which the practical aspects of
indigenous knowledge become most evident. As the focus altered during the investigation
from the seen constituents to the inherent unseen meanings, the second part
turns to the symbolic dimension and raises questions concerning perceptions of nature
and social values linked to the indigenous worldview and expressed in ritual practice.
Within this context of meaning, the construction of identity bound to particular landscape
features will be emphasised, whereas the third part of the chapter is intended to reveal
the processual dynamics of indigenous knowledge. The context of change deals with different
forms of knowledge assemblies and patterns of knowledge transmission. By
considering the foundational nature of historical events and their continued influence
on the current environmental and social relations, underlying causes of transformational
processes will be further explored. The chapter concludes with an integrated
summary of the seminal outcomes, assessing various perspectives and dimensions discussed
throughout the thesis. It combines concluding remarks and recalls theoretical
premises framing the main arguments of the thesis. It is reflexive in that it considers
assumptions underlying scientific thinking and turns back to the question of how locally
derived findings and insights may be transferred to general questions concerned
with in situ conservation and meta-narratives of the global environmental discourse.
As initially outlined, the fundamental question giving rise to the present study aims
at understanding different ways of seeing, perceiving and endowing the world with
meaning. Departing from this point, the attempt to weave together the multiple outlined
threads is illustrated by photographs taken by the author during the time she
spent in Guatemala. 4 They reflect the view that the visual should play a more prominent
role in anthropological descriptions and analyses. The visualised moments I experienced
may remind the reader that the study, although a contribution to social science
and thus also made up of analytical schemes and theoretical abstractions, is
committed to an indigenous world, which is not perceived in scientifically constructed
categories such as ›structures‹, ›systems‹ or ›models‹. The study is not about ›metareferential
parameters‹ or ›cosmological paradigms‹ embedded in a ›cultural logic‹ entailing
›generative principles‹ realised through ›cognitive schemas‹ that promote ›inter-
4 All but one of the photographs were taken by the author during fieldwork in Alta Verapaz.
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