The cultural context of biodiversity conservation - Oapen

3 THE DISCURSIVE CONTEXT – conceptual approaches from anthropology
While the previous discussion introduced the issue of biodiversity conservation and
the role of local and indigenous cultures and resource use patterns therein based on
the political discourse, the present chapter turns to the field of academic discourse.
Even before the 1990s with the arising of large UN conferences, research in the social
sciences has demonstrated considerable cross-cultural variation in the ways human beings
influence and are influenced by natural environments. An important question that
has often been raised is whether the concepts of nature and culture are universal in human
thought and thus present in all cultures, or whether they evolved out of certain
types of human-nature relationships characteristic only of particular societies (Milton
1998: 90). Much recent work is based on the idea that any attempt to understand human
interventions into nature must begin with an effort to rethink the terms by which
humans have described how they place themselves within or outside it. This chapter
reflects on anthropological discussions of environmentalism, which may be defined in
its widest sense as »a broad field of discursive constructions of nature and human
agency« (Brosius 1999: 278). This definition alludes to an initial assumption underlying
current approaches that discourse matters and that environmental discourses are constitutive
of reality, or, as Brosius specifies, of a »multiplicity of realities« (1999: 278). 1
1 The term discourse has multiple meanings as derived from linguistics and social theory, where its use
has been shaped largely through the findings and writings of Michel Foucault. It is commonly assumed
that language does not reflect social reality, but rather produces meaning and creates social
reality itself. In social theory, it carries implications both of process and substance. In particular, discourse
theory refers to the idea that the terms in which we speak, write, and think about the world