The cultural context of biodiversity conservation - Oapen

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The cultural context of biodiversity conservation
significance of cultural values and cosmological notions as expressed in religious
worldviews. While common approaches in ecological anthropology have usually ignored
the relationships between religion and nature, a current trend indicates a growing
number of studies in environmental anthropology that encompass the decisive
role of worldviews. Given the universal need of humans to explain the world and
make it comprehensible, recent theorising further suggests that connections need to
be made that also include the significant role of emotional traits.
The development of theory and ethnography of human-environment relations has
contributed significant opportunities for applied anthropology and in particular for research
in the field of environmental knowledge as acquired by indigenous communities.
If recognising cultural conceptions of nature necessarily implies the existence of
nature as a philosophical point of departure from which particular cultural deviations
might be measured, it has been argued by Ellen and Harris (2000) that the same applies
to the recognition of local knowledge. This is not surprising since the cultural
construction of nature is the necessary condition for establishing knowledge as emanations
of a particular worldview. This point will be discussed in the final part of the
discursive chapter, exploring numerous facets of what has been explored in anthropology
of indigenous knowledge. Essentially, it will be argued that indigenous knowledge and
ways of understanding the natural world need to be placed in their own cultural
frames informed by an array of historical, political, social and economic determinants.
3.1 Environmental anthropology
There is no separation between nature and culture. (Banuri & Apffel Marglin 1993: 15)
Interest in the relationship between people and their ambient world has a long history
in anthropology. Since the beginnings of the discipline in the 19 th century, scholars
have been concerned with the ways in which societies interact with their environment
and utilise natural resources, as with the ways in which natural processes are conceptualised
and classified (Rival 1998: 1). Much of this interest centred on the study of
subsistence patterns by which rural populations adapted to particular biophysical conditions.
The foregoing approaches of the prevailing research genres engaged with environmental
queries include studies in cultural ecology. In the 1950s, Julian Steward laid
the foundation of the sub-discipline engaged with the analysis of cultural adaptation to
natural environments. 3 He forged a comparative analysis based on the central objective
to explain cultural similarities in light of environmental conditions, subsistence
patterns, and economic arrangements. He rejected the dominant theoretical position
of that time that cultural factors were sufficient to explain culture. Steward sought to
identify those aspects of culture that were most influenced by the environment and
delimited the ›culture core‹. While his thoughts were less deterministic than previous
3 For an introduction into the field, see The Concept and Method of Cultural Ecology by Steward (2006).