The cultural context of biodiversity conservation - Oapen

The discursive context
3.1.3 Conceptualising nature
[N]ature is simultaneously semioticised and real. (Roepstorff & Bubandt 2003: 26)
The general theoretical trend that emphasises an epistemological deconstruction of
central concepts of anthropology also allowed for an increasing pluralism in the academic
understanding of nature. In environmental discourse, culture and nature have
been conventionally distinguished from each other as if they were two separate realms
of reality. An important theme of recent debate in environmental anthropology is the
critique of this divide as a dominant element of the ›Western‹ philosophical tradition,
which is seen by Descola and Pálsson as »the key foundation of modernist epistemology«
(1996: 12). 10 From this process of reconsideration, it has been argued by scholars
interested in theorising nature such as Roepstorff and Bubandt (2003) that nature –
very much like culture – emerged as a historical, cultural and social construct with political,
moral and emotional associations. The argument here is not that the biophysical
environment does not exist. It rather implies that ideas actively shape human perceptions
and uses of nature; their contested definition is thus a matter of great importance
(Bryant 2001: 162).
Although the view of science as bias-free and disembodied from the social, political
and economic realms of human existence is still widely held, critics have increasingly
undermined its perception as a privileged way of producing an objective, reliable
and value-free body of ideas. Since it is a social construction of our own society,
knowledges as discursive formations are burdened with presuppositions derived from
our own culture. This recognition implies that the natural and the social sciences operate
as systems of meaning within culture and create and transmit cultural conceptions
themselves. In particular, the theoretical dualism inherent in the predominant
scientific worldview, in which an intensified dichotomy of reality separates not only
culture from nature but likewise, subject from object, mind from body and social sciences
from natural sciences were questioned by anthropologists after they realised that
the nature-culture dichotomy was an inadequate tool to account for the ways in which
the people they studied were referring to their respective environments. In discussing
the emphasised ›inextricable link‹ of culture and nature, Posey (2000b) has criticised
the predominance of scientific values and biological and economic prerogatives inherent
to the current biodiversity discourse. He means the functionalist anthropocentric
philosophy underlying science that reduces nature to a mere ›object‹ for human use
and exploitation. Similarly, it has been argued by Grenier that international science is
reductionist: »It categorizes specialities according to a hierarchy, manages these com-
10 The relationship between culture and nature has been a longstanding topic of philosophical debate.
To go further into this debate and the development of scientific thinking is beyond the scope
in the present context. For this, consider the study Ecology of Knowledge by Wojciechowski (2001), who
delineates the development and the nature of ›Western‹ culture with its particular mode of rationality
that has been determined to a large extent by cultural framework of the ancient Greeks and by
Judeo-Christian hierarchy of values.
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