The cultural context of biodiversity conservation - Oapen

The discursive context
Given the historical legacy of views of the culture-nature dualism, Haila's main argument
is that the assumed inevitability of the dualism needs to be challenged because
of its »debilitating influence on environmental thought« (2000: 156). For him the distinction
is continuously reproduced on the level of ideology and philosophy, but it can
be disintegrated on the level of context-specific analysis: »Contextuality is a common
denominator among the paths toward decomposition of the nature-culture dualism«
(2000: 168). This undertaking requires concrete analyses of socio-ecological complexity.
He concludes his considerations on recent discussions of the relationship between
humanity and nature with the expectation that »a nuanced, multistranded and historically
imaginative picture of culture, nature and their interactions will emerge as time
goes by« (2000: 171). Similarly, Descola ambitiously points the way forward:
Once the ancient nature-culture orthogonal grid has been disposed of, a new multi-dimensional anthropological
landscape may emerge, in which stone adzes and quarks, cultivated plants and the genome
map, hunting rituals and oil production may become intelligible as so many variations within a
single set of relations encompassing humans as well as non-humans (1996: 99).
Except in the scientific tradition, Descola argues, representations of non-humans are
not commonly based on a coherent and systematic corpus of ideas. They are expressed
contextually in daily actions and interactions, in lived knowledge and body
techniques, in practical choices and rituals. Anthropologists reconstruct these mainly
non-verbal mental models of practice from all sorts of apparently insignificant acts
and disconnected statements, which they weave together so as to produce meaningful
patterns. The author then questions whether these meaningful patterns are represented
as guidelines for behaviour in the minds of the people anthropologists study,
or whether they are mere blueprints for ethnographic interpretation. He favours the
first option as human societies appear to conform their practice to a basic set of underlying
patterns, although most members of any given community will find themselves
unable to state explicitly the elementary principles of their cultural conventions.
These underlying patterns are not universal structures of the mind, which operate independent
of cultural and historical contexts (1996: 86f.). Equally, Roepstorff and
Bubandt (2003) emphasise the way practices and images of nature are part of such
particular circumstances. The authors intend to avoid the latent mentalism of much
recent academic thinking in which nature appears primarily a matter of ›classification‹,
›perception‹ or ›invention‹. They argue that humans do not live enclosed in »mental
soap bubbles«, neither individually nor socially; rather it appears that people establish
among themselves entities that cannot be captured exclusively as states of the mind or
as entirely physical things in the world around them (2003: 25).
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