The cultural context of biodiversity conservation - Oapen

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The cultural context of biodiversity conservation
veal relevant topics to focus on in a more detailed investigation of specific themes in
the following. Instead of using a predetermined set of techniques for data collection,
hypothesis testing or the isolation of determinants in social behaviour, I preferred to
adopt an open-ended approach to unravel the complexities of actions and meanings.
During the second stay from May to October 2002, the work became more focused
and shifted from the highlands to the northern lowlands of Alta Verapaz. There the
fieldwork evolved in two peasant communities in the surroundings of the National
Park Laguna Lachuá. Although the findings of the study are based on the fieldwork
conducted in both areas, the chapters presenting local expressions of indigenous knowledge
highlight the investigations carried out in the lowlands. 15
Multi-sited fieldwork is always conducted with an awareness of »being within the
landscape«, as Marcus writes, and as the landscape changes across sites, »the identity
of the ethnographer requires renegotiation« (1995: 112). Moving between official and
subaltern contexts presupposes the ability of an intellectual identification with variously
situated subjects in terms of reflexivity, which he regards as a dimension of method.
In viewing the role of the ethnographer as »circumstantial activist«, he follows
that the conventional ›how-to‹ methodological questions of social science seem to be
embedded in or merged with the political-ethical discourse of self-identification developed
by the ethnographer in multi-sited research. The movement among sites and
levels of society lends »a character of activism« to such an investigation and indeed,
while traversing through the multi-sited space as portrayed above, I found myself confronted
with »all sorts of cross-cutting and contradictory personal commitments«
(1995: 113). Though it is not intended to further discuss the reflexive self-presentation
in contemporary ethnography with an emphasis on commitment, activism and ethics,
it has to be reminded that the researcher herself is never just an observer but has
rather to be considered an integral active part of the field of study, personally informing
events occurring during the research process and influencing the final construction
of the ethnographic text. Given the understanding of culture in Geertz' terms (1975)
as ›a web of significance‹, the ethnographic venture to discover the circulation of
meanings, objects and identities is not so much concerned with objective representations
of reality than with the more elusive topics of perception, cognition and expression
of reality. When it comes to perceptions of nature, Milton (1998) argues that
searching for cultural concepts is not just a matter of identifying words that can be
translated as ›nature‹. The issues people take for granted in their everyday lives seem to
be the hardest parts of their culture to identify since they are not articulated in words
and may be difficult to infer even from action. She reminds to consider that anthropologists'
accounts of indigenous cultures can never be ›neutral‹: »they are inevitably
filtered through their own analytical frameworks. So we also need to ask what ›nature‹
means in the minds of the anthropologists whose work we are consulting« (1998: 89).
15 Details on the study sites in the lowlands and further methodological considerations are provided
in chapter 4.4.