The cultural context of biodiversity conservation - Oapen

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The cultural context of biodiversity conservation
perspective, landscapes are regarded as ›socially constructed‹ in the sense that they are
natural spaces formed by human resource use patterns and characterised by belief systems
as culturally conditioned experiences and understandings. It has been widely asserted
that many so called natural landscapes are in fact cultural or anthropogenic landscapes
that may be seen as a primary source of involvement for the establishment of
human belonging and emplacement. As such, they are a means of referring to physical
entities and particular ways of expressing conceptions of the world; the same landscape
can be seen in different ways by different people, often at the same time. This
implies, as Layton and Ucko have indicated that »there is no environment, only landscape«
(1999: 3). In current political contexts of globalisation, where the interface between
localised understandings of belonging, locality and identity often conflict with
wider national and international political, economic and social interests, the exploration
of how such explanations are culturally constructed seems particularly relevant to
scholars like Escobar (2001). Given the primacy of embodied perception, he argues in
his article Culture Sits in Places. Reflections on Globalism and Subaltern Strategies of Localization
that we always find ourselves in places: »We are, in short, placelings« (2001: 143).
The concept of landscape, as it is presented in the following, provides one tool
among others by means of which interrelationships between humans and nature are
produced and reproduced through systems of local practices and beliefs. In this sense,
it does not stand for an ›absolute‹ geographical site. Rather, it becomes tangible
through social practice interwoven with worldviews, which social scientists came to
recognise and understand through fieldwork and ethnographic description and interpretation.
While one of the common tropes of ethnographic enquiry has always been
that of ›setting‹, new insights into the theorising of landscape also include notions on
intertwining aspects such as identity, memory and history (Stewart & Strathern 2003).
It has been suggested that landscape provides a wider context in which notions about
place and community can be situated. It proves to be a concept for bringing together
materialist and symbolist perspectives, approaches that stress politics and economics and
others that stress cultural meanings. In anthropological landscape analysis, these factors
are brought together and shown to be interrelated. By attempting to further specify
the term, Stewart and Strathern suggest that landscape refers to the perceived settings
that frame humans' senses of place and community.
A place is a socially meaningful and identifiable space to which a historical dimension is attributed.
Community refers to sets of people who may identify themselves with a place or places in terms of notions
of commonality, shared values or solidarity in particular contexts. Landscape is thus a contextual
horizon of perceptions, providing both a foreground and a background in which people feel themselves
to be living in their world. While we may tend to think of this in rural terms or as an aspect of
›nature‹ it may apply equally to urban and rural sites because they are all equally moulded by human
actions and/or by human perceptions. (Stewart & Strathern 2003: 4)
Perspectives by Stewart and Strathern (2003) and The Anthropology of Space and Place. Locating Culture by
Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga (2003).