The cultural context of biodiversity conservation - Oapen

The discursive context
The sense of community that is established through emplacement may encompass the
living and the dead as well as the spirit world. This embeddedness within local, mythical
and ritual landscapes is bound to an inner emotional landscape that merges the
perceived experience of the place with the imagined symbolic meaning to the individual.
This ›contestation‹ of landscape depends on images that are based on memories and
associations that feed into ideology but are based primarily in subjectivity and experience.
Everything depends on how ›the heart‹ sees them as ›inner landscapes‹ (2003: 8f.).
The above assumptions of an intimate and complex set of inner and outer placeoriented
relationships also imbue the work of Strang (1997). In her study concerned
with cultural landscapes and environmental values, she considers landscape as a medium
through which social issues and ideas about identity are formulated, illustrating
how socio-spatial placement contributes significantly to the construction of values
that people inculcate and express. The question of identity – in the sense of personal
and collective identity – is central to the socio-spatial equation, and the ›placement‹
that people feel is one of the strongest influences on their environmental beliefs and
values. However, identity is a complex concept. It is grounded in relations with others;
it grows through interaction with people, places and things, and through forms of selfexpression,
responsibilities, creativity and knowledge. It feeds on beliefs, values and
ideas and it is rooted in particular places, by birth, family or professional involvement,
spiritual attachment and sentiment. It is fluid, multifaceted and, above all, an essentially
social product (1997: 59). With reference to indigenous perceptions in the Australian
context, Strang argues that identity arises specifically from the spiritual and historic
ties to a particular place and the affective response that these engender. Through
the collection and analysis of ethnographic data, she explores the dynamics of environmental
relations, using the concept of landscape to examine the ways in which an
emotional response to the land is culturally constructed. By applying this concept she
shows how different values are located in the land according to social, cultural, historical
and ecological factors. Visible methods of land use and the spatial ordering of
people and landscape are only outward manifestations of a dynamic interaction with
the land in which underlying social structures and cultural concepts are as crucial as
economic and environmental pressures. Indigenous identity comes primarily from the
land linked through ancestral connections. The nature of this identification with land
creates an »unparalleled collective sense of belonging« (1997: 159f.). Thus, for aboriginal
people, who they are and where they are from are not divisible. Strang raises crucial
questions about how people make different places, how the human environmental relationship
is constructed, about environmental values and in particular, what encourages
or discourages the development of affective values inherent in a specific vision of
the land. According to her, the intimate, long-term relationship between aboriginal
people and their country may be the only kind of interaction that could possibly lead
to a complex and thoroughly integrated use of the physical environment as a central
medium and, in consequence, to a high degree of affective concern for the land.
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