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Seeing (and Doing) Conservation Through Cultural Lenses

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Abstract

In this paper, we first discuss various vantage points gained through the authors’ experience of approaching conservation through a “cultural lens.” We then draw out more general concerns that many anthropologists hold with respect to conservation, summarizing and commenting on the work of the Conservation and Community Working Group within the Anthropology and Environment Section of the American Anthropological Association. Here we focus on both critiques and contributions the discipline of anthropology makes with regard to conservation, and show how anthropologists are moving beyond conservation critiques to engage actively with conservation practice and policy. We conclude with reflections on the possibilities for enhancing transdisciplinary dialogue and practice through reflexive questioning, the adoption of disciplinary humility, and the realization that “cross-border” collaboration among conservation scholars and practitioners can strengthen the political will necessary to stem the growing commoditization and ensuing degradation of the earth’s ecosystems.

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Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the symposium “Conservation Without Borders: The Impact of Conservation on Human Communities,” held at Antioch New England Graduate School on October 9, 2004. The authors wish to thank all those responsible for organizing the conference and presenting a forum for the ideas in this article to be discussed. Thanks go to all symposium participants who provided incisive discussion, which helped to clarify our thinking. In particular, we would like to thank Shawn Margles for providing valuable feedback on early drafts of this article and Jim Igoe for his discerning and beneficial comments provided as a reviewer. Thanks are due also to Virginia Dale and other editors at Environmental Management for their constructive and perceptive feedback. All usual disclaimers apply.

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Correspondence to Richard B. Peterson.

Appendix: Authors’ Experience in Conservation

Appendix: Authors’ Experience in Conservation

Richard Peterson

Peterson became involved in conservation in the mid-1980s, working as a project manager with the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) in the Ituri Forest of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). He went on to earn both his M.S. and his Ph.D. in Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. Utilizing anthropological methods, his early research examined various ecological and social impacts of the spontaneous immigration of Eastern Congo’s highland farmers into the lowland rainforest. Pushed to explore more of the fundamental causes of the environmental problems and conflicts he witnessed, he undertook further studies aimed at integrating ecology with examination of how various Central African forest cultures have defined their relationship to, and valuing of, the natural world. This research, utilizing a combination of ethnographic interviews, focus groups, and participant observation, led to a book, Conversations in the Rainforest: Culture, Values, and the Environment in Central Africa (2000), which examines how ecology, community livelihood, land ethics, and conservation interventions are intertwined among various societies inhabiting Central Africa’s rainforests. His work, also published in several articles and book chapters, focuses on how current projects to promote ecological and social sustainability in the Central African region can limit the extent of conflict they generate among local people and have a greater chance of success by incorporating local cultural, ethical, and practical resources for ecological sustainability rather than relying solely on externally derived concepts and practices. He is currently Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of New England.

Diane Russell

Russell also carried out fieldwork in the mid-1980s in the DRC for her Ph.D. in anthropology but it was not focused on conservation. In 2000, she returned to DRC as “environment advisor” to the DRC Mission of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and to the Central African Regional Program on the Environment (CARPE). Between those times, she was employed by the USAID-funded Biodiversity Conservation Network (BCN) as BCN’s social scientist based in Asia and the Pacific. BCN was an ambitious program to test an enterprise-based approach to conservation, centered on enterprises carried out by and benefiting communities in biodiverse areas. On leaving BCN, she met coauthors Brosius and West as part of the AAA/AES, and under its auspices the three formed the Conservation and Community Working Group (CCWG), mentioned above. Her experiences in BCN and CARPE put her in direct contact with emerging conservation approaches within conservation NGOs involving landscape-scale mapping, biodiversity priority setting, monitoring, and evaluation. Integrated conservation and development projects (ICDPs) were increasingly criticized by these NGOs as delivering neither conservation nor livelihood benefits. These experiences led eventually to a book with Camilla Harshbarger, Groundwork for Community-Based Conservation: Strategies for Social Research (2004). In the book and in various articles Russell incorporates anthropological knowledge of patterns of natural resource management, trade, markets, and political influence as well as migrations, innovations, and cultural change to articulate a different vision for “landscapes,” a vision that includes people, history, agriculture, struggle, and cultural meaning. All these elements form part of the “cultural landscape” that must be integrated into conservation’s conceptions of landscapes.

Paige West

West is a cultural and environmental anthropologist with interests in the linkages between environmental conservation and international development, the material and symbolic ways in which the natural world is understood and produced, the aesthetics and poetics of human social relations with nature, and the critical analysis of the creation of commodities and practices of consumption. She received her M.A. in Environmental Anthropology from the University of Georgia and her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Rutgers University. She is currently Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University. Since 1996, drawing on the theories, methods, and insights of both cultural anthropology and political ecology, she has conducted fieldwork in Papua New Guinea (PNG), Australia, Germany, England, and the United States. In 2006 Duke University Press published her book Conservation Is Our Government Now: The Politics of Ecology in Papua New Guinea, which is an ethnographic examination of the history and social effects of conservation and development efforts in PNG. She has just completed a second book manuscript entitled From Modern Production to Imagined Primitive: Tracking the Commodity Ecumene for Papua New Guinean Coffee, which will be reviewed by Duke University Press. She is also the author of several articles, including those cited in this paper.

Peter Brosius

Brosius has a long-standing interest in the human ecology of Southeast Asia, particularly with respect to issues of environmental degradation. Since 1992 when he joined the anthropology faculty at the University of Georgia, where he is currently Professor of Anthropology, his research has focused on the international campaign against logging in the East Malaysian state of Sarawak, on the island of Borneo. Utilizing what anthropologist George Marcus has termed “multisited ethnography,” Brosius has carried out “field” research at a diverse number of sites: encampments of nomadic Penan, the Ministry of Primary Industries in Kuala Lumpur, Rainforest Action Network headquarters in San Francisco, WWF International headquarters near Geneva, the Parliament building in Vienna, the offices of the International Tropical Timber Organization in Yokohama, and in London, Copenhagen, Munich, Basel, Sydney, Penang, and elsewhere. He is currently writing two books based on this research: Melted Earth: The Politics and Poetics of Dispossession in Sarawak (under review) and Arresting Images: The Sarawak Rainforest Campaign and Transnational Environmental Politics. In them, and in several published articles, he provides a history of the Sarawak campaign and how it has been transformed from a singular focus on the imperative to stop the progress of bulldozers to one forced to contend with the Uruguay round of GATT, post-UNCED conventions, ITTO criteria and indicators of sustainability, ecolabeling, and the North-South debate. His current research focuses on linkages between anthropology and conservation. He recently published a coedited volume with Anna Tsing and Charles Zerner, Communities and Conservation: Histories and Politics of Community-Based Natural Resource Management (2005), whose purpose is to examine the history of community-based natural resource management, and to address both some of the tensions and possibilities that emerge out of efforts to reconcile the goals of conservation and social justice. He is currently developing two new research projects: the first will focus on protected area planning and implementation in Pulong Tau National Park in Sarawak and is premised on the recognition that such planning must be viewed in the broader context of other state landscape planning and environmental management agendas, specifically related to timber concessions and plantation development. The second research project will examine a series of ecoregional conservation approaches as they are applied in specific conservation initiatives, focusing specifically on understanding the consequences of visualizing biodiversity at different scales, on how such methodologies produce images of local communities as threats, and on how they lay the groundwork for various forms of environmental governance.

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Peterson, R.B., Russell, D., West, P. et al. Seeing (and Doing) Conservation Through Cultural Lenses. Environmental Management 45, 5–18 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-008-9135-1

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