Of emplacement and emotional involvement

The way we conceptualise nature and the manner in which we manage our relationship with the natural world reveals a great deal about ›who we are‹. (Nakashima 1998: 22)

In contrast to the aforementioned authors, Weber Nicholsen takes a different view, looking beyond considerations of ›cultural constructions‹. From a philosophical point of view, she discusses human relation to the natural world in terms of a »void that is beyond«. This is specified as an encompassing feeling of belonging to the land that is saturated with a sense of continuity through time, which she views as an unformed space that is spiritual rather than material. Instead of conceptualising ›mental models‹

or ›imagined geographies‹, she develops ideas about a »deep receptivity to the nonhu-man world« which is experienced »as a merging with other life« (2002: 23). This rela-tion evolves in an unspoken way: »We may speak of other human beings or to our-selves about our encounter with the natural world, but the encounter itself does not transpire in the medium of language« (2002: 19). She further specifies this encounter:

We can meet nature in its creative vitality only with our direct presence, only by opening our interior selves to it. [...] When we open to the depths within us, we become receptive to the language of nature.

Nature speaks to us and we hear her. [...] To hear nature speak in this way is not a matter of un-derstanding the specific cries of the animal or bird. Nor is it a matter of mere superstition or of con-ventional symbolism. Rather, in perceiving the creature, we enter into a confluence with a deeper mys-tery in which both of us participate (2002: 26f.).

Like Strang, Weber Nicholsen argues that the feelings of attachment and identification humans experience early in their lives, which give rise to the sense of belonging, be-come the basis for later recognition of kinship and form the matrix from which the self develops. The world of home extends back through family to the ancestors; in this way the homeland, for which humans feel nostalgic, is saturated with a sense of continuity through time; i.e. nature enters our experience in childhood in the form of place. The world of childhood is a place to be, a place to become a self. It is a world of people, dwellings, fields, birds, streams, trees, hills and clouds. And that world be-comes us, literally. By surrounding us and gathering us inside itself, it gets inside us, providing the very ground of our being as a felt sense of interiority. We take the world of childhood in through all our senses, as a place that contains smells, textures, warmth and coolness as well as sights and sounds. But this vivid world is largely lost

The discursive context 77 to us as adults (2002: 35ff.). The role of culture then is to provide opportunities for apprenticeship, to offer receptacles for the repertory of stories and occasions for their renewal, to remind humans to attend to their dreams. Such cultures, which maintain the link with the interior, she writes, allow for »a greater degree of maturity« (2002: 4).

Like the aforementioned authors, she also mentions the importance to recognise dif-ferent ways of seeing. Though, she specifies that vision is not mere seeing but an activ-ity of the embodied senses:

Vision, indeed all perception [...] is not a matter of a subject perceiving an object but rather something more complex – a chiasmus, a movement from outside to inside and back again, on both sides, in both directions. [...] Vision happens when the exterior things resonate with their internal trace [...] in the body (2002: 68).

If our relationship to the natural world is one of familiar relatedness, Weber Nichol-sen argues, reciprocity is then what connects kindred beings to one another. She de-scribes reciprocity as »mutual recognition and influence that involve not only individ-ual separateness but also a relating based on an embodiment in which psyche and senses, internal and exterior worlds, are engaged« (2002: 63). Reciprocity is the mutu-ality of an intimate relationship, which is closer to a love relationship than a commod-ity exchange. Through a symbolic relationship of reciproccommod-ity, it has been widely argued by anthropologists such as Nigh (2002), many indigenous peoples essentially establish a ›social relation‹ with the elements of the inhabited landscape. In Constructing Natures.

Symbolic Ecology and Social Practice, Descola, for instance, comments that reciprocity de-fines the relations between humans as well as the relations between humans and non-humans that are characterised by »a constant exchange of services, souls, food or ge-neric vitality« and respectively imply the debt of humans towards non-humans, nota-bly for the food the latter provide (1996: 94). Howitt compares the intense and inti-mate relationship between indigenous peoples and their country even to a »kinship re-lationship« that includes responsibilities and obligations of nurturance (2001: 54).

Similarly, by emphasising that effective resource management and conservation have a rational but also an emotional component, Anderson (1996) takes us to the symbolic dimension and the relevance of religious beliefs as crucial determinants. In doing so, he does not refer to religion per se, but rather to the use of »emotionally po-werful cultural symbols to sell particular moral codes and management systems«

(1996: 166). All traditional societies that have succeeded in maintaining local resources well, he argues, have done this in part through religious or ritual representation of re-source use practices. Though they may appear to be irrational, these practices are ac-tually grounded in intimate and long-term observations of nature over years and gen-erations of experience. Case studies have shown that belief systems were accepted and propagated if they seemed to fit empirical reality, and if they fit well enough with the rest of the culture to seem consistent or coherent with it. The common theme of tra-ditional resource management ethics is not ›spiritual harmony‹ with some disembodied and abstracted nature, but personal and emotional involvement with the actual

land-The cultural context of biodiversity conservation 78

scape and its non-human inhabitants. In comparison to ›Western‹ societies where re-ligion is usually relegated to a small part of life, rere-ligion, worldview and resource man-agement strategies are often inseparable in such societies. This occurs in two ways.

First, religion provides overarching moral sanctions and encodes environmental kno-wledge. Such sanctions are invoked directly to support conservation and join such knowledge to the more classically religious issues such as reassurance, social sanction-ing and cosmology. Second, people are emotionally involved with their natural sur-roundings. The emotional involvement may reach the level of actually incorporating natural elements in society. Culture influences human emotions; we are taught how and when to feel particular emotions. In questioning how people process information and what the real ends of human action are, he asserts that we use resources to satisfy not only our needs for food and shelter but also our needs for love and security: »in conservation as in other moral matters, human beings make sacrifices for what they love, not for what they regard as merely a rational means to a material end« (1996: 72).

We may expect to find that traditional subsistence-oriented cultures will encode a tremendous amount of intensely emotional and personal material about animals and plants, and that this material is highly structured and organized into a simple, memorable worldview that is dramatically highlighted in myth and ritual. (Anderson 1996: 72)

Consequently, environmental problems and their solutions must be attributed to a blend of reason and emotion. A moral code based only on emotion or only on practi-cal reason, Anderson argues further, will not work. To succeed, a moral code must have something to do with reality, it must be strongly believed. But belief, in this sense, does not mean dogmatism. In practice, cognition and affect are not separate and should not be analytically separated. This perception leads him to claim that most so-cial science theories tend to deal with »highly intellectualised and passionless actors«

and are thus »incomplete« (1996: 155). One major problem for modern resource man-agement is that urban life decouples most of us from direct experience with ecological reality, just as overspecialisation decouples from a broad ecological view. Considering that emotion and value are inseparable, Schroeder proposes to view ecology, com-monly understood as a science that studies relationships between organisms and their environments, in a broader sense as a »matter of the heart« (1996: 19). By including humans as an integral part of ecosystems, he continues, more kinds of interaction must be taken into account. If we want to understand how people are related to their environments, we need to understand how they experience these environments. These experiences contribute to the quality of people's lives and lie at the heart of many re-source management issues.

Understanding these experiences is more than just a technical task of social science data collection. It is also a creative, human process, which requires us to open ourselves to perspectives other than our own. [...] we need to use our imagination. We need to be able to bend our own view of the world [...].

We need to be willing to experiment, to play around and see what the world might look like and feel like from different points of view. (Schroeder 1996: 26)

The discursive context 79

In this way, research concerned with the human dimensions of places may help to re-veal how people are emotionally related to their environments. Schroeder's finding that human experience depends on how they conceptualise the world, i.e. on world-view, will be reflected on in the last section of this chapter. A growing body of writ-ings confirms that one of the recurring themes in recent discussions is the mutual relevance of religion and nature, or more specifically, of spirituality and biodiversity.³¹ Increasingly, this theme has been highlighted by anthropologists engaged with envi-ronmental issues. Sponsel, for instance, denotes that religion, when an integral com-ponent of the socio-cultural system, can serve as »a mechanism for symbolically and ritually encoding the uses of biodiversity for sustainable subsistence and conservation practices« (2005a: 180). In his view, the impoverishment of nature is largely caused by

»the progressive objectification and commodification of biodiversity, ecosystems, and landscapes as economic resources with the concomitant desacralization of nature«

(2005a: 181). He reminds that cultural diversity also includes diversity in religions. As religion is often the single most important force providing social cohesion, changes in religion can precipitate transformational effects in the system and may even impact ecological relationships. Thus, he concludes, the promotion of biodiversity conserva-tion depends to a considerable extent on genuine respect for religious freedom to-gether with the maintenance or restoration of traditional spiritual ecologies including sacred sites in nature.