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Changing Protection Policies and Ethnographies of Environmental Engagement

Campbell, B.

Authors



Abstract

Attempts to protect nature by control of human intervention in areas demarcated for biodiversity have given rise to difficult questions of practicality and social justice. This introduction to a set of studies by anthropologists on the relationship between conservation and local community responses to protection measures, looks at the twin processes of rethinking conservation in socially inclusive ways and theoretical developments in viewing human relationships with environments that emphasise their interactive qualities. Whereas oppositional contrasts between nature and society characterised both conservation and anthropology in most of the twentieth century, more mutualistic frameworks are now emergent. Participatory conservation seeks to give voice to local concerns and indigenous perspectives, while social theory has increasingly recognised the cultural and political baggage that accompanies attempts to impose natural states on environments characterised by histories of human environmental engagement. A central focus is given to the dynamics of place in this special issue, so that the impacts of global agendas for nature protection are viewed from the grounded positions of people's lives and their ways of thinking about and dealing with the changes brought.

Citation

Campbell, B. (2005). Changing Protection Policies and Ethnographies of Environmental Engagement. Conservation & Society, 3(2), 280-322

Journal Article Type Article
Publication Date Dec 1, 2005
Deposit Date May 16, 2007
Journal Conservation and Society
Print ISSN 0972-4923
Publisher Medknow Publications
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 3
Issue 2
Pages 280-322
Keywords Anthropology, Protected areas, Community conservation, Place.
Publisher URL http://www.conservationandsociety.org/abs-3-2_3.html