Anthropological Aesthetics: Environmental Protection and Indigenous Land Claims in National Parks

Abstract:

National Parks were invented during American industrialization when wilderness went from being a resource for or an obstacle to progress, to being viewed as something intrinsically valuable and an end in its own right. Preservationism is based on an ethics of restriction, where humans are seen as an unbalancing and devastating force on nature. A park's image as a land-based, ecological preserve hides a strong anthropological component. Modern Preservationism has essentialising purifications and 'othering' effects, and its use as a means of understanding non-Western patterns of human-environmental relationships is problematic for policy and boundary creation in National Parks.

The aesthetics of Preservationism is responsible for the recent history of tribal land at Kona on the Island of Hawaii. In 1995, Nansay Hawaii Inc. planned to build a resort in the area, but when local indigenous families brought the matter to court, the court ruled that "the state, and by extension, private property owners, are required to preserve and protect Native Hawaiians' rights to practice traditional activities" on their land. However, in 1997, the National Park Service forcibly evicted aboriginal families from the same area for the new Kaloko-Honokohau National Historical Park, built as "a center for the presentation, interpretation, and perpetuation of Hawaiian activities and culture" (LaDuke 1999: 168).

In an equal but opposite situation in Rajaji National Park in India, the nomadic Gujjars were to be cut off from forest access during seasonal pastoral migrations. However, understanding the underlying imagery and Western-influenced ideas of nature, the Gujjars re-invented themselves as "forest-people." While this image is not incompatible with their traditional structures, the forest was not a general category of identity or poetic imagery per se for the tribe before that time. Using a dialectic approach to environmental protection and preservation, 'forest and forest knowledge [took] shape out of the background in which it was submerged and became visible' (Gooch 1998: 105, emphasis in original). Making themselves visible within the ideal image of nature was fundamental to the Gujjar's effort to maintain ecological rights.

These examples highlight some of the repercussions of the anthropological side of environmental protection. The aesthetic ethics of purity, authenticity, origin, and permanence within Preservationism are unable to articulate dynamic, non-Western human-ecological relationships. While cases such as that of the Gujjars and the Rajaji National Park demonstrate an ability to negotiate the relations of power set up when parks get to designate "the natural," the category as an epistemological foundation for environmental care is inadequate.

2008