Tigers as kin: Reconceptualising wildlife conservation and development in indigenous/local contexts

目的：为了了解土著人民在全球生态危机中的地位，该项目提出的问题是：在外部驱动的变化中，当地和土著社会如何保持多物种关系和生物文化保护？重要性：在过去50年里，越来越多的土著土地和文化受到以市场为基础的资本主义和一刀切的保护和发展的同质化力量的压力。在同一时期，60%的野生动物种群已经消失。这不是巧合。尽管土著人民占全球人口的5%，但土著管理的土地仍占地球上所有生态完好景观的40%左右。在人类世时代，我们需要新的框架和工具来理解这些多样化的地方/土著世界，自然和文化交织在一起，如何在快速的社会生态变化中保持生物文化保护。理性：保护的历史可以追溯到以西方为中心的意识形态，认为自然是独特的，与人类分开的。它依赖于自然科学的方法，允许某些地区被贴上“自然”的标签，因此值得保护，而其余的“文化”居住的地区则可以“发展”。在许多进行保护的地方/土著社会中，自然和文化并不被视为本质上是分开的。将外部设想的类别强加于不同的地方人与自然关系导致了冲突和失败，这些冲突和失败不断地破坏着当今的许多保护计划。这项广泛相关的工作建议将保护研究和实践重新概念化，作为一种跨学科的伦理合作。超越批评，它将当前的保护范式推向一个新的方向，并展示了如何有意义地整合自然和社会科学、土著和西方知识以及科学和伦理。研究背景：本研究基于印度东北部边境阿鲁纳恰尔邦的三个民族家园。在这个曾经偏远的多民族地区，有计划建造近200座巨型大坝、高速公路和单一种植园。在这里，最近发现了一个全新的老虎种群，在传统的保护机制之外蓬勃发展。这项研究是在全球保护非政府组织、政府和开发商进入的背景下进行的，利用濒危老虎的案例来探索围绕当地人在全球保护和发展中所扮演的角色的更大问题。最初的多学科实地考察将在该地区在类似地缘政治条件下进行的这些民族家园进行。在每个项目中，研究野生动物的生态工具(相机陷阱、遥感)和定量调查方法(问卷)将被整合到多视角民族志方法中，以了解人与野生动物关系不断变化的性质。这个项目从基础开始，与当地人合作，将理解人类与野生动物之间的关系，因为它们以自己的方式存在，破坏了早期的二分法。这些地点的数据将被结合在一起，以了解是什么允许支持多物种共存的习惯安排在外部压力下适应、抵制或崩溃。此外，这项研究还将调查这些压力(除其他外，来自自由市场经济、政策执行和气候变化)如何对当地实践产生影响。影响：该项目将与当地合作者共同撰写8篇学术文章，以小册子形式出版研究框架，跨部门跨学科研究生课程，3本关于人与野生动物关系文化故事的当地语言非学术书籍(每个站点一本)，大众媒体上的定期文章，以及英国政府/机构关于国内外环境政策的白皮书/政策简报。

Aims: In order to understand the position of indigenous peoples in the global ecological crisis, this project asks, 'how do local and indigenous societies maintain multispecies relations and biocultural conservation amidst externally driven change?'Importance: In the past 50 years, an increasing proportion of indigenous lands and cultures have come under pressure from the homogenising forces of market-based capitalism and one-size-fits-all conservation and development. Over the same period, 60% of all wildlife populations have been lost. This is not a coincidence. Although indigenous peoples represent <5% of the global population, indigenously managed land still constitutes about 40% of all ecologically intact landscapes across the Earth. In the era of Anthropocene, we need new frameworks and tools to understand how these diverse local/indigenous worlds, where nature and culture intertwine, will maintain biocultural conservation in the face of rapid socio-ecological change.Rationale: Conservation traces its history to West-centric ideologies that see nature as distinct and separate from humanity. It relies on natural science approaches that allow certain areas to be labelled 'natural', and thus worthy of conservation, while the remaining, where 'culture' lives, can then be 'developed'. Across numerous local/indigenous societies, where conservation operates, nature and culture are not seen as essentially separate. Enforcing externally conceived categories on diverse local human-nature relations had led to conflicts and failures that have continually undermined many present-day conservation programs. This widely relevant work proposes to re-conceptualise conservation research and practice as an interdisciplinary ethical collaboration. Moving beyond critiques, it pushes the current conservation paradigm in a new direction and shows how to meaningfully integrate natural and social sciences, indigenous and western knowledges, and science and ethics.Research context: This research is based in three ethnic homelands in the Northeast Indian border state of Arunachal Pradesh. There are plans to build nearly 200 mega-dams, highways and monoculture plantations in this once remote multi-ethnic region. Here, an entirely new tiger population was recently identified thriving outside conventional conservation mechanisms. This research, set within the context of the entry of global conservation NGOs, governments and developers, uses the case of the endangered tiger to explore larger questions around the role of local people in global conservation and development. Original multidisciplinary fieldwork will be conducted across these ethnic homelands in the region operating under comparable geopolitical conditions. In each, ecological tools (camera traps, remote sensing) and quantitative survey methods (questionnaires) to study wildlife will be integrated within multi-perspectivist ethnographic approaches to understand the changing nature of human-wildlife relations. Working from the ground up and with local people, this project will understand human-wildlife relations as they exist, on their own terms, destabilising earlier dichotomies. Data across the sites will be combined to understand what allows customary arrangements that support multispecies coexistence to adapt, resist or collapse under external pressures. In addition, this research will also investigate how these pressures (that emerge from, amongst others, free-market economy, policy implementation and climate change), act upon local practices.Impact: The project will produce 8 academic articles co-authored with local collaborators, a research framework published as a booklet, a cross-departmental interdisciplinary graduate course, 3 non-academic books in local languages (one from each site) on cultural stories of human-wildlife relations, regular articles in popular media, and white papers/policy briefs for UK government/institutions' on environmental policy at home and abroad.