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An interesting facet of the human point of view toward animals in myth and folktale, and sometimes in art, is that people seem to sense that they are relative newcomers in the world, that many animals-armadillo (often an old man in myth), crocodilian, turtle are millions of years older than Homo sapiens. They represent the primordial earth, which man discovers and explores in myth. These old animals personify the ancestors of the tribe. They are ancestors because they were here before.
It is usually an animal, or a god or culture hero in the form of an animal, who taught people how to plant, how to weave, how to make canoes and rafts, how to dance, how to give respect. The animals in myth were often there long before people were. These old animals give people a sense of time and scale and a framework within which to live as human beings; therefore, animal preservation is the most important. In another kind of observation, while looking at the art and reading the myths, it becomes apparent that the human being was the basic measure in the Pre-Columbian past, as it is in myths from Latin America today.
Whatever involvement and sometimes apparent obsession with animals these peoples had, animals are still extensions of humankind's activities, metaphors for human behavior, wishes, social contracts, and laws. Something human is usually present in most beastly creatures with mixed traits, and where it is not, there appears to be a clear statement that it is human beings who put these aspects of animals together, that humans respect the animals but also manipulate them, both in the real world and in human cosmogonic schemes. It also became dear how Western scientific ways of learning about the forest -- in all its human and nonhuman biological richness so often blind conservationists to local knowledge, to local ways of learning about and caring for the forest. The very epistemologies that guide much of conservation research often bias researchers against carefully listening to what local people have to say and against looking within indigenous culture for locally comprehensible values and practices to serve as the foundation for conservation projects. To put it broadly, conservation science often biases its practitioners against asking what might comprise the components of a local ethic of rainforest inhabitants. Ecologists need to think about the types of approaches that would allow them to experience more deeply what local people encounter in their daily lives in the rainforest.
Local tradition within local peoples ways of understanding the human-environment relationship serves as a better foundation than researchers imported epistemologies for the work of building ecological and social sustainability. The question of how to increase the cultural viability of ecological and social sustainability projects within Latin America rainforest region serves as one pillar of that bridge. It is based on the conviction that rather than relying solely on imported materials from outside local rainforest cultures ecologists would do well to start building environmental projects with local materials (local ecological values, perceptions, ethics, and epistemologies). But finding those materials, both locally and across the region, is not easy.
It takes time lots of time talking with local people who live close to the land, exploring local culture, reading people who still retain aspects of local culture but who now write about land and peoples relations to land from a distance.
Free research essays on topics related to: local people, myth, rainforest, latin america, human beings
Research essay sample on Human Beings Latin America
