One, two, three, myriad

(This post is originally from 28 November 2013 and is reposted here after the server was hacked in summer 2015).

What is ’biocultural diversity’?

Is there an underlying diversity that manifests in two different domains of investigation as biological and cultural diversity? This is an attractive proposition: the diversity of life-forms and assemblages is divided up, artificially, by our disciplinary politics and historically constrained epistemologies. Actually, if we try to focus on cultural diversity we find biological diversity popping up (beer…bacteria; paint…pigment…soils and plants) and if we focus on biological diversity we find cultural diversity erupting (fire plains, pastorialist mountain meadows).

I suspect this is unwarranted monism. That approach seems to me as though we are looking for invisible unities underlying perceived complexity—Platonism, or something like it—which usually founders when one has to explain how these underlying unities actually exist. Like ‘resilience’, it is at best a good metaphor but not a real thing or process.

Is it a dynamic dyad? For example, consider this: ‘In the Anthropocene, cultural drivers shape biodiversity and biological diversity shapes cultural diversity.’ An obvious problem here is the assumption that cultural diversity is one. Crows, whales, monkeys, and many other species have culture. Ethnoprimatologists have a marvellous time working at the intersection of two zones of cultural production. Whose cultural diversity? Do monkeys think in terms of species?

Another alternative is that there are countless differing kinds of diversity: fungal, forest, bacterial, intestinal, soil types, languages, dances, and they are each diverse in their own way. Species differ in one way, languages in another, but actually bacteria differ differently than vertebrates or maize landraces, and agricultural systems are a scale different to those. The best way to measure the biodiversity of a small human society (gut flora, parasites, landraces) is not the same as the best way to measure the diversity of chaparral (fire-activated seeds, invasive grasses, herbivores and their gut flora). There’s no one underlying diversity. There’s an attempt to impose a single way of thinking about multiplicity and difference that’s culturally, historically and biologically specific to us (which us?).

Anyway, why one diversity? Maybe ‘diversity’ itself is a problematic category, a straitjacket, mapping and measuring as
control. The crows and others have their own sense of refracting, multiplying and dissolving differentiation. The diversity of biocultural diversity is itself irreducibly diverse; open the door a little bit, and all our indices of species and languages are relativized.

But we still have to get on with the business of measuring the richness of sacred sites and protected areas. What kind of provisional, critically reflexive ‘diversity’ is good enough to let us get on without making things worse?