The Politics of Representing Nature, Culture, and Conservation in Northwestern Bolivia

This research project explored patterns and variations in ideas about the environment, conservation, and development held by rural residents living within and along the northeastern border of the Madidi National Park and Integrated Natural Management Area. The study site, located where the Central Andes meet the Amazon basin, has been the focus of development efforts by the Bolivian government since the 1980s and of international conservation efforts since the 1990s. Both have had a strong influence on the resident population which included lowland indigenous peoples, migrants who were primarily Quechua and Aymara from the highlands, and individuals who did not identify with either of these groups.;I combined an approach from cognitive anthropology centered on cultural models with a political ecology assessment which considered the role of social, political, economic, and ecological factors at work in the study area. Cultural models about the environment, development, and conservation informed study subjects' attitudes toward the Madidi protected area and their opinions about land tenure and resource use in the region. Given their decreasing prevalence, traditional spiritual-environmental beliefs and practices were not as significant. Study subjects predominantly saw the environment as providing both for their subsistence and income-generation. However the details of how to best use the environment to meet their needs differed, with some seeing the standing forest as more valuable than others. Development, meanwhile, was a widely shared cultural model and motivating factor that included the goal of improving living conditions and a process to achieve this objective. Perceived problems with development to date have contributed to negative attitudes toward the protected area. Western conservation, which external actors introduced to the resident population, had entered the local discourse and become part of the population's cultural models. However, informants did not adopt the tenets wholesale, nor did all informants share the same understanding of conservation. Supporting some aspects of this discourse influenced positive attitudes toward the Madidi protected area. However, conservation also was part of the rhetoric used by a subset of the resident population to argue against the extent of protected area and current distribution of land in the region.