INSIGHTS TO THE NATURE-SOCIETY RELATIONSHIP. NOTES ON BIOCULTURAL HERITAGE

Abstract

Biocultural heritage is both a relatively new field of study and management. It finds its antecedents in the concern for the loss of biodiversity that entails a loss of cultural diversity, concerns that we can locate in the eighties and nineties of the 20th century. The present work is a look at the complexity of the empirical field of biocultural heritage itself as well as the academic demands to understand it. From the academic angle we will see that we can only approach this field with an inter and transdisciplinary look and work teams where the groups of people who hold that heritage also have an active participation. To give us a peek at the complexity of the field, on this occasion we touch on three of the many concepts that biocultural heritage involves: territory, cultural landscape and collective memory. Now, this insistence on the complexity of the field at the level of reflection and above all in each empirical case leads us to the proposal that even when the definition of this type of heritage has a hard core, it is also necessary to elaborate regional conceptualizations in geographical terms on the one hand, as well as a particular conceptual assembly depending on the case in question. In other words, there would be no closed theoretical frameworks.