The aim was to gain an empirically based understanding of how Tibetan Buddhism shapes people’s relations with the natural environment in the context of state policy and market changes, in order to inform conservation interventions. I used a case study and inter-disciplinary methods to explore these multi-dimensional human-environment relationships, and observational and interview data to understand people’s notions and actions. The thesis brings together data on religious ideas and discourse, institutions and power, livelihoods and natural resource use, to form a more holistic, place based approach to understanding how people relate to their environments. In particular, I focused upon the idea of sacred sites which has received increasing attention by conservation practitioners within the framework of ‘community based conservation’.
People in Samdo were found to be orientating themselves towards the environment by means of local cosmology incorporating local gods and spirits, ideas of karma and Buddhist morality which were interlinked (Chapter 3). The sacred, in this sense, was not completely separate from the profane for the whole community: boundaries were unclear, there was differential importance of local gods and spirits according to ritual attention, and conflicts with
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practical and immediate livelihood concerns. A gap between local knowledge and a conservation perspective was found especially in the way that protection toward local gods was stated in ritual rather than governance terms. The sacred cannot be said to be related to completely distinct ideas or sets of behaviours in Tibetan Buddhism, and there was overlap with the karmic model which was in particular connected to non-violence towards living creatures. The notions and religious actions described in Chapter 3 could not exist without a system of authority and must be set in their social and political context, including the institutions of religion, state and market (Chapter 4). Religious authority in the form of ritual lent weight to relationships with local gods, and environmentalist discourse transported through global connections was beginning to give new meanings to the environment. Forms of authority do not act in isolation, and the legitimacy of state policy was reinforced by its alignment with religious norms and traditional forms of authority. Commodification of the environment occurring through both the government tree planting scheme and the booming caterpillar fungus market was also reshaping environmental relationships.
Chapter 5 showed another element of these human-environment relationships in the form of provisioning ecosystem services. Focusing on three resources – caterpillar fungus, matsutake mushrooms and firewood – I showed that access to services was structured according to wealth within Samdo, highlighting the heterogeneity of communities and dynamic relationships with the environment. Despite this, there was a high dependence on caterpillar fungus for livelihoods across the community. Using direct observation of firewood extraction, Chapter 6 reflected findings in Chapter 3 regarding notions of local gods. Evidence of resource use indicates that one particular place of religious significance to a wide group of people resulted in consistent non-extractive practices. But overall the research revealed a dynamic picture of sacred sites set in their historical and policy context. Both practices and ecological conditions change within sacred sites, running counter to equilibrium models of both nature and culture. Taking a wider geographical perspective, Chapter 7 showed that sacred sites in different forms exist across Daocheng County, but they are heterogeneous with differing norms, histories and ecological constitutions. The wider perspective highlights the issue of scale in environmental studies, and the need for conservation interventions that span levels of governance. The limited coverage of sacred sites is set against larger scale forest changes of the last fifty years, suggesting that the conservation value of sacred sites lies at the local level.
166 Limitations of the study
It was not possible due to time limitations to study the pastoral systems in Daocheng and instead I focused on forest use and changes, and to a lesser extent wildlife and hunting. This was because the management of forested areas close to settlements appeared to have closer relationships to religion. The work of other researchers on pastoral systems in Tibet (Gruschke, 2008; Yeh & Gaerrang, 2011; Goldstein, 2012) points to a range of pertinent issues related to this thesis. The way that the interplay of traditional management, livelihoods, state policies, and historical degradation affect environmental change could equally apply to grasslands, and the relatively unexplored impact of caterpillar fungus collection, both ecologically and economically, should be an area of further research. Inclusion of the grassland system into my research would bring a more complete picture to human-environment relations.
The focus was largely on the way people represented and talked about the environment, their actions rather than any analysis of ecological effects, and widening the scope to incorporate more ecological data would strengthen further studies. I aimed for the thesis to be interdisciplinary, but there were challenges to conducting a fully integrated study. In particular, I was not able to directly link norms and representations to environmental actions at an individual level with the data I was able to collect, but rather presented a picture of how these elements of social reality fitted together across one case study community. This highlights the challenges on the ground of linking different sets of data using different methods in complex social settings. At a conceptual level, however, the study was interdisciplinary in that natural and social science methods were used as appropriate for different parts of the thesis within an integrated conceptual framework. The research forms the first step in dialogue about environmental issues and conservation with people in Daocheng, and this should be built upon with further community based work.
The core of the research focused upon the case study of Samdo – a community of only 200 households. Chapter 7 showed that the results with regard to sacred sites were broadly generalisable to the regional level with some village level specificities, and given that belief in and norms regarding the type of local gods discussed here are ubiquitous across Tibet, the study holds significance for the whole Tibetan cultural area. But the results cannot be directly transferred to other local sites, and specific cases will need to be understood within their own contexts. A more in-depth comparison between communities could also shed light on the relative importance of different institutions, for instance a comparison of the south of Daocheng where there are few monasteries with communities in the north. The study does however, raise
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issues and provide lessons regarding the importance of sacred sites, culture, and livelihoods which will be relevant for any conservation project.
8.2 Culture, religion and sacred sites in conservation: implications &