Postcolonial Green: Environmental Politics and World Narratives

Rhetorics of Endangerment: Cultural Difference and Development in International Ape Conservation Discourse

Rhetorics of Endangerment Cultural Difference and Development in International Ape Conservation Discourse neel ahuja The Great Ape Survival Project (GRASP)—a United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) partnership that includes twenty-three Great Ape range states, donor countries, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs),andprivatesectororganizations—unveileditsfirsteducational exhibit at the Uganda National Museum in Kampala on 28 June 2006. As part of the exhibit, text and image displays prepared by UNESCO and France’s Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle undertook two rhetorical strategies in promoting the conservation of Uganda’s eastern chimpanzees and mountain gorillas. The first stressed the economic threats that hunting, disease, deforestation, and agricultural pest control pose to endangered apes, as well as the hope that GRASP’s efforts to “sustainably develop” local communities could successfully remedy these threats. The second strategy summarized a body of anthropological research on great apes that stresses apes’ capacity for “culture” via the shared use of tools and medicines. In particular, one exhibit showcase compared the use of medicinal plants by chimpanzees to indigenous Ugandan healing practices.1 As a conservation initiative developed through negotiations between governments, primatologists, business, and NGOs, GRASP aims to develop a human-centered approach to the conservation of gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees, and bonobos that recognizes how war, poverty , and disease complicate conservation efforts. Because of the often antagonistic relationships between indigenous groups, national elites, and ape conservationists since the successes of African and Asian independence movements of the mid-twentieth century, GRASP’s organizational operational documents focus intently on local solutions, enumerating a variety of ways in which “conservation initiatives . . . are of mutual benefit to [human] communities and great apes” (UNEP/ GRASP, “Human Dimension”). As exemplified in the museum exhibition , the notions of sustainable development and the connection of rhetorics of endangerment 119 indigenous cultures to apes and their environments are central to constructing this human-centered approach to conservation. Focusing on constructions of sustainable development and cultural difference, I locate the rhetoric of the Great Ape Survival Project within a genealogy of technocratic languages developed in internationally negotiated environmental treaties, conventions, and declarations over the past three decades. Such documents should be understood as important genres within what, in an era of neoliberal capitalism and global governance, constitutes a literature of the global. Rather than taking the “world literature” and area studies models that have predictably institutionalized new canons of “great works” in postcolonial literary studies, excavating the literature of the global opens criticism to a variety of types of texts—from journalism and novels to software, advertising , activist manifestos, and global legal instruments—that trace how neoliberal formations inscribe diverse and competing visions of the category of the global.2 This is an important corrective not just for postcolonial studies, but also for ecocritical models that, as Cara Cilano and Elizabeth DeLoughrey argue, were compromised by the insularity of literary objects in the 1990s (75). Such a model ensures interdisciplinary linkages—linking culture to political economy, science and technology, and international law—in order to understand how changing conceptions of difference in translocal and global forums shape the ongoing obstacles to decolonization (Huggan and Tiffin 7). Within the generic conventions of United Nations program documents and their related international legal instruments, the naming of those at risk and in need of redress by the expansion of various types of rights takes center stage. In the case of GRASP, however, organizational documents and operational statements that rhetorically figure indigenous peoples and apes as endangered by modernity reinforce neocolonial approaches to conservation even as they attempt to speak in the interests of those least privileged by international economic and political arrangements. The nexus of “development” and “culture” in the Uganda exhibit is indicative of larger trends attempting to incorporate the interests of indigenous groups and so-called developing nations in international environmental and development discourse. Responding in part to a new politics of biodiversity initiated by indigenous activists against internationally sponsored nature reserves, international law has essentialized the cultural difference of the indigene in an attempt to incorporate the interests of indigenous groups in global structures of conservation aid. GRASP is one of the many instances in which aid 120 neel ahuja continues to operate in a top-down structure, leaving Western NGOs, primatologists, national elites, and development experts to haphazardly attempt to enlist indigenous communities in global conservation structures. Global Conservation Models: From Environmentalist Universality to Sustainable Development I situate the organizational and operational documents of GRASP...