Biocultural Ontologies, Art, and Conservation
摘要
Biocultural conservation focuses on the restoration and conservation of relationships between human inhabitants, other than human co-inhabitants, and the land. Such conservation is rooted in relational ontologies situated from locality. This chapter draws from biocultural literature to offer an account of what such ontological positions might mean for biocultural conservation of art. Both conservation and art exhibition rooted in colonial ontologies tend to reduce Indigenous and local communities’ living relationships with the land to mere historical or art objects. We argue that biocultural conservation presents ontologies of co-constitutive relationality that challenge fixed-object conceptions of art, bringing us to a more nuanced view of art as biocultural expression from locality.