Review article
Rural Tradition and Diversity of the Biotic World
Ivan Cifrić
; Odsjek za sociologiju Filozofskog fakulteta Sveučilišta u Zagrebu, Zagreb, Hrvatska
Abstract
The paper puts forward the problem of the role of rural culture and rural tradition in the protection of biodiversity, since a culture’s condition reflects on its behaviour towards nature. The author of the thesis claims that rural society and rural culture, according to their inner logic of survival, have always maintained the diversity of the natural landscape and the living world. Based on a social tradition, in which religion held a large regulative meaning, and on the cyclical nature of life (production and culture), the rural society established a social-environmental metabolism close to the one found in nature. The diversity among the farmed plant and animal species suited their needs for survival and protection against natural disasters, and the society itself was not endangering nature. The modern society formed new ways of life, based on economic rationality, monoculture and a technically highly mediated relationship towards nature, which resulted in endangering the natural and cultural environment and the extinction of animal species, even the domesticated breeds. Technological progress, especially globalisation, intensified cultural and biotic homogenisation, which increased the cultural biotic entropy. Due to the environmental crisis and the postmodern epoch, the recognition of diversity’s value and the need to protect different cultures and the diversity of the flora and the fauna has again been established. The results of the empirical study of the animal species’ right to life and the human motives behind the treatment of the living world indicate sensitivity towards that world and show ethic values in human behaviour.
Keywords
Biotic homogenisation; animal species’ right to live; diversity; rural society; rural metabolism
Hrčak ID:
181313
URI
Publication date:
3.4.2017.
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