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Abstract
Since the early 2000s, biocultural diversity conservation has emerged as a response to environmental challenges, extending beyond the preservation of ecosystems to include the cultural knowledges that sustain them, such as traditional ecological knowledges. The key assumption in biocultural diversity is that cultural diversity—in all its forms, including linguistic diversity—and biodiversity are inherently linked and that conserving one helps sustain the other. Southwest China has figured prominently in the discourse of biocultural diversity, having been identified as a global biodiversity hotspot with a high level of ethnic and cultural diversity. As national and international conservation efforts unfold in this region, community-engaged conservation methods highlight the value of local ethnic cultures, leading to a recognition of local people’s unique ways of perceiving the world that contribute to sustaining diversity on the planet. Camera-mediated audiovisual self-representations, often referred to as community video (shequ yingxiang), have emerged as a prominent conservation method to capture the subjectivities of ethnic people and document their diverse natures and cultures. This was facilitated by the commercialization of digital cameras, which transformed video-making into a prevalent mode of self-expression and representation at the turn of the century, now evolving into an explosion of visualization driven by video-based social media platforms. This dissertation focuses on the interconnected knowledge practices involved in biocultural diversity conservation. How have ethnic groups become embodiments of distinct knowledges that translate into conservatory value not only meaningful to local communities but also to the entire planet? What kinds of subjects are being cultivated within them? What other adjacent knowledge practices are shaping their perspectives? By answering these questions, this dissertation examines the nature of conservation as a social and epistemic practice contextualized within political, intellectual, and discursive histories. It is based on a multisited and multimodal methodology that incorporates ethnographic fieldwork and archival research from 2017 to 2023 across three spatial and temporal sites of conservation in the Southwest: 1) the historical creation of biocultural diversity in and from the region, 2) the conservation efforts that portray local ethnic groups as conserving subjects and aim to cultivate their subjectivity through film training, and 3) a Donyu ethnic community whose culture and subjectivity navigate the politics of recognition and erasure within conservation efforts. Bridging anthropology, environmental studies, media studies, and the history of science, this dissertation theorizes conservation as a modern practice for sustaining diversity: recognizing objects worthy of prolonged existence on the planet and enabling them to sustain their existence against an otherwise anticipated disappearance, which reflects a temporal imaginary of collective ending that characterizes the contemporary world of man-made destruction. It argues that conservation produces a new subject position that I refer to as the conserving subject. Conserving subjects are those whose subjectivities, often assumed to have originated from their unique cultural traditions, are recognized as distinct and valuable (diverse) for sustaining the planet, with their distinct subjectivities defining their subject position. These subjectivities, or ways of experiencing and knowing the world, are expected to differ from those of modernity; this difference is deemed significant in sustaining other forms of diversity, such as cultural diversity or biodiversity on the planet. This approach examines how marginalized communities engage with conservation, cultivating themselves as conserving subjects with valuable traditional knowledges. It also highlights the epistemic violence (Spivak 1999) present in conservation that perpetuates imperial legacies of what is deemed knowable and conservable.