Paper short abstract:

In a protected area of Guinea-Bissau, an international conservation NGO has been mapping sacred forests, aiming to create legislation to protect them. The NGO seems to ignore the political dimensions of their mapping, as well as the religious and political dimensions of sacred forests.

Paper long abstract:

Interest in sacred forests is not new, however, following the creation of the IUCN Task Force on Cultural and Spiritual Values, sacred natural sites (SNS) have become part of this ‘globally circulating knowledge’ (Tsing, 2005) of nature conservation. Much of the available literature on SNS is produced by conservation biologists for whom wilderness and SNS go hand in hand, but their focus is on biodiversity rather than culture. In one of the seven protected areas of Guinea-Bissau, an international conservation NGO has been acting for the protection of chimpanzees for more than a decade. They have applied a model of community-based conservation, like many other NGOs in Guinea-Bissau, claiming that it is the only model capable of succeeding. Over the past five years, the NGO has gathered efforts on mapping what they call sacred forests, as part of a wider, half million euro project, aiming to “strengthen the role of the local population in safeguarding the cultural and natural assets.” Much of the data collected were concerned with the presence of charismatic species on the mapped sacred forests and in quantifying sacred forest uses (e.g., water, fruits, medicine, hunting). Very little effort was made to understand the depth of the religious/supernatural and political dimensions of sacred forests and their relationship to the concrete dimensions of people’s lives. At the same time, the sacred forest mapping has been used by some villagers to claim land from other villages, showing that the mapping process has a de facto a political use.