Paper short abstract:

The paper presents a two-dimensional approach to environmental sustainability. Based on indigenous people’s nature conceptions and a theoretical model of social and cultural anthropology, the paper discusses challenges model construction.

Paper long abstract:

The paper bridges everyday knowledge with scientific knowledge by introducing a two-dimensional way of defining what environmental sustainability might mean. First, it shows empirical material of the Skolt Sami indigenous people’s conceptions about human obligations to nature. Second, related to them, it presents a theoretical model of social and cultural anthropology, in other words, a model of human-environment interaction based on Gregory Bateson’s formulations. It then constructs a model of environmental sustainability based on the empirical material and Bateson's model. The paper considers the challenges of this model formation. For example, how to understand different forms of knowledge and how to handle them? How to deal with indigenous knowledge? The paper argues that different kinds of research processes may honor indigenous people’s knowledge in different ways.