Bio-cultural Texts for Civic Learning: Reading Diversity, Subsistence and Survival in Stann Creek, Belize

• In Event: Recognition and Denial: Race and Ethnicity in Latin America.

Abstract

In this paper I assess the potential for using landscapes as bio-cultural ‘texts’ in a Latin American and Caribbean Geography course with an international travel and civic learning component. I draw attention to this tool as a possible antidote to casual assessments and categories observers often make when viewing rural settlements in the region. I draw on surveys conducted with students who participated in the course, which involves an alternative spring break experience in Belize, and on ethnographic interviews and land use mapping in the country’s Stann Creek district.

Landscapes reflect economic and cultural changes experienced by places and peoples in ways that can be actively read with proper attention and background. Developing the capacity to read a landscape can make the difference between dismissive judgments about a community’s perceived poverty, powerlessness and languor versus an acknowledgement of centuries of active labor, intervention and survival. By training students’ ability to read three specific types land use—commercial citrus orchard, home garden/agro-forest, and protected tropical moist forest—students may develop a greater understanding of the political economic and sociocultural contexts in which environmental mosaics emerge, who benefits from the outcomes and why. Further, it is hoped that a better understanding of the lived struggles for livelihood, food security and cultural identity can take place.

Of the three land uses addressed in the research the home garden/agro-forest is of particular interest. My emphasis is that the repertoire of tended and cultivated species and associated place-based, botanical knowledge convey stories of subsistence and survival.

Author

• Brian W Conz, Westfield State University