A Global Problem....
As more remote, less densely populated regions, such as Amazonia and Siberia, have become natural resource colonies for the urbanized centers of an industrialized world, conflicts inevitably have emerged between traditional peoples, adapted to specific ecosystems, and industrialized peoples, whose technology has made them at once more flexible in local adaptations yet more interdependent globally. Unfortunately, traditional communities and their fund of culturally informed knowledge, accumulated through centuries of experience with specific ecosystems, are often excluded from all centralized planning. Planners realize only belatedly the value of traditional knowledge in the face of environmental degradation prompted by unrestrained development. Increasingly institutions, such as multilateral banks, are recognizing that incorporating traditional knowledge by planning locally through participatory democracy is the key to creating sustainable growth which balances the impacts of development with the needs of traditional communties.
A Local Problem...
New Mexico is not isolated from these same development forces. Historically, New Mexico's economy has been driven by natural resource exploitation, that brought ranchers, farmers, miners, even sun-seekers. The population of the state has grown so rapidly that enormous pressures are created to modernize aging infrastructure or create new infrastructure. Aging carries away generation of the elderly who pass on without telling the story of how their communties shaped a special relationship to this land. Mass media and popular entertainment erode the differences in language and custom and belief that strengthen local community values and ethnic identity. These forces threaten the historical and cultural resources important to the cultural diversity which gives this state its unique character. No one suffers from these pressures more heavily than traditional cultural groups whose life is bound to the land.
Procession to Bless the Fields for San Ysidro Day
Managing Change: Cultural Conservation
The Heritage Center exists to put expertise at the service of communities so that we can assist people in managing change. Cultural conservation is not inherently opposed to all development. On the contrary, it assumes that by identifying the values and beliefs that derive from specific cultural traditions and by adapting technologies and development strategies to them, we can foster sustainable development in a socially and politically favorable climate for the creation of a more benign human environment.Cultural conservation, then, has a management orientation, is invoked to resolve conflicts, and can be both reactive and proactive.
- Reactively it takes an impact assessment approach to identifying the
effects the proposed introduction of a new technology or a modification of
the environment will have upon the distinctive cultural forms that have
emerged from a people's traditional relationship to the natural
environment. Communities can then develop plans to mitigate these
impacts.
- Proactively it involves communities in developing cultural resources
inventories so that a basic cultural profile of the community can be
established and development can take place within the framework of a
comprehensive plan.
The Heritage Center's Work
Interview Scene
- EDUCATION AND TRAINING of NMSU students
through specific coursework and research, leading toward a Minor in
Cultural Conservation
- RESEARCH AND PUBLIC PROGRAMMING in
service to communities
- MAINTAINING AN ARCHIVE of oral and
community history and folklife documentation collected during the course
of research conducted by the Center
- PUBLICATIONS and other forms of disseminating information about cultural conservation.