ABSTRACT
This chapter will explore how the specifics of cultural context might be incorporated within international conservation through an exposition of knowledge practices relating to the keeping and competing of songbirds in Indonesia. In a household survey of six cities on Java and Bali, birds were the most popular pet: one in three households kept a bird and two in three households reported keeping a bird in the previous ten years. This popular pastime has deep and diverse culture roots. For instance, a ‘bird in a cage’ is one of five symbols of a traditional Javanese knight representing the importance of a hobby in a balanced life (Toer, 1996); the role of the cockfight in Balinese culture has been much discussed among anthropologists (Geertz, 2005) and the popularity of birds among people of Chinese ethnicity is well known (Layton, 1991). In the cosmopolitan cities of Java and Bali, these ethnic ways of knowing birds have interacted with broader trends in society to produce a distinctly Indonesian or, more specifically, urban Indonesian study of birds. This local knowledge of birds has largely been ignored by Indonesian bird conservation groups, who have orientated towards the scientific and policy frameworks promoted by international bird conservation networks. Indonesian bird conservation groups were mostly founded by biology graduates during the early 1990s; but they have struggled to grow and remain largely dependent on external funding sources. The core idea developed in this chapter is that a vigorous bird conservation movement could emerge in developing countries such as Indonesia if:
• the worldviews, forms of knowledge and practices that underpin Westerngenerated conservation approaches are made visible;
• local ways of knowing birds and the practices and actor groups related to these are revealed; and
• conditions and spaces for interplay between the two are created.
