Thinking about popular religion and heritage

This chapter discusses regional attitudes toward landscapes which, if seriously adopted and utilized by preservationists, might succeed not only in preserving them as cultural resources but also as natural reservoirs of diversity. This chapter illuminates the types of complex differences of opinion which can arise between various stakeholders in heritage preservation projects such as official conservation programs and local cultural associations. The priorities of the local stakeholders are often based upon quite different premises from those of the national governments, and these differences often stem from a dichotomy between “tradition” and “modernization” between the opposing views of the relationship between humans, nature and the supernatural. The same differences permeate many of the other discussions in this book, but the issue of the landscape is perhaps the area in which these fundamental differences of worldview among Southeast Asians themselves are most clearly exposed.