Abstract EN:

The varietal diversity of coconut and taro in an isolated village from Vanuatu are identified using tools from agronomy, anthropology, genetics and geography. The result of this interdisciplinary work suggests that its validation, both from the local as well as scientific points of view, depends not only upon the social relationships with the plants, which have been shaped by their biology and their history, but also upon the purposes for which they are intended, namely, to preserve a cultural diversity, a phenotypic variability, an evolutionary potential and the place's memory through ancestral links. The contrasting examples of the taro (a socially valued object, cultivated on land inherited "from the ancestors", and linked to an important cultural diversity and a narrow genetic-base) and the coconut (a socially valued object, planted in a crop space at the prompting of "the Whites" and genetically diverse despite few named categories) demonstrate that the same farmers make up a society that, through its management of taro, affirms traditional ecological knowledge, and all the while participates in a market economy by intensifying its crop of coconuts. This thesis illustrates that the integration of cultural and biological diversity into the biodiversity concept can lead to contradictions if this knowledge, reduced to simple formulae, is abstracted from its cognitive and socio-cultural settings. In questioning the feasibility of in situ conservation and participatory plant breeding politics, it underlines that an interdisciplinary approach is necessary to optimize the effectiveness and conciliation of conservation and development programs for subsequent populations that are confronted with globalisation processes.