The indigenous hunting issues have been the major sources of potential conflicts between indigenous society and the broadly defined environmental groups, especially the animal protection groups. Conflicts often concentrate on different understandings and representations of both Nature and tradition between these two sides. It is necessary to reconsider the different attitudes towards Nature and traditional culture between indigenous knowledge system and environmental groups in order to analyze the issues theoretically. The meaning of Nature to humans has undergone significant changes since industrial revolution. Meanwhile, the colonial expansion of Western powers has resulted into the loss of indigenous sovereignty, the exploitation of nature and the extraction of resources are the inevitable path toward capitalistic development. The mainstream dominant thinking on Nature and wilderness ignores frequently the people who are part of the landscape and participate in its production. Nature and culture become the opposite two ends and the first binary structure of current society. The second binary structure comes from the sharp division between the modernity and the authenticity of tradition. These two binary structures often appearing in the debates on the indigenous hunting lack the consideration of changes occurring in the whole process and tend to freeze the concepts of nature, culture and tradition in the fixed spatio-temporal contexts. The paper reviews the conflicts and theoretical engagements on the indigenous hunting issue in the past two decades and the changes occurring in the last two years. This article will explore the most up-to-date literatures on nature-society relationship, particularly in rethinking the concepts of both tradition and Nature for a critical review.
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