2 Cultural Ecology: Concept, Definition and Relevance

K.R. Rammohan

Contents:

Introduction

Cultural Ecology and Process of Adaptation

Concepts of Adaptation and Adaptive Strategies used in Cultural Ecology

Adaptation process among Hunting and Gathering Societies

Adaptation Process among Horticultural Societies

Adaptation Process among Pastoralists

Adaptation Process among Intensive Agricultural Societies

The Evolutionary Ecology of Culture

Summary

Learning Objectives:

1.      This module will help the students to understand the concept of Cultural Ecology.

2.      This module will enable the students to gain insights into the process of Adaptation.

3.      This module will equip the students to study the relevance of Cultural Ecology.

Introduction

Cultural Ecology is an important branch in ecological anthropology. Ecological anthropology is broadly defined as the study of relations between human beings and their environment. Orlove (1980) defines ecological anthropology as the study of the relationships among the population dynamics, social organization, and culture of the human population and the environment in which they live. Within this framework, Cultural Ecology studies the relationships among the transformation of nature, social reproduction and cultural processes within particular social formations. To understand Cultural Ecology, it is necessary to know the relationship between ecology and culture.

The term ‘ecology’ was coined by the biologist Ernest Haeckel in 1869. Nowadays, it has come to mean the study of all aspects of the interactions between organisms and their environments. The latter include the physical (abiotic) environment and other species (the biotic environment). In the broadest sense, ecology includes interactions with the environment involving all biological processes, including physiology, development, demography, social interaction, and evolution. It includes the interactions at all levels, including individuals, population of a single species, pairs of interacting species, and communities/ecosystems of multiple species.

Historically, most emphasis was placed on ecology as a pure science, due to its effect of the ecological environment on organisms rather than vice versa, and in particular processes at particular levels. These later included demographic processes (births, deaths, dispersal, and population growth rates and sizes) both at the level of single population and pairs of populations interacting competitively (- -), mutualistically (+ +), or antagonistically (+ -), as well as the flow of energy and materials through, and the degree of species richness in ecosystems. In recent decades these have been supplemented with more emphasis on applied problems of environmental management, on the effects of organisms on the ecological environment (niche construction), and on other processes such as the physiology of individuals (physiological ecology) and the evolution of populations (evolutionary ecology).

Cultural Ecology has been traced to emerged from North American anthropology in the mid-twentieth century, Cultural Ecology has mostly concerned itself with non-industrial societies, typically pastoralists, hunter–gathers, fishing cultures and small-scale cultivators, with an emphasis on ethnographic field methods. Cultural Ecology in this sense is most closely associated with the work of Julian Steward and the Chicago school, particularly after the publication of Steward’s Theory of culture change (1955). Most of the ethnographers follow this tradition that emphasizes a close relationship between symbolic culture (values, religious beliefs and traditions) on the one hand, and the material, ecological basis of a society on the other.

Julian Steward has emphasized the dynamic, two-way nature of the culture-environment relation, and the importance of the concept of adaptation in understanding it. Further, Steward distinguished ‘cultural’ from ‘biological’ ecology on the grounds that the former was about the adaptation of culture as a system existing outside of individual human organisms. By contrast, in the so-called ‘new ecology’ of the 1960s, culture was seen as the means of environmental adaptation of human population. Theories developed in animal ecology were also considered applicable to humans as well.

Drawing on one such theory, of group selection, ecological anthropologists focused on how aspects of cultural behaviour maintain balance or ‘homeostasis’ in the relations between a local group and its environmental resources, and so promote its long-term survival. Steward in particular developed the notion of a ‘cultural core’ shaped in a possibilist perspective wherein critical environmental resources like crops,animals, energy sources etc. were supposedly used by a culture.

Netting (1986) observed that “Cultural Ecology is a convenient, conventional title rather than an invitation to scholarly debate”. He further clarified that in contrast to other subfields within anthropology which took shape during the same period (e.g linguistics), Cultural Ecology did not emerge with a formally-stated set of principles, theory, or methodology. Rather, during the 1950s a “persistent dissatisfaction” with existing theories of cultural change which were either too vague to be tested or too rigid to account for variation, stimulated a “tendency to adopt an ecological perspective”. This ecological ‘tendency’ was to more closely consider the role played by the physical environment in cultural change, in opposing the prevailing explanation provided by cultural determinism, where culture determines culture (Netting 1986).

In the late 1960s the first generation of anthropologists influenced by Steward came of age, with the first three major empirical works in cultural ecology emerging within a span of two years: Netting’s Own The Hill Farmers of Nigeria (1968), Roy Rappaport’s Pigs for the Ancestors (1968), and John Bennett’s Northern Plainsmen (1969). These early seminal works generally set the boundaries for cultural ecology as it has ‘matured’ over the last three decades.

It is Julian Steward’s primary interest on cultural formation and change, but cultural ecology more generally was at the forefront of scholarly attention to questions about the social bases of environmental change, how cultures respond or adapt to environmental change and also how cultures influence the management of critical environmental resources. Moreover, considerable theoretical and methodological diversity characterizes self-described cultural ecologists (Netting, 1986).

Critically, it is culture functionally linked to environmental conditions and resource availability. This is apparent, for example, in Roy Rappaport’s (1968) work on wild pigs, and the spiritual beliefs and rituals surrounding these resources in New Guinea.

Figure 1: Cultural Ecology

Source Link: blog.culturalecology.info

Cultural Ecology and Process of Adaptation:

Ecology is the study of the interaction between organisms and their environments and cultural ecology is the study of the interaction between cultures and their ecological environments. Cultural ecology includes descriptions of different modes of subsistence. Environmental and ecological archaeology is the study of the relation between past human populations and their environments and includes geoarchaeology, archaeobotany and zooarchaeology. Some issues discussed are discrete versus continuous modes of subsistence, the evolutionary linkages among them, the role of ecology and history in cultural evolution, the mechanism of cultural adaptation, the evolutionary ecology of culture, co-evolution, and the future of our relationship with the environment.

The material remains that archaeologists normally study (the remnants of artefacts such as the tools, pottery, buildings, and settlements of past human societies) is logically part of culture more broadly. First, culture also includes languages as well as socially learned customs, beliefs, and values; these merged into social roles, statuses, or identities and these aggregated in turn into organizations and institutions. Hence, material culture needs to be placed in the context of culture more generally. Second, since human (including cultural) ecology is logically part of ecology more broadly, it needs to be placed in that context. Although the actual historical story of the evolution of these fields of study is considerably more complex than these simple logical distinctions, they are used here as organizing principles and hence the discussion will proceed from ecology to human (specifically cultural) ecology, and thence to environmental and ecological archaeology including a discussion of the impact of people on their environments.

In particular, cultural ecologists commonly distinguish among societies with different subsistence patterns (ways of making a living from nature), distinguishing in particular among hunting and gathering, horticultural, pastoral, and intensive agricultural societies.

The concept of adaptation is ubiquitous in cultural ecology and ecological and environmental archaeology. Different modes of subsistence are different modes of adaptation to the ecological environment.

Concepts of Adaptation and Adaptive Strategies used in Cultural Ecology:

Steward (1955) poses the question on how much of culture is adaptation to environment versus other factors and the origin of cultural features which can be traced to relationships with environment. For him, Cultural ecology = effect of environment upon culture. Special type of ecology characterizing man as culture bearer.

Geertz (1963) has used the concept of Involution or ‘Over Adaptation’, where of an established form e.g.Wet rice agriculture under increasing population density. In such a way that it becomes rigid through and inward-directed over-elaboration.

EricWolf (1966) Ecotypes: The ecological adaptation of the peasantry consists of a set of food transfers and a set of devices used to harness inorganic sources of energy to the productive process. Together, these sets make up a system of energy transfers from environment to man. Such a system of energy transfers are called as an ecotype.

Cohen (1968) Adaptation as Organizing principle: Human societies alter their relationships to a habitat in order to make that habitat a more fit place to live.

Rappaport (1971) Homeostatic: Adaptation is multidimensional. Man adapts to two environments: cognitive and operative. Culture imposes on nature as nature imposes on culture. How men participate in an eco system depends not only on the structure and composition of that ecosystem but also upon the cultural baggage of those who enter it — what they and their descendants subsequently receive by diffusion or invent themselves, the demands imposed on the local population from outside, and the needs which may be fulfilled by the local population from outside.

Vayda and McCay (1976) Existential Game: Societies responds to environmental hazards.

Bennett (1976) defined adaptation as a social process and strategic behaviour. He  further  stated  it  as  a  rational  or  purposive  manipulation  of  social  and  natural  environments. Multidimensional in terms of impacts: good for one group, not good for another, or for nature. In this scenario, the structure is loose and not fixed.

Löfgren  (1976)  Pattern of resource exploitation within a given macroeconomic framework.  The peasant economy is seen as more than a specific form of adaptation to the physical environment. The model also  considers forms of supra-regional division of labour, as reflected in local economies. The diversity of possible  modes of adaptation is a response to a  specific environment.

Ellen (1982)  Human adaptation involves the modification of behavior in order to adjust to new conditions, cope with hazards, or improve existing conditions. It may be an active conscious process or unconscious by-product of another activity. Individuals are the main agents of adaptation and they adapt mainly through changes in their social and economic relationships.

Wilk (1991) Households as adaptive groups. Structures of patterned human action. The household is the logical level of analysis in Cultural Ecology studies. He concluded that “Societies adapt in only the most abstract sense of the word but households adapt in concrete and observable ways”.

Adaptation is an active and dialectical process whereby people change their environment even as they change themselves and their social arrangements. Existing form or ‘tradition’ provides template for acceptable change and involves interaction between social forms and productive techniques.

Adaptation process among Hunting and Gathering Societies:

In hunting and gathering societies, people eat wild varieties of food available in their environment. They do little to actively control the reproduction of exploited species. They do utilize a great array of plant and animal species of which they possess detailed knowledge, but commonly concentrate on the tubers, seeds, nuts, and fruits of plants as well as small animals and birds. A few have specialized in hunting large animals. Hunter-gatherers may be sedentary if a rich store of resources is available locally as was the case with salmon for the Nuu-chah-nulth of the British Columbia coast and with sea mammals for the Chumash of the California coast.

In these communities, population sizes can become large and social organization complex. In most cases, however, hunter-gatherers live in small bands of an average of 25 or so and rarely more than 40 people. They are mobile in some or all of three ways as followed. First, they may travel frequently, foraging through a familiar landscape on a route timed to when resources are expected to become available. Second, they may instead, or in addition, make trips, often in smaller groups, out from a short or longer-term home base, collecting resources which are brought back to the home base. Finally, they may migrate into a wholly new area.

It was reported that once all human societies were hunter-gatherers and it was by means of this mode of subsistence that they spread out to populate the Earth. As all parts of the world became inhabited, however, and some groups turned to agriculture to make a living, hunter-gatherers came to be limited to more marginal habitats. Relationships between hunter-gatherers and farmers tend to be uneasy for obvious reasons, but in some cases, mutualistic relationships have been established with trade between them, based on exchange of wild for cultivated foods. Despite the limitations that most people having turned to agriculture has placed on hunter-gatherers, many anthropological studies have shown that this way of life remains successful for some – even providing greater leisure, for example, than other modes of subsistence. Some hunter-gatherers that have been studied by anthropologists are Australian Aborigines, the Inuit of the Canadian arctic, the San of the Kalahari desert in southern Africa and the Batak of the Philippines.

Figure 2: Hunting and Gathering

Source Link: http://thehadzalastofthefirst.com

Adaptation Process among Horticultural Societies:

Horticultural societies practice small-scale agriculture with human labour using hand tools and without draft animals, although they may keep small domesticated animals such as chickens and pigs. The extent to which horticulturalists alter the landscape and control the reproduction of domesticated species in order to make a living from nature can vary greatly. Slash and burn or shifting cultivation is sometimes practiced in tropical forests where fields are cleared, planted, and abandoned after a few years when the soil becomes exhausted. Swidden agriculture is a more sustainable system in which fields are reused regularly after a fallow period. Because the diversity of biological species increases towards the equator and decreases towards the poles, tropical horticulture can be a very complex phenomenon with many different species whose requirements complement each other interplanted, which mature at different times, and are used for different purposes. Elsewhere, the intensity of cultivation can vary greatly between and within societies. Small intensively cultivated gardens, sometimes terraced, may be maintained near home, while plots for different species which are less intensively cultivated are located further afield. The degree of control over the reproduction of domesticated species can also vary from simply controlling what species grows whereby practicing some selective breeding, choosing the best individuals in a domesticated species for material to plant and breed.

The less intensive the cultivation, the more likely it is that rights to cultivate plots can be redistributed among families by clan elders as family sizes wax and wane but the more intensive the cultivation, the more these rights tend to be treated as family property. Some examples of horticultural societies which have been studied by anthropologists are the Dani of highland New Guinea, the Nuer and Dinka of East Africa, the Kofyar of the Jos Plateau of Northern Nigeria, and the Yanomam of north western Brazil.

Figure 3: Horticultural Society

Source Link: https://www.britannica.com

Adaptation Process among Pastoralists:

Pastoralists derive all or the majority of their food and other resources from domesticated animals which they herd – goats, sheep, llamas, camels, cattle, etc., or less commonly simply follow, for example, reindeer. Pastoralism is really a form of gathering though not gathering directly, pastoralists herd herbivores that gather, that is, which graze on grasses or browse on bushes that humans cannot digest, and then the people live on the animals – on their milk, blood, meat, wool, hides, dung (useful for fuel), etc. The animals may provide transportation as well. Like hunter-gatherers, all pastoralists are mobile to varying degrees. They may be almost continuously nomadic, herding their animals on a route timed to when resources are expected to be available, for example, among waterholes, between lowland and upland pastures, etc. Alternatively, or in addition, they may make trips (often in smaller groups, usually composed of younger males, but which can extend to all males) out from, and back to, a shorter or a longer-term home based.

The most common intentional landscape alteration they engage in is burning to control the ratio of grass to brush but they often practice quite sophisticated selective breeding of their animals. Pastoralists live at higher population densities than hunter-gatherers but lower than horticulturists. Because they often have animals available for transporting goods, they usually have more material possessions than hunter-gatherers. Some examples of pastoral societies which have been studied by anthropologists are the Sami of northern Scandinavia, the Nuer and Maasai of east Africa, and the Navajo of the American southwest.

Figure 4: the Masai: Pastoral Society

Source Link: https://www.cedarberg-travel.com

Adaptation Process among Intensive Agricultural Societies:

Intensive agriculturalists farm with intensive energy inputs derived from animals by utilising yoke and ploughs. They alter the landscape much more than the horticulturalists do, by ploughing larger fields and employing a great variety of methods of intensification (acquiring more resources per unit land area) by irrigating (controlling floods, diverting streams, building dams and canals, digging wells, and terracing) as well as by fertilizing, rotating crops, and selectively breeding crops and livestock. Agricultural production typically is concentrated on a single crop. Their population sizes, birth rates, and population densities are all higher than those of horticultural societies. Intensive agriculturalists are sedentary. Their farming yields a surplus beyond that is needed to feed those who actually do the work of farming and caring for animals. This permits emergence of some craft specialization and, in the case of the most productive, a whole strata or series of strata of craft specialists and religious, political, military, and bureaucratic leaders in archaic states. Despite its productivity, the narrowing of diet which tends to occur under intensive agriculture and the social inequality which increases may result in deficiency diseases and poorer health, at least for some. Those who do the actual agricultural work may live, or live part of the time, near their fields. However, all intensive agricultural societies include villages or towns with ceremonial centres, and in the case of states, a series of such, which form satellites around an even larger urban centre. Some examples of intensive agriculturalists that have been studied by anthropologists are the Tamang of Nepal, the Mexican village of Cacurpe, and the Kofyar of central Nigeria and other societies.

Figure 5: Agricultural Society

Source Link: http://www.udayavani.com

Figure 6: Cultural Adaptation: Adaptive Strategies used in Cultural Ecology

The Evolutionary Ecology of Culture:

It is a widely accepted notion of foraging that low densities relative to resources favour eating (acquiring more resources), while high densities favour digesting (deriving more breakdown products from each such resource unit acquired). Cultures also behave in a similar way. Even hunter-gatherers process food in various ways – use tools to cut off the most tender cuts of meat; chop, pound, and winnow plant foods; and cook many different kinds of food. These are all methods of pre-digestion, suggesting that even hunter-gatherers experience resource pressures. Indeed, all techniques of cultivation used in horticulture and intensive agriculture, techniques such as irrigating and fertilizing, are methods of intensification, of deriving more resources from each land unit.

On a larger scale, low densities favour growth while high densities favour motility in a colonisable environment, maintenance in a renewable one, and mutability (innovation) in one with environmental carrying capacity unutilized for historical reasons. While all cultures use all of these strategies to some degree, hunter-gatherers tend to emphasize motility, moving on when resources become depleted. Agricultural societies tend to emphasize maintenance, methods of storing and preserving food until at least the next harvest. Industrial societies tend to be very technologically innovative. Density dependence is only one kind of example; there are other evolutionary-ecological principles of potential relevance to cultural ecology and archaeology, principles such as scale, frequency, and heterogeneity-dependent selection.

Summary

The Concept of ‘Cultural Ecology’ was first used by the anthropologists Julian Steward and Leslie White in the 1950s. Steward defined Cultural Ecology as “the adaptive processes by which the nature of society and an unpredictable number of features of culture are affected by the basic adjustment through which man utilizes a given environment”. It has come to mean the study of all aspects of the interaction between human cultures and their ecological environments. Like other sciences, much of Cultural Ecology is classificatory and descriptive.

Cultural Ecology was heavily influenced by the rise of ecology. This is true not only in terms of a focus on the relationship between environmental conditions and cultural processes, but also in some of the conceptual emphasis on systems adaptation, homeostasis, resilience, stability and so on, which are all hallmarks of an earlier phase of ecology.

Cultural Ecology has provided the various processes of adaptation by different forms of societies like the hunting-gathering, horticulturists, pastoralists and intensive agricultural practices.

Notwithstanding the deeper understanding the relationship between environment and culture, Cultural Ecology provided little capacity for understanding Power, the appropriation of surplus and valuation in the context of a global political economy, even when important linkages along these lines were recognized by cultural ecologists themselves. There is also another strand of argument about the relevance of political economy, and the need for attention to the articulation of local social formations with broader social processes.

At the same time, strict adherence to traditional ethnography in Cultural Ecology at times meant that particular social formations were conceptualized rigidly as such, independent and isolated from the rest of the world, with little or no consideration of or facility for the ways in which these ostensibly remote cultures articulate with social processes at broader scales of analysis.

References

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Suggested Readings

Anderson, J N.1973. Ecological anthropology and anthropological ecology In Handbook of Social and Cultural Anthropology, ed J J Honing- pp 179-239 Chicago Rand McNally

Barth,  F. (1958)  ‘Ecological  Relationships  of  Ethnic  Groups  in  Swat,  North  Pakistan’,

American Anthropologist 58: 1079-89.

Carneiro, R. L. (1961) ‘Slash and Burn Cultivation among the Kiukuru and Its Implications for Cultural Development in the Amazon Basin’, Anthropologia, supplement no. 2.

Ellen, R. (1982) Environment, Subsistence and System: The Ecology of Small-Scale Social Formations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Forde, D. (1934) Habitat, Economy and Society, London: Methuen

Guha, Ramchandra (1989) The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya, Berkeley: University of California Press

Harris, M. 1966 The Cultural Ecology of India’s Sacred Cattle. Current Anthropology 7:51-59.

Harris, M. (1979) Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture, New York: Random House

Helms M.1969 The cultural ecology of a colonial tribe. Ethnology, 8. 76-84

Kottak, Conrad P. 1980 The Past in the Present: History, Ecology, and Cultural Variation in Highland Madagascar. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press

Netting, R. M. (1993b) Cultural Ecology, 2nd edn, Prospect Heights, , IL: Waveland Press

Rappaport, R. (1979) Ecology, Meaning and Religion, Richmond,CA: North Atlantic Books

Rappaport, Roy A. 1968. Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press

Steward, J. (1963) Theory of Culture Change, Urbana: University of Illinois Press.