4 Development of Cultural Ecology and its different theories

K.R. Rammohan

Contents:

Introduction

The Rise of Cultural Ecology

Cultural materialism

Marvin Harris and the Sacred Cow

Historical Ecology

Postmodernism

Summary

Learning Objectives:

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

2.      This module will enable the students to gain insights into different concepts in Cultural Ecology.

3.      This module equip the students to study Cultural ecology and its different theories.

Introduction

Ecology is the study of the interaction between living things and their environment. Human ecology is the study of the relationships and interactions among humans, their biology, their cultures, and their physical environment. The phrase ‘Cultural Ecology’ was first used by the anthropologists Julian Steward and Leslie White in the 1950s. It was defined by Steward 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. In particular, cultural ecologists commonly distinguish among societies with different subsistence patterns such as ways of making a living from nature, distinguishing in particular among hunting and gathering, horticultural, pastoral, and intensive agricultural societies.

Fig 1. Cultural ecology looks into the interaction between humans and the environment surrounding them

Cultural Evolution: It had long been recognized that cultures change over time, although it was not understood how or why. Not until after the new theory of biological evolution (Darwin, 1859) had been proposed did a comprehensive theory of cultural evolution developed.

Unilinear Cultural Evolution: The first major theory in anthropology was the concept that cultures evolved upwards along a single line. This idea was developed by Lewis H.Morgan and amplified by Edward B.Taylor and others, and later known as unilinear cultural evolution. It was proposed that cultures evolved progressively through three basic stages: from “savagery”(hunting and gathering), to “barbarism”, (pastoralism, later agriculture), and then up to “civilization”. This view encompassed the nineteenth-century notion of progress. Morgan saw human life as a search for “livelihood”, that is, subsistence of food, clothing, and shelter. He was aware that humans need social life and a sense of control over their world but thought of these as constant, while ways of obtaining food, and therefore technology, varied according to local creativity and local environment. Morgan held that certain inventions, such as the bow and arrow, pottery, and agriculture, were keystones in Cultural Evolution. Each one led to a new,“higher”phase of society.

Fig 2. Unilinear cultural evolution

At about the same time, Marx and Engels proposed a six stage theory of unilinear cultural evolution, but with politics and economics, rather than technology, being the most important factors. It was proposed that societies would ultimately evolve to advanced communism, the pinnacle of development. From the point of view of contemporary human ecology, perhaps the most important contribution of the evolutionary ideas of Marx and Engels was the assertion of the creativity and resourcefulness of human beings. Earlier thinkers (e.g., Montesquieu) gave nature pride of place and claimed that nature determined culture. Marx and Engels gave human creativity pride of place over nature, and this is a point that has come to lie behind much contemporary human ecological work.

The theory of Unilinear Cultural Evolution was accepted throughout the social sciences in the nineteenth century, only to be disproved in the early twentieth century, partly due to the understanding that technology alone does not dominate cultures and partly due to the realization that historical process was an important factor. However, it is still recognized that technological innovations have played a major role in cultural change and that certain innovations are more important than others. The use of Unilinear Cultural Evolution’s tripartite division of “hunting-gathering, pastoralism, and agriculture” has also survived and is still widely employed by anthropologists, but now only as a classificatory scheme not as a description of evolutionary progress. Whatever their details, cultural evolutionary theory proposed relationships between culture and environment, including natural, political, social, and technological environments. Even today, the details of how cultures evolve remain unresolved, but it is clear that there is a relationship between environment and cultural change.

Multilinear Cultural Evolution: By the early twentieth century, the unilinear cultural evolutionary model was in trouble. Key postulates, such as the idea that herding preceded agriculture, were not standing up under investigation. Worse, the simple scheme of progress as proceeding through neat regular stages was inadequate to deal with the accumulating ethnographic data. It was also realized that food was not the only thing people got from the environment. Early theories (like contemporary ones such as optimal foraging theory) dealt almost exclusively with food. But, in fact, other activities, such as art and religion, also draw on resources. It soon became obvious that evolution was not always unidirectional. Many groups have abandoned agriculture to become herders or hunter-gatherers (e.g., on the plains of North America). Some broad ethnic categories include elements of each of the supposedly distinct evolutionary stages: hunter-gatherers, agriculturalists, and “advanced” townsfolk— all of which were trading with one another and giving every appearance of being economically specialized subgroups of one broad social formation, rather than mixtures of ancestors and evolved descendants.

Fig 3. The arrows indicate the range of evolution. No culture evolve at the same rate

Arthur Herman (2001) pointed out that Adam Smith could observe all this stages—foraging, herding, farming, and commerce—in the Scotland of his time, without having to leave home. Some hunter-gatherers, such as those of the Pacific Coast of North America, had exceedingly complex social and technological systems—much more complex than those of many farmers. It was realized that if cultural evolution were to survive as a theory,it would have to be viewed as following many lines. Thus, Julian Steward proposed “multilinear evolution.”

Neo evolution: Despite the rejection of cultural evolutionary models in the early 1900s,by the middle of the twentieth century many anthropologists began to accept the reality that cultural evolution had occurred, even if in a multilinear way. Leslie White, one of the founders of the ecological tradition in anthropology, made an attempt to revive unilinear cultural evolution by framing it in a new way (neo evolution). White argued that cultures evolved as they increased their control of energy sources: from fire to animal power, to coal, to oil, to electricity, to thermonuclear power. At every stage, we become more adept at using greater and greater amounts of energy. Contemporary theorists would add that we increase in ability to use energy more efficiently and to control it better. White expressed this in summary from, CET, where C stands for culture, E is for energy, and T is for technology. It was not intended to be taken as literal mathematics; White did not argue that the United States is twice as advanced as Sweden because it used twice as much energy per capita. But White was arguing—rightly or wrongly— that energy, and the means of harnessing it, are basic to a culture, in a way that art styles or dynastic genealogies are not. White also held that symbols were the basis of culture, and humans were symbolizing animals. However, he saw this as equally typical of all humans and thus not causing change or evolution per se. Julian Steward introduced an evolutionary scheme based on increasing sociocultural complexity. The least complex was the band, consisting of small, relatively mobile hunting and gathering groups with informal leaders.

Next was the tribe, consisting of larger, more or less settled groups of hunter-gatherers or incipient agriculturalists (horticulturalists or pastoralists) with several settlements and relatively formal decision-making authority but still no centralized authority. Third was the chiefdom, which had large, sedentary populations (usually of agriculturalists), elites, some social stratification, and leaders with the authority to impose their will. Last was the state (sometimes called “civilization”, a highly loaded term), a large and complex system based on grain agriculture with larger and more dense populations, complex social and political structures, elaborate record keeping, urban centers or cities, central authority, monumental architecture, and specialization. While there has been much criticism of this scheme, it is still widely utilized by anthropologists to describe political entities and ecological adaptations.

This would have band-level hunter-gatherers as the original societies, with some evolving to tribes in the sense of local independent settlements or groups of about five hundred to one thousand persons. With the incorporation of agriculture or sophisticated hunting-gathering as the economic base, some tribes grew into chiefdoms. Some tribes and chiefdoms, under certain circumstances, developed into states. While there is ample archaeological and other evidence of this general trend, there is no reason to believe such evolution has been unidirectional, still less good or bad.

Possibilism: As anthropologists began to accumulate more general knowledge of culture and detailed knowledge of specific cultures, it became apparent that culture was highly adaptive, that most environments had been modified by humans, that there was a variety of responses possible to most environmental situations, and that cultures were considerably influenced by other cultures. There was no illusion that environment did not influence culture,but it became clear that it did not dictate it.

In possibilism, the environment is seen as a limiting or enabling factor rather than a determining factor. To be sure, the environment may deny certain possibilities, such as the use of snow houses in Arabia, but will open a variety of other possibilities, such as houses of wood, grass, mud, cloth, stone, or skins, all of which occur in Arabia. The culture makes the choice of which of the possibilities to employ. The culture also has limiting factors, including technology, belief systems, and extra cultural relations. In our housing example above, metal houses are a possibility offered by the environment (e.g., iron ore exists), but if a culture does not possess the technology to mine, process, and fabricate metal, it is not really a choice. However, if that culture has access to metal through trade, perhaps it could be a choice. Possibilism is an interactive process between culture and the environment. The choices available in the environment may be limited by the capabilities of the culture, or vice versa, and as culture and the environment evolve (change), the interplay also changes. While the culture area concept relate similarities between cultures and environment, it was recognized (Wissler 1926; Kroeber 1953; Meggers 1954) that the same environment (or culture area) might include cultures with quite different ecological adaptations. For example, the Southwest culture area contained Pueblo agriculturalists, hunting-and-gathering Apaches, and the sheep herding Navajo. These groups coexisted by filling complementary niches. Thus, culture in a way shapes environmental response. The environment did not control behavior; it merely made some behaviors more reasonable than others. Another classic study along these lines was the work of Birdsell (1953) on the relationship between rainfall and population density in aboriginal Australia. Some would view possibilism as the opposite of determinism.

In fact, however, possibilism is deterministic from the standpoint that some options are excluded, and the solutions are limited to a subset of all possibilities—a determination of which are possible and which are not. Possibilism seems much more realistic than strict determinism, as the role of culture is considered to some extent. Human culture has a penchant for changing the conditions and rules; as human cultural institutions and technology become more complex, the environment seems to play less and less of a role in limiting or determining human responses and adaptation. Thus, possibilism has been frequently criticized (Smith 1991) as not being a theory at all, as it predicts nothing specific. It is difficult to refute this argument.

THE RISE OF CULTURAL ECOLOGY

While always embedded in general anthropological theory (Adams 1935; Park 1936), Cultural Ecology did not come into its own until after the late 1930s, primarily through the work of Julian Steward. He began his career working with the Paiute-Shoshone people of the Great Basin in western North America but later worked in South America and eventually in Puerto Rico, a colonial-type society in the contemporary world. He was one of the first anthropologists to look at complex societies and their place in the even more complex world of today. Steward also drew on the concept of possibilism. Societies could adapt in any of a number of possible directions rather than being subject to environmental determinism.

Steward’s concept on Ecology: Steward was the first to combine four approaches in studying the interaction between culture and environment: (1) an explanation of culture in terms of the environment where it existed, rather than just a geographic association with economy; (2) the relationship between culture and environment as a process (not just a correlation); (3) a consideration of small-scale environment, rather than culture-area-size regions; and (4) the connection of ecology and multilinear cultural evolution. Steward’s landmark ecological work, Basin-Plateau Aboriginal Sociopolitical Groups, dealt with native peoples of the Great Basin. In that work, Steward first described the general environment, listed important resources, and then discussed how those resources were utilized. He then discussed the sociopolitical patterns and how they related to technology, the environment, and the distribution of resources. His approach was groundbreaking.

Steward’s (1955) primary arguments were that (1) cultures in similar environments may have similar adaptations; (2) all adaptations are short-lived and are constantly adjusting to changing environments; and (3) changes in culture can elaborate existing culture or result in entirely new ones. Steward coined the term Cultural Ecology to describe his approach and is frequently referred to as the father of ecological studies in anthropology. Steward (1955) recognized that the ecology of humans had both distinct biological and distinct cultural aspects, though they were intertwined. He argued that the cultural aspect was associated with technology, which set humans and their cultures above and separate them from the rest of the environment. While Steward was correct in recognizing the difference between the biological and cultural aspects of human ecology, he was wrong to view humans as separate from the rest of the environment.

The New Ecology approach: While Steward tied culture into the environment, a new approach, called the “new ecology”, tied culture into the emerging science of systems ecology ( Vayda and Rappaport 1968). It was argued that human cultures were not unique but formed only one of the population units interacting “to form food webs, biotic communities, and ecosystems” (Vayda and Rappaport 1968). This approach placed humans within a unified science of ecology so that what was learned about human behavior would have greater applicability.

This approach has had the effect of moving the analysis of human behavior from strictly qualitative ethnography to quantitative science, leading to a whole new way to look at humans. One weakness of this approach is that analysis is based on data that describe situations at a single point in time. While variables can be measured and compared to each other and relationships between variables can be described and modeled, it is difficult to model cultural change and evolution using such data. This problem is also an issue with much of the more recent work, such as the use of optimization models. Another weakness is that systems in ecology have proved to be more difficult to analyze than they seemed in the 1960s and are often chaotic and weakly bounded. Vayda has thus moved toward what he calls “event ecology”, analyzing particular events and their complex causes, rather than systems.

Cultural materialism is a practical, rather straightforward, functionalist approach to anthropology with a focus on the specific hows and whys of culture. It is based on the idea that “human social life is a response to the practical problems of earthly existence” (Harris 1979) and that these issues can be studied in a practical way. Cultural materialism emphasizes very empirical phenomena, such as technology, economy (e.g., food), environment, and population, takes an evolutionary perspective, and has an unwavering commitment to the rules of Western science.

Marvin Harris espoused a concept of “techno-environmental materialism” that initially held that all cultural institutions could be explained by direct material payoff. Harris did not claim that this always provided a total explanation; he saw it as a research strategy. One starts by looking for a direct material payoff—typically in food calories—for a cultural institution. If that is inadequate, look for a payoff in protein or in shelter. Only when all material payoffs have been eliminated should one investigate psychological and sociological factors. but only if one remembers to carry out the whole agenda, looking to psychology and society when necessary (as Harris did in his later works). Materialists tend to look at specifics rather than trends and at distinctive traits rather than general ones. The task was to explain the trait and why it is done in that particular way. Detractors would consider this approach to be biased away from nonmaterial aspects of culture, often overlooking important, if not critical, information. Proponents would argue that the overlooked information is not empirical and so not science. Nonetheless, cultural materialism has formed the basis for much anthropological research since the 1960s.

Marvin Harris and the Sacred Cow: An example of the functionalist/materialist approach is the analysis of the role of sacred cows in India. To Hindus, cows are sacred and cannot be eaten. Hindu religion includes a belief in reincarnation, and so it is possible that a relative may have been reincarnated as a cow, and eating the cow would be equivalent to cannibalism. To many Westerners who eat beef on an almost daily basis, it seem silly to have starving people refusing to eat their cows. However, an analysis of the function in Indian society of cows revealed that they were simply too important to eat. First, cows provide labor for plowing; few farmers could afford a tractor, and there was no infrastructure for the support of such machines. Also, cow dung was used as fertilizer and fuel; no substitutes were available, and the fields had to have some fertilizer to maintain productivity. Cows did not have to be fed; they survive by foraging trash and weeds, and help in keeping the area clean. In addition, they provide milk, a renewable resource. Thus, slaughtering the cows for food would provide a wonderful few weeks of steak and ribs but would also result in no labor to pull plows, no fertilizer, no fuel, no milk, the need for weed or trash disposal, the rapid collapse of the entire agricultural system, and the death of millions by famine. However, the cows are eventually eaten when they age and are incapable to provide the desired output. When cows die naturally, members of the “untouchables”, the lowest caste in Indian society, butcher them, eat the meat, and manufacture useful products from their skins and other parts. It is a system that functions well under these circumstances. However, it does not necessarily explain the origin of the practice.

A Note on Function and Origin to many cultural materialists’ explanation center on the question of function and origin. If something serves a specific function, the rationale goes, it must have originated or been designed to fulfill that function. Many human ecologists focus their research on functional aspects, such as food procurement or technology. However, it is a mistake to assume that function must be equated with origin. Some, if not most, things have multiple functions. Choosing one and then determining the origin will likely result in error. Also, some things may have multiple origins and may have been recombined to serve different functions. Technology and culture are constantly being modified, changed, and adjusted to fit new conditions. It may be that the origin of a particular practice is lost in all the changes. The reverse investigative approach also is true; knowing an origin does not necessarily mean the function is known. The function of things may change over time, so their origin may have little to do with their current use. Sleeve buttons once used to attach gloves are now mere decoration, and old engine parts are now paperweights.

Rational Choice Theory: Currently, one paradigm in environmental social science is some form of rational choice theory. This theory, popular in economics and political science as well as in some fields of anthropology, asserts that people decide how to achieve their goals on the basis of deliberate, individual consideration of all available information, that they seek out better information as required, and that they are good calculators of their chances; that they know where to hunt deer, which crops will grow, and how to trade off the potential yields of hunting deer versus cultivating crops. Some would consider rational choice theory to be related to evolutionary ecology because poor choices would be subjected to negative selective pressure. Thus, people have evolved to make better choices. It is true that much conventional behavior is rationally chosen. Some behavior is not rational, however, even if there is a seemingly reasonable argument made for such conduct.

In practice, people rationalize irrational behavior. It seems obvious that cultures vary in their approaches to adaptation and that if rational choice were always correct, much less variation would be expected. However, each culture has different goals, different technologies, and different concepts of what is rational, so the rational choice of group A will likely be different from that of group B, even in the same environment. In addition, people have many of their choices made for them before they are old enough to choose for themselves. People take on many traits, such as language and diet, long before they are old enough to make rational choices. Also, people do not have time to decide everything in detail. They have to take shortcuts, which usually mean going with habit or imitating others. When we are forced to change, we are forced to make more or less rational decisions. The rest of the time we tend to find that the most rational course is to minimize the effort of making decisions; we go with our habits or with quick approximations.

It has been argued that the whole Western attitude toward nature is cultural and irrational. Westerners tend to regard nature as something separate from humans, ours to exploit and ruin at will. This belief is neither scientifically sensible nor conducive to maximizing any of the many resources we get from the non-human world. A rational chooser would choose to believe something quite different. Rational choice is an indispensable tool of human ecological analysis, but it leaves a good deal for us to explain. In fact, it leaves almost all the content of culture for us to explain. We might freely grant that all cultural practices were adopted because they seemed, at one time, the most rational things to do under the existing circumstances. Like cultural materialism, rational choice makes a good starting place for an analysis; it is not usually the final resting place.

Political Ecology: A recent development in human ecology is the rapid spread of political ecology. The term was coined by Steward’s student Eric Wolf in 1972. It was popularized in the mid-1980s and became particularly popular in geography. Political ecology is concerned with power relations and specifically with the day-to-day conflicts, alliances, and negotiations that ultimately result in some sort of definitive behavior. It directs our attention to immediate processes and conflicts. It also is notably concerned with scale, analyzing conflicts from the household level to the local to the global. It has therefore meaningfully supplemented the other branches of human ecology that tend to look at the long term but that have often ignored the wide scale. Where cultural ecology tends to focus on a particular small ethnic group over a long time, political ecology tends to focus on larger forces impinging on a community at one point in time. The field of political ecology rose rapidly in the late 1980s and the 1990s, heavily influenced by contemporary economic and political theories. Perhaps most important of these influences was environmental politics. Worldwide battles between exploiters and conservationists have always had a serious impact on indigenous communities.

Most political ecology falls into two broad categories. First is the work on resource management in complex contemporary societies. Much of the work involves management of resources owned by the community or not owned at all, and studies of common property water resources have been important. Second, was research on the fate of small-scale, indigenous societies caught in the midst of “modernization”. At first, many studies naively demonized globalization and multinationalism, discrediting local people, labeling them as “mere victims”. This sort of abuse of the term led to a sharp critique of the whole field by Vayda & Walters (1999). They argued that the term itself should be dropped and return to a holistic, event-centered ecology.

Biology and culture have been brought back into the fold. Political and cultural ecology continue to blend into each other. In recent years, cultural/political ecology has been increasingly influenced by world systems theory. This theory was developed largely by Immanuel Wallerstein (1976). He began to look seriously at the interconnections of societies around the world—going beyond the simple “rich-poor” and “developed-less developed” contrasts to see how the rise of one society may lead to, or be linked with, the fall of others. He separated the world into “cores”(the rich nations: Europe, North America, and Japan today; China and the Near East a thousand years ago); “peripheries” (poor and isolated societies); and “semiperipheries”. These last are the countries in between, fairly well off but with much poverty and displaying a contrast of highly developed and much less developed sectors. Countries like Mexico, Turkey, and China provide current examples; in the world of a thousand year ago, southernmost Europe qualified (the rest was “periphery”), and so did much of Southeast Asia. Long cycles of empire and dominance occur, reflected in economic swings and geographic shifts of power. Wallerstein’s theory has been used to evaluate the rise and fall of cultures and the problems of smaller, more remote societies in today’s world and in their own earlier worlds, where they could create small, local “world” systems.

Unlike Cultural Ecology, which nests in anthropology, political ecology now involves geographers, political scientists, environmental scientists, and others, as well as anthropologists. In spite of some polemic basic introduction, the fields are at least complementary, and we view them more as two aspects of the same thing. Both are solidly derivative of the Stewardian agenda.

Historical Ecology: Recently, the number of terms in the human-ecological field has been increased by the addition of historical ecology. (The term has been around at least since the 1970s, when Edward S Deevey directed a historical ecology project at the University of Florida (Crumley 1998). This field is close to environmental history, landscape history, and similar historical subfields, as well as to cultural geography. In practice, it has been something of a blend of these fields—anthropology with more historical detail than usual, or history with more holistic cultural and environmental data than usual. A specific theory for this subfield was proposed by William Balée who emphasized interactions (“dialectical” in his usage) between people and environments, with the two being active players rather than as humans merely adapting to the environment.

Balée argued that: (1) human activity has affected virtually all environments; (2) human activity does not necessarily degrade or improve environments; (3) different cultural systems have different impacts on their environments; and (4) human interaction with the environment can be understood as a total phenomenon. This directs attention to individual action as opposed to such things as evolutionary dynamics, cultural ideologies, or social systems. These latter are abstractions that do not really interact per se. Historical ecologists, like other human ecologists in recent years, have paid much attention to the influence of small-scale societies on their environments. Such people were once dismissed as “primitives” and “savages” who had minimal effect on their surroundings—who were, according to earlier formulations, part of “nature” rather than “culture”.

In short, historical ecology focuses much more on change, contingency, and human agency than did some of the other traditions within cultural ecology. In this, it continues a long-standing agenda in the field. The counter agendas include evolutionary ones, whether Darwinian or cultural, and highly determinative “adaptation” theories that view human action as more or less a reflex of the environment. Historical ecology, along with recent archaeological theory and cultural ecology in general, has revivified the old cultural-geography concept of “landscape”. Balée emphasized the need to look at actual influences, without prejudging, in order to understand. This is doubly true if we wish to maintain or revive traditional land management techniques (such as controlled burning). Impartial analysis and understanding must preempt the field from the sort of naive, condemnatory judgment that we critique elsewhere in this book. Sauer was far ahead of his time, and only recently has his concept of landscape broadened its scope and exploded into widespread use. This has followed on the realization noted above: even the “simplest” people not only know an incredible amount about their environment, but also profoundly modify them.

Postmodernism: A fairly new paradigm in contemporary social thought is postmodernism. The postmodernists were critical of all modern things and argued that science itself was flawed. Extreme postmodernism took a very subjective and antiscientific stance in opposition to the objectivism of the modern world. This view holds that science is subjective; thus, our interpretations of cultures are also subjective. Postmodernists argue that there is no objective reality and that fact lists have no place in anthropology. This approach is not science but has evolved within studies of literature, religion, and expressive behavior. In so far as it directs our attention to interpreting and understanding cultural practices, it is a valuable contribution.

However, it has not spread far into human ecological studies because ecologists find that humans do have to consider some blunt truths: the need for food, the need to avoid extreme cold and heat, the brutal facts of disease, broken bones, grizzly bear attacks, and the like. Humans confront these details of life in a multitude of ways, and cultural interpretation plays a vital role in our understanding of those ways. However, we cannot ignore the life-and-death matters that force humans to adjust. Postmodernism is a philosophical position that runs counter to science.

On the other hand, a “softer” form of postmodernism directs our attention back to texts, discourse, and expressive culture, basic to early ethnography but rather ignored in much of ecological anthropology. It also has the salutary effect of displacing narrow focus on Western ideas, subjecting them to the same analysis that anthropologists give to traditional people, while giving local people credit for having their own very good ideas. Some of the best recent work thus combines solid biology and exquisite attention to local people’s words, concepts, and contributions. Again, this is not really new; Steward and many other early workers published extensive texts. But the new work makes much more use of local ideas in actual analysis and theory building.

Anthropology and human ecology are eclectic sciences. Human ecology does not have its own theory; it uses ideas taken from other disciplines, modified as needed and then applied to problems. Any approach that can be used to learn about how people and cultures interact with the environment will serve. If something does not inform us, it will be abandoned and another procedure used. This flexibility in research approaches is a strength and helps us to better understand humans, their cultures, and their relationship with the environment.

SUMMARY

Communities occupy most of the diverse environments on the planet, and cultural ecology is the story of how they do that. Some do it well, others less so. In any case, humans are the key species in most environments, and whatever their practices, we can learn from them. The study of humans’ interaction with their environment is called human ecology, with human biological ecology emphasizing the biological aspect of the adaptation (including evolution) and cultural ecology emphasizing the cultural aspect. Human ecology generally falls within anthropology, the study of humans (through time and space). Human ecology has a long history, with many ideas and concepts being proposed. The ideas of environment dictating culture (environmental determinism), of cultures evolving through stages, and of cultures operating within environmental parameters (possibilism) have been proposed, rejected, refined, argued, and reconsidered. However, modern human ecology, including cultural ecology, was founded by Julian Steward, who argued that human adaptation was an interplay among environment, biology, and culture. Today, most human ecologists utilize the principles of empirical science in their investigations and approach it in a number of ways. These include a “humans as animals” procedure that relies heavily on biological principles. Some view humans as rational choosers and use a functional and materialist approach. Others emphasize political processes and the interaction between power and modernization.

References

• Barth,  F. (1958)  ‘Ecological  Relationships  of  Ethnic  Groups  in  Swat,  North  Pakistan’, American Anthropologist 58: 1079-89
• Blute, M. (2008). Cultural Ecology. In D. Pearsall (Ed.), Encyclopaedia of Archaeology. Oxford, United Kingdom: Elsevier Science & Technology
• 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.
• Frake,C.O ( 1962)’ Cultural Ecology and Ethnography.’ American Anthropologist, 64, 53-59
• Harris, M. (1979) Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture, New York: Random House
• Netting, R.M.(1986) Cultural Ecology.2nd edn. Waveland Press, Inc Prospect Heights.
• Rappaport, R. (1979) Ecology, Meaning and Religion, Richmond, , CA: North Atlantic Books.
• Steward, J. (1963) Theory of Culture Change, Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
• Sutton, M.Q.; Anderson, E.N.(2004) Introduction to Cultural Ecology. Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc Walnut Creek, CA

    Suggested Readings

• Barth, Fredrik. 1969 Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Cultural Difference. London: Allen and Unwin.
• Bramwell, Anna .1989. Ecology in the Twentieth Century: A History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press
• Harris, Marvin .1966.The Cultural Ecology of India’s Sacred Cattle. Current Anthropology 7:51-59.
• Harris, Marvin.1974 Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture. New York: Random
• Love, T F.1977 Ecological niche theory in sociocultural anthropology a conceptual frame work and an application American Ethnologist. 4 27-41
• Rappaport.R 1971 Nature, Culture, and Ecological Anthropology. In Man, Culture, and Society. H. Shapiro, ed. Pp. 237-268. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Steward, J H 1968 The concept and method of cultural ecology , International Encyclopedia of The Social Sciences, ed D L Sills, 4 337-44 New York: Macmilan
• Steward,J H 1956. People of Puerto Rico. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
• Vayda, A P,MacKay, B 1975 New directions in ecology and ecological anthropology. Ann Rev Anthropology 4.293-306