7 Nature and culture: contemporary approach

Ajeet Jaiswal

Contents:

1. Introduction

2. Human Ecology

3. Nature and culture

4. Culture

5. Cultural Ecology

6. Development of a notion of culture

7. Culture and Nature

8. Synthesis of Culture and Nature

9. Summary

Learning objectives:

The course provides contemporary approach information about Nature and culture in the field of Ecological Anthropology.
It includes the Human ecology, Cultural ecology and Development of a notion of culture
The study of this module enables the students at postgraduate level to understand the evolutionary concept related to Synthesis of Culture and Nature in Ecological Anthropology.

1. Introduction

In the twenty-first century, the relationship between the concepts of nature and culture has undergone significant changes, or even questionings or reversals in value, which are fairly representative of the general state of contemporary thinking.

In fact, traditionally, relations between nature and culture have been characterized by differences, or even opposition, between the two concepts. At one level, what has traditionally characterized culture and distinguished it from nature has been artifice, custom and convention.

Culture is a human institution, and as such it reflects the exercise of will, or at least, a set of intended meanings: culture is a world where rules and values operate. These, however, relate to human action, and are, so as to speak, victims of its inconstancy: culture is also the domain of diversity of beliefs, of inconsistency of passions, even of contradiction in human decisions.

Nature, on the other hand, presents itself as a reality characterised by permanence, stability, regularity. The recurrence of seasons and blooming, the constancy of living forms, but also of the material world, cause nature to be a kind of guarantee of the substantiality of being: the fact that things have a nature gives them a sort of solidity on which humanity can rely in its actions and its enterprises.

In the four or five million years since their development, humans have colonized virtually every terrestrial environment of the planet. Humans everywhere are virtually the same biologically (in spite of visible but superficial differences) but have been able to adapt to the enormous environmental diversity of the planet through culture, an incredibly flexible and adaptive mechanism that other animals lack. Thus, humans have been a very successful species. Human activity has a wide range of impacts on the environment, however, from exceedingly minor to catastrophic.

Today, human activities are having huge impacts on the very environment on which we depend, ultimately threatening our own existence. Understanding and dealing with these challenges is a daunting but essential task.

Anthropology, including cultural ecology, differs from other fields in that it studies all humans, everywhere, from the earliest times (millions of years ago) to today and from the Arctic to the Antarctic. No group is so small that it is not important, and no period of history or prehistory is without interest. This wide approach has allowed anthropologists to disprove many generalizations based only on modern or Western societies and to demonstrate some other generalizations that were not obvious once, such as the universality of complex kinship systems and dietary rules.

People in Western societies tend to hold the view that humans are separate from the environment, above it in some way. This can be traced back to the Bible. In Genesis 1 the world (the environment) was first created, and then “man”—an entity separate and superior to nature—was created and given the task of subduing nature (Genesis 1:28; Wilson, 1967). Genesis 2 argues otherwise, for “stewardship”, but Western philosophy continues to include the view that it is the goal and mission of people to “conquer” nature.

Thus, many people today continue to believe that humans are not participants in the environment but that we must overcome it and bend it to our own will. This conviction continues to permeate Western thought and action, as we strive to separate ourselves from our natural surroundings by artificially creating closed environments, including our homes, offices, and cars. Ironically, some (mostly corporate and government people) have conveniently shifted their view on this matter, arguing now that human activity is part of nature and so changes in climate caused by humans (e.g., global warming) is “natural” and thus not of concern.

One could argue that many traditional societies do not hold the view that people are separate from nature, and that they are somehow “ecologists” living in harmony with their environment (White, 1997; Krech, 1999; Hames, 2007). It is true that the activities of many societies have less impact on the environment than others, and it is also true that some of these groups hold a more ecologically friendly philosophy of life than Westerners generally do. It has also been argued, however, that traditional societies often make less of an impact on the environment only because their technology is less complex and their populations smaller. Given the right conditions and incentives, the argument goes; they would do as Westerners do. In support of this argument, one can point to the destruction of the habitat on Easter Island (Diamond, 2005; Hunt ,2007), the deforestation of most of Europe during the Neolithic, and the worse degradation of the northern islands (McGovern et al., 1988; Diamond, 2005), among other examples.

Fortunately, local traditional people can be trusted to take care of their resources— not out of fuzzy-minded love for Mother Earth but out of solid, hardheaded, good sense, often shored up by traditional religion and morality (Anderson, 1996; Berkes, 1999; Lentz, 2000). Biologists are beginning to realize this. Kent Redford, who coined the sarcastic term “the ecologically noble savage” (Redford, 1990; Lopez,1992) has since repented and now takes a more balanced position (Redford and Mansour, 1996; Sponsel, 2001).

We now recognize that humans and their cultures are an integral part of the environment. Human activity affects the environment, which is then altered, in turn affecting human activities. The shape and form of the environment is dependent on its history, a history that includes humans. Yet it is also important to realize that humans are not just another animal. Humans are self-aware, cooperative, technological, and highly social. This unique combination does separate humans from other organisms, making their interactions with the environment more complex and fascinating.

2. Human Ecology

Human ecology is the study of the interactions of humans with their environments, or the study of the distribution and abundance of humans. This definition is based directly on conventional definitions of biological ecology. Ecology is usually defined as the study of interactions of organisms with their environments and each other. More pointedly, it can be defined as the study of the distribution and abundance of organisms. This definition is deceptive. It implies much more than it says explicitly because virtually everything that humans are or do (and the same goes for any species) affects their distribution and abundance. Thus, using the term “human ecology” actually expresses a broad ambition to understand human behavior.

Human ecology is an approach to the study of human behavior marked by two commitments. First, human ecologists think that humans should be studied as living systems operating in complex environments. The human sciences are balkanized into several social science, humanistic, and human biological disciplines. Ecologists are used to thinking that systemic nature of individual organisms and populations of organisms mean that we typically have to understand how diverse parts of the system operate together to produce behavior. The traditional human science disciplines take people apart; human ecologists endeavor to put us back together.

Breaking complex problems down to operationally tractable parts is a great strategy, but only so long as some are committed to puting them back together in the end! Second, human ecologists think that humans are subject to very similar ecological and evolutionary processes as any other species. Of course, humans are unique, and this fact has important consequences. However, we think that the deep rifts between human biologists and social scientists (and between scientists and humanists for that matter) are a deeply embarrassing scandal that honest scholars are obligated to repair as expeditiously as possible.

3. Nature and culture

At the foundation of cultural anthropology lies the notion of a great fault line sundering the world of human culture from the rest of the living world. On this view, part of our human constitution falls on one side of the line, the side explicable by biological and allied sciences. On that side we resemble other animals. But on the other side, dominated by our capacity for learning, language and the use of symbols, we reach beyond the knowledge of biology and attain our essential, unique and, so to speak, superanimal character. In his presidential address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1958, Leslie White captured this doctrine in a memorable myth.

[Using symbols] man built a new world in which to live … He still trod the earth, felt the wind against his cheek, or heard it sigh among the pines; he … slept beneath the stars, and awoke to greet the sun. But it was not the same sun! . Everything was ‘bathed in celestial light’; and there were ‘intimations of immortality on every hand’. Between man and nature hung the veil of culture, and he could see nothing save through this medium .Permeating everything was the essence of words: the meanings and values that lay beyond the senses.

The imagery of this just-so story dividing humans from animals is fanciful, but the message is sincerely intended: human cognition and action are mediated by learned and therefore cultural, rather than by instinctive or inborn, responses. Since this is so, culture is a separate object of study, cultural variation is different in kind from biological variation, and cultural anthropology is an autonomous discipline, separate from the biological sciences.

4. Culture

Culture is the core concept in anthropology; Specialists of all the branches of anthropology use it in various ways. The only problem with this concept iss that there is little agreement about how to define the term. The scientific use of the term correspond to the original meaning of culture, which is derived from the Latin words Coletre (to cultivate and instruct) and Cultus (cultivation and training). In its broadest sense, Culture is cultivated behaviour, i.e. man’s learned and socially transmitted behaviour. This is the general anthropological meaning of the term.

However, anthropologists have operationalized the concept of in more than one ways. Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952) have uncovered over 160 definitions of the term. A few representative views are discussed below:

That complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as member of society (Tylor, 1871).
All the historically created design for living, explicit and implicit, rational, irrational and non-rational, which exist at any given time as potential guides for the behaviour of men (Kluckhohn and Kelly, 1945).
The mass of learned and transmitted motor reaction, habits, technique and ideas and valued the behaviourthery induced (Kroeber, 1948).
The man made part of the environment (Herskovits, 1955).
Culture consists of “standards for deciding what is, what can be, how one can feel about it, what to do about it and how to go about doing it.” (Goodenough, 1961).

5. Cultural Ecology

The Cultural Ecology theory considers how environmental forces influence humans and how human activities affect the biosphere and the Earth itself (Kottak,, 2009). The study of the environment’s effects on humans was especially prevalent in the 1950s and 1970s when Julian Steward founded the anthropological theory of Cultural Ecology. Steward (1955) defined Cultural Ecology in his book, The Theory of Cultural Change, as “a heuristic device for understanding the effect of environment upon culture” (Steward, 1955).

6. Development of a notion of culture

Nevertheless the development of a notion of culture has from the beginning been driven hard from behind by the intellectual struggle against attempts to explain human behaviour and human variety using purely natural scientific means. It is therefore impossible to understand the concept ‘culture’ clearly without reference to its opposing concept, ‘nature’. In a wider perspective this struggle is but a fragment of the greater conflict over human nature which has been so pervasive a feature of intellectual life in the North Atlantic societies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For as the assurance of the natural sciences grew, and as more of the living world fell under their confident surveillance, so a conception of nature began to grow that was to be subject to an increasingly authoritative style of enquiry, which we know today as biology. The burning question then became: to what extent do humans fall into nature and therefore under the sovereignty of biological explanation?

For some – and this is as true today as it was in the last century – the sway of such explanation was to be total. For others in sociology and related disciplines, however, humans and human society participate in a different order of existence altogether.

In the province of intellectual endeavour that became anthropology, the province concerned with human diversity, the struggle for a distinct science of humanity was led by Franz Boas (1858-1942) in the United States. To Boas we owe the creation of both the cultural anthropological attitude and the very profession of cultural anthropology itself. When he began work in the 1880s, Boas found in place a theory hardly fifty years old, but already very elaborate, which purported to explain the different varieties of people, their customs, and their apparently different mental capacities by reference to race. The race theory was firmly anchored in the new science of biology by evolutionary ideas which suggested that some races were more primitive than others, and therefore more animal like, or ‘theromorphic’, in bodily form, mental ability, and moral development. The theory measured each race against the supposedly most advanced, the Northern Europeans.

Boas broke the evidently seamless simplicity of this theory. He showed that bodily form is not linked to language or to any of the matters we associate with culture: attitudes and values, customs, modes of livelihood and forms of social organization. He argued that there is no reason to think that other ‘races’ (or, more accurately, other ways of life) are less moral or less intelligent than Northern Europeans, and so there is no single standard for evaluation. Moreover by his own strenuous example he showed that different cultures could, and should, be the object of intensive field research which would reveal forms and patterns in human life that were hitherto unsuspected. These patterns are so various, he argued, that they could not have arisen from a uniform process of social or cultural evolution but must rather be the fruit of complex local historical causes.

These ideas were set out in Boas’s ‘The Mind of Primitive Man’ in 1911, but they were elaborated in the next generation by Boas’s large and brilliant group of students, which included Edward Sapir, Alfred Kroeber, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict, and by their students in turn. On this view, human culture is marked by its extreme plasticity, such that human beings, possessing everywhere much the same biological heritage, are nevertheless able to sustain kaleidoscopically differing sets of values, institutions and behaviours in different cultures. Yet if culture seems to this extent arbitrary in its variety, its possession is central to the human constitution, for without culture – without some learned collection of language and habits of thought and action – human beings could most literally not live. These ideas were well in place by the publication of Benedict’s Patterns of Culture in 1934. To achieve Leslie White’s just so story of 1958 only a slight extra stress was needed, to the effect that humans are ‘symboling’ and classifying creatures, creatures who possess meaning.

These ideas were hugely successful. They became the pons asinorum, the bridge separating those who understand anthropology from those who do not, and they serve even today as the entry to what grew into a vast professional academic discipline in the United States.

7. Culture and Nature

The Boasian doctrine expanded and changed as well. Along one line of development nature/ culture became, for anthropologists who now studied culture alone, an unexamined or even dogmatic presupposition, an unquestioned feature of reality. Hence the distinction came to be applied just like any such general and governing idea, as a conceptual Swiss Army knife, useful for many purposes beyond its designers’ plans. The French anthropologist Levi Strauss is perhaps the most influential representative of this turn. He argued that the nature/culture divide is not just an anthropologist’s concept, but is to be found among all societies in some form as a cognitive device for understanding the world. Indeed he went further, suggesting that it is the very making of a distinction between nature and culture that distinguishes humans from animals. Few have been willing to follow him around so many corners (and he later scaled down his claims about the universality of the distinction), but his example has given warrant to the use of nature versus culture as an interpretive device throughout anthropology. Some writers, for example, have suggested that the divide falls between men and women, such that women, or perhaps the processes of child birth, are natural, whereas men, or the ritual and political processes they control, are cultural (for a critical review see MacCormack and Strathern, 1980).

The nature/culture divide is often used to great and illuminating effect, but it is worth remembering that the very concept is a product of, and is used by, only a small segment of the societies of the North Atlantic Rim in the twentieth century, and so may not enjoy the universal explanatory penetration that is sometimes claimed for it.

One of the other alternatives was to accept a notion of culture, but to turn back to scientific styles of explanation to give an account of it. The rise to prominence of the biological field of ecology after World War II stimulated some anthropologists to look for a new material logic underpinning cultural forms. The most famous and least persuasive, example is Marvin Harris’s attempt to explain the worship of cattle in India by reference to the usefulness of cowdung to Indian farmers. A more plausible example is Roy Rappaport’s painstaking attempt to explain the religion of Papua New Guinea people by their ecology and mode of livelihood. The force of such arguments often lies not so much in themselves as in their demonstration of weaknesses in the Boasian inheritance, which often glosses over complexities in social and material life that are not amenable to traditional cultural explanation.

In any case the vigour and anger of the replies to such arguments reveal how fervently many anthropologists cling to the autonomy of culture. Indeed, the temperature of the continuing conflict between the parties of biological and cultural determinism remains high. This conflict has ranged in the twentieth century across race, sexuality, gender, aggression, intelligence, nutrition and many more issues besides. It may seem merely antiquarian to stress the importance of Boas – until we realize that the research project on adolescent sexuality in Samoa proposed by him for Margaret Mead, a project which then seemed to demonstrate decisively the force of cultural over biological explanation, was challenged fiercely in the 1980s in the name of new forms of biological explanation. On the one hand, the notion of nature/culture has worked its way into conceptual vocabularies across the learned disciplines of the North Atlantic societies, and into the thought of psychologists, “ethologists, and even evolutionary biologists.

Even British social anthropology, which for so long resisted the concept of culture, has silently accepted its importance. Yet on the other hand the disciplinary disputes continue because the biological sciences have very different schemes of training, and very different aspirations, than the cultural disciplines. And if anthropologists have grown in number and confidence, so have biologists: the biologists’ nineteenth century claim for decisive authority has only been magnified by a growth in the professionalization and the accomplishments, and a fabulous growth in the authority and the funding, of biological sciences in the twentieth. In the mutual misunderstanding of the two parties it is often difficult to judge who are the more ignorant of the other and the more arrogant.

8. Synthesis of Culture and Nature

Yet the late twentieth century has seen the beginning of an extraordinary cooperative effort, by behavioural biologists, psychologists and anthropologists, not so much to reconcile the disciplines as to channel their conflicting energies into a greater project. Suppose, for a moment, that we took the two parties each to have revealed a broken fragment of the truth. Humans do vary greatly in their cultural endowments and those endowments bear heavily on their behaviour; yet humans, like other animals, came into being through forces best described as Darwinian. It follows then that humans evolved to have culture, so to speak: our big brains with their ability to manipulate symbols, along with our abilities to use our respiratory tracts for speech, comprise the Darwinian heritage that makes us the culture bearing animal par excellence. This much might be admitted by even a very reductionist biologist or a very doctrinaire cultural anthropologist. What is only now coming to light, however, is a subtler picture, which shows that we have evolved not in the first instance as culture bearing animals, but as social animals. Studies of childhood cognitive and emotional development, and comparative studies of other primates, show that beneath and around the stuff of culture there stands a scaffolding of social abilities and distinctly social intelligence.

We can learn culture because we come richly equipped, even as the smallest infant, to enter into conscious and responsive social relations with our fellows. We become culturally knowledgeable because we first become socially knowledgeable, able to grasp and react to the moods and intentions of those around us in a way recognizably akin to, but a good deal more powerful than, that of our primate cousins. And because this scaffolding intelligence is both relatively powerful and flexible — because, in other words, it is a creative and imaginative intelligence — we can begin to see how humans have, quite naturally, been so productive of a rich panoply of differing cultures across the world.

9. Summary

In the twenty-first century, the relationship between the concepts of nature and culture has undergone significant changes, or even questionings or reversals in value, which are fairly representative of the general state of contemporary thinking.
Culture is a human institution, and as such it reflects the exercise of will, or at least, a set of intended meanings.
Culture is a world where rules and values operate.
Nature presents itself as a reality characterised by permanence, stability, regularity.
Today, human activities are having huge impacts on the very environment on which we depend, ultimately threatening our own existence.
Anthropology, including cultural ecology, differs from other fields in that it studies all humans, everywhere, from the earliest times (millions of years ago) to today and from the Arctic to the Antarctic.
Human ecology is the study of the interactions of humans with their environments
“Human ecology” actually expresses a broad ambition to understand human behavior.
At the foundation of cultural anthropology lies the notion of a great fault line sundering the world of human culture from the rest of the living world.
Culture is the core concept in anthropology.
Culture is derived from the Latin words Coletre (to cultivate and instruct) and Cultus (cultivation and training).
The Cultural Ecology theory considers how environmental forces influence humans and how human activities affect the biosphere and the earth itself.
Nevertheless the development of a notion of culture has from the beginning been driven hard from behind by the intellectual struggle against attempts to explain human behaviour and human variety using purely natural scientific means.
The French anthropologist Levi Strauss is perhaps the most influential representative of culture and nature turn.
The nature/culture divide is often used to great and illuminating effect,
Even British social anthropology, which for so long resisted the concept of culture, has silently accepted its importance.
We can learn culture because we come richly equipped, even as the smallest infant, to enter into conscious and responsive social relations with our fellows.

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References

Anderson, E. N. (1996). Ecologies of the Heart. Emotion, Belief, and the Environment, Oxford University Press, UK
Barnard, Alan, and Jonathan Spencer, eds. Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology. Rev. ed. Routledge World Reference. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Berkes, F. 1999 Sacred ecology: traditional ecological knowledge and resource management. Taylor and Francis.
Boas F. 1911, The Mind of primitive Man, The j of Americ Folklore. 1-11
Carole McGranahan, Lecture, ANTH 2010 Frontiers of Cultural Anthropology, 20 September 2010.
Diamond J. 2005. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail. New York: Viking Goodwenough, W.H., 1961, On cultural evolution. Daedalus, 90, 521-28.
Herskovits, M. J. 1955 Cultural anthropology. New York, Alfred A. Knopf.
Hames R. 2007. Game conservation or efficient hunting. In Capturing the Commons: Anthropological Approaches to Resource Management, ed. B Mccay, J Acheson, pp. 192–207. Tucson: Univ. Ariz. Press
Haenn, Nora, and Richard R. Wilk, eds. The Environment in Anthropology: A Reader in Ecology, Culture, and Sustainable Living. New York: New York University Press, 2006.
Holt F. 2005. The catch-22 of conservation: indigenous peoples, biologists, and cultural change. Hum. Ecol. 33:199–215
Joan Leopold, Culture in Comparative and Evolutionary Perspective: E. B. Tylor and the Making of Primitive Culture (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1980).
Kottak, Conrad Phillip, Cultural Anthropology: Appreciating Cultural Diversity. 14th edition. New York: McGraw Hill, 2009, p. 373.
Kluckhohn, C., & Kelly, W.H. (1945). The concept of culture. In R. Linton (Ed.). The Science of Man in the World Culture. New York. (pp. 78-105).
Krech S. 1999. The Ecological Indian: Myth and History. New York: Norton
Kroeber, A. L. 1948 Anthropology : race, language, culture, psychology, prehistory 1948
Kroeber, A L and Clyde , Kluckhohn (Eds), 1952.culture: A crotical review of concepts and definition. Harvard university, 47
Lantz, T. C. (2001). Population Ecology and Ethnobotany of Devil_s Club (Oplopanax horridus (Sm.) Torr. and A. Gray. ex. Miq.). MS thesis, Department of Biology, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC
MacCormack Carol P., Marilyn Strathern 1980. Nature, Culture and Gender, Cambridge University Press.
Porter, P. W. “Ecology, Cultural.” In International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Vol. 5. Edited by Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes, 4035–4041. Amsterdam and New York: Elsevier, 2001.
Redman, C. L. (1999). Human Impact on Ancient Environments, University of Arizona, Tucson
Rappaport, Roy A. 1968. Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale Universty Press.
Redford K.H and J.A. Mansour, 1996. Traditional people and biodiversity Conservation in large tropic landscape, America Verde Press, Virgiinia
Sponsel E. 2001. Anthropological applications of optimal foraging theory: a critical review. Curr. Anthropol. 24:625–51
Srivastava. A R N, 2013, Essential of Cultural Anthropology, PHI Learning Private Limited
Steward, Julian. 1955. “The Concept and Method of Cultural Ecology,” in Theory of Culture
Change, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 30-42.
Steward Julian H. 1955 Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution.” PP 39, 40 The University of Illinois Press. Web. 15 Oct. 2010.
Tylor, E,. 1871, Handout in class: HCW Tylor’s definition of culture Session 2
White, Leslie A. 1959. Energy and Tools. In Readings for a History of Anthropological Theory 3rd. Paul A. Erickson and Liam D. Murphy, eds. Pp. 293-310. Toronto, Ontario: University of Toronto Press, Inc.

Suggested Readings

Dove, Michael R., and Carol Carpenter, eds. Environmental Anthropology: A Historical Reader. Blackwell Anthologies in Social and Cultural Anthropology 10. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008.
Erickson, Paul A. and Liam D. Murphy. 2008. A History of Anthropological Theory ﴾Third Edition﴿. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. “Julian Steward”
Gregory, Derek, Ronald J. Johnston, Geraldine Pratt, Michael Watts, and Sarah Whatmore, eds. The Dictionary of Human Geography. 5th ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2009.
Harris , Marvin. The Cultural Ecology of India’s Sacred Cattle. PP 51. Chicago: : The University of Chicago Press, 1966. 51, 54+55, 66. Lanham and New York: Alta Mira Press.
“Julian Steward” and “Marvin Harris” Lanham and New York: Alta Mira Press. “Julian Steward” and “Marvin Harris”
Mathewson, Kent. “Cultural Ecology.” In Encyclopedia of Human Geography. Edited by Barney Warf, 69–70. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2006.
Marquette, Catherine. “Cultural Ecology”. http://www.indiana.edu/~wanthro/eco. htm#themes Miller, Julia R., Richard M. Lerner, Lawrence B. Schiamberg, and Pamela M. Anderson, eds.
The Encyclopedia of Human Ecology. 2 vols. Santa Barbara, CA: ABCCLIO, 2003.
McGee, R. Jon and Richard L. Warms. 2004[1996]. Anthropological Theory: An Introductory History ﴾Third Edition﴿. New York: McGraw Hill. “Cultural Ecology”
Moore, Jerry. 2009. Visions of Culture: An Introduction to Anthropological Theories and Theorists ﴾Third Edition﴿.
Rappaport, Roy A. 1968. Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale Universty Press.
Srivastava. A R N, 2013, Essential of Cultural Anthropology, PHI Learning Private Limited Steward, Julian. 1955. “The Concept and Method of Cultural Ecology,” in Theory of Culture Change, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 30-42.
Sutton, Mark Q., and E. N. Anderson. Introduction to Cultural Ecology. 2d ed. Lanham, MD: AltaMira, 2010.
White, Leslie A. 1959. Energy and Tools. In Readings for a History of Anthropological Theory 3rd. Paul A. Erickson and Liam D. Murphy, eds. Pp. 293-310. Toronto, Ontario: University of Toronto Press, Inc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_ecology, accessed.
http://kekexili.typepad.com/life_on_the_tibetan_plate/2006/10/yaks.html,
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http://www.indiana.edu/~wanthro/eco.

Glossary

Human Ecology:

Human ecology is the study of the interactions of humans with their environments, or the study of the distribution and abundance of humans. This definition is based directly on conventional definitions of biological ecology. Ecology is usually defined as the study of interactions of organisms with their environments1 and each other. More pointedly, it can be defined as the study of the distribution and abundance of organisms. This definition is deceptive. It implies much more than it says explicitly because virtually everything that humans are or do (and the same goes for any species) affects their distribution and abundance. Thus, using the term “human ecology” actually expresses a broad ambition to understand human behavior.

Nature and culture:

At the foundation of cultural anthropology lies the notion of a great fault line sundering the world of human culture from the rest of the living world. On this view, part of our human constitution falls on one side of the line, the side explicable by biological and allied sciences. On that side we resemble other animals. But on the other side, dominated by our capacity for learning, language and the use of symbols, we reach beyond the ken of biology and attain our essential, unique and, so to speak, superanimal character. In his presidential address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1958, Leslie White captured this doctrine in a memorable myth.

Concept of Culture:

That complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as member of society (Tylor, 1871)

All the historically created design for living, explicit and implicit, rational, irrational and non-rational, which exist at any given time as potential guides for the behaviour of men (Kluckhohn and Kelly, 1945).

The mass of learned and transmitted motor reaction, habits, technique and ideas and valued the behaviourthery induced (Kroeber, 1948)

The man made part of the environment (Herskovits, 1955)

Culture consists of “standards for deciding what is, what can be, how one can feel about it, what to do about it and how to go about doing it.” (Goodenough, 1961)

Cultural Ecology:

The Cultural Ecology theory considers how environmental forces influence humans and how human activities affect the biosphere and the Earth itself (Kottak,, 2009). The study of the environment’s effects on humans was especially prevalent in the 1950s1970s when Julian Steward founded the anthropological theory of Cultural Ecology. Steward defined Cultural Ecology in his 1955 book, The Theory of Cultural Change, as “a heuristic device for understanding the effect of environment upon culture” (Steward, 1955).