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The anthropological field of cultural ecology asserts that societies develop on paths related to their environmental circumstances: culture is often a mode of adaptation. Since the mid-twentieth century when it emerged, cultural ecology has developed varying foci and assumed several different varieties. Whether nature influences culture, or culture effects the environment, is a debatable topic among cultural anthropologists.
Cultural ecology in a wide sense denotes a concern with the relationship between human culture and the natural environment, and in a narrow sense a particular perspective on this relationship that was first developed by anthropologists such as Julian Steward (1902–1972) and Leslie White (1900–1975) in the late 1940s and the 1950s. Steward and White were both critical of the historical particularism that dominated American anthropology in the early decades of the twentieth century through the influence of Franz Boas (1858–1942), Alfred Kroeber (1876–1960), and their students, who rejected any attempt to explain cultural phenomena by reference to noncultural factors such as evolution or environment. Although the differences between Steward and White were considerable, they converged in the ambition to revive an evolutionist and comparative perspective on culture, and in seeking explanations of cultural forms in technological and environmental factors. Both had a materialist orientation, influenced by Marxism, and tended to regard the social and ideational aspects of culture as accommodations to its technoenvironmental aspects.
Steward emphasized what he called the culture core, that is, those features of a society most closely associated with subsistence, as an adaptation to specific environmental conditions. He then classified societies with similar cultural cores into categories that he called culture types. Finally, he sorted these culture types into a series of stages based on their complexity or level of sociocultural integration, which later provided the foundation for his student Elman Service’s (1915–1996) influential evolutionary sequence: bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states. Steward offered a theory of multilinear evolution, distinct from nineteenth-century unilinear evolutionism. By this he meant that societies could develop along different paths depending on their environmental circumstances.
White also argued for an evolutionary perspective on culture as a mode of adaptation, but focused on technological advances in the harnessing of energy as the standard by which to measure evolutionary progress. Whereas Steward’s evolutionism was specific and relativistic, White’s was thus general and universalistic.
Steward’s and White’s cultural ecologies prepared the ground for the emergence, in the 1960s and 1970s, of an ecological anthropology influenced by cybernetics, general systems theory, and the rapidly developing science of ecology. Much of the research conducted under this label has been concerned with the relation between local populations and their natural habitats, interpreted in terms of human adaptation to an ecological niche and the maintenance of sustainable energy flows in local ecosystems. Most faithful to the Marxist roots was Marvin Harris’s (1927–2001) cultural materialism, a perspective that viewed seemingly arbitrary cultural phenomena (e.g., the sacredness of India’s cattle) as reflections of an underlying material rationality (in this case, the productive importance of cattle in India), thus representing an extreme version of cultural ecology’s ambition to explain culture by reference to nature. A more sophisticated version was Roy Rappaport’s (1926–1997) account of ritual pig slaughter in highland New Guinea as a cybernetic feedback mechanism that maintained ecological equilibrium and cultural stability. In synthesizing influences from materialist cultural ecology, on one hand, and the cybernetics and communication theory informing Gregory Bateson’s (1904–1980) ecology of mind, on the other, Rappaport pioneered a more holistic ecological anthropology that sought to address both material and ideational aspects of human–environmental relations. Another school of ecological anthropology, represented by neoevolutionists such as Morton Fried (1923–1986), Elman Service, and Kent Flannery (b. 1934), maintained a focus on tracing long-term processes of sociocultural development to explain the origins of increasing social complexity.
Critiques
A number of criticisms have been directed at these various versions of cultural ecology, the most general of which are their inclination toward environmental determinism and their neofunctionalist assumptions of adaptation. It has often been observed that to demonstrate the ecological consequences of a cultural institution is not to explain its existence. Marxist critics also point out that an emphasis on the ecological functions of culture neglects the crucial role of conflict, power, and contradiction in sociocultural processes. White’s Marxist-inspired technological optimism, on the other hand, is difficult to reconcile with world developments since the 1950s. His law of cultural evolution, which ambiguously refers to both the amount of energy harnessed per capita and the efficiency of energy use, did not reckon with the possibility that quantity and efficiency (what his students Marshall Sahlins and Elman Service later distinguished as thermodynamic achievement versus thermodynamic efficiency) may in fact be inversely related in world history. The simpler and less energy-intensive a society is, the more efficient its energy use is likely to be. Nor did White consider the possibility that the expanded levels of thermodynamic achievement (technological development) that he visualized as the foundation of an egalitarian future world might be dependent on an unequal exchange of energy and other resources in global society. In their inclination to focus on local populations and ecosystems, and on technology as a local phenomenon, cultural ecology and subsequent proponents of ecological anthropology have generally underestimated the role of global or even regional systems and processes in shaping local economy and culture. The recently expanding field of political ecology, however, is a promising antidote to such parochialism and political naivety. In addition to exploring applied environmental issues such as sustainable development, environmental justice, ecological economics, and the tragedy of the commons (i.e., the overuse of common property resources by people pursuing their individual interests), political ecology has generated new theoretical frameworks for understanding how environmental issues, power, and inequality are intermeshed.
In recent years, the label environmental anthropology has been used in a general sense for anthropological studies of human–environmental relations, including those whose concerns transcend the questions traditionally asked by cultural ecology and ecological anthropology. This more inclusive label should arguably be extended to the ethnoecology pioneered in the 1950s by the cognitive anthropologist Harold Conklin (b. 1926). A subfield of ethnoscience, this method uses linguistic analysis of native (emic) categories to map a group’s own view or knowledge of their natural environment.
Environmental anthropology would also include the symbolic ecology launched in the 1990s by Philippe Descola (b. 1949), building on the structuralist perspectives of Claude Levi-Strauss (1908– 2009). Apparently sharing Levi-Strauss’s position that nature and culture are universal cognitive categories, Descola has redefined animism and totemism as mirror images of each other, metaphorically transferring meanings from society to nature and from nature to society, respectively. Symbolic ecology shares with ethnoecology a focus on the cultural construction of the environment, rather than on how the environment shapes culture. Finally, also in the 1990s, Tim Ingold (b. 1948) has developed an approach to human– environmental relations, inspired by, for example, phenomenology, ecological psychology, and Gregory Bateson, that he calls relational-ecological-developmental. Ingold rejects the universality of the distinction between nature and culture by showing that such categories are generally alien to hunter-gatherers. He also rejects the view that knowledge of the environment is either a representation or a construction of reality, in favor of Bateson’s view that knowledge is a relation that shapes both the knower and the known, both subject and object. Ingold challenges all notions of cultural or biological inheritance, arguing instead that humans are constituted (as indissolubly persons and organisms) through practical enskilment and engagement in specific environments. As for Bateson and Rappaport, the thrust of this effort is to transcend the conventional dualism in Western thought that separates material and ideational aspects of humanenvironmental relations.
Bibliography:
- Bateson, G. (1973). Steps to an ecology of mind. Frogmore, U.K.: Paladin.
- Crumley, C. (Ed.). (2001). New directions in anthropology and environment. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira.
- Descola, P., & Palsson, G. (Eds.). (1996). Nature and society: Anthropological perspectives. London: Routledge.
- Ellen, R. (1982). Environment, subsistence, and system: The ecology of small-scale social formations. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
- Harris, M. (1979). Cultural materialism: The struggle for a science of culture. New York: Vintage.
- Ingold, T. (2000). The perception of the environment: Essays in livelihood, dwelling, and skill. London: Routledge.
- McGee, R. J., & Warms, R. L. (Eds.). (1996). Anthropological theory: An introductory history. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield.
- Rappaport, R. A. (1968). Pigs for the ancestors: Ritual in the ecology of a New Guinea people. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
- Sahlins, M. D., & Service, E. R. (Eds.). (1960). Evolution and culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
- Steward, J. (1977). Evolution and ecology: Essays on social transformation by Julian H. Steward. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
- Vayda, A. P. (Ed.). (1969). Environment and cultural behavior: Ecological studies in cultural anthropology. New York: Natural History Press.
- White, L. A. (1959). The evolution of culture: The development of civilization to the fall of Rome. New York: McGraw-Hill.
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