Cultural Ecology Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Cultural ecology is the study of how or cultural groups interact with their biophysical environment. With deep roots in the disciplines of geography and anthropology, cultural ecology is an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the origins and development of human-environmental relations in places where people depend on their immediate environment for sustenance and symbolic meaning. The cultural ecology approach argues that human-environmental relations are tied dynamically to demography, technology, food production, and social organization.

Cultural ecology is closely associated with the work of Julian Steward. When Steward first coined the phrase in 1955, he sought to understand “the effect of environment upon culture,” but later clarified his ideas by saying that cultural ecology “is the study of the processes by which a society adapts to its environment.” By stressing human-environmental interaction, Steward pursued a compromise between environmental determinism (which he felt over-emphasized the role of the environment in shaping culture) and possibilism (which he felt neglected ecology).

Stewart argued that cultural ecology provided a methodology to study adaptive processes: how certain cultural traits-what he called the cultural core-related to specific (or what he called relevant) features of the natural environment. By examining cultural traits most closely tied to subsistence activities and economic arrangements, and by scrutinizing how they interacted with the relevant environment, Steward was able to show why hunters, pastoralists, or farmers in dissimilar environments and in distinct historical periods shared or did not share cultural traits. Although the scope and intent of cultural ecology has changed, Stewart’s emphasis on adaptive process remains central to the cultural ecology approach.

Scientific revolutions in quantitative and biological sciences pushed cultural ecology in new directions during the 1960s. In his seminal 1968 book Pigs for the Ancestors, anthropologist Roy Rappaport used a cultural ecology approach (also known as ecological anthropology) to study the Maring peoples of Papua New Guinea. By examining human behavior and its functional relationship with the environment, Rappaport showed that belief systems and their associated rituals served as selfregulating mechanisms that kept people below the carrying capacity of their habitat-that is, in balance with their ecosystem. Rappaport’s innovation was to regard the Maring as “a population in the ecological sense” and, thus, amenable to study as part of an ecosystem like any other social mammal. Contemporaneous cybernetic models involving systems, information networks, feedback loops, homeostasis, and perturbation combined with biological analogies such as trophic exchanges, stress, and niche to examine the role of culture in maintaining social harmony in bounded natural ecosystems.

This approach helped solidify the notion of culture as learned behavior transmitted through practice. Work by Rappaport, Marvin Harris, and others at what became known as the Columbia School suggested that many aspects of culture-such as specific religious beliefs that were assumed to be historically contingent-had deeper functional and environmental origins because they kept social groups in balance with one another and their ecosystem. Regardless of its limitations, Rappaport’s brand of cultural ecology had a large impact on the study of human-environmental relations.

Criticism

By the 1970s, Rappaport’s “neofunctional” view of cultural ecology faced severe criticism from all sides. Because neofunctionalists focused on relatively isolated groups already deemed to be adapted, it was difficult to understand the adaptive process itself; behaviors were simply judged to be adaptive since the people studied were considered to be isolated and self-regulating. The argument became circular and teleological. How could we study maladaptive groups, or come to know maladaptive processes? How did people reach their self-regulating condition? Did it make sense to assume people were bounded spatially or isolated culturally and economically? What about differences within the groups? As scholarly concerns shifted to nonisolated groups, Third World development, and peasant studies during the era of the Vietnam War, the cultural ecology approach became less appealing.

Yet even during this period, geographers such as Harold Brookfield, Piers Blaikie, and Karl Butzer as well as anthropologists such as John Bennett, Robert McNetting, Emilio Moran, and many others-kept cultural ecology significant because they sought to explain social and environmental change and the relationship between the two. In the work of these scholars, small and isolated groups were avoided. Instead, they examined larger and more complex societies undergoing demographic, environmental, or social change. Concerns shifted from seeing culture as a regulating black box to a dynamic social and individual force that made decisions by weighing and rejecting alternatives.

Behavior was not viewed as strictly functional, but the outcome of a social process that engaged a larger political economy. Scholarly research concentrated on how people responded to change, how they adjusted their behaviors, how they intensified land and resource use, and adopted or rejected new technologies. Scholars found that an “adaptive dynamic” existed between people, their cultural beliefs, social values, knowledge, forms of social organization, economic opportunities, population growth, and environmental change (which they themselves were partly responsible for). Understanding how people made adjustments in their environmental practices to remain socially viable became the challenge for cultural ecologists.

Over the last decade, cultural ecology has broadened to examine more complex aspects of society nature relations. Greater attention to the geographic notion of scale particularly how local adaptive processes are mediated by regional and global political economies-became an important topic of research. The biophysical environment also received greater attention by cultural ecologists and is viewed as increasingly complex, nonlinear, and less predicable. Many cultural ecologists today deconstruct notions of culture by examining environmental discourse and the origins, circulation, and deployment of local knowledge. Cultural ecologists commonly investigate livelihoods as they relate to peoples’ access to natural resources. They seek to understand the role of customary rights of access to resource commons in traditional resource management, and how state-centered policies affect this relationship. Cultural ecologists no longer consider social groups as homogenous units devoid of class, racial, ethnic or gender differences. Gendered knowledge and differential access to and control over resources, for example, have become important focuses within cultural and related political ecology approaches to society-environment relations. Contemporary cultural ecology also brings its core foci to study biodiversity, environmental knowledge, and conservation policy to enhance innovative forms of nature conservation that promote social justice.

Bibliography:

Thomas J. Bassett and Karl Zimmerer, “Cultural Ecology” In Geography in America at the Dawn of the 21st Century, Gary L. Gaile and Cort J. Willmott, eds., (Oxford University Press, 2003);
Benjamin Orlove, “Ecological Anthropology,” Annual Review of Anthropology (v.9,1980);
Karl W. Butzer, “Cultural Ecology,” In Geography in America, Gary Gaile and Cort J. Willmott, eds., (Merrill Publishing Company, 1989);
Emilio F. Moran, Human Adaptability: An Introduction to Ecological Anthropology (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000);
Roy Rappaport, Pigs of the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People (Yale University Press, 1968);
Julian Steward, Theory of Culture Change (University of Illinois Press, 1955).