Adaptation, Cultural

History of the Idea

The origin of the concept of cultural adaptation and dissemination in contemporary anthropological literature is connected with the concept of cultural [Page 18]systems that, to a certain extent, fit the living conditions of their transmitters. The theoretical background of such an approach was created at the end of the 19th century in the American school of possibilism led by Franz Boas. Possibilists regarded nature as a basis from which a great number of different versions of cultural communities could arise and develop. Bronislaw Malinowski, the founder of the functional approach to the interpretation of culture, understood culture as the specific answer to the challenges of nature. Representatives of the New York school of culture studies, led by Ashley Montagu, regarded culture as an adaptive dimension of human society.

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Western European anthropologists in the 1950s and 1960s—in line with a reconsideration of the fundamental basis of theoretical reflection in the humanities—took the next step. Julian Steward put forward the idea that we should regard the natural environment as one of many factors of cultural change. About the same time, Leslie White proposed the view that human culture was an extrasomatic system of adaptation with three basic directions:technological, social, and ideological.

With this theoretical background, a social direction was formed for investigations in the fields of cultural and social anthropology, cultural geography, ecology, psychology, and archaeology. Its proponents see their primary task as the detection of the ecological function of culture. In the mid-1990s, we could distinguish two basic approaches within this framework: the phenomenological approach, which paid special attention to the active character of primitive populations' engagement with their environments, and the cognitive approach, which tried to classify mental representations of the environment. As a result, western European and American science now thinks of cultural systems and societies as autonomous but mutually interdependent units in which complicated mechanisms of adaptation to living conditions are elaborated and realized. In this process, cultural systems act as determinants of social trajectory, and society is an indispensable component of this trajectory.

In Marxist Soviet and post-Soviet science, the analysis of natural geographic factors in the genesis of culture and detection of culture's ecological function is connected with the ethnographic direction of interpreting culture from an actional approach. The movement's most prominent founder and promoter,E. Markaryan, regarded culture as a system of extrabiological mechanisms, through which the whole cycle of human activity is realized, primarily in all of its specific manifestations:stimulation, programming, regulation, fulfillment, maintenance, and reproduction. The adaptive effect here could be achieved as a result of the plurality of a culture system's potentialities. At the same time, the majority of actionalism's proponents don't deny that the specific mode of adaptation to living conditions is elaborated in human society. There, the cultural system no longer acts as an adaptive unit but only as a universal mechanism of adaptation.

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