Cultural Ecology

The Roots of Cultural Ecology

In On the Spirit of Laws (1748), Montesquieu made some effort to explain why societies differed from one another and suggested that variables such as soils, climate, and the environment were among the many influential factors informing the constitution of a people. Ideas about the relationship between peoples' cultures and their mode of life, or how people interact with nature in procuring their livelihood, again arose in the nineteenth century. The theories presented to explain cultural differences were evolutionary and placed groups of people in categories based, in part, on the effectiveness of their technologies in extracting resources from the environment.

The linear evolutionary scheme most representative of the period was that of the ethnologist Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881). Morgan argued for what he called “ethical periods” through which all human societies passed in succession. These periods were the three stages of savagery (lower, middle, and upper), the three stages of barbarism (lower, middle, and upper), and the two stages of civilization (low and high). Morgan noted in Ancient Society that “improvement in subsistence … must have favored the general advancement of the family. It led to localization, to the use of additional arts, to an improvement of house architecture, and to a more intelligent life”” (Morgan 1877/1978, p. 469).

Although the evolutionary doctrine outlined by Morgan has been thoroughly discredited in anthropology, the idea that the material conditions of life are primary still informs some approaches in anthropology, particularly cultural ecology. After the linear evolutionary theories were abandoned, two views about the role of the environment in human societies were distinguished in anthropology and geography through the first half of the twentieth century. These views were labeled environmental determinism (or environmentalism) and environmental possibilism.