Cultural Ecology

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.