Cultural Ecology

Cultural ecology is a subfield of geography that is shared with anthropology and other allied fields. It positions itself in the center of the humanenvironment or “nature and society” tradition in geography (which itself is considered to be the core and uniqueness of geography) and concerns itself with the way in which humans are integral components of the environment and “ecology” of a particular place. It has long focused on the historical context of human-environmental relations, both the human and the natural history of place and how humans have adapted to nature, as well as how humans have modified nature for their [Page 632]needs. Cultural ecology focuses on process rather than material culture. Key elements of the subfield are a focus on marginalized and/or vulnerable peoples (both in the developing periphery and more recently in the developed core), a concern with the impacts of economic development on local livelihoods, a focus on threatened landscapes as well as (agro)biodiversity conservation, an interest in local knowledge, and a focus on rural and agrarian systems, although recently, urban space has received significant attention.

Cultural ecology's research approach has always focused on intensive empirical fieldwork, often long-term and place based. Research questions are field based and use theory to inform, but they are not theory driven. Though originally focused on deep ethnographic fieldwork, often combined with historical analysis, cultural ecology has consistently used mixed methods, ranging from an incorporation of quantitative analysis (e.g., survey research, including approaches from microeconomics) to participatory methods (e.g., mapping, transect walks, seasonal calendars) and research methods from the physical sciences (e.g., soil surveys, plant measurements and surveys). More recently, cultural ecology has increasingly used discourse analysis and other tools from critical theory, as well as geospatial technologies (e.g., the analysis of remotely sensed images, use of global positioning systems [GPS] as a tracking tool, and use of geographic information systems to incorporate information from different sources and scales), in its methods suite. The use of the latter technologies has generally reduced field time for practitioners, but it has opened up the ability to scale up from what had been a focus on local-level studies.