Cultural Ecology

Cultural ecology is an approach within geography and anthropology to the study of people and the interrelationships among cultures, resources, and environments. Cultural ecology and its practitioners hold that similar assemblages of environments and technologies demonstrate functional and causal relationships to concomitant forms of social organization. Therefore, it studies the patterns, practices, and processes whereby cultural groups adapt to their specific habitats or environmental conditions. In turn, cultural ecologists are primarily concerned with specifying and explaining subsistence activities or food production. These patterns and practices are seen as constituting the “culture core” of a given cultural formation. Cultural ecology can be seen as a subdomain within the larger and more diffuse field of human ecology and as a variant of anthropogeography in its nondeterministic expression.

Cultural ecology as a distinct and recognized subfield in geography and anthropology first emerged during the 1950s. Its older roots tap into the perennial concern to understand humans' cultural relationships with their ambient environments. More proximate antecedents can be seen in 19th-century geography's syntheses of human and physical geography, especially where concern for the cultural dimensions of humans' impact on specific environments was registered. Starting in the 1930s, anthropologist Julian Steward can be credited with naming the approach, theorizing its objectives, and providing examples of its practice with his studies of remnant Amerind hunter–gatherers in the American West. Much subsequent work in traditional cultural ecology has concentrated on hunter–gatherer populations and traditional agriculturalists.

Quite simply, the “simpler” or more direct the cultural group's interaction with the “natural” environment, the more tractable and accessible the analysis of adaptative processes (or at least this was the idea). Steward later applied his cultural ecological method to more complex societal formations, both prehistoric and contemporary. His method can be summarized as a tripartite exercise, namely (a) specifying the interrelations between environments and subsistence technologies, (b) studying the resulting behaviors, and (c) determining the effect of these behaviors on other aspects of culture. Collectively, these adaptational changes led to multilinear pathways of cultural evolution. Thus, Steward conceived his theory and method as counter to approaches that posited unilinear stage progression in cultural evolution. Rather than searching for universal principles of causation and uniform evolutionary trajectories as with dogmatic versions of historical materialism (e.g., Marxist) or cultural organicist cyclical models (e.g., Spenglerian), Steward looked for parallels in cultural causalities. The nondeterministic approach of cultural ecology has found widespread acceptance in the study of prehistoric societies.

Although Steward has been widely considered the intellectual author and first practitioner of cultural ecology, his ideas were actually incubated in the context of his graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Steward sought to renew attention to culture– environment interactions and to rehabilitate cultural evolutionary perspectives within a more materialist anthropology. In the wake of the excesses of environmental determinism and unilinear evolutionism, Franz Boas and his followers moved anthropology away from these earlier tendencies. As a student, Steward had close contacts with Carl Sauer and his Berkeley School followers. In turn, much of what both Sauer and Steward proposed in terms of the study of subsistence systems and cultural adaptations was anticipated and articulated by British geographer C. D. Forde. Since Steward's initial 1950s launching, cultural ecology has undergone a number of adaptations to changing academic currents and critical concerns. These shifts and reorientations can be viewed in terms of decadal phases, each with its distinctive theoretical concerns, key practitioners, and prime texts. The 1950s phase, then, can be characterized by the concerns of Steward and others (both archaeologists and cultural anthropologists) to put questions of subsistence at the center of their investigations. For archaeologists, this included looking for comparative regularities in ancient civilizational processes rather than simply charting cultural– historical sequences or specifying civilizational patterns. For cultural anthropologists, it meant directing less attention to questions of kinship and ideational aspects of culture(s) and more to the material workings of cultural reproduction, especially food production and habitat appropriation.

...