Cultural ecology is the study of human adaptations to
social and physical environments. Human adaptation refers to both biological
and cultural processes that enable a population to survive and reproduce within
a given or changing environment. This may be carried out diachronically
(examining entities that existed in different epochs), or synchronically
(examining a present system and its components). The central argument is that
the natural environment, in small scale or subsistence societies dependent in
part upon it, is a major contributor to social organization and other human
institutions.
In the academic realm, when combined with study of political
economy, the study of economies as polities, it becomes political
ecology, another academic subfield. It also helps interrogate historical
events like the Easter Island Syndrome.
Coining the term
Anthropologist Julian
Steward (1902-1972) coined the term, envisioning cultural ecology as a
methodology for understanding how humans adapt to such a wide variety of
environments. In his Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear
Evolution (1955), cultural ecology represents the "ways in which
culture change is induced by adaptation to the environment." A key point
is that any particular human adaptation is in part historically inherited and
involves the technologies, practices, and knowledge that allow people to live
in an environment. This means that while the environment influences the
character of human adaptation, it does not determine it. In this way, Steward
wisely separated the vagaries of the environment from the inner workings of a
culture that occupied a given environment. Viewed over the long term, this
means that environment and culture are on more or less separate evolutionary
tracks and that the ability of one to influence the other is dependent on how
each is structured.
It is this assertion - that the physical and biological
environment affects culture - that has proved controversial, because it implies
an element of environmental determinism over human
actions, which some social scientists find problematic, particularly those
writing from a Marxist perspective. Cultural ecology recognizes that ecological
locale plays a significant role in shaping the cultures of a region.
Steward's method was to:
- document the technologies & methods used to exploit the environment - to get a living from it. s
- look at patterns of human behavior/culture associated with using the environment.
- assess how much these patterns of behavior influenced other aspects of culture (e.g., how, in a drought-prone region, great concern over rainfall patterns meant this became central to everyday life, and led to the development of a religious belief system in which rainfall and water figured very strongly. This belief system may not appear in a society where good rainfall for crops can be taken for granted, or where irrigation was practiced).
Steward's concept of cultural ecology became widespread
among anthropologists and archaeologists of the mid-20th century, though they
would later be critiqued for their environmental determinism. Cultural ecology
was one of the central tenets and driving factors in the development of processual archaeology in the 1960s, as
archaeologists understood cultural change through the framework of technology
and its effects on environmental adaptation.
Cultural ecology in anthropology
Cultural ecology as developed by Steward is a major
subdiscipline of anthropology. It derives from the work of Franz Boas
and has branched out to cover a number of aspects of human society, in
particular the distribution of wealth and power in a society, and how that affects such
behaviour as hoarding
or gifting
(e.g. the tradition of the potlatch on the Northest North American coast).
Cultural ecology as a transdisciplinary project
One recent conception of cultural ecology is as a general
theory that regards ecology as a paradigm not only for the natural and human
sciences, but for cultural studies as well. In his Die Ökologie des
Wissens (The Ecology of Knowledge), Peter Finke explains that this theory
brings together the various cultures of knowledge that have evolved in history,
and that have been separated into more and more specialized disciplines and
subdisciplines in the evolution of modern science (Finke 2005). In this view,
cultural ecology considers the sphere of human culture not as separate from but
as interdependent with and transfused by ecological processes and natural energy
cycles. At the same time, it recognizes the relative independence and
self-reflexive dynamics of cultural processes. As the dependency of culture on
nature, and the ineradicable presence of nature in culture, are gaining
interdisciplinary attention, the difference between cultural evolution and
natural evolution is increasingly acknowledged by cultural ecologists. Rather
than genetic laws, information and communication have become major driving
forces of cultural evolution (see Finke 2005, 2006). Thus, causal deterministic
laws do not apply to culture in a strict sense, but there are nevertheless
productive analogies that can be drawn between ecological and cultural
processes.
Gregory Bateson was the first to draw such analogies in his
project of an Ecology of Mind (Bateson 1973), which was based on general
principles of complex dynamic life processes, e.g. the concept of feedback
loops, which he saw as operating both between the mind and the world and within
the mind itself. Bateson thinks of the mind neither as an autonomous
metaphysical force nor as a mere neurological function of the brain, but as a
"dehierarchized concept of a mutual dependency between the (human)
organism and its (natural) environment, subject and object, culture and
nature", and thus as "a synonym for a cybernetic system of
information circuits that are relevant for the survival of the species."
(Gersdorf/ Mayer 2005: 9).
Finke fuses these ideas with concepts from systems
theory. He describes the various sections and subsystems of society as
'cultural ecosystems' with their own processes of production, consumption, and
reduction of energy (physical as well as psychic energy). This also applies to
the cultural ecosystems of art and of literature, which follow their own
internal forces of selection and self-renewal, but also have an important
function within the cultural system as a whole (see next section).
Cultural ecology in literary studies
The vital interrelatedness between culture and nature has
been a special focus of literary culture from its archaic beginnings in myth,
ritual, and oral story-telling, in legends and fairy tales, in the genres of
pastoral literature, nature poetry. Important texts in this tradition include
the stories of mutual transformations between human and nonhuman life, most
famously collected in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses, which became a highly influential text throughout literary history
and across different cultures. This attention to culture-nature interaction
became especially prominent in the era of romanticism,
but continues to be characteristic of literary stagings of human experience up
to the present. The mutual opening and symbolic reconnection of culture and
nature, mind and body, human and nonhuman life in a holistic and yet radically
pluralistic way seems to be one significant mode in which literature functions
and in which literary knowledge is produced.
From this perspective, literature can itself be described as
the symbolic medium of a particularly powerful form of "cultural
ecology" (Zapf 2002). Literary texts have staged and explored, in ever new
scenarios, the complex feedback relationship of prevailing cultural systems
with the needs and manifestations of human and nonhuman "nature."
From this paradoxical act of creative regression they have derived their
specific power of innovation and cultural self-renewal.
German ecocritic Hubert Zapf argues that literature draws its
cognitive and creative potential from a threefold dynamics in its relationship
to the larger cultural system: as a "cultural-critical
metadiscourse," an "imaginative counterdiscourse," and a
"reintegrative interdiscourse" (Zapf 2001, 2002). It is a
textual form which breaks up ossified social structures and ideologies,
symbolically empowers the marginalized, and reconnects what is culturally
separated. In that way, literature counteracts economic, political or pragmatic
forms of interpreting and instrumentalizing human life, and breaks up
one-dimensional views of the world and the self, opening them up towards their
repressed or excluded other. Literature is thus, on the one hand, a sensorium
for what goes wrong in a society, for the biophobic, life-paralyzing
implications of one-sided forms of consciousness and civilizational uniformity,
and it is, on the other hand, a medium of constant cultural self-renewal, in
which the neglected biophilic energies can find a symbolic space of expression
and of (re-)integration into the larger ecology of cultural discourses. This
approach has been applied and widened in a recent volume of essays by scholars
from over the world (Zapf 2008).
Cultural ecology in geography
In geography, cultural ecology developed in response to the
"landscape morphology" approach of Carl O.
Sauer. Sauer's school was criticized for being unscientific and later for
holding a "reified" or "superorganic" conception of
culture.[2]
Cultural ecology applied ideas from ecology and systems
theory to understand the adaptation of humans to their environment. These
cultural ecologists focused on flows of energy and materials, examining how
beliefs and institutions in a culture regulated its interchanges with the
natural ecology that surrounded it. In this perspective humans were as much a
part of the ecology as any other organism. Important practitioners of this form
of cultural ecology include Karl Butzer and David Stoddard.
The second form of cultural ecology introduced decision
theory from agricultural economics, particularly
inspired by the works of Alexander Chayanov and Ester
Boserup. These cultural ecologists were concerned with how human groups
made decisions about how they use their natural environment. They were
particularly concerned with the question of agricultural
intensification, refining the competing models of Thomas
Malthus and Boserup. Notable cultural ecologists in this second tradition
include Harold Brookfield and Billie Lee Turner II.
Starting in the 1980s, cultural ecology came under criticism
from political ecology. Political ecologists charged
that cultural ecology ignored the connections between the local-scale systems
they studied and the global political
economy. Today few geographers self-identify as cultural ecologists, but
ideas from cultural ecology have been adopted and built on by political
ecology, land change science, and sustainability science.
Conceptual views of culture and ecology
The Human Species
Books about culture and ecology began to emerge in the 1950s
and 1960s. One of the first to be published in the United
Kingdom was The Human Species by a zoologist,
Anthony Barnett. It came out in 1950-subtitled The biology of man but
was about a much narrower subset of topics. It dealt with the cultural bearing
of some outstanding areas of environmental knowledge about health and disease,
food, the sizes and quality of human populations, and the diversity of human
types and their abilities. Barnett's view was that his selected areas of
information "....are all topics on which knowledge is not only desirable,
but for a twentieth-century adult, necessary". He went on to point out
some of the concepts underpinning human ecology towards the social problems
facing his readers in the 1950s as well as the assertion that human nature
cannot change, what this statement could mean, and whether it is true. The
third chapter deals in more detail with some aspects of human genetics.
Then come five chapters on the evolution of man, and the
differences between groups of men (or races)
and between individual men and women today in relation to population growth
(the topic of 'human diversity'). Finally, there is a series of chapters on
various aspects of human populations (the topic of "life and death").
Like other animals man must, in order to survive, overcome the dangers of
starvation and infection; at the same time he must be fertile. Four chapters
therefore deal with food, disease and the growth and decline of human
populations.
Barnett anticipated that his personal scheme might be
criticised on the grounds that it omits an account of those human
characteristics, which distinguish humankind most clearly, and sharply from
other animals. That is to say, the point might be expressed by saying that
human behaviour is ignored; or some might say that human psychology is left
out, or that no account is taken of the human mind. He justified his limited
view, not because little importance was attached to what was left out, but
because the omitted topics were so important that each needed a book of similar
size even for a summary account. In other words, the author was embedded in a
world of academic specialists and therefore somewhat worried about taking a
partial conceptual, and idiosyncratic view of the zoology of Homo sapiens.
The Ecology of Man
Moves to produce prescriptions for adjusting human culture
to ecological realities were also afoot in North America. Paul Sears,
in his 1957 Condon Lecture at the University of Oregon, titled "The Ecology
of Man," he mandated "serious attention to the ecology of man"
and demanded "its skillful application to human affairs." Sears was
one of the few prominent ecologists to successfully write for popular
audiences. Sears documents the mistakes American farmers made in creating
conditions that led to the disastrous Dust Bowl.
This book gave momentum to the soil conservation movement in the United States.
Man's Impact on Nature
During this same time was J.A. Lauwery's Man's Impact on
Nature, which was part of a series on 'Interdependence in Nature' published
in 1969. Both Russel's and Lauwerys' books were about cultural ecology,
although not titled as such. People still had difficulty in escaping from their
labels. Even Beginnings and Blunders, produced in 1970 by the polymath
zoologist Lancelot Hogben, with the subtitle Before
Science Began, clung to anthropology as a traditional reference point. However,
its slant makes it clear that 'cultural ecology' would be a more apt title to
cover his wide-ranging description of how early societies adapted to
environment with tools, technologies and social groupings. In 1973 the
physicist Jacob Bronowski produced The Ascent of Man,
which summarised a magnificent thirteen part BBC television series about all
the ways in which humans have moulded the Earth and its future.
Changing the Face of the Earth
By the 1980s the human ecological-functional view had
prevailed. It had become a conventional way to present scientific concepts in
the ecological perspective of human animals dominating an overpopulated world,
with the practical aim of producing a greener culture. This is exemplified by I. G.
Simmons' book Changing the Face of the Earth, with its telling
subtitle "Culture, Environment History" which was published in 1989.
Simmons was a geographer, and his book was a tribute to the influence of W.L
Thomas' edited collection, Man's role in 'Changing the Face of the Earth
that came out in 1956.
Simmons' book was one of many interdisciplinary
culture/environment publications of the 1970s and 1980s, which triggered a
crisis in geography with regards its subject matter, academic sub-divisions,
and boundaries. This was resolved by officially adopting conceptual frameworks
as an approach to facilitate the organisation of research and teaching that
cuts cross old subject divisions. Cultural ecology is in fact a conceptual
arena that has, over the past six decades allowed sociologists, physicists,
zoologists and geographers to enter common intellectual ground from the
sidelines of their specialist subjects.
Relationship in the 21st Century
In the first decade of the 21st century, there are
publications dealing with the ways in which humans can develop a more
acceptable cultural relationship with the environment. An example is sacred
ecology, a sub-topic of cultural ecology, produced by Fikret Berkes in 1999. It
seeks lessons from traditional ways of life in Northern Canada to shape a new
environmental perception for urban dwellers. This particular conceptualisation
of people and environment comes from various cultural levels of local knowledge
about species and place, resource management systems using local experience,
social institutions with their rules and codes of behaviour, and a world view
through religion, ethics and broadly defined belief systems.
Despite the differences in information concepts, all of the
publications carry the message that culture is a balancing act between the
mindset devoted to the exploitation of natural resources and that, which
conserves them. Perhaps the best model of cultural ecology in this context is,
paradoxically, the mismatch of culture and ecology that have occurred when
Europeans suppressed the age-old native methods of land use and have tried to
settle European farming cultures on soils manifestly incapable of supporting
them. There is a sacred ecology associated with environmental awareness, and
the task of cultural ecology is to inspire urban dwellers to develop a more
acceptable sustainable cultural relationship with the environment that supports
them.
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