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.
History
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 and methods used to exploit the environment to get a living from it.
- 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.
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 Northwest North American coast).
As transdisciplinary project
One 2000s-era 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).
In literary studies
The
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 volumes of
essays by scholars from over the world (ed. Zapf 2008, 2016), as well as
in a recent monograph (Zapf 2016).
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. 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 Stoddart.
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
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 behavior 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.
Ecology
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.
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 summarized a magnificent thirteen part BBC television series
about all the ways in which humans have molded the Earth and its
future.
Changing 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.
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.
Educational framework
