ECOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY: HISTORY AND OVERVIEW

What? (theory)

What is the place of humans in nature?
What is the relationship between nature and culture?

Cultural ecology focus - How does the subsistence economy influence other aspects of culture through the interplay of the human population and the ecosystems in their habitat?

Culture - alternative system of adapting humans to each other, their ecosystems, and the supernatural, which is socially learned, patterned, and shared by an interacting group of people.

Schools of thought to 1960s
1. thesis - environmental determinism (anthropogeography)
2. antithesis - environmental possibilism (Franz Boas)
3. synthesis - cultural ecology (Julian Steward)

Culture & environment - isolated, pristine, homogeneous, static (until 1990s)

Natural environment - geographical (landscape) to ecological (ecosystem) perspective by 1960s

Other factors - population, nutrition, health, hazards, human environmental impact, politics

When? (historic period and trends)

1. Roots - ancient, perennial, and universal questions
2. Formative - 1930-1950s (Steward)
3. Biologization - 1960s-70s (Rappaport)
4. Diversification - 1980s-90s (historical, political, spiritual)

Where? (geographic foci)

Research - USA (initially SW and W) 1930s, by 1960s expanded into Amazon, New Guinea, SE Asia, Africa

Training - first Berkeley (pre-WWI), then Columbia (1950s-60s), later proliferation of centers (especially 1980s)

Who? (pioneer contributors)

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834)- population, limits
Franz Boas (1858-1942) - possibilism
Julian Steward (1902-1972) - cultural ecology
Andrew Vayda (19 - ) - method of progressive contextualization
Roy Rappaport (1926-1997) - natural functions of supernatural
John Bennett (1915- ) - the ecological transition
Fredrik Barth (1928- ) - ethnic groups, competition, niche differentiation
Marvin Harris (1929-2001) - cultural materialism as research strategy
Harold Conklin (1926- ) - ethnoecology (mentalistic approach)

How? (methods)

Standard ethnographic field methods
Subsistence (food), technology (tools), labor (social organization of)
Ecosystem analysis?

Why? (goals)

Basic research to explain extra-cultural (environmental) causes of aspects of culture (core)

Cultural evolutionism - "primitive" (foragers, herders, farmers)

So what? (contributions)

Basic - recurrent elemental questions, culture as key to human adaptability, eco-logic or environmental rationale to explain culture

Applied - environmental anthropology (job market shift, environmental crisis)

But what about? (limitations)

functionalism - confuse function with origin
neglected -
maladaptation
decision-making process by individual actors
human environmental impact and feedback
obsession with energetics (caloric input/output analysis)

Conclusions

continuities as well as discontinuities in history of EA
EA well-established
shift in emphasis to applied
proliferation of approaches
no synthesis in sight