Saint Louis University

School of Natural Sciences

Sociology (Socio 2)

15:00 - 16:00 TTHS / S411

CULTURAL ECOLOGY

Madrid, Gabriel

Caguioa, Kamila Z.

Chapap, Jessalyn

Lopez, Monica May G.

Ngateb, Melanie C.

Submitted to: Atty. Arlene B. Aoas

Date of submission: February 02, 2016

The Cultural Ecology Theory considers how environmental forces influence humans and how

human activities affect the biosphere and the Earth itself. This theory can be used to analyze the

distribution of wealth and power in a society, and how that affects behaviors of exchange.

Cultural ecology theory has drawn a great deal of criticism, primarily for its strong emphasis on

environmental determinism. This has been argued to be a potentially dangerous oversimplification of

social and cultural processes. Such critics state that cultural ecology theory tends to ignore the

importance and power of social and individual agency. While some of the critiques lodged against

cultural ecology theory are important to keep in mind and are valid, the value of the theory and its

impact on the social sciences cannot be denied and today can still be used very effectively.

Cultural ecology studies the relationship between a given society and its natural environment as

well as the life-forms and ecosystems that support its life-ways. This may be carried out diachronically

(examining entities that existed in different epochs), or synchronically (examining a present system

and its components).

Cultural Ecology focuses on how cultural beliefs and practices helps human populations adapt to

their environments and live within the means of their ecosystem. It contributes to social organization

and other human institutions. Cultural Ecology views culture as evolutionary, the cultural adaptations

have come as the result of a changing environment.

Also, on the conceptual as well as methodological level, cultural ecology has steadily made an

effort to combine both the ideas and the approaches of the natural and social sciences. In this way,

cultural ecology seeks to explain the social sciences by the means of the natural sciences. It uses the

environmental pressures as explanations for cultural change. It therefore recognizes the ways in which

different societies adapt differently not as a result of intelligence, but as a result of their climate.
 Discussion

The study of the environment’s effects on humans was especially prevalent in the 1950s-1970s

when Julian Steward founded the anthropological theory of Cultural Ecology. Steward defined Cultural

Ecology in his 1955 book, The Theory of Cultural Change, as "a heuristic device for understanding the

effect of environment upon culture.” He was a Boasian by intellectual upbringing, is the "father" of

modern cultural ecology. Julian Steward (1902-1972) was born in Washington, D.C, he attended the

University of California, Berkeley. He also influenced a host of distinguished political and economic

anthropologists, including Morton Fried, Andrew Vayda, Eric Wolf, and Elman Service. Steward's first

research was in archeology, then he moved on to ethnography and worked with the Shoshoni, the

Pueblo, and later the Carrier Indians in British Columbia. Steward also devoted a great deal of energy

to the study of parallel developmental sequences in the evolution of civilizations in the New and Old

Worlds. He termed the cultural features associated with subsistence practices the "cultural

core." Steward viewed his specialist brand of cultural evolutionism as "multilineal."

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.” It is this

assertion that the physical and biological environment affects culture that had 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 ideas of cultural ecology became widespread among anthropologists and archaeologists

of the mid-20th century, though they would later be critiqued for their environmental determinism.

However, Steward looks at the evolution as multi-linear, as opposed to the early anthropological

theories that saw societies as uni-linear and working towards one main goal: civilization. It recognizes

that each environment requires different adaptations and that not every culture is working towards the

same “norm”.
 Leslie White (1900-1975) was an American anthropologist known for his advocacy of theories of

cultural evolution, Neoevolutionism, and culturology. He developed the theory of cultural evolution,

which was ignored by most anthropologists at that time. White’s attempts to restore the evolutionary

topic started in the 1920s, when he was impressed by Morgan’s model and logic of his evolutionary

theory. White decided that whatever problems the theory had, it could not be dismissed. His main

contribution was that he provided scientific insights to the evolution of culture. He created a formula

that measures the degree of cultural development. He was born 19 January 1900 in Salida, Colorado.

His father was an engineer and the family moved often, living in various parts of Kansas and

Louisiana. He was trained in Boasian historical particularism as well. A student of Edward Sapir at the

University of Chicago but found Boasian anthropology intellectually unsatisfying. Influenced by the

writings of Herbert Spencer and Lewis Henry Morgan, White argued that evolutionary development

was just as valid for cultures as it was for biology. He proposed the idea of culturology (his own term)

which is defined as the field of science which studies and interprets the precise order of all things

"culture". With this idea, he proposed a grand, universal law of cultural evolution: culture advances as

the efficiency with which energy is utilized increases. White separates culture into three levels;

technological, sociological, and ideological.

He argued that the technological aspect is the basis of cultural evolution. The technological aspect

is composed of material, mechanical, physical and chemical instruments, as well as the way people

use these techniques.

Rappaport, Roy A. (1926-1997) was responsible for bringing ecology and structural functionalism

together. Rappaport defined and was included in a paradigm called Neofunctionalism. He saw culture

as a function of the ecosystem. The carrying capacity and energy expenditure are central themes in

Rappaport’s studies, conducted in New Guinea. He completed the first systematic study of ritual,

religion, and ecology, and this study is characterized as synchronic and functionalist. The scientific

revolution, functionalism in anthropology, and new ecology are the three main influences upon

Rappaport. Furthermore, like Steward and Harris, he was more interested in the infrastructural

aspects of society, similar to Steward. Rappaport was the first scientist to successfully reconcile

ecological sciences and cybernetics with functionalism in anthropology (Balée 1996). Roy A.

Rappaport was Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan and President of the American

Anthropological Association (1987 - 1989).

He stated “culture imposes on nature as nature imposes on culture”. Within this statement he

challenges the idea that the environment solely influences culture (environmental determinism). His
writings, which span ecology, systems theory, and religion, address the large issues of ritual and

religious logos in human survival and evolution. After helping to conceptualize the field of

anthropological human ecology in the 1960s, Rappaport did fieldwork among the Maring of highland

New Guinea and crafted a truly innovative "systems" ethnography, in what became the classic Pigs for

the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People (1968), which explores the ritual

regulation of environmental relations in their local ecosystems. Rappaport followed up on his analysis

of what religion does by probing through cybernetic studies of the sacred and in essays that link

adaptation, the structure of human communication, and why ritual should order ecosystems and

human life. While conducting his religion research, he also consulted with government agencies on the

notion of human impacts, arguing for a more public and policy-engaged anthropology.

Examples

Cultural ecology is, simply, the study of how humans adapt to social and environmental factors in

order to survive and prosper. There are certain cultures that would have long died out if they hadn’t

adapted to the physical landscape. Those adaption have become synonymous with those cultures and

have very much become engrained as the way of life. That, in short, is the entire concept of cultural

ecology.

Culture happens all over the world, there are thousands upon thousands of cultures, but what is truly

interesting is how we, as a group, adapt, change and meet the needs of our society in order to form

our cultures. Culture ecology touches on all of those very abstract concepts and makes them

concrete. It also interprets cultural practices in terms of their long-term role in helping humans adapt to

their environment.

There are examples of interesting cultural ecology stories all around us right now; it's not limited to

history. For example, mangroves influence the lifestyles of many southeast Asian communities.

Mangroves provide unique housing material for people, support fish populations (and fishing), promote

ecotourism, and help to lessen the impact of flooding for the coastal communities but there are also

challenges for people living in mangrove ecosystems (salty water, flooding, removal of mangroves, the

smell of mangroves, etc.). A cultural ecologist would study how people living near mangroves are

affected by these ecosystems, and how they use and change them.

The potlatch tradition of the Pacific Coast native cultures encourages people to redistribute their

belongings within the community. This tradition increases prestige and social bonds while meeting the

community’s subsistence needs.

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Barrett, R. A. (1989). The Paradoxical Anthropology of Leslie White. Nueva York: Harper & Row

Sutton, M. Q., E. N. Anderson. (2004). Introduction to Cultural Ecology. Walnut Creek: Alta Mira Press.

Kottak, C. P. (n.d.). Cultural Anthropology: Appreciating Cultural Diversity, 14th edition. New York:
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Marquette, C. (1998). Cultural Ecology. Retrieved January 27, 2016, from http://www.indiana.edu/
~wanthro/eco.htm#themes