Cultural ecology is the study of human adaptations to social and physical environments. Julian Steward coined the term and proposed that culture changes are induced by environmental adaptations. Steward's method examined how technologies exploited the environment for subsistence and how associated cultural patterns influenced other aspects of culture. While the environment influences human adaptation, it does not determine it. Cultural ecology recognizes ecology plays a role in shaping regional cultures but does not imply environmental determinism. It continues as a line of inquiry to understand how local environmental practices are influenced by global forces and markets.

1. Cultural Ecology

2. What is Cultural Ecology
• Cultural ecology is the study of human adaptations (biological and
cultural processes) to social and physical environments
• This may be carried out
• diachronically (examining entities that existed in different epochs), or
• synchronically (examining a present system and its components)
• The natural environment is a major contributor to social organization
and other human institutions
• Anthropologist Julian Steward (1902-1972) coined the term

3. Adaptation to the environment
• Steward, J., 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.“
• Any particular human adaptation is in part historically inherited and
involves the technologies, practices, and knowledge
• This means that while the environment influences the character of
human adaptation, it does not determine it
• J. Steward separated the vagaries of the environment from the inner
workings of a culture that occupied a given environment

4. Steward's method
• His method was to
1. Document the technologies and methods used to exploit the
environment to get a living from it.
2. Look at patterns of human behaviour/culture associated with using
the environment.
3. Assess how much these patterns of behaviour influenced other
aspects of culture
• 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

5. Adaptation or Determinism
• Environment and Culture, the ability of one to influence the other is
dependent on how each is structured
• Environmental influence on Culture implies an element of
environmental determinism over human actions
• Cultural ecology recognizes that ecological locale plays a significant
role in shaping the cultures of a region

6. Cultural to Political
• 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

7. Development of Cultural Ecological thoughts
• 1865, Russin Geographer Peter Kropotkin and his expedition to a
largely unmapped region of northern Siberia
• Late he published ‘Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution’ (1902)
where he raised some prominent issues
• production as a key site of social-environmental process
• organization of society in places
• marginalized and disenfranchised communities' survival and
innovation of “institutions, habits, and customs”
• power of traditional environmental knowledge

8. Theories of culture and change
• Steward, J., Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of
Multilinear Evolution (1955)
• Carl O. Sauer, 'Morphology of Landscape' (1925) argues that the
contact of man with his nature is expressed through the cultural
landscape
• E.g Agrarian Landscapes, Urban Landscape
• In contrary to Steward, Saure’s work focused on the adaptation of the
environment

9. Theories of culture and change
• Cultural Ecologists are interested in
• how people make a living in nature?
• how they adapt the landscape? and
• how their technology, labour, and knowledges link to
complex environmental systems

10. Adaptation – in Cultural Ecology studies
• The works on adaptation in Cultural Ecology seeks to explain how
complex traditions and practices function ecologically
• Roy Rappaport’s, Pigs for the Ancestor’ (1968) analysis of the
livelihoods of the Maring people of New Guinea
• explains the complex, intermittently repeated, ritual behaviours
of subsistence producers
• He concluded that both periodic ritual warfare and pig sacrifice
were the product of population cycles of both pigs and people,
and that they interacted in complex metabolism to achieve
equilibrium

11. Limits to Adaptation theories
• The adaptation approach overextended itself seriously, and
suffered from a fundamental teleological flaw: if people do it, it
must be adaptive
• More fundamentally, exploring adaptation of varying
communities does little to illuminate why certain forms of
human ecology prevail
• the broader forces acting within and between communities is
ignored
• However adaptation as a general line of inquiry continues to
make sense. To understand the efficacy of environmental
practices of local people, adaptation research helps to makes
sense

12. Cultural Ecology as line of enquiry
• Cultural Ecologists continue to direct attention both towards
human adaptation to the environment and of the
environment.
• Cultural Ecology is poised to address -
• How does articulation with globalizing markets influence
environmental decision making and production of natural
environments?
• How are individual production decisions influenced and how do
they, in turn, effect global land cover transformations?

13. Cultural Ecology as line of enquiry
• Cultural Ecology as a line of enquiry teaches
• Geography is a process not a pre-existing, a priori, “natural”
condition.
• Geography is created through the interaction of human and non-
human agents
• Geographies are produced, and are neither destinies nor prisons.