Cultural ecology
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Cultural ecology is ecology including humans. It studies the relationship between a given society and its natural environment - the life-forms and ecosystems that support its lifeways. This may be carried out historically (diachronically), 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 organisation and other human institutions. Particularly those concerned with the distribution of wealth and power in a society, and how that affects such behaviour as hoarding or gifting, e.g. the Haida tradition of the potlatch in Melanesia. 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.
Anthropologist Julian Steward (1955) is associated with the term. In his "Origins of Cultural Change" , cultural ecology is the
"..study of the adaptive processes by which the nature of society, and an unpredictable number of features of culture, are affected by the basic adjustment through which man utilizes a given environment".
It is this assertion - that the physical environment affects culture - that had proved controversial, because it implies an element of environmental determininsm over human actions. Cultural ecology is, indeed, inflicted with mild environmental determinism, but the approach has value in the types of situations inwhich it was developed. Less so in connected and globalised societies.
Steward's method was to: 1) document the technologies & methods used to exploit the environment - to get a living from it. 2) look at patterns of human behavior/culture associated with using the environment. 3) assess how much these patterns of behavior influenced other aspects of culture (eg 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).
The field is less popular than it was in the late 20th century. It lives on, however, in anthropology and geography - and because political, cultural, human, and social eoclogy are contested terms, many people still make detailed assessments of environment-culture linkages, without calling this cultural ecology. The Journal of Human Ecology is a prime outlet for scholars in this field.
Sources: Cultural Ecology, by Simon Batterbury [1] (http://www.colorado.edu/geography/courses/geog6402/ce.html)