From Natural Ecology to Cultural Ecology

in the context of anthropology and ethnology, designating the importance of the natural environment for the evolution of human culture.Cultural ecology in this sense investigated the concrete influence of environmental conditions such as climate, soil, terrain, water resources, animal populations, and plant species on the technologies and forms of production but also on the values and mythologies of cultures.In some of its versions, this kind of cultural ecology moved toward a strict functionalism and environmental determinism, in which social structures were mono-causally derived from local physical conditions of life (Carneiro 2003).This form of naturalistic reductionism was practiced in anthropology, archaeology, or geography and was subsequently criticized by an emergent political ecology for its lack of attention to human agency and a globalized political economy.The concept of adaption was transferred from evolutionary biology to the evolution of cultures.Typical fields of application were farming methods, the use of domestic animals, forms of labor, rituals, and festivals in response to environmental conditions such as aridity, temperature, or rainfall patterns, often in reference to relatively homoeostatic preindustrial rather than modern dynamic societies.However, the deterministic strain of cultural ecology had its counterpart in an "environmental possibilism" (J.W. Bennett 162), which goes back to anthropologists like Franz Boas and Alfred Kroeber and assumes that the "natural environment sets certain possibilities of options from which cultures, conditioned by their history and particular customs, may choose" (Marquette).This form of cultural ecology favors an "interactive and dialectical rather than a deterministic view of the relationships between cultures and their environment which has remained at the center of cultural ecological approaches" (Marquette).Steward himself, who was