Cultural ecology
Cultural ecology is a research approach at the interface between cultural , geological and biological sciences . She examines the extent to which human forms of culture are shaped by dealing with the natural environment and to what extent human forms of culture in turn shape their natural environment. Different approaches in cultural anthropology / ethnology and Anglo-American geography developed .
definition
The definition in the "New Dictionary of Ethnology" is:
"... how far human forms of culture and society are shaped by the way they deal with their natural (animate and inanimate) environment and how far culture and society in turn have an impact on the natural environment."
Julian Haynes Steward (1902–1972) defined the term as follows: "Cultural ecology is the study of the processes by which a society adapts to its environment."
Cultural Ecology
The English term cultural ecology is not synonymous with the German term cultural ecology : The cultural ecology is a specific variant of the cultural ecology that goes back to the American anthropologist Julian Haynes Steward. He tried to explain why structurally comparable forms of environmental adaptation occur at different times and in different places.
Cooperation and competition are also processes of mutual influence, so that the social environment is also taken into account. Steward also distinguishes companies internally according to different types of socio-cultural systems and institutions. It assumes that adaptation to the environment is also dependent on technology, needs, social structure and the nature of the environment.
Steward asks himself whether the adaptation requires certain behaviors and whether it is inflexible, i.e. only allows a certain culture pattern or whether there is certain room for deviations. He based his analysis on three points, which he included in the term culture core ( Cultural Core summarizing):
- Environmental conditions / economic sources (resources, flora, fauna, climate, diseases, pathogens)
- Nature of the culture / devices and knowledge / potential usability (exploitative and adaptive technology, internal and external social environment)
- Social organization resulting from the interaction of the first two components / forms of work organization / real usability (land use rights, population density, durability and composition of agglomerations, cultural values)
He comes to the conclusion that the different application
- same technology in independent cultures,
- depending on their geographical environmental conditions to one
- different social organization leads. Steward gives up the idea of the environment as merely prohibitive (preventing, holding back) or permissive (yielding, permeable) and sees creative processes in the processes of cultural and ecological adaptation.
Further terms coined by Steward are: culture core, culture (area) type (culture [area] type), transcultural type (cross-cultural type), level of integration, level of organization, multilinear evolution.
Steward was heavily criticized, for example by the cultural materialist Marvin Harris , who is more of a techno-ecological or techno-economic determinism. He argued that the same techniques naturally lead to similar manifestations in the division of labor, social structures and value systems (cultural materialism).