The cultural ecology It arises from the interrelation between ecology and economic anthropology, in order to try to understand the interaction between culture and environment. The work carried out in the first half of the 20th century by Julian Steward, Leslie White and Gordon Childe contributed to its development..
This discipline highlights the mutual conditioning between the cultural forms of a society and its particular natural environment. Its most effective scope of application are the societies most directly linked to the natural environment.
On the other hand, in modern, globalized and highly technical societies, the relationship is more mediated by the technological component. According to this anthropological approach, social development is not linear and therefore does not follow a series of predefined stages..
On the contrary, a multilinear development is postulated, where each society develops its culture from its particular interaction with its specific natural environment. Cultural ecology opened the doors to a vision of human cultural and social development as part of nature.
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Julian Steward is pointed out as the creator of the concept of cultural ecology, in his 1935 work, Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution. In it Steward defines cultural ecology as the study of cultural changes made to adapt to the environment.
Here the objective of cultural ecology is established, to determine to what extent the behavior models associated with the exploitation of the environment affect other aspects of culture.
Subsequently, the discipline reached its peak in the 1960s and 1970s with the work of various researchers in the field of economic anthropology.
The method proposed by Steward to highlight the influence of the natural environment on the development of culture is fundamentally descriptive. It consists of documenting the technologies used by the members of a society to benefit from the environment.
Then, the behavior patterns that develop in this process of intervention of the natural environment are established. To finally determine how these patterns of behavior are configuring the cultural environment of that society.
For cultural ecology, the human being is part of an ecosystem formed by the interrelation between the natural and cultural environment. More precisely, the cultural environment is part of the natural ecosystem, mutually determining culture and natural environment..
The human being develops his tools, technologies and interpretations of the environment, to adapt to the environment. In turn, these technologies and in general human action also modify the natural environment. In fact, cultural evolution would be a particular form of biological evolution..
In principle, all human society maintains in one way or another relations with its natural environment. However, these relationships are closer the lower the technological development of said society..
Therefore, it has been pointed out that cultural ecology as a discipline of study manifests itself in all its potential when traditional social structures are studied, since it is in this type of societies that are directly dependent on the natural environment where it has the greatest impact on their culture..
For example, in hunter-gatherer societies their existence depends on natural cycles. This means that the culture they develop is closely linked to the environment.
The earth represents fertility, the sun and water life, and thus all these natural factors are expressed in cultural forms. The gods of water, the Sun or nature appear as the mother of everything, the so-called Pacha mama of the Andean natives.
These studies can be of societies of the past (diachronic) or of the present (synchronic), such as rural societies or indigenous ethnic groups that still persist. On the other hand, the further a society moves away from its dependence on the natural environment, the more its cultural forms respond to other factors. This is how in modern society the greatest cultural determinant is technology and to a lesser extent in the natural environment..
Cultural ecology emerges as an alternative to the functionalist approach in economic anthropology. Functionalism studied societies as closed local systems, whose components and phenomena were determined internally..
While the cultural ecology approach conceived societies as open systems in close dependence on their natural environment. Thus, it was derived from neo-evolutionist thought applied to the sociocultural field..
Understanding culture as a continuity of natural history, although with its own determining principles. For cultural ecology, culture is for humans a way to adapt to the demands of the natural environment.
Cultural ecology questioned the vision of classical social evolutionism that assigned a linear and universal evolution to societies. In other words, he conceived of social history as a linear succession of predefined stages that all societies had to go through equally..
For Steward, social history is multilinear, where each society develops its own sequence of phases in its interrelation with its natural environment..
In the process of adaptation to convert certain environmental elements into resources, cultural ecology identifies certain factors. The most significant factors being technology and work organization.
These factors develop in the historical dynamics of the interaction between society and the natural environment. In addition, technology and particularly the organization of work determine other cultural components, such as institutions and social practices..
Cultural ecology as an anthropological discipline, part of considering human populations in society as part of the ecosystem. In this sense, some cultural ecologists apply ecological methods, establishing food webs, measuring flows of energy and matter between society and the natural environment..
They include concepts such as the carrying capacity of the ecosystem, including the social ecosystem. That is, given the technological resources available, the specific natural environment, define the amount of population that can be supported.
The exchange relationships that occur between human populations are also incorporated here. And from the information available, they interpret how cultural forms have adapted to these conditions..
In the studies of cultural ecology three currents have been manifested: the deterministic, the possibilist and the "interactionist".
The first assumes a determining influence of the natural environment on cultural development..
In the possibilist it is considered that environmental factors limit the possible options for cultural development. That is, possibilism assigns more or less probabilities to one or another cultural expression. In this case, the human being and his culture play an active role in developing one or another possibility..
Finally, the "interactionist" approach poses a total interdependence between culture and environment, mutually influencing each other..
Cultural ecology is criticized for presenting a certain burden of environmental determinism. That is, according to its critics, this discipline assigns too much weight to environmental factors in the development of cultural forms..
It follows that cultural ecology underestimates the influence of relationships between social groups, resulting in a vision of disconnected societies, determined almost exclusively by their natural environment..
Although these criticisms apply to many of the cultural ecologists, the truth is that Steward's original theses deviate from this vision. The father of cultural ecology always assumed that human beings and the natural environment condition each other ("interactionist" approach).
One of the central elements in every society is religion, as a way of relating to the gods and the center of the worldview of each culture. Cultural ecology interprets religion as an ideological product arising from the interaction of human beings with their natural environment.
The gods and rites would be forms of interpretation and regulation of the natural processes vital to a particular culture. For example, rain cycles for agriculture or periodic catastrophes in the form of storms, are interpreted as divine decisions..
The entire vision of the natural universe was originally developed on metaphysical bases that were arranged in a body of religious ideas. From here the rites derive as ways of trying to influence the decisions or states of mind of the divinity.
Already in this 21st century, the approach derived from cultural ecology has made possible the search for new ways of relating to nature. An example of this is the so-called sacred ecology by Fikret Berkes (1999).
This author studied the ways of relating to nature by the ethnic groups of northern Canada. Later, he tried to extract valid orientations for urban society in the search for a balance with nature.
Traditionally, Western thought has excluded the human being from nature, contrasting the human with the natural. The main relevance of the cultural ecology approach is to place the human being as part of nature and not in front of it, and it conceives social history as a continuity of natural history.
On the other hand, it broke with the linear and universal vision of social evolution, proposing a multilinear and local approach, without this implying renouncing to establish the common and general factors that influence the development of human societies..
This has important repercussions in the consideration of those current societies that do not have the same technological development as Western society, since in the linear vision of classical anthropology these societies were considered stagnant in a primitive phase.
According to this conception, every society should go through the same stages of development. While according to cultural ecology, it is considered that these societies only have another way of relating to their natural environment.
All this generated the possibility of addressing new research problems and methodologies in the field of social science. Above all, it has made possible the development of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary works, where sociologists, physicists, zoologists and geographers have been able to enter into a common field..
Cultural ecology contributed to the complex process currently underway, gestation of the conception of the need for sustainable development.
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