Cultural ecology

DEFINITION: Theory of anthropology that seeks to explain human cultures in terms of the environmental conditions in their home territories

While claims that environmental factors can wholly explain cultural traits and dynamics are no longer made, cultural ecology has become a useful approach for understanding a given society’s customs, even those that initially make no sense to outsiders. Cultural ecology has proven such a fruitful approach that it has been adopted by such disciplines as political science, geography, agricultural science, and even religious studies and art.

Cultural ecology was originally associated with anthropologist Julian Steward. He developed the theory during the 1950s, using it to study how cultural norms and customs are adaptive, given the environment that a group inhabits.

Early attempts to apply the theory to classic anthropological tropes, such as the frequent warfare and female infanticide of the Yanomami of South America and the custom of potlatch (competitive giving feasts) among Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest coast, had mixed results. For example, anthropologist Marvin Harris explained the fierce wars and infanticide of the Yanomami as methods of keeping their population levels within the carrying capacity of their jungle environment. Although war may be seen as one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, a consequence of population pressures, this is more a literary or religious concept than a sociological truth. There was little evidence that the Yanomami felt such pressures; other explanations fit their acknowledged cultural traits better. On the other hand, the potlatch took place within a culture region that usually had a surplus of food and other material resources. The gift-giving ceremony not only built prestige for the sponsoring chief but also helped to counteract local scarcities caused by sudden natural events. Producing and storing food for a potlatch also gave a village a margin of safety against future natural disasters.

With worldwide movements for both increased food production and protection of the environment, insights from cultural ecology have become invaluable. For example, Western efforts to impose temperate-zone, mechanized farming methods on small-scale farmers in the tropics have often met with disaster. Indigenous patterns of shifting cultivation, growing several crops with different maturation dates together in the same small plot, and periodically using fire to put chemicals back into the soil quickly may actually reflect the optimum use of this land.

Early anthropologists, it has been noted, were more interested in recording a society’s rain dances than in the rain itself and its place in the society’s life. With longer terms of fieldwork and the tools of cultural ecology, observers can note the role of both in the culture and the conditions under which imminent rain is felt to be essential to survival and thus must be called down.

In modern societies, the web of life support extends far beyond the immediate natural surroundings. Rain, or its lack, may be less immediately relevant to a society’s present well-being than the infrastructure, which includes reservoirs, irrigation mechanisms, commercial and transportation arrangements for food distribution, and many other factors. Each society, however, no matter how complex, has its tipping point, and the social mechanisms for avoiding the tipping point are not always understood, much less practiced. Cultural ecology, while potentially useful, has only fitfully treated the complexity of the changing interfaces between human society and the environment in advanced societies. This remains a challenge for the future.

Bibliography

Bennett, John E. The Ecological Transition: Cultural Anthropology and Human Adaptation. Transaction, 2005.

“Cultural Ecology.” ScienceDirect, www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/cultural-ecology. Accessed 14 Sept. 2025.

Haeen, Nora, editor. The Environment in Anthropology. New York UP, 2005.

Netting, Robert M. Cultural Ecology. 2nd ed., Waveland Press, 1986.

Wibowo, Agung, et al. "A Tourism Village Development Model Based on Cultural Ecology on the Slopes of Mount Lawu, Indonesia." University of Sebelas, 2022, www.e3s-conferences.org/articles/e3sconf/pdf/2022/28/e3sconf_iconard2022_03020.pdf. Accessed 14 Sept. 2025.

Wormley, Alexandra S., et al. "The Ecology-Culture Dataset: A New Resource for Investigating Cultural Variation." Scientific Data, vol. 9, no. 615, 2022, pp. 1-7, doi.org/10.1038/s41597-022-01738-z. Accessed 14 Sept. 2025.