Murphy, Anthropological Theories of Julian H. Steward. 1977:21-25

CULTURAL ECOLOGY

Julian Steward's greatest contribution to anthropology was his earliest: the theory of cultural ecology. The reawakening of interest in man's impact upon the environment in the 1960s and the growing public alarm at ecological degradation and the exhaustion of the earth's resources also make this the most timely of his ideas today. When Steward first wrote on the subject in the mid 1930s, he was one of the very first anthropologists to have given serious attention to the problem. There were a scattering of environmental determinists of various stripes throughout the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries, but most of their work was characterized by a simplistic mechanism that tended to look for direct connections between weather and topography and the character or ethos of a people. Thus the progress of the peoples of Europe and North America might be attributed to the invigorating and varied climate, while heat and humidity accounted for the presumed slothful and backward ways of tropical peoples. It did not take much research, of course, to show that civilization was flourishing in many tropical areas during centuries when the "vigorous" Europeans were looked down upon as howling barbarians by their southern neighbors. Nor did one need to know much history to see that the great cities of North America stood on top of the poor remains of very simple Indian societies. If there were indeed a causal relationship between culture and the environment, it clearly had to account for the complexities of history.

Alfred Kroeber's Cultural and Natural Areas of Native North America (1939), which had been sitting in manuscript form long before its publication, was the nearest precursor to Steward's theories. It was, however, more a compendium of useful plants arid animals and their distribution relative to the culture areas of North America than a systematic exploration of a relationship. In this sense Kroeber was following the path of Clark Wissler and others, who found a correlation between culture areas and the dominant economy or food pursuit of these regions. The way of life of mounted bison hunters of the Plains contrasted-sharply with that of the sedentary agriculturalists of the southwestern pueblos, which in turn differed radically from the cultures of the impoverished hunters and collectors of the Great Basin. But the contrasts given within the culture area classifications tended to be obvious and analytically gross. It remained for Steward to develop a theory that could be stated in abstract and universalized terms.

The theory of cultural ecology has less to say about the environment than about culture, and this is its strength. Steward wrote that the concept involves both a problem and a method: "The problem is to ascertain whether the adjustments of human societies to their environments require particular modes of behavior or whether they permit latitude for .a certain range of possible behavior patterns" (1955:86). The method for investigating the problem contains three steps. The first is to analyze "the interrelationship of exploitative or productive technology and environment" (ib;d.A1). In short, the theory* and method of culture ecology posit a relationship between the resources of the environment, the tools and knowledge available to exploit them, -and the patterns of work necessary to bring the technology to bear upon the resources. The organization of work, in turn, is hypothesized as having a determinant effect upon other social institutions and practices: The key element in the equation is not the environment, nor is it the culture. Rather, it is the process of work in the fullest sense: the division of labor and the organization, timing, cycling, and management of human work in pursuit of subsistence. Steward's theory may not have been the first in anthropology to treat the environment, but it was indeed the first to examine the creative and determinant effects of the organization of production.

Despite the clear emphasis upon the material base of society, Steward did not consider the theory to be a form of economic determinism. He regarded it instead as a strategy and a method which did not prejudge a relationship but simply set it as a problem for inquiry. It was not the only subject to be investigated, but merely the first to be considered in any analysis. The reasons for the priority are clear. First, in all societies the quest for subsistence has an immediacy and urgency that set it apart from other human activities. Second, the relationship is peculiarly accessible to a causal analysis because there are strict limits to the patterns of work that can be used with a particular technology on particular resources. The relationship is not invariant and absolutely determined in a one-to-one way, but it is circumscribed. There may indeed be more than one way to skin a cat, but if your only tool is a bamboo sliver, there are not many. There is thus an element of necessity in the ways a group gains its subsistence that any analysis must account for.

Nowhere is the cultural-ecological equation more evident than among the Western Shoshoni, where there was little latitude of range of possible behavior patterns, following Steward's phrasing of the problem. Steward systematically interviewed informants for information on hunting and collecting patterns in every district of the Shoshoni habitat, getting from them data on actual behavior and aggregations, a far more difficult chore than collecting normative, cultural material. Shoshoni technology was of the simplest sort known, and the food-getting equipment was limited to the bow and arrow, digging stick, winnowing flail and pan, stone-flake knives, and the like. The men hunted deer, antelope, rabbits, an occasional mountain sheep, and rodents, and the women gathered various grass seeds, roots, and berries. Steward demonstrated for almost every activity that the lone worker was the most effective unit and that the environment was so poor in resources that people had to scatter thinly over the landscape to gather enough to eat. The only large-scale cooperative economic activities were the antelope surround and the rabbit drive. These endeavors drew people together for only limited periods and infrequently, and they yielded only temporary aggregations and leadership.

The critical part of the year in Nevada was the winter, when the Shoshoni depended upon stored foods for survival. The principal winter provender was the pine nut, which was gathered each fall on the mountainsides, brought to a sheltered spot nearby in the valleys, and cached; the people made their winter camps nearby. The winter villages were the largest gatherings of the year, except for occasional game drives and dances, but their populations were unstable and shifting, their existence often ephemeral. Under ordinary circumstances one might expect groups of Shoshoni to return to the same pine-nut grove and village every year, thus producing a stable social unit, but the vagaries of pine-nut harvests prevented this. Each grove would fail to yield fruits about every third year or so, and the occupants of a winter village of one year might have to scatter in different directions in the following year to find a grove that was producing. The result was a great fluidity of population, of movement of families from one valley to another, of changing patterns of association. The cultural-ecological equation produced social fragmentation and amorphousness.

The basic camp group involved in hunting and foraging was a cluster of some four or five nuclear families. These, however, were of shifting composition and had no distinct identities or patterns of leadership. There were loosely recognized neighborhoods in Shoshoni country, but no populations having stable memberships were linked to these areas. In effect, there were no bands in either a territorial or a political sense. The truly stable and durable unit was the nuclear family. There was thus maximum impact of the adjustment to the environment upon other patterns of behavior. The Shoshoni case, however, did not make for a theoretic mold that all societies fitted into, and Steward hypothesized that the immediate impact of environment upon culture would decrease with the increase of social complexity and the growth of man's - domination of the environment through technology: "In proportion that societies have adequately solved subsistence problems, the effect of ecology becomes more difficult to ascertain. In complex societies certain components of the social superstructure rather than ecology seem to be determinants of further development" (Steward, 1938:262).

Steward's first important article on the ecology of hunters and collectors was not on the Shoshoni but was based on research in secondary sources and dealt with what he termed the "patrilineal band" (Steward, 1936). Surveying the Bushmen, Pygmies, Semang, Australian aborigines; the Ona, and other groups, he found the basic social aggregation to be a patrilocal, patrilineal, exogamous, and territory-owning band. The ecological conditions for these parallelisms were low population density, foot transportation, and the hunting of scattered and nonmigratory animals, making it of strategic value for a man to remain in the territory of his birth. In the same article he distinguished the patrilineal band from the "composite band." The latter had eclectic memberships; were generally larger than the patrilineal groups, and found their principal subsistence in the hunting of large, gregarious, and migratory animals. Later research has shown some of these patrilineal band societies to be bilateral in descent, with a strong tendency to patrilocality; but, in another direction, Elman Service has argued the patrilocal band as an early and general form in social evolution (Service, 1962): In either case Steward's work on hunters and gatherers . during the 1930s, posed a good many of the major problems for later research, as the results of the conference on "Man the Hunter" (Lee and deVore, 1968) amply demonstrated.

Cultural ecology placed emphasis on the study of behavior patterns, of movement and sensate activity, of the performance of work. It was in this respect, little noted by historians of anthropology, that Steward made one of his sharpest breaks with the past. American anthropology had been notable for its emphasis on the culture trait, as a basic symbolic unit, and on jural rules and matters of form and style. One might indeed choose to define culture as being the realm of the normative, as does much of American anthropology, but this hardly means that this is the only domain of anthropology, however much it might be termed "the study of culture." Norms are articulated and expressed in terms of action, and the interplay between rules, values, and style on the one hand and activity on the other is at the very heart of anthropological research. Steward's third step in ecological analysis, the investigation of the ways that work patterns affect other aspects of culture, calls at once for meticulous analysis of interaction patterns and for a theory that sees social activity as underlying culture. This underlying dimension of ecological theory may well prove to have been its most important message.

Ecological studies have flourished in anthropology during the past ten years, simultaneously expanding their theoretical scope and interests. One direction of research has seen the introduction of biological models that reduce human behavior and institutions to items within ecosystems. The general methodology in the newer ecologies has been functionalist, but the referent of function is either to the biosphere seen as a system or to the population as an aggregate of human organisms. Mindful of the old Darwinian premise that population maximization is the end product of the struggle for survival and thus the measure of adaptation, attention has been directed to the calories obtained from subsistence (which is good) at the expense of emphasis on the ways in which the subsistence is obtained (which is bad). Steward, to the contrary, never forgot that the goal of anthropology is the study of human behavior, and that human behavior is intelligible only in a cultural context.

The theory and method of cultural ecology is not concerned with the environment per se as much as with an interaction, even an opposition, between man and his surroundings. Its treatment of technology takes full account of the fact that technology is a cultural realm, dealing with historically derived tools and knowledge, whether diffused or independently invented. Moreover, Steward emphasized that his interest was less in the gross environment than in the resources it offered, and resources to him were a matter of culture. They were subjects of the knowledge of the people, and they were of value only to the extent that the available technology made them both accessible and usable. Steward's ecology was always a cultural ecology, for he was ever suspicious of biological reductionism, an inheritance, no doubt, of his studentship under Kroeber.