![]() Viewed over the long term, this means that environment and culture are on more or less separate evolutionary tracks and that the ability of one to influence the other is dependent on how each is structured. In this way, Steward wisely separated the vagaries of the environment from the inner workings of a culture that occupied a given environment. This means that while the environment influences the character of human adaptation, it does not determine it. In his Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution (1955), cultural ecology represents the "ways in which culture change is induced by adaptation to the environment." A key point is that any particular human adaptation is in part historically inherited and involves the technologies, practices, and knowledge that allow people to live in an environment. It also helps interrogate historical events like the Easter Island Syndrome.Īnthropologist Julian Steward (1902-1972) coined the term, envisioning cultural ecology as a methodology for understanding how humans adapt to such a wide variety of environments. In the academic realm, when combined with study of political economy, the study of economies as polities, it becomes political ecology, another academic subfield. The central argument is that the natural environment, in small scale or subsistence societies dependent in part upon it, is a major contributor to social organization and other human institutions. This may be carried out diachronically (examining entities that existed in different epochs), or synchronically (examining a present system and its components). Human adaptation refers to both biological and cultural processes that enable a population to survive and reproduce within a given or changing environment. 13 illus.Cultural ecology is the study of human adaptations to social and physical environments. It charts new directions for research, demanding a more exacting study of environmental conditions, material adaptations, and organizational responses, as well as an appreciation of the ideological and humanistic dimensions of Basin Life. Julian Steward and the Great Basin also corrects long-standing misperceptions that originated with Steward about lifeways of the Indians living between the Great Plains and California. ![]() Each chapter explores a different aspect of his work ranging from early efforts at documenting trait distributions to his later role in the development of social transformation theory, area studies, and applied anthropology. In one sense, the phases of Steward's career epitomize the successive schools of anthropological theory and practice. He was also central in shaping basic anthropological constructs such as "hunter-gatherer" and "adaptation." But his fieldwork took place almost entirely in the Great Basin. ![]() Steward (1902-1972) was one of the foremost American exponents of cultural ecology, the idea that societies evolve in adaptation to their human and natural environments. Julian Steward and the Great Basin is a critical assessment of Steward's work, the factors that influenced him, and his deep effect on American anthropology.
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