Kasymseitova Sandugash Alihanovna
Senior Lecturer, Department of Philosophy
Kostanai State University the name of Baitursinov. Sity Kostanai. Republic of
Kazakhstan
The
concept of cultural ecology in various sciences
Cultural ecology is the study of
human adaptations to social and physical environments. Human adaptation refers
to both biological and cultural processes that enable a population to survive
and reproduce within a given or changing environment. This may be carried out diachronically
(examining entities that existed in different epochs), or synchronically
(examining a present system and its components). 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. In the academic realm, when combined with study of political economy, the
study of economies as polities, it becomes political ecology,
another academic subfield. It also helps interrogate historical events like the Easter
Island Syndrome.
Coining the term
Anthropologist 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
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.
This means that while the environment influences the character of human
adaptation, it does not determine it. In this way, Steward wisely separated the
vagaries of the environment from the inner workings of a culture that occupied
a given environment. 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. It is
this assertion - that the physical and biological environment affects culture -
that has proved controversial, because it implies an element of environmental
determinism over human actions, which some social scientists
find problematic, particularly those writing from a Marxist perspective.
Cultural ecology recognizes that ecological locale plays a significant role in
shaping the cultures of a region.
Steward's method was to:
1.
document the technologies & methods used to exploit the environment -
to get a living from it. s
2.
look at patterns of human behavior/culture associated with using the
environment.
3.
assess how much these patterns of behavior influenced other aspects of
culture (e.g., how, in a drought-prone region, great concern over rainfall
patterns meant this became central to everyday life, and led to the development
of a religious belief system in which rainfall and water figured very strongly.
This belief system may not appear in a society where good rainfall for crops
can be taken for granted, or where irrigation was practiced).
Steward's concept of cultural ecology became
widespread among anthropologists and archaeologists of the mid-20th century,
though they would later be critiqued for their environmental determinism.
Cultural ecology was one of the central tenets and driving factors in the
development of processual archaeology in the 1960s, as
archaeologists understood cultural change through the framework of technology
and its effects on environmental adaptation.
Cultural ecology in anthropology
Cultural ecology
as developed by Steward is a major subdiscipline of anthropology. It derives
from the work of Franz Boas and has branched out to cover a number of
aspects of human society, in particular the distribution of wealth and power in a society, and how that affects such behaviour as hoarding or gifting (e.g. the tradition of
the potlatch on the Northest North American coast).
Cultural ecology as a transdisciplinary project
One recent conception of cultural ecology is as a
general theory that regards ecology as a paradigm not only for
the natural and human sciences, but
for cultural studies as well. In his Die
Ökologie des Wissens (The Ecology
of Knowledge), Peter Finke explains that this theory brings together the
various cultures of knowledge that have evolved in history, and that have been
separated into more and more specialized disciplines and subdisciplines in the
evolution of modern science (Finke 2005). In this view, cultural ecology
considers the sphere of human culture not as separate from but as
interdependent with and transfused by ecological processes and natural energy
cycles. At the same time, it recognizes the relative independence and
self-reflexive dynamics of cultural processes. As the dependency of culture on
nature, and the ineradicable presence of nature in culture, are gaining
interdisciplinary attention, the difference between cultural evolution and
natural evolution is increasingly acknowledged by cultural ecologists. Rather
than genetic laws, information and communication have become major driving
forces of cultural evolution (see Finke 2005, 2006). Thus, causal deterministic
laws do not apply to culture in a strict sense, but there are nevertheless
productive analogies that can be drawn between ecological and cultural
processes.
Gregory Bateson was the first to draw such analogies
in his project of an Ecology of Mind (Bateson 1973), which was based on general
principles of complex dynamic life processes, e.g. the concept of feedback
loops, which he saw as operating both between the mind and the world and within
the mind itself. Bateson thinks of the mind neither as an autonomous
metaphysical force nor as a mere neurological function of the brain, but as a
"dehierarchized concept of a mutual dependency between the (human)
organism and its (natural) environment, subject and object, culture and
nature", and thus as "a synonym for a cybernetic system of
information circuits that are relevant for the survival of the species."
(Gersdorf/ Mayer 2005: 9).
Finke fuses these ideas with concepts from systems theory. He
describes the various sections and subsystems of society as 'cultural
ecosystems' with their own processes of production, consumption, and reduction
of energy (physical as well as psychic energy). This also applies to the
cultural ecosystems of art and of literature, which follow their own internal
forces of selection and self-renewal, but also have an important function
within the cultural system as a whole (see next section).
Cultural ecology in literary studies
The vital interrelatedness between culture and nature
has been a special focus of literary culture from its archaic beginnings in
myth, ritual, and oral story-telling, in legends and fairy tales, in the genres
of pastoral literature, nature poetry. Important texts in this tradition
include the stories of mutual transformations between human and nonhuman life,
most famously collected in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which became
a highly influential text throughout literary history and across different
cultures. This attention to culture-nature interaction became especially
prominent in the era of romanticism, but continues to be characteristic of literary stagings
of human experience up to the present. The mutual opening and symbolic
reconnection of culture and nature, mind and body, human and nonhuman life in a
holistic and yet radically pluralistic way seems to be one significant mode in
which literature functions and in which literary knowledge is produced.
From this perspective, literature can itself be
described as the symbolic medium of a particularly powerful form of
"cultural ecology" (Zapf 2002). Literary texts have staged and
explored, in ever new scenarios, the complex feedback relationship of
prevailing cultural systems with the needs and manifestations of human and
nonhuman "nature." From this paradoxical act of creative regression
they have derived their specific power of innovation and cultural self-renewal.
German ecocritic Hubert
Zapf argues that literature draws its cognitive and creative potential from a
threefold dynamics in its relationship to the larger cultural system: as a
"cultural-critical metadiscourse," an "imaginative
counterdiscourse," and a "reintegrative interdiscourse"
(Zapf 2001, 2002). It is a textual form which breaks up ossified social
structures and ideologies, symbolically empowers the marginalized, and
reconnects what is culturally separated. In that way, literature counteracts
economic, political or pragmatic forms of interpreting and instrumentalizing human
life, and breaks up one-dimensional views of the world and the self, opening
them up towards their repressed or excluded other. Literature is thus, on the
one hand, a sensorium for what goes wrong in a society, for the biophobic,
life-paralyzing implications of one-sided forms of consciousness and
civilizational uniformity, and it is, on the other hand, a medium of constant
cultural self-renewal, in which the neglected biophilic energies can find a
symbolic space of expression and of (re-)integration into the larger ecology of
cultural discourses. This approach has been applied and widened in a recent
volume of essays by scholars from over the world (Zapf 2008).
Cultural ecology in geography
In geography,
cultural ecology developed in response to the "landscape morphology"
approach of Carl O. Sauer. Sauer's school was criticized for being unscientific
and later for holding a "reified" or "superorganic"
conception of culture. Cultural ecology applied ideas from ecology and systems
theory to understand the adaptation of humans to their environment. These
cultural ecologists focused on flows of energy and materials, examining how
beliefs and institutions in a culture regulated its interchanges with the
natural ecology that surrounded it. In this perspective humans were as much a
part of the ecology as any other organism. Important practitioners of this form
of cultural ecology include Karl Butzer and David Stoddard.
The second form
of cultural ecology introduced decision theory from agricultural economics, particularly
inspired by the works of Alexander Chayanov and Ester Boserup. These cultural
ecologists were concerned with how human groups made decisions about how they
use their natural environment. They were particularly concerned with the
question of agricultural intensification, refining the competing models of
Thomas Malthus and Boserup. Notable cultural ecologists in this second
tradition include Harold Brookfield and Billie Lee Turner II.
Starting in the
1980s, cultural ecology came under criticism from political ecology. Political
ecologists charged that cultural ecology ignored the connections between the
local-scale systems they studied and the global political economy. Today few
geographers self-identify as cultural ecologists, but ideas from cultural
ecology have been adopted and built on by political ecology, land change
science, and sustainability science.
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