CUYLTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

AND TlE MAN-ENVIRONMENT REIATIONSBIP:

AN HISTORICAL DISCUSSION

Joan M.W. Abbott

University of Colorado, Boulder

Cultural anthropology's interest in the man-environment
relationship is reviewed within the larger context of
Western intellectual history. It is concluded that:
1) like most of Western science, anthropology is

permeated by the fundamental notion of a distinction
between man and nature; 2) cultural anthropology

including the subdiscipline of cultutal ecology has
limited its concern to only a narrow aspect of the
man-environment relationship. It is suggested that
anthropology needs to incorporate non-Western

assumptions about man and nature, rid itself of

culture-centricity, and utilize more fully the total
ecosystem model. [ecology, ecosystem,environment,

history of anthropology, intellectual history, man-
environment relationship, theory, Western ideolgy]

INTRODUCTION

The intellectual provenance of the present concern with man's

degradation of his environment is found in the work of the geographer-
statesman George P. Marsh, who wrote in 1864:

The earth is fast becoming an unfit home for its

noblest inhabitant and another era of equal human
crime and human improvidence and of like duration
with that through which traces of that crime and
that improvidence extend, would reduce it to such
a condition of impoverished productiveness, of
shattered surface, of climatic excess, as to

threaten the depravation, barbarism, and perhaps
even the extinction of the species (1965: 43.
Originally published 1864)-).

Nearly a century later biologist Rachel Carson repeated the warning
demonstrating that men are destroying the balance of nature with
sophisticated chemical death rain and that in these ingenious

10

modifications may lie man's demise (Carson 1962). It is not surprising
that the scientists who first sounded the alarmwere naturalists whose

subject matter seemed threatened--Marsh worried mostly about the forest,
Carson about the insects. Wbat is startling is the lack of response

from those who study the other element in the man-environment relation,
that is anthropologists. The aspect of man that makes him so capable
of altering the world is his culture, anthropology's central concern.

Engrossed in defining the nature of the cultural animal, delineating the
varieties of socio-cultures around the world, and trying to predict
socio-cultural behavior, anthropologists have seen little to be
alarmed about.

The question of anthropology's lack of interest in environmental

problems lies imbedded in the larger issue of the nature of anthropology's
concern with the man-environment relationship.  It is only, for example,
since the early 1950's that anthropology has embraced the concept of
adaptation as applied to human biological and sociocultural systems.
We shall see below that in spite of the emphasis on adaptedness, the

focus of cultural ecology, potentially as broad a field as anthropology
itself, is still quite narrow and specialized.

Historically, anthropology's concern with the man-environment

relationship derives from the heritage of Western thought on the topic,
and it is important for the advance of anthropological thought for us to
recognize this heritage. The goals of this paper are thus threefold:
1) to demonstrate that certain attitudes about the man-environment

relationship carry over into anthropology from Western intellectual
tradition; 2) to show the ways anthropology has been concerned with
men and their environments; and 3) to suggest some implications and
new directions.

Unless otherwise stated, "anthropology" in this paper means

Western cultural anthropology. Of course, the ecological perspective
cross-cuts all subfields of anthropology and is particularly strongly
developed in archeology and physical anthropology (see Helm 1962;

11

Schoenwetter 1967; Baker 1962 for reviews of ecological studies
in these areas), but the focus of this paper is upon the man-

environment concern within the bounds of traditional ethnology.
Though an attempt has been made to cover most important

American works on the topic, I certainly have not c6vered all;
thus the following should be taken as suggestive rather than
definitive.

ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE MAN-ENVIROMENM RELATIONSHIP

The word 'ecology' was coined by Ernst Haeckel in about 1870,
and it meant to him basically what it means to us--the relationships

of the animate world with both the inorganic and organic environments
(Bates 1953:700). However, men have been discussing the relation
between man and nature since ancient times. Glacken (1967),after

extensive perusal of the literature on the history of Western thought,

stated that three questions concerning man and nature have persistantly
been asked by men of the Western tradition: 1) Was the earth made for
man, with man dominant over other forms of like? 2) Has the earth's
environment influenced human character and society? 3) How have men
changed the earth? (Glacken 1967:vii). These three questions

dominated the Western view of the man-nature relationship until at

least the end of the 18th century; they persist--though not exclusively--
to form the fundamental moral outlook of a large part of science and
society today.

I have borrowed Glacken's three themes in the organization of the
material below. They will become particularly meaningful in the

discussion of anthropology's concern with the man-environment relationship.

The Western intellectual herit

There is widespread awareness today that the historical roots

of the crisis in ecology lie in large part in the Judeo-Christian world-
view (White 1967). So strongly is this felt that some opt for the

development of a new religion (Shepard 1969), as the only recourse for

12

a society so permeated by an anti-ecological morality.

Though Christianity is a complex religion, replete with rebels
such as St. Francis of Assisi, there seems little question that its

dominant theme regarding man's place in nature has been that of nan's
distinctness from his environment and his fellow creatures, and of his
dominance over them. After creating man and woman:

...God said unto them, Be fruitful and multiply,
and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and

have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over
the fowl of the air, and over every living thing
that moveth upon the earth (Genesis2:28).

Christianity is extremely anthropocentric; man is like a god, the world
having been designed for his use and exploitation. In the 17th century,
John Ray, a natural theologian, carried the argument further in The

Wisdom of God as Manifested in the Works of Creation (1759; originally
published 1680). The earth, he held, is an orderly well-planned place
with nothing ill-made or frivolous. Man is supposed to explore and
exploit it, advancing himself in understanding the Creator's plan by

seeking the "grand design" in the "great chain of being", pleasing the
Creator by using natural resources and improving the "barren and

desolate Wilderness" (Glacken 1967:483-4). Ritterbush (1968) suggests
that 17th century Utopian fantasies like this one are the ultimate

intellectual sources of the exploitative side of scientific endeavor.

Although the idea of a consciously designed earth has lost power,

in part because we are now more cognizant of the nature of geologic time,
the idea of man as both distinct from nature and manipulator of nature
has remained. The business of scientific technology, indeed, requires
manipulation of nature by an "objective outsider". Anthropology, as

the youngest of the sciences, is heir to this complex of ideas and like
all other sciences has had difficulty coming to grips with such moral
considerations. "Despite Copernicus, all the world rotates around our
little globe. Despite Darwin, we are not, in our hearts, part of
the natural process" (White 1967:1206).

13

If the notion of man's dominion over the earth is as old as

Judaism, the question of the degree to which environment has molded
the race, psychology and socioculture of man is probably at least as
old. In his History, written in the 5th century B.C., Herodotus

proved keenly interested in the effects of geography and environment,
and occasionally attempted to correlate culture and environment. He

suggested that the nomadic way of life in combination with the nature
of their land made the Scythians practically unconquerable (1954:257).
Isidore of Seville, the transmitter of classical knowledge from Greece
to the Middle Ages, also remarked on the influence of climate on the
diversity of man, attributing to geography the "seriousness of the
Romans, light-heartedness of the Greeks, and the cunning of the

Africans" (Glacken 1967:208-9). Ibn Khaldun, an Arab who lived from

1322-1406, thought climate set absolute lmi ts on culture, influencing
greatly the shape of society (1950:38-70). The most important of the
many Renaissance thinkers on this general subject was Jean Bodin

(1530-96). In the Six Books of a Commonweale (1606) Bodin held the

state to be a product of the conquest by nomads of developed agricultural
peoples. The latter, due to their way of life, lacked vigor; the

former's stringent existence produced militant types. Later 18th century
thinkers included Montesquieu, Willian Robertson and Kant, all of whom
had environmental deterministic theories.

It is a curious and provocative fact that Western thinkers have
been so obsessed with the effects of environment on human life and
so little concerned with the effects of humans on their physical
environment. There are many possible reasons for this. If the

environment is a "home" which man dominates and exploits by divine grace,
then man need not worry about the effects of his inroads. After the
first great era of discovery in the 15th century, intellectuals were
interested in explaining the diversity of men; concomitantly there
was little awareness of the huge exploitative endeavor in which the

West was engaged. Possibly refusal to consider the effects of culture

14

on environment has been a kind of large-scale defense mechanism.

Whatever the case, the notion that man has only recently been
exploiting his environment is fallacious; groups of men have been
exercising their talents upon the earth's face since they first

grasped bone or stone as tools. We can more safely say that it is

only in this century that technological developments have accelerated
degradation so that sociocultural suicide is a distinct possibility.

In previous eras man seems to have greatly altered his environment and
exploited natural resources, although, as we shall see below, little

systematic research has been conducted on the topic by anthropologists.
Stewart (1956) suggests that large-scale burning of vegetational areas

in association with hunting may have produced the grasslands of the world.
Ritterbush notes that smelters were in operation three thousand years ago.

It is estimated that the mining of a single copper lode

(near Salzburg) in the Bronze Age required about 180 men
to work a single mine, and that the 32 mines which were
worked in the lode over a period of several centuries
yielded about 12,000 metric tons of copper! (1968:108).

In the Western tradition little mention is made of man's role as a
geographic agent until the 18th century. One of the first to be

interested in the idea was Comte de Buffon. In Histoire Naturelle (1750)
he commented on the changes wrought in nature by man, particularly those
accompanying the grcwth of civilization. Buffon felt man must change

the earth's surface if he is to become civilized. Nature will win out

if man falters, becomes lazy, doesn't populate. Some of the purposeful
changes noted by Buffon were animal domestication, the drying up of

marshes, control of river courses and cataracts, forest clearance and
land cultivation (see Glacken 1967:658-81).

It was George P. Marsh, in Man and Nature (1864), who first

thoroughly explored the changes man has made on the earth's face, and
first suggested that this might be cause for concern (see quotation

at beginning of paper). His theme was that man disrupts the fundamental

harmony or balance of nature, and that it is man who exerts a revolutionary
effect on nature, not the reverse. The earth was not made for man only.

15

In 1864, Marsh called for political and moral reforms, not technological
solutions or more scientific understanding.

These three ideas--man's domainion, environmental influence cn
socioculture, and man as geographic agent--intertwine in Western

1intellectual history. It is suggested that in general the first has

been accepted as a "given", the second has been a topic of almost endless
discussion and speculation, and the third has been neglected.

The anthropological tradition

The aim of this section is to demanstrate the carry-over of

these three themes into the modern discipline of anthropology, defined
as commencing with Tylor in the last quarter of the l9th century. The
idea of man's dominion reached a peak during the second half of the
19th century  in association with the "stage-theory" of cultural

evolution which placed Western industrialized civilization at the fore-
front. Tylor had little to say about man's relation with the environ-
ment, but near the end of the lgth century, Otis T. Mason, one of the
first American anthropologists, wrote:

.progress looks forward to a time when the whole
earth will have been exploited, every pernicious
plant and animal and man or tribe of men removed,

and all that is good domesticated: when the powers
of nature will all be harnessed or enslaved...The
earth will be subdued by men who will say of the
mountains "Be ye removed and be ye cast into the
sea, and it shall be done, and the desert shall
blossom as the rose"' (1894:61).

For Mason, "technogeography" was the study of the relationship between
the earth and human arts and inventions, and it would demonstrate the
gradual trend from the dominance of nature over man to the prevalence

of civilization through its technology over nature (1894:137-161). Mason's
effort is an outstanding example of the powerful influence of ideas in
the general intellectual milieu upon the kinds of questions asked by
social scientists.

Progressive Social Darwinism has long gone by, however. The

Boasian period and succeeding eras in American anthropology have been
void of this kind of millenarianism. In the first quarter of this

century, anthropology was going about the business of discovering and
defining its subject matter; and while the idea of the superorganic
was taking shape, Wissler wrote The Relations of Nature to Man in

Aboriginal America (1926). Title notwithstanding, this work concerned
itself with developing the notions of culture area and culture trait

distribution and had little to say about nature. The assumption that man
is somehow qualitatively separate from his environment, if not the old
idea of man's dominance over nature, is implicit in Wissler's book.
Wissler speaks of "contacts between man and his surroundings"; he

suggests that "the bond between man and nature is unbreakable" and

that ecology is concerned with questions regarding the degree to which
environment is a determiner "in so far as living forms are forced to

adjust themselves to the conditions it imposes" (1926: 212.  Emphasis
added ). Later in this century, in the works of Leslie White, this

insecurity about the man-environment relation reaches a strange culmin-
ation. Man is such a unique form of being, possessing culture, that
White would remove him entirely from "nature". White considers
environment a constant, a given.

...a consideration of environmental irftluence is
relevant only to studies of particular cultures;

it is not pertinent to a general study of culture
as such....if one is concerned with culture as a
distinct class of phenomena, if one wishes to

discover how cultural systems are structured and
how they function as cultural systems, then one
does not need to consider the natural habitat
at all... (1959:51).

Thus the study of man is first of all the study of culture; and,

since culture is a self-contained system, cultural facts being caused
only by cultural facts, concern with the environment is irrelevant for
anthropologists. White's view seems certainly to justify a lack
of professional interest in environmental problems on the part of
anthropologi st s.

17

The idea that man's control over nature has changed through time

has appeared in recent years. Ferdon (1959), while noting that man will
always operate with the broadest laws of nature, states that "in the

years since the last war it has become more and more evident that man,
through his cultural processes, may control the more apparent factors
of environment" (1959:19). His paper's thesis, indeed, is that

in the evolution of culture, environment seems to determine degree of

agricultural productivity "in inverse ratio to the quality of agricultural
technology possessed by the occupying culture" (1959:18). Other authors

who support the idea of man's increasing control over nature are  Sahlins
(1964:145), Steward (1955:30-42) and Gayton (1945:252-68).

I am not arguing that greater sophist.ication in technology and
scientific knowledge about nature will not produce increased .

environmental control (although the ultimate cost of such "control"
without application of a new morality seems devastating). I am

suggesting rather that the ancient theme underlying the "designed

earth" idea, the -idea of man's distinctive difference from everything
else in nature, carries over strongly into cultural anthropology. The
kinds of problems anthropology considers in relation to the man-

environment issue are' still stamped with the mythology of Genesis.

If -the idea of man's distinctiveness from nature is basic to
present anthropological thought, the second of the themes under

discussion, that of environmental influence on socioculture, has been
the most common topic of debate when anthropologists choose to discuss
the man-environment relationship. The great variety of comments on
this topic can be divided roughly into three types: environmental
determinism, environmental possibilism and cultural ecology. They
will be reviewed in this order.

The early anthropologically-oriented thinkers mentioned in the
section above were mostly environmental determinists. This position

can be generally stated as follows: there is a direct causal relationship

between the environment or aspects of the environment and a culture
(generally holistically conceived). This position has never been

prevalent among anthropologists, although early "anthropogeographers"
such as Ratzel (1896, 1899), Semple (1911) and Huntington (1915)
espoused moderate to extreme determinist positions. Huntington,
for example, states:

In the South [u.s.] we find less energy, less vitality,
less education and fewer men who rise to eminence than
in the North, not because southerners are in any way

innately inferior to northeners, but apparently because
of the adverse climate. In the Far West people seem to
be stimulated to such a degree that nervous exhaustion
threatens them (1915 :286).

From the beginning, it seems, anthropologists were dissatisfied
with the determinist position in its raw state, since they were

vividly aware of the immense diversity of human cultures. Determinism
has carried through in a modified form, however. In Wissler's book
(1926) mentioned above, it is suggested that culture area centers

(in North America) are also ecological area centers. Thus geographical
distribution of traits is due to the fact that they are "adjusted to
external conditions" (1926:222). Wissler is not a strict determinist
because cause-effect relationships are not spelled out; a holistic

determinism is implied, however. In 1954 Meggers presented the "law
of environmental limitation on culture" which reads:  "the level to
which a culture can develop is dependent upon the agricultural

potentiality of the environment, each with different cultural potential
due to different agricultural potentials. The idea is not thoroughly
deterministic, for it focuses primarily on subsistence activities

and the relation of a culture to its environment. But it also falls
short of being entirely cultural-ecological (see below) because

Mieggers doesn't spell out the adaptive relations between specific
st>bsistence activities and the rest of a culture.

The second kind of approach, environmental possibilism, was

quite popular in anthropology until around 1950. This position states

19

that environment only limits cultures. It allows variation, and in

general it is a passive factor on which cultures act selectively. In
19341, C. DarylL Forde emphasized the vast variability of culture and
habitat s:

Neither the world distributions of the various economies,
nor their development and relative importance among

particular peoples, can be regarded as simple functions
of physical conditions and natural resources. Between
the physical environment and human activity there is

always a middle term, a collection of specific objectives
and values, a body of knowledge and belief:  in other
words, a cultural pattern (1934:463).

Forde finds the determinist position faulty, for in the determination of
culture there is always an interplay between cultural and environmental
factors. Various parts of the socioculture are determined by habitat,
economy, and other aspects of culture: ". .the economy may owe as

much to the social and ritual pattern as does the character of society
to the economy" (Forde 1934:465). In 1939 Kroeber further refined this

idea. In Cultural and Natural Areas of Native North America he attempted
to delineate the degree of isomorphism between ecological and cultural

areas in North America. Kroeber emphasized, however, the healthy turning
away from previous environmentalist positions.

While it is true that cultures are rooted in nature, and
can therefore never be completely understood except with
reference to that piece of nature in which they occur,
they are no more produced by that nature than a plant

is produced or caused by the soil in which it is rooted.
The immediate causes of cultural phenomena are other
cultural phenomena (1939:1).

It is a small step from this position to that of White, in which the

environment is a given constant. The possibilistic position reiterates
the extreme complexity of possible interactions between culture and
environment and suggests that this makes generalization unprofitable
on the whole. Thus Kroeber's ultimate aim is not a statement about

man-environment relations but about historical and processual relations
between cultures and culture areas (1939:1-2).

20

The third and most recent approach, that of cultural ecology,
incorporates the idea of an adaptive response of a culture to its

environment. It differs from the above two approaches by suggesting

that only certain critical aspects of the environment determine certain
aspects of the socioculture, and it tries to spell them out. .Steward,
who in 1955 made the major contribution to the development of the

cultural ecology concept, states that the objective of this approach is
to determine whether. similar socio-cultural adjustments occur -in

similar environments. This is done by analyzing 1) the interrelations
of productive technology and environment, 2) the behavior patterns

involved in exploiting a particular area with a particular technology,
and 3) the extent to which behavior patterns involved in exploiting
the environment affect other aspects of culture (1955:30-42). The

advantages of the cultural ecological approach over former ones are
significant: direction of cause and effect is specified, cultures

are treated as separate cases rather than as levels in the growth of
civilization, and cultures are seen to be in a dynamic state of

adaptation. Most anthropologists who today concern themselves with

man-environment relationships espouse the cu4tural ecological approach;
among these are Harris (1968) whose "cultural materialism" accounts

for differences and similarities between cultures in terms of "techno-
economic" and "techno-environmental" conditions, Vayda (1961), Barth
(1956), Dumond (1961) and others. The cultural ecological approach
has drawbacks at present, and these will be reviewed below. The

important point here is that cultural ecology is still in the main-
stream of the environmental influence idea.

Anthropology has neglected the issue of man as geographic

agent until very recently. In 1894 Mason made passing mention of

the effects of man on nature, stating that "charming books have been
written on the subject" (1894:137) (referring to Marsh), but dropped
the topic there. Not until nearly a century after the publication of

Man and Nature, did anthropology rouse itself when in 1955 the Wenner-

21

Gren Foundation sponsored a symposium, dedicated to George Marsh,
entitled "Man's Role- in Changing the Face of the Earth". The

ensuing book of the same title (Thomas 1956) included articles by
Sauer on what we know about the effects of primitive and peasant

cultures on their environments (which isn't much)-and by Stewart on
the impact of fire as a cultural tool, on.past -environments. It is

significant, however, that although sponsored by an anthropological

foundation, the conference. included 40% earth scientists, 28% biological
scientists, and 20% researchers in applied fields such as city planning
and administration (Thomas 1956:xxvi). Only about 6 papers out of the
52 published were.written by anthropologists. Their conference has

not been followed by a rise in interest among anthropologists in the
effects of sociocultures on their environments.

A CRITIQUE OF THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL APPROACH

Cultural anthropology's attitude toward the environment has

been on the whole very narrow. In compartmentalized fashion it has
asked, what (if anything) can man's environment tell us about the
variety and functioning of sociocultures? As we have seen above,
anthropology has made a crucial decision before even asking this

question, a decision deriving from the Western tradition that there
is a distinctness of man from nature. Instead of commencing with an
open mind, anthropology early drew a circle around "culture, the

superorganic" and proclaimed as its subject matter that which so strongly
distinguished man from all other living beings. Instead of seeing

similarities,anthropology saw differences and embraced those differences,
thereby embracing an attitude that set man against his natural environ-
ment and perpetuated the Genesis mythology.

We have seen, secondly, that anthropology, paralleling Western
tradition, has indulged in lively discussion. of the degree to.which
environment determines or influences cultures or aspects of culture,

but has almost ignored the obvious complementary issues-of cultures',

reciprocal effects. on their environments. Again, because anthropology

22

has drawn limits around the concept of culture as that which is to be

studied and explained, anthropologists don't tend to ask such questions
as, what are the effects of different levels of cultural development
on the environment? Is man more destructive of his environment

because of his ideology, or because of his technology? Are there

cultures which are non-destructive, truly "in balance with nature",

or has man always been destructive?  These questions all imply causal

feedback effects on the cultures involved; it seems even the most diehard

cultural deterninist would wish to take into account these feedback effects.

Thirdly, the cultural ecological approach (as Steward defines it),
though an improvement on previous theories, remains a theory of environ-
mental effects on culture. The emphasis is on cultural adaptation
to a changing milieu, paralleling the Darwinian concept of species

adaptedness to an environment. The cultural ecologist selects out those

features of the environment which are critical in shaping certain aspects
of the socioculture. He does not reverse this, however, and note the
critical aspects of culture which shape and change the environment.
Steward suggests that "primry attention be paid only to relevant

environmental features rather than to the web of life for its own sake"
(1955:39). This approach might be diagrammed as in Figure 1. In this
diagram the arrows indicate cause-effect relationships.

Thus the range of cultural ecology, potentially as broad a

field as anthropology itself and perhaps broader, is actually quite

narrow and specialized, being focussed not on feedback relations between
culture and environment, as one might expect, but ultimately on the
ancient question of the influence of environment on culture.

CONCLUSION AND NEW DIRECTIONS

On the basis of the above criticisms, several new directions

in the study of the man-environment relationship may be suggested. The
first is so obvious as to be trite, and yet so difficult to implement
that I hesitate to suggest it: Anthropology desperately needs to

incorporate in its method and theory non-Western assumptions about man

23

The present cultural ecological approach

Phy s i c a I

Environm ent

Socio culture

Figure I

and nature. We might ask ourselves, how would the science of man

have developed if we began with the idea of unbroken continuity and
interrelatedness of all natural things? New points of view on the

subject should emerge with the development of a "native anthropology,"
and with the "decolonization of anthropological knowledge" spoken
of by Jones (1971).

Anthropology must also become less "culture-centric". As

Western intellectual tradition has been anthropocentric in religion
and life-style, anthropology has been culture-centric, especially

since Kroeber. By becoming less culture-centric I do not mean that
anthropologists should give up the study of culture. Rather I'm

suggesting that anthropology should stop making culture the central
issue, the important "thing" to be concerned with. By becoming

purposefully more interdisciplinary in aim, cultural anthropology

would gain in the understanding of culture, not lose. Both archeology
and physical anthropology seem to be ahead of cultural anthropology
in this respect, archeology perhaps because its methodology involves
deducing things about sociocultures largely from the remnant effects
of man upon his environment, and physical anthropology because feed-
back effects between culture, environment and human biology have

been documented in evolutionary studies (for example, see Livingstone
1958).

Thirdly, anthropology might become more systems-oriented. Until
extremely recently systems theory has had minimal impact on anthro-

pological endeavors; particularly lacking is the use of the ecosystem
concept, in its broadest sense defined as the interrelationships

between organisms and their environment. Anthropologists as we have
seen, tend to look at cause-effect relationships in one direction--

the effects of environment on culture. The ecosystem approach focusses
on feedback relationships between every appropriate part of the system
considered. Duncan (1961:140-1) has suggested that the ecosystem
approach is particularly important because it obviates the levels

concept, a concept which tends to encourage thinkers to work within

25

a level (inorganic, organic, psychological, or socio-cultural) and
not with it.

A tentative diagram of the ecosystem including human factors
is presented in Figure 2. The arrows represent cause-effect

relationships; of course, there are also cause-effect relationships
within each circle. It is some such model of relationships that the
anthropological scientist should start with when he approaches the
study of man and environment.

A recent example of the use of a similar model can be found
in the sociologist Duncan's article (1961) in which the ecosystem
approach is illustrated by application to the problem of air
pollution in Los Angeles.

Just as the way people act depends on what they think about
themselves in relation to the world, the way a researcher proceeds
depends on his theoretical framework. Anthropology's traditional
theoretical framework has been culture-centric and devoid of the
ecosystem idea. -It has thus been found wanting in an area where

it should have much to say. What I' am calling for is that anthro -
pologists become ecologists in a very broad sense of the term--that
they become concerned with human elements and relationships within
the context of a total ecosystem. The ecological approach thus

becomes more a point of view than a subject, and it can be thought

of as a moral commitment much like the concept of cultural relativism
in the anthropology of the past.

Like most modern sciences, anthropology stands in need of a
new more universal ethic. Acceptance of the ecosystem approach
might lay the groundwork for this ethic; it would also lead

anthropology into stimulating new areas, among these the study of
our own ecosystem, and the commitment to preserving viable
ecosystems rather than cultures.

26

Figure 2 A suggested model for the study of

man- environment relationships

Socioc ulture

Physical

El

Non-humon
Org a n i s m s

Human

O r g a n i s m s

REFERENCES

Baker, Paul T.

1962        The application of ecological theory to anthropology.

American Anthropologist 64: 15-22.
Barth, Fredrik

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Bates, Marston

1953        Humn ecology.  In Anthropology today. A.L. Kroeber,

ed.   Chicago:  University of Chicago Press.  pp.
700-713.
Bodin, Jean

1606        The six books of a commonweale.  London:  G. Bishop.
Buffon, Comte de

1750        Histoire naturelle.  Paris:  Imprimerie Royale.
Carson, Rachel

1962        Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
DlnDnd, D.E.

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