Table of Contents
Cultural Ecology and Julian Steward:
The question of
how culture is formed, evolved or changed continues to remain a puzzle to the
anthropologists. The answer to this question is never settled and called for
increasing number of diverse answers. The question is dealt differently by
different schools of thought. Hence, for the 19th century
evolutionists it was similar to Darwinian evolution, for scholars like Franz
Boas (Harris, 1968) it was the ‘historical determinants’ for ecological
anthropologists, championed by Julian Steward (1955) it is the ‘ecological
determinants’ or cultural ecology.
The cultural
ecologists speak about an intimate relationship between culture and
environment. For Sahlins (1969) it is cultural moulding of ecological challenges
to enhance life chances, and for Steward (1955) it is a dialectic-interplay of
culture and environment creating something known as ‘reciprocal-causality.’
Steward created
a theoretical perspective that was distinctive in mid-20th-century
anthropology. His environmental perspective on culture was unusual, as was his
synthesis of comparative, secondary data from archaeological and ethnographic
research. Both were essential to his goal of understanding the causes of
cultural change by charting the course of change in the past. He did share a
broadly historical orientation with archaeologists and many American cultural
anthropologists of his time. But he departed sharply from the cultural
historicism of Franz Boas and his American students, who included Steward’s own
teachers, Kroeber and Lowie.
Steward’s
theoretical perspective, in contrast to theirs, was materialist,
environmentally oriented, generalizing, and concerned with causality. It was
also thoroughly behaviorist. His theoretical ideas were the antithesis of
humanistic and relativistic trends in cultural anthropology at the time. The
work of Ruth Benedict—his colleague at Columbia University and a student of
Boas—perhaps best represented those prevailing trends, which Steward always
rejected.
Unlike Benedict,
and in keeping with behaviorist principles, Steward consistently focused on
what was external and observable. He gave priority to environmental resources,
primarily those most important in human subsistence, such as edible plants,
animals, and water; to technology, especially the tools used in procuring food
and water; and to behavior, above all, subsistence-related work. These elements
constituted what he eventually termed the cultural core, a key concept in his
thinking about the causes of cultural change. Another, earlier foundational
concept was what he termed the patrilineal band. Steward developed this concept
in an essay that he called his “first work,” a 1936 essay on types of bands
(later divided into two essays and republished in Theory of Culture Change). He
defined the patrilineal band as an exogamous and politically independent group
of male kin who own land and defend exclusive rights to that territory.
Patrilineal bands, he hypothesized, developed in arid regions and others where
food resources were scattered and limited and where hunting centered on the
pursuit of nonmigratory game animals. These were causal factors that limited
the size of bands and kept population density low. Steward thought of this type
of band as a particular cultural type, or cross-cultural type as he termed it.
He argued that the patrilineal band occurred under certain ecological
conditions, while different conditions produced—that is, caused— other types.
Steward drew his
first evidence for the patrilineal band from published, but fragmentary,
accounts of
hunter-gatherers
written by explorers, missionaries, and early anthropologists. He set out to
find first hand evidence through his own ethnographic fieldwork in the Great
Basin in 1935 and 1936, but his search for the patrilineal band did not
succeed. Steward found no evidence that hunter-gatherers in the Great Basin of
western North America had formerly lived in patrilineal bands. In his 1938 ethnography,
Basin-Plateau Aboriginal Sociopolitical Groups, he instead documented the
diversity he had found. He focused on how environmental resources and
conditions in different localities varied, how people in each place had adapted
culturally, and how this resulted in differences in the size and structure of
local groups. The concept of cultural adaptation, which Steward sometimes
termed cultural ecological adaptation, provided a conceptual framework for the
monograph. Over time, it became a unifying concept in American anthropology,
spanning several subfields.
Steward’s search
for the patrilineal band also motivated his two subsequent efforts at fieldwork
with hunter-gatherers: the failed effort in South America in 1938 and his final
fieldwork with Carrier Indians in Canada in 1940. In Canada, as in the Great
Basin, he found no evidence of patrilineal bands. He never succeeded in
documenting this type of band structure in his own fieldwork. During a 20-year
period, between the mid-1930s and the mid-1950s, Steward wrote and published
the series of articles that he later included in the collection titled Theory of Culture Change. One of the
most important was “Cultural Causality
and Law: A Trial Formulation of the Development of Early Civilizations,”
first published in 1949. Using secondary data from published archaeological
reports, Steward argued that the earliest civilizations developed in arid and
semiarid environments and shared a uniform sequence of development, including
the use of irrigation in agriculture. As the telling title suggests, “Cultural Causality and Law” addressed one of Steward’s central
questions: What causes cultural change such as the independent development of
civilization? A central premise came from the natural sciences. Steward
believed that just as there are natural laws, discovered through scientific
inquiry, so are there cultural laws that can likewise be discovered.
Steward came to
call his approach cultural ecology, having used the terms ecology and
ecological in print since the 1930s (e.g., “Ecological
Aspects of Southwestern Society,” first published in 1937 and later reprinted
in Theory of Culture Change). In the early 1950s, he finally wrote an essay on
the concept and method of cultural ecology; it appeared in print as a chapter
in Theory of Culture Change. There,
he explicitly named and defined the cultural core, a concept implicit in his
previous writings about patrilineal bands, lineage- and clan-based societies,
and early civilizations. A few years later, he quietly abandoned the concept of
the cultural core—which was arguably the linchpin of cultural ecology—but he
never questioned the concept of the patrilineal band, despite the lack of
empirical evidence to support it. This foundational concept, inspired in part by
experiences at Deep Springs, held deeply personal as well as intellectual
meaning for him.
In the 1950s,
Steward began to be linked with Leslie White as a fellow cultural evolutionist.
White’s brand of cultural evolution differed in many ways from Steward’s ideas
about the causes and the course of cultural change, and Steward adopted the
term multilinear evolution to distinguish his approach from what he called
White’s universal evolution.
Despite its
name, the basic ideas of multilinear evolution came from cultural ecology.
Steward consistently focused on environmental resources, technology, and the
organization of work in analyzing cultural change. To analyze change in
sociopolitical structures and complexity, a topic of perennial interest to him,
he developed a concept he termed levels of sociocultural integration. He
included a chapter on that topic in Theory of Culture Change.
Steward always preferred
the name cultural ecology for his approach, a set of ideas that he complained
had been hard to “sell.” That name proved to be the one that endured, and his
theoretical ideas began gaining ground after the publication of Theory of Culture Change. Steward’s
environmental perspective helped stimulate a range of ecological approaches
later in the 20th century, including human behavioral ecology, which has drawn
adherents from biological anthropology, archaeology, and cultural anthropology.
Cultural ecology’s influence on three of the four subfields of American
anthropology is undeniable but perhaps not widely appreciated.
Steward has
become a figure of controversy among cultural anthropologists and Native scholars
for his role in the Indian Claims Commission trials and the way in which he
represented Great Basin Indians in his testimony and in his published writings;
for his conviction that anthropology was a value-neutral science; and for his
notable preoccupation with men’s labor but his near silence about women’s,
despite having learned in fieldwork as early as 1935 that women had made the
larger contribution to subsistence in much of the Great Basin.
Many
archaeologists, among others, continue to find great heuristic value in
Steward’s cultural ecology. His founding role in environmental anthropology
also continues to receive favorable attention. The Julian Steward Award,
launched in 2002 and given periodically by the Anthropology and Environment Section
of the American Anthropological Association, recognizes what is judged the best
new book in ecological/environmental anthropology.
Theory in Social and Cultural Anthropology – An Encyclopedia, Edited by R. Jon McGee and Richard L. Warms 2013, Sage: Thousand
Oaks, California
Dictionary of Anthropology, Edited by Thomas Barfield, New York: Blackwell, 1996
Neo-evolutionism:
http://sumananthromaterials.blogspot.com/2019/07/neo-evolutionism-with-special-emphasis.html
Branches of
Social Cultural Anthropology (especially ecological anthropology): http://sumananthromaterials.blogspot.com/2014/11/branches-of-social-cultural-anthropology.html
Political
Anthropology: http://sumananthromaterials.blogspot.com/2014/11/political-anthropology.html
A brief discussion on Cultural Ecology by Julian Steward (Bilingual meant for my college students)
