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Cultural Ecology

20 January, 2016 - 09:31

Culture first emerges within the ecosystems of primates where it is expressed in the learned group behaviours of food- gathering and display, which are local to a species in a certain place. In humans, culture appeared as the integrated system of learned behaviour patterns characteristic of members of a society. The system of behaviour constitutes a way of life of any given social group. It is also a social heritage, transmitted from generation to generation by individuals and organisations. This heritage is instilled into the minds of the young, not only by initiation and education, but also by the long, unconscious conditioning whereby each individual becomes the person he/she ultimately is. It thus becomes a form of social heredity. As an evolved harmonious whole it ensures that all the institutions interacting within a society, and constituting it, contribute to group solidarity.

New relationships are being forged between culture and ecology in response to social concerns that arise because of the present state of the earth household. One of these responses is the concept of ‘sustainability’, which is not a scientific term, but more a focus of social problems arising from the large-scale use of natural resources. These issues can only be solved by new social organisations, local and global, established to manage industrial production within the limitations of Earth’s ecological infrastructure. There also has to be a new holistic cross-disciplinary social model, where knowledge about human social evolution is categorised to connect the social sciences with disciplines such as law, history, geography, education, and biology. A start in this direction was made by Ramchandra Guha (1994) who argues in favour of creating an ‘environmentally orientated sociology’ for a world in environmental crisis by placing ecological infrastructure at the base of the traditional pyramidal model of society.

In such a pyramid, consisting of ‘nature’, ‘society’ and ‘culture, the two functional pillars of social organisation are the organisation of people for production (political economy) and the organisation of natural resources for production (natural economy). Both of these economies draw upon what may be called the planetary economy. This model of cultural ecology is provisionally set out in Fig 11.1. Geographers and anthropologists mean different (but complementary) things by "cultural ecology." In general, "cultural ecology" studies the relationship between a given society and its natural environment. But geographers generally mean the study of how socially organized human activities affect the natural environment; anthropologists generally mean the study of how the natural environment affects socially organized behaviours (although, at its extreme, environmental determinism has fallen out of favour among most anthropologists).

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Figure 11.1  Provisional model of cultural ecology