What is Ecology? - we may take the original definition of Haeckel in 1870, who coined the term, as "...the study of the economy, of the household, of animal organisms. This includes the relationships of animals with both the inorganic and organic environments, above all the beneficial and inimical relations that Darwin referred to as the conditions of the struggle of existence." These ideas were reworked by A. Tansley who in 1935, coined the term "ecosystem". Butzer (1989) suggests ecology deals with 1. organic productivity (ie growth of plants, animals, and other organisms) 2. competition between other organisms 3. food chains (who eats what). Some, but not all, of these ideas are useful for studying farming systems and small-scale communities in the developing world, and have been 'imported' into cultural ecology.
What is cultural ecology? Cultural ecology has attempted to apply these concepts of system and ecological relationships to human societies; usually small-scale communities reliant on the local resource base for all or most of their daily needs. We can call these "low energy" societies. Julian Steward (1955) in his "Origins of Cultural Change" said that cultural ecology is the "..study of the adaptive processes by which the nature of society, and an unpredictable number of features of culture, are affected by the basic adjustment through which man utilizes a given environment".
It is this assertion - that the physical environment affects culture - that had proved controversial since this early statement was made - especially since it has been easy to attack cultural ecology for a mild form of environmental determinism. Steward's method was to: 1) document the technologies & methods used to exploit the environment - to get a living from it. 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 (eg 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). Butzer (1989) suggests that contemporary cultural ecology looks at "how people live, doing what, how well, for how long, and with what human and environmental constraints". Cultural ecologists argue that the possibilities and the constraints of the resource base, and the local environment that a group uses is extremely important for certain features of that society: its diet, where settlements are located, how festivals and ceremonies occur, how exchanges of goods or services are made, how agricultural labour is organised, what technologies are used, and so-on. Many of these things depend on how food is obtained, and what must be gone though in order to obtain it. It is suggested that people adapt to the environment - they are not its slaves. Adaptation really means responding to change in order to survive and prosper better. The term could refer to the development of better technologies (like ploughs) to cope with increased food needs, or to the continuing changes made to farming patterns (use of different crop types etc) over time as climate or soils change. Ethnoscientific knowledge has been studied in great depth; it is felt by writers including Paul Richards and Robert Netting that local knowledge about plants, animals and other resources is usually well developed, and it is this knowledge which allows people to adapt and survive so well in environments that may be quite marginal (see Richards 1985. Indigenous Agricultural Revolution). What people KNOW ABOUT their local environment, and how they BEHAVE in it, are both important aspects of studying these small scale systems.
Recent work and criticisms Is this the only way to study small scale farming systems? Of course not. Agricultural economists, for example, see farming in terms of meeting supply and demand for food and other goods, and making rational decisions about prices and resource allocation, and their approach emerges in 'farming systems research'. A lot of focus is placed on markets and trade in current studies from various disciplinary perspectives, since these are features of many if not all cultures today. Cultural geographers and some anthropologists look at the meanings and symbols used by farming cultures, and some suggest that rituals, religious belief and forms of social organization are not closely linked to the environment at all, but instead form unique 'worldviews' shaped by socialization and political-economic circumstance (Peet & Watts, 1996). As in many academic debates, there are many theories, and not enough agreement. Before deciding to accept or reject the basic premise of cultural ecology, note that the early work of Steward and his colleagues has been refined over the years. Firstly It was felt the definition of C-E above did not sufficiently consider human impacts on the environment. These impacts and transformations should be seen as part of a truly interdependent natural-human system. This is where ecosystem studies become important - they show the form of these interrelationships in particular societies (see Ellen 1882, Butzer 1989). The effects of farming on soil quality, on vegetation, on water resources and pests and disease vectors should be examined when conducting fieldwork in particular places. Using the 'system' as a basis for study is often helpful. From this perspective, soil erosion and other environmental problems (some resulting from poverty and unwise development scenarios) can be accounted for. The most famous example of an ecosystem based analysis is that of Rappoport who wrote "Pigs for the Ancestors" (1969). The New Guinea Maring, he argues, have rituals which are essential to the smooth functioning of that society. Every few years, a ceremony is held at which pigs (which had been fed and pampered up for up to 7 years prior to the event) are slaughtered and their meat distributed to all members of the community. This strange practice, Rappoport showed, actually made a lot of sense if one looked at the flows of energy among the Maring. A Kaiko ritual slaughtering occurred when women (who tend the pigs) are unable to cope with so many of them. These occasional feasts re-distributed much-needed protein to all members of the tribe, and had implications for reducing warfare with neighboring groups too (men ate salted pig fat before warfare, which meant they had too much thirst to fight for long!). Rappoport says little, though, about what the Maring think about all of this and whether they are happy with their 'adaptive strategy'. Could it also be that they plan the feasts because they enjoy having them, not because they are forced to have them? A second criticism is over the scale of these types of studies - they are done at the 'microregion' scale. The results may not be generalizable over larger areas. Also, regional-scale processes may be missed by the analysis - trade patterns, what migrants do when they are not in the community itself, and how regional or national authorities operate in the region can all be important too. Where societies were contacted early-on by traders and colonial authorities and started to produce crops for international markets, the idea of a small 'ecosystem' study seems impossible to justify - how does one study the influence these markets have on individual farmers, or trace the flow of cash and purchased items through the community? What if colonial raiders and armies ravaged the village, or took much of the agricultural surplus in the form of taxes and tithes? The task of cultural ecology becomes harder to defend under these circumstances. The wider picture, and the differences in the community itself in terms of classes and hierarchies of power, need to be examined as well. One of the best uses of the cultural-ecological approach, however, is in comparing across different types of farming systems. This allows factors such as the influence of population densities to be related to the type of farming, the intensity (ie, how much effort and how much land is used to produce a given about of food) of production, and the types of social arrangements which grow up to support these farming systems. Cultural ecological studies have challenged Malthusian ideas about population growth and quality of life in developing countries, since they place faith in human adaptive capacities. The implications of work in this field has been profound. Take hunter gather communities. These are people, increasingly rare today, who have little or no farming and keep no domestic animals. The tool they use are simple. The image of hunter gatherers held by western people was often one of extreme poverty, primitivism, and of people constantly on the bare limits of survival, as Tim Ingold has pointed out in numerous publications. This was seem as totally at odds with the sophistication of western society. Cultural ecologists have demonstrated the falseness of these images. It has been shown that 1) Hunter-gatherers have an adequate and reliable food base 2) They use minimal, or acceptable labour contributions to meet their everyday needs 3) they live to an advanced age without obviously more health problems than comparable peoples. Richard Lee's studies of the Kalahari Bushmen in the 1960s illustrated these points. Through exhaustive fieldwork he showed the San bushmen worked the following weekly hours: Men: 21.6 hrs on subsistence work, 5.1 on tool making, 15.4 on housework. Women: 12.6 hours on subsistence, 5.1 on tool making, and 22.4 hours on housework. Totals: Men 44.5 hrs per week, women 40.1 hours per week - about the same as western levels! These labour inputs are sufficient to support the tribe, and its old, infirm and young children. He also showed that it was the exhaustion of local food sources (nuts & berries, some game) which forces the relocation of their camps. For this mobility to work, a flexible sort of social structure was needed - small, flexible bands. If bands had too many people, the carrying capacity of the desert would be exhaused and clashes with neighbouring groups could occur. The San regulate their own population, therefore. The third criticism - cultural ecology needs to examine CHANGE, and the past. How farming systems got to where they are today is also vital to understanding, as are the "ecological transitions" of regions and of societies (See John Bennett's "The Ecological Transition", 1976). Thus historical work is needed, using such sources as documents, archeological work, or simple oral histories, to elicit how things were in the past. Very long term studies have also been done, for example on prehistoric irrigation systems, pre-contact Mexican societies and their food production, and the evolution of African village life over the centuries. These are some of the best cultural ecology studies, in my view. In north Nigeria, Michael Watts (Silent Violence, 1983) has shown how farm communities have been altered by the different government systems in power over the centuries, and he has shown how the British colonial power offered a worse deal for farmers because of its heavy tax burdens, demands for production of cash crops, and lack of stored grain stocks to disburse in lean years.
Cultural ecologists are "fundamentally opposed to mindless modernisation according to western standards" (Butzer 1989). They argue that traditional agriculture works, is an intelligent use of local resources, and often out-performs the modern systems of high-input agriculture or irrigated farming that has been offered as options. Traditional systems minimise risk, and gives rise to sensible and deeply held sets of values and cultural systems (Netting 1993). People may be brought together by the shared experience of making a living from the land, not pushed apart in the search for cash, goods and status (Roger Keesing, an anthropologist, has produced work on this). Westerners should learn from farmers. Cultural ecology thus provides evidence and support for an alternative form of development that allows rural people the right to determine the pace and the style at which they wish to change. Some may choose to have TV and western medicine, but this cannot be assumed or pushed for!
What do you think? Would you be interested in studying the cultural ecology of traditional agriculture? What would it reveal about our own culture and society? How would you go about doing such a study? The readings tackle some of these issues for you, and provide examples.