Political Ecology. Paul Robbins

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Political Ecology - Paul Robbins


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in plantation societies, which offered the enslaved a profound understanding of food, medicinal, and environmental resources that would abet their survival and resistance.”

      In this way, the power of Carney's story in both contributing to, and inverting, diffusionist history is profound.

       Julian Steward: a positivist alternative

      The postwar period brought with it a change in the structure and direction of social scientific research. While the historicism of human ecology continued to be championed by researchers like Sauer, a new generation of cultural researchers became increasingly interested in an explicit, predictive science, one that sought laws with universal applicability using rigorous, quantitative investigation of cause and effect. Inspired by positivist approaches to social science – those that sought to establish scientific theories and laws of social behavior and function – these researchers wanted to move beyond descriptive histories and landscape studies. Without returning to crude determinism, anthropologists and geographers were searching for a science of culture.

      In Julian Steward, they found an intriguing alternative. In contrast to Sauer and other historicists, Steward was driven by an interest in cross‐cultural comparison. While the historicist notion of history creating culture, he claimed, avoids the problems of determinism, he insisted that it could not explain, and so must be rejected (Steward 1972).

Diagram of Julian Steward’s cultural ecology displaying three concentric circles indicating the culture core (inner circle), the primary features (middle circle), and the contingent features (outer circle).

      The core includes such social, political, and religious patterns as are empirically determined to be closely connected with these arrangements. Innumerable other features may have great potential variability because they are less strongly tied to the core. These latter, or secondary features, are determined to a greater extent by purely cultural‐ historical factors – by random innovations or diffusion – and they give the appearance of outward distinctiveness to cultures with similar cores. Cultural ecology pays primary attention to those features which empirical analysis shows to be most closely involved in the utilization of environment in culturally prescribed ways.

       (Steward 1972, p. 37)

      Methodologically, Steward's model formed a clear mission for researchers. By observing many cases of the same kinds of production and comparatively assessing those cultural characteristics that do and do not vary, researchers can scientifically understand what the ordered functions of social and cultural process might be. This regime further compelled researchers to study more “simply structured” and less complex social groups – hunter‐gatherers, agriculturists, and herders. Though the same principles applied to modern industrial societies, it was reasoned, a scientific study should begin at the simple and extend only slowly to more complex cases (Steward 1972). Like Sauer, therefore, Steward's cultural ecology would focus on subsistence producers in rural areas, often in underdeveloped contexts. The implications of this for later political ecology cannot be overstated (Figure 2.1).

       System, function, and human life: mature cultural ecology

      But long before such approaches emerged, the science of cultural ecology would develop into a complex and diverse field of study in its own right, propelled by simultaneous enthusiasm in geography and the emerging sub‐discipline of ecological anthropology, and drawing upon an increasingly sophisticated body of concepts and quantitative methods (Grossman 1977; Hardesty 1977). In particular, the science of ecology provided the central analytical tools with which cultural ecologists would experiment. These were attractive because they allowed researchers to discuss human behaviors and practices in terms of their function and role in regulating energy and nutrient flows in a larger system, towards or away from homeostatic equilibria (Foote and Greer‐Wooten 1968). In other words, by viewing humans as essentially the same as other plant and animal species, basic functional hypotheses could be proposed to explain complex cultural patterns. Rituals, kinship patterns, and traditional institutions could be evaluated to determine if they served an ecosystem function – one that helped regulate the general system of human–environment relations, maintaining stability.

      In a classic example, Roy Rappaport, an anthropologist with years of field experience amongst the Maring people of New Guinea, proposed that major features of the Maring's complex culture could be explained by virtue of their role in maintaining ecosystemic balances. Specifically he hypothesized that periodic ritual warfare and pig sacrifice were the indirect response mechanisms to cycles of population growth and decline amongst both pigs and people (Rappaport 1967, 1968).

      Other researchers used ecological concepts like “ecological niche” and “adaptation” to explore within‐ and across‐group relationships (Barth 1956; Hardesty 1975). In the adaptation research of John Bennett, for example, the practices of a range of ethnic groups on the northern plains of Alberta, including Hutterite farmers, Anglo ranchers, and Native Americans, were explained in terms of the different ways in which they made a living from the diverse resources of the prairie (Bennett 1969).

      During the 1960s and 70s, cultural ecologists became increasingly interested in developing common metrics with which such meaningful cross‐cultural measurements and comparisons might be made. How can the patterns of resource use in the forests of New Guinea, for example, be meaningfully compared to practices in rural England


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