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White also argued for an evolutionary perspective on
culture as a mode of adaptation, but focused on techno-
logical advances in the harnessing of energy as the stan-
dard by which to measure evolutionary progress.Whereas
Cultural Ecology Steward’s evolutionism was specific and relativistic,

White’s was thus general and universalistic.
ultural ecology in a wide sense denotes a concern Steward’s and White’s cultural ecologies prepared the
Cwith the relationship between human culture and ground for the emergence, in the 1960s and 1970s, of an
the natural environment, and in a narrow sense a partic- ecological anthropology influenced by cybernetics, gen-
ular perspective on this relationship that was first devel- eral systems theory, and the rapidly developing science of
oped by anthropologists such as Julian Steward (1902– ecology. Much of the research conducted under this label
1972) and Leslie White (1900–1975) in the late 1940s has been concerned with the relation between local pop-
and the 1950s. Steward and White were both critical of ulations and their natural habitats, interpreted in terms of
the historical particularism that dominated American human adaptation to an ecological niche and the main-
anthropology in the early decades of the twentieth cen- tenance of sustainable energy flows in local ecosystems.
tury through the influence of Franz Boas (1858–1942), Most faithful to the Marxist roots was Marvin Harris’s
Alfred Kroeber (1876–1960), and their students, who (1927–2001) cultural materialism, a perspective that
rejected any attempt to explain cultural phenomena by viewed seemingly arbitrary cultural phenomena (e.g., the
reference to noncultural factors such as evolution or sacredness of India’s cattle) as reflections of an underly-
environment. Although the differences between Steward ing material rationality (in this case, the productive impor-
and White were considerable, they converged in the tance of cattle in India), thus representing an extreme