Page 116 - Encyclopedia Of World History

466 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

[The] law of cultural development: Culture advances as the amount of energy
harnessed per capita per year increases, or as the efficiency or economy of the means
of controlling energy is increased, or both. • Leslie White (1900–1975)

version of cultural ecology’s ambition to explain culture modynamic achievement (technological development)
by reference to nature. A more sophisticated version was that he visualized as the foundation of an egalitarian
Roy Rappaport’s (1926–1997) account of ritual pig future world might be dependent on an unequal
slaughter in highland New Guinea as a cybernetic feed- exchange of energy and other resources in global society.
back mechanism that maintained ecological equilibrium In their inclination to focus on local populations and
and cultural stability. In synthesizing influences from ecosystems, and on technology as a local phenomenon,
materialist cultural ecology, on one hand, and the cyber- cultural ecology and subsequent proponents of ecological
netics and communication theory informing Gregory anthropology have generally underestimated the role of
Bateson’s (1904–1980) ecology of mind, on the other, global or even regional systems and processes in shaping
Rappaport pioneered a more holistic ecological anthro- local economy and culture.The recently expanding field
pology that sought to address both material and of political ecology, however, is a promising antidote to
ideational aspects of human-environmental relations. such parochialism and political naivety. In addition to
Another school of ecological anthropology, represented exploring applied environmental issues such as sustain-
by neoevolutionists such as Morton Fried (1923–1986), able development, environmental justice, ecological eco-
Elman Service, and Kent Flannery (b. 1934), maintained nomics, and the tragedy of the commons (i.e., the overuse
a focus on tracing long-term processes of sociocultural of common property resources by people pursuing their
development to explain the origins of increasing social individual interests), political ecology has generated new
complexity. theoretical frameworks for understanding how environ-
mental issues, power, and inequality are intermeshed.
Critiques In recent years, the label environmental anthropology
A number of criticisms have been directed at these vari- has been used in a general sense for anthropological stud-
ous versions of cultural ecology, the most general of ies of human-environmental relations, including those
which are their inclination toward environmental deter- whose concerns transcend the questions traditionally
minism and their neofunctionalist assumptions of adap- asked by cultural ecology and ecological anthropology.
tation. It has often been observed that to demonstrate the This more inclusive label should arguably be extended to
ecological consequences of a cultural institution is not to the ethnoecology pioneered in the 1950s by the cognitive
explain its existence. Marxist critics also point out that an anthropologist Harold Conklin (b. 1926). A subfield of
emphasis on the ecological functions of culture neglects ethnoscience, this method uses linguistic analysis of
the crucial role of conflict, power, and contradiction in native (emic) categories to map a group’s own view or
sociocultural processes.White’s Marxist-inspired techno- knowledge of their natural environment. Environmental
logical optimism, on the other hand, is difficult to recon- anthropology would also include the symbolic ecology
cile with world developments since the 1950s. His law of launched in the 1990s by Philippe Descola (b. 1949),
cultural evolution, which ambiguously refers to both the building on the structuralist perspectives of Claude Lévi-
amount of energy harnessed per capita and the efficiency Strauss (b. 1908).Apparently sharing Lévi-Strauss’s posi-
of energy use, did not reckon with the possibility that tion that nature and culture are universal cognitive
quantity and efficiency (what his students Marshall categories, Descola has redefined animism and totemism
Sahlins and Elman Service later distinguished as ther- as mirror images of each other, metaphorically transfer-
modynamic achievement versus thermodynamic effi- ring meanings from society to nature and from nature to
ciency) may in fact be inversely related in world history. society, respectively. Symbolic ecology shares with eth-
The simpler and less energy-intensive a society is, the noecology a focus on the cultural construction of the
more efficient its energy use is likely to be. Nor didWhite environment, rather than on how the environment shapes
consider the possibility that the expanded levels of ther- culture. Finally, also in the 1990s,Tim Ingold (b. 1948)