Neo-Evolutionism and Cultural Ecology

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Neo-Evolutionism and Cultural Ecology

• A major theoretical shift occurred in American
  anthropology in the late 1940s and 1950s
• antievolutionary perspective of the Boasian
  school competes with the new and more
  sophisticated evolutionary approaches of Julian
  Steward and Leslie White
• similarities between cultures could be explained
  by parallel adaptations to similar natural
  environments
• not all societies passed through similar stages
  of cultural development i.e. unilineal models of
  evolution were too sweeping.

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Julian Haynes Steward 1902 - 1972

• central figure in the introduction of ecological
  concepts into social and cultural anthropology
• cultural ecology
• Multilinear Evolution

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Cultural Ecology
Cultural Ecology is the study of the processes
by which a society adapts to its environment.
Its principle problem is to determine whether
these adaptations initiate internal social
transformations of evolutionary change 1968
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3 basic steps for a cultural ecological
investigation

1. Analysis of the relationship between the material
   culture and the natural resources
2. the behaviour patterns involved in the
   exploitation of a particular area by means of a
   particular technology must be analyzed e.g..
   Solitary hunter or group
3. how behaviour patterns entailed in exploiting the
   environment affect other aspects of culture

This three step approach identifies the cultural
core the constellation of features which are
most closely related to subsistence activities
and economic arrangements
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Shoshone Women with large baskets for carrying
gear and collecting wild foods, flat baskets for
preparing seeds and nuts. In the Great Basin
Desert circa 1868.
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• Cultures that shared similar core features
  belonged to the same culture type
• Having identified these culture types Steward
  then compared and sorted them into a hierarchy
  arranged by complexity
• Stewards original ranking was family,
  multifamily and state-level societies
• These categories were later refined by his
  followers into band, tribe chiefdom and state.

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Band ? Tribe ? Chiefdom ? Ag. State ?
Industrial State
Hallmarks of Difference
-Centralized
-Decentralized
Band -H/G -mobile
-kinship -egalitarian
Tribe -Hort./pastoralist -Complex kinship
-Headman -warfare

• Chiefdom
• Intermediate b/w tribe
• and bureaucratic govts.
• -1 (or gt1) descent group
• gains dominance
• -hierarchical ? social strata
• - 1,000s ? 10,000s

Ag. States -bureaucratic govt -dense
populations (urban) -food surpluses
-many economic roles
-writing systems
-public works (labor)
-10,000s ? Million(s)
Chief any individual who held leadership role
in a non-western, stateless society
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Multilinear evolution

• Cross-cultural parallels in social patterns could
  be explained as adaptations to similar
  environments
• Steward proposed cultural parallels due to
  adaptation rather than historical diffusion or
  migration
• i.e. Multilinear evolution focuses on the
  evolution of specific cultures without assuming
  that all cultures follow the same evolutionary
  process
•  Avoids the twin traps of particularism and
  historicism.
• Particular societies are seen as the product of
  unique historical trajectories, while
  simultaneously recognizing that
  similarly-organized social groups in similar
  physical environments will often undergo similar
  evolutionary processes

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Multilinear evolution

• compared the development patterns in 5
  independent centers of ancient civilization
  Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, Mesoamerica and the
  Andes
• these centers showed parallels of form, function
  and sequence based on having developed in arid
  and semi-arid environments in which the economic
  basis was irrigation and flood-water agriculture
• Agriculture produced f ood surpluses which
  allowed for non-subsistence activities and
  population growth
• When population growth reached the limits of
  agricultural productivity competition over
  natural r esources intensified, warfare ensued,
  and political leadership shifted from temple
  priest to warrior king
• As some communities prospered and others
  suffered, empires were forged that instituted
  string political controls over vast regions

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Leslie White (19001978)
central theorist in the resuscitation of
evolutionary theory in anthropology
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• For White, the predominant themes of cultural
  evolution (as manifest in human history) were
• increasing energy-capture per capita
• increasing complexity of material and social
  culture
• increasing predictability and security of life
• Hence, culture was, first and foremost, practical
  and useful
• And this pointed the way to its scientific
  interpre-tation, which was utilitarian

Cultures could be compared objectively in terms
of energy-capture and complexity
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Materialism versus Idealism 2 opposite
philosophical approaches, underlying 2
corresponding opposed theoretical tendencies in
anthropological theory

• MATERIALISTS hold that the proper way to make
  sense of human social and cultural phenomena is
  to analyze them broadly as natural systems and in
  terms of their material conditions
• e.g. , how particular social and cultural systems
  relate to their environment i.e. how they
  transform it, extract energy from it, distribute
  the captured energy among their members, and
  dominate (encapsulate and absorb) one another
• in this analysis, the members own mental
  concepts and ideas are treated as dependent
  variables that is, they are passive reflections
  in human consciousness of material processes, and
  not autonomous causal forces in their own right

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IDEALISM idealists hold that human cultures are
shaped primarily by processes of shared human
consciousness, ideation, and imagination
processes which cannot be reduced to purely
material causes
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Marvin Harris 1927-2001
1979 Cultural Materialism The Struggle for a
Science of Culture

• culture a system of energy-transfer between
  nature and human populations (use of standard
  energy measures calories, horse-power
• cultures viewed as systems of energy transfer and
  redistribution

• By focusing on observable, measurable phenomena,
  cultural materialism presents an etic approach

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Cultural Materialism is based on two key
assumptions about societies. First, the various
parts of society are interrelated. When one part
of society changes, other parts must also change.

This means that an institution, such as the
family cannot be looked at in isolation from the
economic, political, or religious institutions of
a society. When one part changes it has an
effect on other parts of the system.
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The second assumption of CM is that the
foundation of the sociocultural system is the
environment.
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Environment

• Like all living organisms, Humans must draw
  energy from their environment.
• The environment is limited in terms of the amount
  of energy and raw material it contains.
• The need to draw energy out of the environment
  in order to satisfy the biological needs of its
  people is the first and central task of any
  society
• Therefore, each society must ultimately exist
  within the constraints imposed by its
  environment.

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Basic Premise Cultural Materialism is "...based
on the simple premise that human social life is a
response to the practical problems of earthly
existence..."
that a society's mode of production (technology
and work patterns, especially in regard to food)
and mode of reproduction (population level and
growth) in interaction with the natural
environment has profound effects on sociocultural
stability and change.
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• A good deal of Harris' work, therefore, is
  concerned with explaining cultural systems
  (norms, ideologies, values, beliefs) and
  widespread social institutions and practices
  through the use of population, production, and
  ecological variables.
• Throughout his books, Marvin Harris uses cultural
  materialist theories to explain a wide variety of
  cultural phenomenon
• food taboos,
• Christianity,
• male supremacy and
• warfare.

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Example the sacred cow phenomenon in the
Indian subcontinent

• a firmly-established culture complex of ideas
  and practices linked to Hinduism, based on the
  cultural premise of the sacred status of cattle
  as symbols of holiness
• cattle are kept and cows dominate the physical
  landscape, even of densely populated urban
  neighborhoods

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• cattle utilized as a source of milk, butter,
  traction, and dung (fuel) but the meat is not
  consumed (inefficient usage of resources, by
  Western standards)

• Idealist interpretation a distinctive complex of
  ideas which grew up and became institutionalized,
  following an inner symbolic logic which
  requires to be understood in (emic) cultural
  terms
• set of related ideas, developed by Brahmans
  (priestly class), using the cow as a symbol for
  an entire social ethic involving ideas of purity,
  vegetarianism
• the practices follow from the ideas

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• why for a Hindu is beef taboo, whereas in Canada
  and the U.S.A. and most of the Western world is
  it considered to be a very honorific and
  delicious food
• it is inadequate to say Hindus dont consume beef
  because their religion prohibits it.
• This is no explanation, you also have to ask, why
  Hinduism has this kind of reverence for cattle
  but Islam, Judaism, and Christianity do not

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• Materialist interpretation a cultural complex
  adapted to a specific ecological setting
  characterized by plow agriculture and vast
  populations
• require oxen (castrated male cattle) to draw
  plows in chronic short supply

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• also, cows convert marginally useful resources
  (garbage, odd patches of grass) into useful
  resources (milk, butter, dung)
• the ideology grew up to support the practice,
  which was ecologically necessary to sustain the
  vast population

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• Materialists place the stress on the analytical
  priority of the material factors (functions)
  over the ideological factors...
• do not deny that an ideology of the sacred cow
  emerged and flourished
• but take the position that the ideology is the
  dependent variable (the effect), while the
  overall ecological adaptation is the independent
  variable (the cause)
• folk models usually reverse the sequence of
  causation and hence folk models are rarely
  adequate accounts of any situation

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Critique

• can we be so dismissive of the informants emic
  viewpoint if culture is rooted in values and
  meanings held by individuals?
• What does it say about individual free will and
  purpose
• oversimplification via reduction
• Is it ethnocentric
• Postmodernists view science is itself a
  culturally determined phenomenon that is affected
  by class, race and other structural and
  infrastructural variables
• Do all food taboos have functional explanations
  are such explanations intrinsically more
  satisfying than symbolic ones

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CLAUDELÉVI-STRAUSS 1908 -
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• He proposed that the proper study for
  anthropologists is not how people categorize the
  world (not the content of cultures) but the
  underlying patterns of human thought that produce
  those categories

• The way we segment things and impose structure on
  inherently formless phenomena (like space and
  time) reflect deeply held structure from our
  minds
• L-S believes that the underlying logical
  processes that structure all human thought
  operate within different cultural contexts
• Consequently, cultural phenomena eg. Kinship,
  myth, religon, are not identical but they are the
  products of an underlying universal pattern of
  thought.
• His anthropology centres on the search to uncover
  this pattern.
• for Lévi-Strauss, the subject matter of
  anthropology is Culture, not cultures
  (although the fact that there are cultures is
  useful as a method to investigate Culture)

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• compare dozens of variant versions of the same
  basic narrative collected over a wide area e.g.
  the origin of the sexes the origin of initiation
• look for basic structures, typically expressed as
  oppositions upstream/downstream sky/earth
  dark/light
• relate particular oppositions to wider and
  universal ones (e.g. nature/culture)

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Linguistic Analogy

• The important aspects of linguistics for LS were
• The shift of linguistic focus from conscious
  behaviour to unconscious structure
• Most speakers of a language cannot articulate the
  underlying rules that structure their use of
  phonemes and create meaningful communication yet
  all are able to use language to communicate
• The idea of binary contrasts which was
  fundamental to structuralism
• words are built upon contrasts (binary
  oppositions) between phonemes rather than simply
  being groups of sounds. e.g. the minimal pair
  bat, pat
• The new focus on the relations between terms
  rather than on terms.

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• LS argued that women are a commodity that could
  be exchanged, and kinship systems are about the
  exchange of women
• LS argued that one of the most important
  distinctions a human makes is between self and
  others.
• Defining the categories of potential spouses and
  prohibited mates.
• This natural binary distinction leads to the
  formation of the incest taboo, which necessitates
  choosing spouses from outside your family
• In this way the binary distinction between kin
  and non-kin is resolved by the reciprocal
  exchange of women and formation of kin networks
  in primitive societies.

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• Primary Opposition is Nature versus Culture
• Culture appropriates matter from nature and
  reorganizes it
• Culture Nature Raw Cooked
• binary oppositions are reflected in various
  cultural institutions

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Critique

• theories are often very abstract and untestable.
• methods imprecise and dependent upon the observer
  
• As it is primarily concerned with the structure
  of the human psyche, it does not address
  historical aspects or change in culture
• a psychic unity of all human minds does not
  account for individual human action historically.
  
• lack of concern with human individuality.

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• Symbolic or Interpretive Anthropology
• 1960s 1970s general reevaluation of cultural
  anthropology as a scientific enterprise
• From function to meaning
• from materialist theories to idealist theories
• shift toward issues of culture and interpretation
  and away from grand theories
• increased emphasis on the way in which individual
  actions creatively shape culture

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• Most symbolicists would agree on these two
  points
• culture is, fundamentally, a symbolic system and
  so analysis of cultural symbols provides the
  natural point of entrée into a cultural universe
• If culture is symbolic then it follows that it is
  used to create and convey meanings since that is
  the purpose of symbols.
• If meanings are the end products of culture then
  understanding culture requires understanding the
  meanings of its creators and users

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• Victor Turner
• Scottish social anthropologist, 19201983
• 1950-54 fieldwork among the Ndembu of Zambia
• but central career interest symbolic
  anthropology
• mainly concerned with cultural symbols or (in
  his term) ritual symbols

• objects which have more or less generally shared
  meanings within a culture
• Milk Tree for Ndembu
• Cross for Christians

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A milk tree' growing in the compound of a Senior
Chief in southern Zambia. Regarded as feminine by
the inhabitants of the compound, the milk tree
twines as a palpable dependent on its deciduous
masculine' host.
Many Bantu peoples strongly associated this tree
with womanhood because of the thick white,
milk-like sap which the live wood exudes when
cut.
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A fresh cut in the milk tree showing the milky
white sap that gives the tree its common name
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Novicesdaubedwith clay
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Last day ofmukanda initiates don new clothes
and dance in public for first time as men
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A fresh, bright scarlet cut on a blood tree' in
Kangaba, Mali marked that wood as masculine
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Clifford Geertz 1926-

• 1950 Meets Margaret Mead and decides enrolls in
  anthropology at Harvard
• 1952-54 to Java as part of a research team with
  the explicit goal of improving economic growth
• 1973 The Interpretation of Cultures

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Thick Description Toward and Interpretive Theory
of Culture
The concept of culture I espouseis essentially
a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that
man is an animal suspended in webs of
significance he himself has spun, I take cultures
to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be
therefore not an experimental science in search
of law, but an interpretive one in search of
meaning. (Geertz 19735)
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Geertz Interpretive Anthropology PREMISE man
is an animal suspended in webs of significance he
himself has spun and our name for those webs is
culture CONCLUSION the analysis of it
therefore is not an experimental science in
search of law but an interpretive one in search
of meaning
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THICK DESCRIPTION
A wink or a twitch
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between what Ryle calls the "thin description"
of what the rehearser (parodist, winker, twitcher
. . .) is doing (rapidly contracting his right
eyelids) and The "thick description" of what he
is doing ("practicing a burlesque of a friend
faking a wink to deceive an innocent into
thinking a conspiracy is in motion") lies the
object of ethnography a stratified hierarchy of
meaningful structures in terms of which twitches,
winks, fake-winks, parodies, rehearsals of
parodies are produced, perceived, and interpreted

• Unraveling and identifying those context and
  meanings requires thick description.
• Geertz argues that this is precisely what
  ethnographic writing does

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...ethnography is thick description. What the
ethnographer is in fact faced with except when
(as of course, he must do) he is pursuing the
more automatized routines of data collection is
a multiplicity of complex conceptual structures,
many of them superimposed upon or knotted into
one another, which are at once strange,
irregular, and inexplicit, and which he must
contrive somehow first to grasp and then to
render...
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Deep Play The Balinese Cockfight
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• It is not just cocks that are fighting but men
• Cocks are masculine symbols
• The word cock is used metaphorically to mean
  bachelor, lady-killer, tough guy etc

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• The Balinese cockfight, is fundamentally a
  dramatization of status concerns.
• nothing really happens at a cockfight.

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• The conflicts, alliances, wins and losses are all
  symbolic of things that happen elsewhere.
• In the cockfight all action is symbolic.
• The real causes lie elsewhere, presumably in
  material circumstances.

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Questions

• If cultural knowledge is inherently interpretive,
  how can we invalidate the truth of an
  interpretation since there are potentially as
  many true interpretations as there are members of
  a culture?
• I.e. If ethnography is interpretation how can we
  know that interpretation is correct.
• Most of us cannot go to Bali or northern Morocco
  and check the interpretation
• if all such claims are equally valid, then the
  most anthropology can hope for is to create a
  rich documentary of multiple interpretations,
  none denied and none privileged.
• This means that it cannot be a science since it
  cannot generalize from truth statements or tests
  the statements against empirical data the nature
  of culture precludes this

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• Geertz triggered a profound rethinking of the
  anthropological enterprise
• forced anthropologists to become aware of the
  cultural contexts they interpret and the
  ethnographic texts they create.
• He is also touched off a major debate in about
  the fundamental nature of anthropology
• These Issues arose against a backdrop of a
  changing world and world view
• As independence movements transformed former
  colonial subjects into new national citizens,
  intergroup conflicts intensified as power was
  reconfigured and new governments exerted their
  control

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THE DECOLONIZATION DISCOURSE

• For the first time, Anthropology directly
  criticized as the handmaid of colonialism...
• assisting in the pacification of peoples
• use of ethnographic information about them in
  their own subjugation
• providing justifications for the colonial system

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1978 Orientalism

• scathing analysis of Western scholarship on the
  Middle East
• this scholarship an ideological tool of
  domination
• the West creates a simplistic stereotype of the
  Orient and subsequent scholarship studies not the
  Orient but rather reaffirms the stereotype
• the other presented as timeless, changeless,
  essentialized (in contrast to Westerners concept
  of themselves as individuals in particular
  historical contexts)
• the power relationship between the constructing
  subject and constructed object ignored

Edward Saïd
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• ORIENTALISM
• ignores the variability of Middle Eastern society
  and substitutes a single mentality to stand for
  the Orient
• evidence selected to fit the schema and contrary
  evidence ignored
• the construction of an Other, not like
  ourselves, but fundamentally different
• The oriental of Western scholarship is
  constructed as exotic, driven by hidebound
  Tradition, thinks differently from ourselves,
  is envious of the West, but at the same time
  incapable of shuffling off the (sometimes rather
  charming) superstitions which make his society
  backward
• Subtext he needs our help to attain his full
  potential

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• Postmodernism
• literally means after modernity
• An extremely diffuse concept
• Provided a major focus of debate and commentary
• Postmodernists challenge modernist assertions
• believe that objective neutral knowledge of
  another culture, or any aspect of the world is
  impossible

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Postmodernist view of Fieldwork

• Fieldwork is crucial in the creation of
  ethnographic texts.
• anthropologists can never be unbiased observers
  of all that goes on in culture
• Fieldworkers must of necessity be in specific
  places at specific times.
• As a result they see some things and not others
• The particular circumstances of fieldwork, the
  political context in which it occurs, the
  investigators preferences and predilections, and
  the people met by chance or design all condition
  the understanding of society that results.

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Postmodernist view of ethnography

• Writing ethnography is the primary means by which
  anthropologists convey their interpretations of
  other cultures
• Traditionally written as if the anthropologist
  was a neutral, omniscient observer
• Postmodernists claim that because the collection
  of anthropological data is subjective, it is not
  possible to analyze the data objectively.
• Postmodernists question the validity of the
  authors interpretations over competing
  alternatives
• And examine the literary techniques used in the
  writing of ethnographies

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• Throughout the history of anthropology
  anthropologists have claimed to be authorities on
  other cultures
• this claim fortified with emphasizing the
  mystique of fieldwork and by explaining other
  cultures to their audiences through written
  descriptions.
• The hermeneutic and deconstructionist approaches
  led many anthropologists to ask a variety of
  questions about the relationship between the
  ethnographic texts and the fieldwork experience
  upon which those texts are based.
• the filtering of exotic otherness through the
  constructions of social theory is exposed as a
  literary excursion disguised as scientific
  reportage

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• Ethnographies have traditionally followed some
  basic literary conventions
• rather than saying I am writing my
  interpretation of what the natives were doing
  authors claim to represent the native point of
  view.
• But the anthropologist chooses who speaks for the
  society and in his or her translation of the
  native language decides what words are presented
  to the audience.
• Writers also claim to describe completely other
  cultures or societies, even though
  anthropologists actually know only the part of a
  culture that they personally experience

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• Ethnographic authority was characteristic of the
  Modern it was the official narrative
  explaining the significance of the antecedent
  cultures out of which the National-State cultures
  of the Modern era were composed
• Its tools monographs, museums, and research
  institutes. example, at major museums like the
  American Museum of Natural History, authoritative
  accounts of Polynesian cultures are determined by
  the curator
• The whole represented by a few artifacts
  selected by the curator, usually with an eye to
  the predominantly Western aesthetics of the
  audience...

James Clifford
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Postmodernity in Anthropology therefore has
focused on 1. an examination of the power
relations according to which the Other has been
constructed 2. examinations of the rhetorical
devices and preoccupations of ethnographers
themselves
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REFLEXIVITY

• With what to replace objectivity?
• Consensus solution reflexivity not the
  unintentional mirroring of the authors culture
  in a descriptive work about the Other, but a
  self-aware reflexivity
• detailed disclosure of the terms and conditions
  of the fieldwork
• discussion of interpersonal relationships with
  informants that led to acquisition of the
  knowledge reported
• self-analysis of authors motives, agendas, and
  self-doubts
• the knowledge presented situated in terms of how
  the ethnographer collected it

• reflexive ethnographies tend to read more like
  diaries or autobiographies than the conventional
  ethnographic genre

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• Renato Rosaldo, Ilongot headhunting, 18831974
• Ilongot explanation of headhunting
• He says that rage, born of grief, impels him to
  kill his fellow human beings. He claims he needs
  a place to carry his anger The act of severing
  and tossing away the victims head enables him,
  he says, to vent and, he hopes, to throw away the
  anger of his bereavement... To him grief, rage,
  and headhunting go together in a self-evident
  manner.

October 1981 Michelle loses footing on steep
trail, falls to her death...
LUZON, PHILIPPINES
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Immediately on finding her body I became
enraged. How could she abandon me? How could she
have been so stupid as to fall. I tried to cry. I
sobbed, but rage blocked the tears... This anger
in a number of forms, has swept over me on a
number of occasions since then, lasting hours and
even days at a time...
In other words, his own subjective experience
(and not any amount of reasoning) enabled him to
grasp the connection between grief and rage...
and only by alluding to the personal account of
Michelle Rosaldos death could he communicate it
to the reader
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• Critiques of Postmodernism
• Taken to its logical extreme postmodernism comes
  close to turning anthropology into a sub field of
  literature.
• If all writing is nothing more than
  interpretations of interpretations then
  ethnography is fiction
• And no conclusions can ultimately be reached
  about anything
• anthropology is a representational genre rather
  than a clearly bounded scientific domain

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