Neo-Evolutionism and Cultural Ecology

1. 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.

2. Julian Haynes Steward 1902 - 1972 • central figure in the introduction of ecological concepts into social and cultural anthropology • “cultural ecology” • Multilinear Evolution

3. 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

4. 3 basic steps for a cultural ecological investigation • Analysis of the relationship between the material culture and the natural resources • 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 • 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

6. 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.

7. 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 • Steward’s original ranking was family, multifamily and state-level societies • These categories were later refined by his followers into band, tribe chiefdom and state.

8. 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 gov’ts. • -1 (or >1) descent group • gains dominance • -hierarchical social strata • - 1,000’s  10,000’s Ag. States: -bureaucratic gov’t -dense populations (urban) -food surpluses -many economic roles -writing systems -public works (labor) -10,000’s  Million(s) Chief: any individual who held leadership role in a non-western, stateless society

9. Multilinear evolution • Cross-cultural parallels in social patterns could be explained as adaptations to similar environments 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

10. 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

11. Leslie White (1900–1978) central theorist in the resuscitation of evolutionary theory in anthropology

12. 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

13. 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

14. 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

15. Marvin Harris1927-2001 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

16. 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.

17. The second assumption of CM is that the foundation of the sociocultural system is the environment.

18. 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.

19. 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.

20. 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.

21. 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

22. 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 ethicinvolving ideas of purity, vegetarianism • the practices follow from the ideas

23. 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 don’t 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

24. 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

25. 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

26. Materialists place the stress on the 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

27. Critique • can we be so dismissive of the informant’s 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 variables • Do all food taboos have functional explanations; are such explanations intrinsically more satisfying than symbolic ones

28. CLAUDELÉVI-STRAUSS1908 -

29. 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, religion, 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)

30. 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)

31. 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.

32. 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.

33. 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

34. 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.

35. 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

36. 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

37. Victor Turner • Scottish social anthropologist, 1920–1983 • 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

38. 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. `

39. A fresh cut in the milk tree showing the milky white sap that gives the tree its common name

40. Novicesdaubedwith clay

41. Last day ofmukanda: initiates don new clothes and dance in public for first time as men

42. A fresh, bright scarlet cut on a `blood tree' in Kangaba, Mali marked that wood as masculine

43. 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

44. Thick Description Toward and Interpretive Theory of Culture “The concept of culture I espouse…is 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 1973:5)

45. 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”

46. THICK DESCRIPTION A wink or a twitch

47. “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

48. “...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...

49. Deep Play: The Balinese Cockfight

50. 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