Ecologies: Anthropology, Culture and the Environment
Author(s)
Milton, Kay
Abstract
This article describes anthropology’s distinctive perspective on the relationship between human societies and their environments and its relation to contemporary environmental discourse. Early approaches in ecological anthropology were characterized by varying degrees of environmental determinism, but from the late 1950s two new approaches were developed. The ecosystem approach, adopted from biology, examined the role of human populations in ecological systems, and the study of ‘ethnoecology’, within the broader field of cognitive anthropology, examined people’s cultural perspectives on the environment. The focus on cultural perspectives fostered an extreme form of cultural relativism which has recently been challenged from both within and outside the discipline. Anthropologists have also, in recent years, attacked the modernist dichotomies (between thought and action, mind and body. culture and nature) which have been fundamental to Western science. These trends are shaping anthropology’s role in contemporary environmental discourse. In a technical sense, anthropological knowledge can be used in addressing specific environmental problems and in the search for sustainable ways of living. In addition, the nature of anthropological theory gives the discipline an implicit position in the environmental debate: one which favours local rather than global control of environmental resources and the conservation of cultural diversity as a strategy for survival.
