Cultural Ecology and Economics

Background Land use, land tenure, kinship, residence are emic, parts of cultural codes—ideologies— that are important for how people produce things For instance, holy cows in India, pigs in the Middle East

But cultural ecology also studies the results of peoples’ actions such as obesity, global warming, environmental pollution and demography whether or not the people have the same understanding of these things as we do

Julian Steward, 1955

With a given technology in a given environment, people have to do some things a certain way or not at all. That explains cultural similarities. People face different problems in different environments and with different technologies and that explains cultural differences.

Different selective forces in our biological evolution worked at cross-purposes. E.g. bipedalism and mature birth of infants. different selective forces in our biological evolution worked at cross-purposes. The advantages of using and making tools selected for the re-structuring of our skeleton for bipedalism. That meant our pelvises widened and our birth canals narrowed. The same advantages selected for larger brains. Narrow birth canals and large brains cannot go together. Something had to give. That’s why we’re born immature and that has all of the consequences we wrote about earlier.

Marshall Sahlins “Lots of things people do are truly stupid, if understandable….” “To adapt is to do as well as possible under the circumstances—which may not turn out very well at all.”

It is not to achieve a perfect fit, but to find reasonable solutions to the problems that face people.

Since cultural ecology directs our attention to those aspects of the culture most related to making a living, anthropologists need to understand economic systems. We need a framework that allows us to compare all economic systems without being ethnocentric.

While it is important to understand systems from the inside, to understand their emic meanings, if we want to compare cultures, we have to step outside of them and develop frameworks that do not depend on the ideas of any single culture.

We’ll develop an etic system for studying economics whether in the U.S. or New Guinea.

All societies Produce the things they need Exchange things with each other and people of other societies Consume things

3 subsystems of economic system Production Exchange Consumption