Family-Level Societies
Julian Steward and the Birth of
Cultural Ecology
Julian Steward 1902-1972
• Steward originally came to California in
1918 to attend the Deep Springs school in
the Deep Springs Valley east of the White
Mountains near the Nevada border. He
later returned in 1935 to undertake a
survey of the people of the Great Basin
under a program begun by Alfred Kroeber
at Berkeley.
Published in 1938
The Peoples of the Great Basin
“language tribes” – Joseph Birdsell
Population densities 18701880 (in sq. miles per
person)
Ecological
Variation
Villages and
movements:
Owens Valley
and Death
Valley
Villages:
Central
Nevada
Northern Paiute
woman and
hut: 1926
Photo by
Edward
Curtis
Paiute Family 1906
The Seasonal Round: Eastern California
• March-April: Stored seeds became exhausted and
families left the winter village. They gathered greens and
hunted antelopes and rabbits.
• May: Gathering larvae in Owens Lake.
• Summer: Seed gathering in mountains.
• Fall: Gathering of pine nuts and carrying out of
communal rabbit drives.
• Winter: Return to the winter village.
Scheduling: exploiting different sets of resources on a
seasonal basis.
Cultural Ecology: school of social anthropology
which examines the relationship of a society to
its environment.
Subsistence economy: how a society feeds itself.
Culture Core: those facets of a culture most
closely related to subsistence: e.g. technology.
Secondary features: aspects of a society affected
by the culture core: e.g. social structure and
religion.
Economic Concepts Applicable to Foragers
and Primitive Horticulturalists
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Sexual division of labor.
Generalized reciprocity.
Domestic mode of production.
Broad spectrum (foragers only).
Original affluent society.
The Original Affluent Society
• Data from the Dobe Ju/’hoansi
Characteristics of Social Structure
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Situational leadership: e.g. rabbit bosses.
Ad hoc ceremonialism.
Basic social unit: Extended family.
Largest residential social group: Winter camp.
Anthropologists place primary importance on the camp,
although its membership fluctuates.
• Notions of kinship are flexible – marriage ties
are just as important as blood ties: bilateral
kinship networks.
• Forms of fictive kinship are common.
From: The Dobe !Kung
Richard B. Lee 1984
Horticulture
• Also called gardening.
• Form of land use: extensive.
• Swidden: plots are cleared, farmed for a
few years until the nutrients give out (or
regrowth forces abandonment), and then
abandoned.
• Slash and burn: method of plot
preparation.
Religion - Animism
• Animism: describes a worldview wherein it
is accepted that a spiritual world exists
parallel to the experienced world, and that
everything possesses a spiritual
dimension, or soul.
• Shamans: part-time religious specialists.
The shaman is respected for his/her ability
to easily contact and perceive things in the
spiritual world, and to manipulate them.
Altered states of consciousness: the spiritual
dimension to reality is experienced during
altered states of consciousness, including
• Dreams.
• Drug-induced states.
• States of consciousness induced by
extended sessions involving dancing,
drumming, sleep and food deprivation,
self-torture, etc.