What is culture?
 Material culture – subsistence strategies
and technologies developed by humans
as they adapt to environmental
conditions in their locality (J. Steward)
 Symbolic culture – the information
(cognitive, emotive, etc.) that one must
know to act effectively in the
environment (E. Hunn)
Julian Steward and cultural ecology
The work of Julian Steward is one of the principal sources of methods and
theory for EA, and especially in the development of the field of ethnoecology.
Basic concept of Steward is the idea of the culture core. He defines the
culture core as comprised of the
 basic features of social and economic life that are most closely
related to subsistence in a given place;
 these features include the technological strategies and material
practices that local cultures develop to adapt to the ecological
conditions of their home place; technology is adapted to exploit the
environmental conditions in place;
 thus, cultural diversity emerges from ecological diversity as is
evident in the variety of technologies and material practices of
subsistence among different cultures; mountain cultures develop
different strategies and techniques of subsistence when compared
to plains cultures, desert cultures, rainforest cultures, maritime
cultures etc.
 Steward proposed the methods of cultural ecology to ascertain
the technology and material practices of subsistence that define a
given culture core; cultural ecology involves the study of the
relationship of technology used in subsistence production to the
environment in which it is used; then they relate other behavioral
patterns, like kinship, customary law, childrearing practices,
communal work, and religious ritual to the pattern of subsistence
strategies.
Cultural ecology represented an effort to deal with two problems facing
anthropological study of human cultural variety in ecological context:
(1)the racist and colonialist legacy of an anthropology that had posited
the idea of unilinear evolution in which human cultures were seen
as evolving from simpler, more primitive, even savage, cultures to
more complex, modern, even progressive cultures;
(2)the reaction to this older, ethnocentric, form of anthropology was to
adhere to the idea of cultural relativism – every culture was to be
accepted on its own terms as a product of its unique history,
development, and location in a given environmental context; thus, one
could not understand cultures in terms of universal truths;
(3)Steward disagreed with both of these approaches; he rejected the
racist and colonialist assumptions of the unilinear evolutionists and he
also shunned the idea that there were no knowable universal patterns;
he supported the view that cultural ecologists could uncover universal
regularities and patterns across cultures through careful observation
and comparison;
(4)Steward proposed an alternative theory of multilinear evolution that
basically argued that cultures everywhere had to produce subsistence
but produced sequences of change that were not universal. He
proposed that this could be explained because of the diversity in
patterns of cultural adaptation. This idea is simply that culture
adapts to its biophysical environment.