However it may be used, the term ‘environment’ refers both to things and to relations (between humans and biophysical factors). Everything which merits the term ‘anthropology’ must in some sense also be environmental anthropology and avoid the dangers of socio-centrism or the circularity of †cultural determinism. Attempts to interpret culture in purely cultural terms are like attempts to interpret *religion in purely theological terms: they are circular and noncontextual, and therefore don’t constitute interpretations at all.
Anthropology which puts more than usual emphasis on the interface between cultural and biophysical factors is variously called *ecological anthropology, *cultural materialism, cultural ecology, or environmentalism. These are all variants of †materialism, differing according to the degree to which they acknowledge *technology (both in the narrow sense of tools and the wider senses of knowledge and productive organization) as a mediator between the biophysical environment and culture.
Among these, †Marvin Harris’s cultural materialist approach argues the strongest case for the shaping of culture by material factors. He divides cultural phenomena into infrastructure, structure, and superstructure, and unequivocally attributes causal primacy to infrastructure, the level at which people use technology to interact with their environment. Thus he argues, for example, that the veneration of cattle in India is maintained because of the role of cattle as the key technological adaptation to the environment; religious belief, the superstructural level, is only causative insofar as it facilitates the continuation of the system (see e.g. Harris 1993).
In cultural ecology, inspired primarily by †Julian Steward (1955), there is similar emphasis on levels of causation but more recognition of mutual causation between culture and environment, and of causation between cultures as recognized in Steward’s term ‘social environment’. One of the most influential statements of the cultural ecological approach comes from †Sahlins and †Service (1960), who developed †Leslie White’s theory of techological, sociological, and ideological ‘levels’ by insisting that the relationships between cultures should be included in cultural ecology, rather than just people’s relationships with natural features of habitat. Their notion of the ‘superorganic environment’ enormously expanded the scope of what they called ‘cultural ecology’ to make it include historical, cultural, social, and economic factors—in short, to make it coterminous with ‘anthropology’ (1960:49–50).
In the 1960s and 1970s many anthropologists explored the potential of interpreting culture as a †cybernetic system for regulating relations between people and their environments. The most celebrated example of this is Roy Rappaport’s interpretation of periodic cycles of ritualized warfare and peace among Maring-speaking Tsembaga people in the New Guinea Central Highlands as a system maintenance strategy for perpetuation of balances between people, pigs, and various resources such as cultivable land and wildlife. Elegant, detailed, and persuasive though his analysis may be, he grossly underestimates the symbolic aspects of the ritual-belief nexus. And by focusing on a community living in exceptional conditions of environmental circumscription, he exaggerates the potential for identifying isolated ‘ecosystems’ in other parts of the world with which particular cultures might be associated.
In anthropology materialism is contrasted with †idealism, as it is throughout the social sciences and the humanities. As either extreme is approached, so causation is increasingly perceived as unidirectional. Ultimately it is quite true to say that everything we do is determined by our environment, given a sufficiently broad definition of environment. However, environmental determinist arguments overemphasize the influences of specific components in the environment, and exclude or downplay the role of other members of the species (i.e. for us, other people). If our definition is sufficiently broad, our culture is part of our environment.
Most anthropologists lie somewhere between the extremes of materialism and idealism, recognizing that holistic social analysis must analyse the mutual constitution and ultimate inseparability of culture and nature, mind and body. Once this is recognized, then such notions as ‘environmental determinism’ and ‘cultural determinism’ are not only untenable but unthinkable. As Croll and Parkin point out, ‘human and non-human agency’ or ‘person and environment’ are ‘reciprocally inscribed’ (1992:3).
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