Cultural ecology theory holds that a society’s way of making a living in a particular environment shapes much of its social organization. Formulated by the American anthropologist Julian Steward in the mid-twentieth century, it offered a middle path between the idea that environment dictates culture and the idea that culture develops independently of nature. This article summarizes the theory, its method, a classic example, the main criticisms and its lasting influence. A broader introduction is available in the overview of cultural ecology.
The core idea
Julian Steward (1902–1972) set out the theory most fully in Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution (1955). His starting point was that culture and environment are not separate spheres. People use technology to extract resources from their surroundings, and the way they organize that work affects family structure, group size, leadership, property rules and settlement patterns.
Steward did not claim that environment explains everything. He argued that certain features of culture, those closely tied to subsistence, respond to ecological conditions in regular ways, while others are shaped more by history, borrowing and chance. The task of cultural ecology was to identify which is which.
Steward’s method in three steps
Steward proposed a research procedure that can be summarized in three steps:
- Analyze the relationship between environment and technology. Which resources are available, and what tools and techniques are used to obtain them? Hunting with bows in open desert differs from fishing with weirs on a salmon river.
- Analyze the behavior patterns involved in exploiting the environment. Who does the work, in what size of group, at what times of year, and how is the product shared?
- Determine how these behavior patterns affect other aspects of culture. How do work patterns shape kinship, residence, political authority and ritual?
The method required detailed fieldwork on subsistence, a focus that distinguished it from earlier anthropology centered on myths, kinship terms and material collections.
Key terms
Culture core
The culture core is the set of features most closely related to subsistence activities and economic arrangements. It includes the division of labor, the size and composition of working groups, land tenure and the seasonal round. Steward expected cross-cultural regularities in the culture core.
Secondary features
Secondary features are those less directly tied to subsistence, such as art styles, many religious beliefs and details of ceremony. They are more likely to vary through historical accident or diffusion from neighbors.
Multilinear evolution
Nineteenth-century evolutionists described a single sequence of stages for all humanity. Steward replaced it with multilinear evolution: several parallel paths of development, each associated with a type of environment and technology. Societies on similar paths could develop similar institutions independently.
Levels of sociocultural integration
Steward also distinguished levels of integration, from family bands to multi-family communities to states. A society’s organization can only be understood with reference to its level.
A classic example: the Great Basin Shoshone
Steward developed his ideas through fieldwork in the 1930s among the Western Shoshone and related groups of the Great Basin, a region of desert basins and mountain ranges in Nevada, Utah and neighboring states. Rainfall was low and unpredictable, and food resources were scattered.
The most important food was the pine nut from piñon trees, harvested in autumn and stored for winter. But pine nut crops varied greatly from year to year and from one mountain range to another. Seeds, roots, insects, rabbits and occasionally antelope supplemented the diet.
Steward showed that Shoshone social organization matched this pattern. For most of the year people lived in small family groups that moved independently to wherever food could be found. Larger gatherings took place only when resources allowed, such as good pine nut harvests or communal rabbit drives, when several families cooperated under a temporary leader. There were no permanent villages, fixed territories or chiefs with lasting authority. In Steward’s analysis, this was not a lack of development but an effective adaptation to a sparse, unpredictable environment.
A contrast: Northwest Coast salmon fishers
The contrast with the Northwest Coast of North America illustrates the theory. There, massive seasonal salmon runs, abundant shellfish and cedar forests allowed peoples such as the Kwakwaka’wakw and Tlingit to live in large permanent villages, store great quantities of dried fish and develop ranked societies with hereditary chiefs and elaborate ceremonies. Both Shoshone and Northwest Coast peoples were hunter-gatherers, yet their environments supported very different social structures, which is exactly the kind of difference Steward sought to explain.
Hydraulic societies
At a larger scale, Steward compared early civilizations that depended on irrigation, including Mesopotamia, Egypt, northern China, coastal Peru and Mesoamerica. He noted parallel sequences: small farming villages, then larger irrigation works, then states with priest-kings, then conquest empires. Around the same time the historian Karl Wittfogel argued in Oriental Despotism (1957) that the need to manage large irrigation systems produced centralized, despotic states. Later research found that many irrigation systems were built and run locally, long before or without strong states, and Wittfogel’s thesis in its strong form is no longer accepted.
Criticism
Cultural ecology theory drew several lines of criticism:
- Environmental determinism: critics argued that despite Steward’s caveats, the theory tended to treat culture as a response to environment and underplayed human choice and creativity.
- Neglect of agency: individuals and groups with different interests appear mainly as parts of an adaptive system.
- Neglect of power and history: the Shoshone Steward studied had already been affected by settlers, mining and ranching, factors his model left largely aside. Colonialism, markets and state policy often shape resource use more than local ecology.
- Functionalism: explaining customs by their adaptive usefulness risks assuming that whatever exists must be adaptive.
Legacy
Despite these criticisms, cultural ecology changed anthropology and archaeology. It made the study of subsistence, work and environment central to both. Archaeologists built on it in settlement pattern studies and processual archaeology. Roy Rappaport and others extended it with ecosystem concepts, and Marvin Harris incorporated it into cultural materialism.
Critics developed new fields out of it. Political ecology added power, markets and inequality. Historical ecology emphasized that landscapes are shaped by long human history. Human behavioral ecology applied evolutionary models to individual decisions. All of them share Steward’s basic conviction that culture and environment have to be studied together.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is cultural ecology theory?
Julian Steward’s theory that the way a society obtains a living from its environment shapes core features of its social organization.
What are Steward’s three steps?
Analyze environment and technology, analyze the work patterns used to exploit the environment, and determine how these patterns affect other parts of culture.
What is the difference between the culture core and secondary features?
The culture core is closely tied to subsistence and shows regular links to environment; secondary features such as art and many beliefs vary more through history and diffusion.
Why is cultural ecology criticized?
For leaning toward environmental determinism and for neglecting individual agency, power, colonial history and markets.
