New Directions in Ecology and Ecological Anthropology

Abstract

In this essay we consider four criticisms of ecological anthropology: its overemphasis on energy, its inability to explain cultural phenomena, its preoccupation with static equilibria, and its lack of clarity about the appropriate units of analysis. Recognizing that some of these criticisms may not be justified, we nevertheless point to parallel concerns in ecology. Further, we ask whether new directions indicated by some ecologists might be appropriate paths for future work in ecological anthropology. A central theme is the desirability of focusing on environmental problems and how people respond to them. The kind of environmental problems we are especially concerned with here are those constituting to the lives of the organisms experiencing them. In other words, we are particularly concerned with problems that carry the risk of morbidity or mortality, the risk of losing an existential in which success consists simply in staying in the game (82, 85; cf 80, cited in 78). Our focus upon and responses to them emerges partly from consideration of neo-Darwinian selection theory. As Colinvaux (22, p. 499) notes: Selection . . . chooses from among individuals those which are best adapted to avoid the of life at that time and place. Our focus reflects also the new concern of biologists such as Slobodkin (81, 82, 85) with the actual processes of responding to or environmental perturbations rather than with formal alterations in hypothetical genetic systems. Related also is the emerging view among medical scientists that health is a continuing property, potentially measurable by the individual's ability to rally from insults, whether chemical, physical, infectious, psychological, or (7, 8; cf 78). At least some and perhaps all of the insults referred to in the preceding quotation can be subsumed in our category of hazards; even social and psychological insults may evoke physiological stress and disease (60, 79) as well as psychological and behavioral adaptive strategies (99). A further influence on us has been the recent proliferation of research and thinking on problems of human response to natural hazards in geography (19,