Meanings
In common usage, ‘environment’ refers to non-human influences on humanity. Like ‘nature’, it is shorthand for the biophysical context, the ‘natural world’ in which we live. Less obviously it is linked with nature/culture dualism, and is intrinsically anthropocentric in its cosmologi-cal image of humanity surrounded by relevant biophysical factors. Environment refers not just to biophysical context, but to human interaction with, and interpretation of, that context. When environment is used in its etymological sense of ‘surroundings’, the term ‘environmental anthropology’ is tautologous, since all anthropology is worthless if it fails to provide a holistic analysis of context.
Environment is one of the broadest concepts in the social sciences. Ultimately it is a category residual to the self, and can be extended to include every aspect of context from the body to the limitless cosmos. It has little explanatory use, but may serve as a general rubric for reminders of the different kinds and levels of context which social analysis must heed.
Biophysical factors
Anthropologists have generally followed the common usage of ‘environment’ to refer to biophysical factors rather than to context in a broader sense. Unmarked, the term refers to non-human things so that ‘environmental’ analysis in anthropology really means biophysical analysis. Marked, as in terms like ‘social environment’ and ‘learning environment’ there is usually a strong sense of metaphorical transference from the biophysical to the social domain, as there is in terms like ‘economic climate’ and ‘strained atmosphere’. In other words, even when social aspects of our surroundings are alluded to with the term ‘environment’, they tend to be understood in ecological metaphors borrowed from the biophysical environment.
Anthropologists must recognize that biophysical factors may not only be shaped by humans in a material sense, but are culturally perceived; the environment, therefore, is not just a set of things to which people adapt, but also a set of ongoing relations of mutual adaptation between culture and material context.
Materialism, idealism, and holism
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 non-contextual, 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 Rappa-port’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’
Symbolism and metaphor
The influences of the biophysical environment on human behaviour are never purely material or ‘natural’, but are always in part cultural since they are mediated by the culturally determined ways in which they are perceived. The influence of seasonal fluctuations in temperature may be perceived as bodily influences restricting our opportunities, but these influences are culturally reconstructed as, for example, the traditional opposition between rugby and cricket, winter and summer, in Britain. Culture is typically perceived as more ‘natural’ than it actually is; even purely symbolic influences on behaviour such as astrological ones tend to be perceived as influences from our biophysical environment.
Of particular interest to anthropologists has been the exchange of metaphor between culture and its biophysical context. All cultures select features of their environment as a source of terms or images for understanding humanity, and conversely employ the patterning of social relations when coming to terms with the biophysical environment. The term ‘mother nature’, for example, may be used both to naturalize the socially constructed mother—child relationship, and to humanize aspects of the environment by imputing maternal characteristics to them. Nurit Bird-David, in various articles (see e.g. 1993), has argued that different peoples following similar modes of subsistence ‘relate metaphorically to their natural environment’ in similar ways: among hunter-gatherers, human relations with the environment are understood in social metaphors such as parent—child, husband—wife and namesake relationships, which carry expectations of particular kinds of reciprocity.
There is not only an exchange of metaphors between aspects of society and aspects of the environment; human relations with the environment provide metaphors for the construction of relations between humans, and vice versa. Thus relations between husbands and wives, for example, are in many cultures understood in terms of relations between farmers and fields (control, planting, fertility) or hunters and prey (unpredictability, sexual chasing); conversely, people may understand their relations with non-human resources in terms of the husband—wife relationship.
All cultures have a concept of pollution by which to designate some forms of interaction with the environment as undesirable. These concepts have both biophysical and social referents, and may be used as a way of mapping social space in less abstract, more geographical terms. Among the most dramatic versions of this form of environmental consciousness is the use of pollution concepts by Hindus as a means of concretizing the asymmetries of inter-caste relations by insisting that members of more ‘polluted’ castes keep respectful distance from ‘purer’ castes.
Dualism and anthropocentrism
The popular association of ‘environment’ with non-human things derives from the nature/ culture dualism whereby humanity is defined in opposition to everything else. The idea of environment as surroundings which are relevant to human existence derives from anthropocentrism, a worldview which places humanity in centre stage. The extent to which dualism and anthro-pocentrism vary cross-culturally is a matter of considerable debate.
Environmental debates promoted by ‘deep ecologists’ contrast ‘biocentric’ (or ‘ecocentric’) with ‘anthropocentric’ cosmologies. A biocentric approach denies the distinct and superior moral status of humanity which the anthropocentric philosophy takes for granted. Biocentrists believe in the intrinsic value of nature; but since the notion of value is itself anthropocentric they inevitably end up humanizing the non-human world. The pragmatic element in deep ecology is nonetheless important for anthropology: namely, that the experience of wilderness — of relatively undomesticated nature — is something which all peoples use in various ways, and primarily as a means of coming to terms with their own culture.
Applications
The development of theory and ethnography of human—environment relations can contribute significant opportunities for applied anthropology. Indigenous environmental knowledge promises to be of great importance in improving environmental management, and by enhancing its status among planners anthropologists can promote participatory development. Ecological anthropology can inform Environmental Impact Assessments to ensure that these incorporate analysis of socioeconomic factors. Understanding of the embeddedness of culture in its biophysical environment helps understand the effect of the displacement of people from one environment to another. Applied anthropologists also frequently have to inform planners of the ways in which traditional common-property resource management systems have been disrupted by acculturation and externally planned development programmes.
Environmental anthropology demands good understanding not only of biophysical resources, human needs and uses of those resources, but also of the tenurial and spatial arrangements by which those resources are appropriated, managed, and used. Cross-cultural comparison based on evidence from holistic, long-term, local studies of these arrangements can promote better global understanding of the conditions under which management of resources remains stable and sustainable or else results in deterioration. Such comparison can also remind natural scientists that the concept of ‘environmental degradation’ is a subjective judgement related to the needs, values, and perceptions of specific interest groups.
Studies of common property regimes and mobility as environmental strategies have been of particular importance, since these tend to be more significant among peoples marginal to states. In demonstrating the viability of such systems, anthropologists have played important roles in arguing against those who assume that state control or privatization of resources are the only means of ensuring sound environmental management (see e.g. Berkes 1989).
Most importantly, ‘environment’ suggests interdisciplinarity. Anthropological concerns, like the livelihoods of most rural people in the Third World, are multi-disciplinary and unspecialized. However, the individualism of ethnographic research means that this multi-disciplinarity is undisciplined — it generally fails to engage with the various disciplines in whose interests it dabbles.
