The Ecosystem Supproach In Ecological Anthropology

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Here, I describe the historical usage of the ecosystem approach in ecological anthropology. Glacken (1976) documents the dis-articulation of nature and society in ‘Western’ thought following the industrial revolution. Many disciplines have followed this divide into the humanities and the sciences, yet some have attempted to join them. Marx provided early attempts to model human-nature relationships in the 19th century (Wolf 1982: 74). During the 20th century, various disciplines have attempted to link environment and society, consolidating into half a dozen subdisciplines. These include Robert Park's human ecology, (1936), Julian Steward's cultural ecology (1955), the ecological anthropology of Rappaport (1968), Bateson (1972), Netting (1974) …show more content…

E. Clements (1916). Before this, the physical environment was seen as just a backdrop to biotic activity, yet Tansley felt that the relationship between the two was far more involved (Golly 1993). The same would be theorised within anthropology regarding human activity. During the 1940s and 1950s the concept gained more widespread use, and with Odum’s Fundamentals of Ecology (1971), the ecosystem as an analytic unit was firmly established. Geertz (1963) is significant in that he postulated the combination of humans and their environment as a single analytical unit. This theoretical approach focuses on the elements of systems in terms of structure, equilibrium and change, rather than on paired points, as in the nature-culture dichotomy of Steward’s approach. This reduced the number of variables in what Geertz saw as a more complex system of interactions, and that change is not only predicated on ecological processes, but includes political, economic and intellectual developments (1963). Although Geertz first used the ecosystem concept in anthropology, Rappaport is widely held to have produced the first comprehensive study of the ecosystem studies in the analysis of human behaviour, in Pigs for the Ancestors (1968). Where Steward viewed humans as an external factor to the environment, Vayda and Rappaport (1968) argued that humans should be considered as an essential part of the ecological systems. They started to use the units of ecology: individuals, populations and ecosystems, as a unified field of ecology. As Geertz’s broad ecosystem concept involving ecological, social and political proved hard to operationalize, Vayda and Rappaport moved to a study of adaptation using biological ecology

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