Concept Of Ecological Anthropology – Notes For W.B.C.S. Examination.

বাস্তুসংস্থানীয় নৃবিজ্ঞানের ধারণা – WBCS পরীক্ষা।

Ecological anthropology studies the relations between human beings and their environments. Its foundations were laid by Julian Steward in the mid-twentieth century. Steward emphasised the dynamic, two-way nature of the culture-environment relation, and the importance of the concept of adaptation in understanding it.Continue Reading Concepts And Methods Of Ecological Anthropology – Notes For W.B.C.S. Examination.

Steward distinguished ‘cultural’ from ‘biological’ ecology on the grounds that the former was about the adaptation of culture as a system existing outside of individual human organisms. By contrast, in the so-called ‘new ecology’ of the 1960s, culture was seen as the means of environmental adaptation of human populations. Theories developed in animal ecology were considered applicable to humans as well. Drawing on one such theory, of group selection, ecological anthropologists focused on how aspects of cultural behaviour maintain balance or ‘homeostasis’ in the relations between a local group and its environmental resources, and so promote its long-term survival.

In the 1970s and 1980s, ecological anthropology was overtaken by sociobiology. Emphasising the gene rather than the group as the unit of selection, sociobiologists argued that the adaptive role of cultural behaviour is to contribute to the representation of individuals’ genes in future generations. One recent offshoot of sociobiology, ‘evolutionary behavioural ecology’, is dedicated to showing how adaptive strategies established through natural selection are played out under variable environmental conditions. For example, studies of human foraging have explained the relationship between food procurement patterns and energy returns. During the 1990s, however, a quite different trend has emerged in ecological anthropology. This approach looks at the totality of relations existing between persons and their environments and privileges neither genetics nor culture in explanations of human action and perception.

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