Cultural Ecology of the Highland Communities: Some Anthropological Observations from Eastern Nepal - by Laya Prasad Uprety

1. Prelude:
This research paper has two-fold objectives: (i) to familiarize the graduate students majoring in anthropology with the theoretical underpinnings of cultural ecology, and (ii) to analyze and explicate the ecological-cultural adaptations among the communities living in the harsh mountain
ecological setting of eastern Nepal and their traditional organizations and institutions contributing to community welfare and social equity within the framework of cultural ecology. The paper has been based on the impressionistic data garnered in from the Himalayan ecological setting in
eastern Nepal.

2. Theoretical Underpinnings of Cultural Ecology within Ecological Anthropology
D.L Hardesty (1977:1) notes that the science of anthropology has traditionally been a “holistic” discipline. Anthropologists have advocated a broad, comparative study of human behavior in the search for general laws and principles, and little about man has been left out. Contextually, anthropologists have explored the ways in which “environment” has been used in the anthropological explanation, an area of endeavor referred to as “ecological anthropology”. Of the several roots of “ecological anthropology” such as environmental determinism, environmental possibilism, population ecology, systems ecology and ethnology, cultural ecology is one. It is contextual to begin the discussion by defining “ecology” first before going to the notion of “cultural ecology”. Odum (1971:1) defines ecology as the “the study of the relation of organisms or groups of organisms to their environment or the science of interrelations between living organisms and their environment.” Hardesty (1977:8-9) notes that ecology as a science
blossomed in the 20th century but had initially been restricted to the study of plants and animals other than man. Julian Steward had expressed the ecological perspective in anthropology in 1930s. In his contribution to the
“Method of Cultural Ecology”, he emphasized that culture and environment are not the separate spheres but are involved in the dialectic interplay or what is called “reciprocal causality”. Two ideas are important in the reciprocal causality: the idea that neither environment nor culture is a given but that each is defined in terms of the other, and the idea that environment plays an active, not just a limiting or selective, role in human affairs.

Steward (1955:30-41) also notes that the principal meaning of ecology is “adaptation to environment.” Steward believed that some sectors of culture are more prone to a strong environmental relationship than other sectors and that ecological analysis could be used to explain cross-cultural similarities only in this “culture core”. The “culture core” consists of the economic sector of society, those features that are most closely related to subsistence activities
and economic arrangements. His method of cultural ecology involved the analysis of:

(i) the interrelationship between environment and exploitative or productive technology;

(ii) the interrelationship between “behavior” patterns and exploitative technology, and

(iii) the extent to which those “behavior” patterns affect other sectors of culture. His goal was to explain the origin of particular cultural features and patterns, which characterize different areas.

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journals.sfu.ca/nepal/ind ex.php/DSAJ/article/viewF ile/273/267