Abstract
Anthropologists contend that the organism-environment connections responsible for human evolution are indirect—mediated by culture. This chapter reviews influential twentieth-century anthropological interpretations of the cultural mediation of human adaptations to environments, arguing that ethnography and other qualitative forms of analysis reveal important phenomena overlooked by quantitative analysts committed to methodological individualism. It highlights work by post-positivist anthropologists, who describe relations among human and non-human organisms, cultural forms, and features of environments as “natural-cultural” networks, an approach reminiscent of developmental systems theory and niche construction. Evolutionary theorists have much to gain by incorporating these sophisticated, contemporary post-positivist anthropological understandings of culture into their models of human-environment connections.
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Notes
- 1.
Although disrespect has been expressed on both sides of the divide, the kind of contempt often expressed by sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists toward their critics has been particularly striking in my experience. Anthropologists and others committed to evolution, but critical of sociobiology, have risked being labeled “anti-science,” “anti-evolution,” or even “creationist.” As a result, many of us have had to adopt the position of “anti-antievolutionists,” who resist the critics of evolution, but who are unable to wholeheartedly affirm the hegemonic version of evolutionary theory (see Schultz 2009). The new developments and possibilities discussed in Parts 3 and 4 below may help change this state of affairs.
- 2.
- 3.
Ingold is the only anthropologist who contributed an essay to the DST compendium Cycles of Contingency (Oyama et al. 2001).
- 4.
So-called “processual archaeology” emerged in the 1960s and is closely associated with the work of Lewis Binford (1962). It encompasses a variety of different approaches, but “all share a common processual orientation grounded in cultural evolutionary theory and a systemic view of culture” based on the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss (Preucel 2010, 94). “Post-processual archaeology” encompasses a variety of different approaches sharing “a common dissatisfaction with the scientistic approach of much of processual archaeology, particularly its focus on positivism and general laws of human behavior. In its place they adopt hermeneutic methods and emphasize the social salience of ideology and power,” commenting, “as an empirical social science which privileges material culture, archaeology retains a strong modernist core and resists full colonization by poststructuralism and postmodernism” (Preucel 2010, 123).
- 5.
A term he coined (Preucel 2010, 126).
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Gillian Barker, Eric Desjardins, and Trevor Pearce for inviting me to present an earlier version of this paper at the 2010 ISHPSSB Off-Year Workshop, Integrating Complexity: Environment and History, at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, October 7–10, 2010. I benefited greatly from their feedback and that of other conference participants. Robert Lavenda and Daniel Lavenda provided helpful observations as I revised the paper for publication. Final responsibility for the views expressed, however, rests solely with me.
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Schultz, E.A. (2014). New Perspectives on Organism-Environment Interactions in Anthropology. In: Barker, G., Desjardins, E., Pearce, T. (eds) Entangled Life. History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7067-6_5
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