Cultural Ecology by Simon Batterbury GEOG 6402 Cultural Ecology and its critics Simon Batterbury 1997 All references are given on the reading list. This includes the relationships of animals with both the inorganic and organic environments, above all the beneficial and inimical relations that Darwin referred to as the conditions of the struggle of existence. Some, but not all, of these ideas are useful for studying farming systems and small-scale communities in the developing world, and have been 'imported' into cultural ecology. Many of these things depend on how food is obtained, and what must be gone though in order to obtain it. It is suggested that people adapt to the environment - they are not its slaves.
Adaptation really means responding to change in order to survive and prosper better.
Of course not. Agricultural economists, for example, see farming in terms of meeting supply and demand for food and other goods, and making rational decisions about prices and resource allocation, and their approach emerges in 'farming systems research'. A lot of focus is placed on markets and trade in current studies from various disciplinary perspectives, since these are features of many if not all cultures today. As in many academic debates, there are many theories, and not enough agreement. Before deciding to accept or reject the basic premise of cultural ecology, note that the early work of Steward and his colleagues has been refined over the years.