ECOLOGIES - ANTHROPOLOGY, CULTURE AND THE ENVIRONMENT

This article describes anthropology's distinctive perspective on the r elationship between human societies and their environments and its rel ation to contemporary environmental discourse. Early approaches in eco logical anthropology were characterized by varying degrees of environ mental determinism, but from the late 1950s two new approaches were de veloped. The ecosystem approach, adopted from biology, examined the ro le of human populations in ecological systems, and the study of 'ethno ecology', within the broader field of cognitive anthropology, examined people's cultural perspectives on the environment. The focus on cultu ral perspectives fostered an extreme form of cultural relativism which has recently been challenged from both within and outside the discipl ine. Anthropologists have also, in recent years, attacked the modernis t dichotomies (between thought and action, mind and body, culture and nature) which have been fundamental to Western science. These trends a re shaping anthropology's role in contemporary environmental discourse . In a technical sense, anthropological knowledge can be used in addre ssing specific environmental problems and in the search for sustainabl e ways of living. In addition, the nature of anthropological theory gi ves the discipline an implicit position in the environmental debate: o ne which favours local rather than global control of environmental res ources and the conservation of cultural diversity as a strategy for su rvival.