Analysis of the relations between human societies and their environments is much older than the discipline of anthropology, but from the start anthropologists have had an abiding interest in the topic. A view known as environmental determinism, which holds that environmental features directly determine aspects of human behaviour and society, was propounded by many Enlightenment philosophers, who argued that differences among peoples were not innate but were due to climate, landscape, and other environmental factors. By the early 20th century, however, environmental determinism was under attack by influential anthropologists such as A.L. Kroeber. These critics argued that the environment might limit the spread of certain sociocultural features (making agriculture impossible in the Arctic, for example) but that it cannot explain why features such as agriculture originated and spread in other areas.

This latter view, known as “possibilism,” is still dominant in anthropology and many other social sciences and humanities, but possibilism itself has limitations. First, historical, archaeological, and ethnographic evidence indicates that the patterned associations between environmental features and sociocultural ones cannot be viewed in possibilist terms; for example, agriculture was not practiced by Native Americans in California, even though it was environmentally possible, while in North America’s arid Southwest, other American Indians transformed the environment through irrigation agriculture.

In reaction to the determinist-possibilist debate, Julian Steward in 1955 developed an approach he termed cultural ecology. Steward proposed that cultures interact with their environmental settings by adapting features of technology, economic organization, and even kinship or religion to allow people to best pursue their livelihoods. Thus, cultural ecology views the environment as presenting problems and opportunities, not just limits or simple determinants, while recognizing that the resulting cultural adaptations depend as much on the sociocultural features at hand as on the environment. For example, a population with stone tools and relying on wild foods will adapt to the Australian bush in very different ways than one with domesticated sheep, metal, and fossil fuels.

Steward developed cultural ecology in influential studies of Great Basin American Indians and other hunter-gatherers and of the rise of complex societies in arid valleys scattered around the globe. Prominent studies that followed in Steward’s footsteps include Richard Lee’s work on the !Kung San of Africa’s Kalahari desert and Robert Netting’s work on household agricultural production. The cultural ecology approach has also been very influential within archaeology.

One of the most famous works in ecological anthropology is Roy Rappaport’s study of the Tsembaga Maring of highland New Guinea. In it he argued that Tsembaga ritual regulated pig husbandry and the incidence of warfare and thereby responded to environmental “feedback” by adjusting human population densities, work effort, food production, and a host of other factors. Rappaport’s study exemplifies the very popular notion that premodern human-environment systems are closely regulated to maintain a balance or equilibrium through complex, often unrecognized feedback mechanisms that maintain population below environmental “carrying capacity.”

This equilibrium-centred view was widely challenged within anthropology beginning in the 1970s, however. The approach known as political ecology criticizes it for portraying premodern societies as timeless and outside of history. Other anthropologists, working under the label historical ecology, reject not only the equilibrium approach but also the notion of static nonhuman environments, stressing that all environments inhabited by human societies in the past 50,000 years are “anthropogenic” (that is, modified or engineered by activities such as controlled burning, irrigation, terracing, etc.). Taking another approach, behavioral ecologists guided by modern evolutionary theory argue that humans, like all species, are designed to efficiently convert resources into offspring and that any group-level phenomenon such as population equilibrium is a by-product of individual adaptation. Increasingly, research guided by these three approaches is replacing or at least transforming the legacy of Stewardian cultural ecology.

The field of ethno-ecology focuses on the ways people conceptualize elements of the natural environment and human activity within it and investigates how these concepts vary culturally as well as reveal universal aspects of human cognition. Another trend in contemporary environmental studies at the turn of the 21st century was the growing importance of applied research, focused on such issues as environmental justice and sustainable development (see below).

Development anthropology

The final quarter of the 20th century saw an increasing involvement of social anthropologists with the process of accelerated incorporation of formerly colonial countries into the world economic system. Referred to as development, the process of incorporation involves the transfer to poor countries of technology, funding, and expertise from countries of the industrial north through multinational, governmental, and nongovernmental organizations and increasingly by private-sector corporations. Although some anthropologists were involved in the immediate post-World War II period of decolonization, the emergence of development anthropology as an academically acceptable subfield dates only from the 1980s. At the turn of the 21st century, most graduate departments of anthropology in the United States, Great Britain, and France included at least one specialist in the application of anthropological theory and methods, particularly those of political ecology, to the achievement of an economic development that is also equitable, environmentally sustainable, culturally pluralistic, and socially just. A perhaps larger number of development anthropologists are employed outside of academia, by government aid agencies, the World Bank, United Nations agencies, and various nongovernmental organizations such as OXFAM, World Union for the Conservation of Nature, and CARE. Over time, anthropologists have moved from being peripheral members of the teams to being team leaders, responsible for assuring that the work of all technical specialists is socially sound.

The legitimacy of a specifically development-oriented anthropology has been challenged by persons fundamentally wedded to cultural relativism, who argue that anthropologists might describe social change but should never participate in causing it. Increasingly, though, the profession has acknowledged the moral necessity of rejecting those who hold to an inviolability of local culture, even when this position results in poverty, infant mortality, child labour, gender hierarchies, and the general exclusion of the poor from democratic participation in government. This commitment to improving the well-being and the political power of the poor has been challenged also by some other development specialists, particularly neoliberal economists, for whom the prime measure of national development is not increasing equity but growth in gross national product (GNP) per capita.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of development anthropologists has been the demonstration to economists and technical specialists that the “beneficiaries” of development, the low-income majorities in poor countries, must be active participants at all levels of the process if it is to be successful. This means that their expertise as resource managers must be acknowledged and fully incorporated in the identification, design, implementation, and evaluation of development projects. Anthropologists have also demonstrated the internal complexity and socioeconomic differentiation (by class, age, gender, ethnicity, education, etc.) of local communities that were assumed by outside “experts” to be homogeneous. Development anthropologists have repeatedly demonstrated that projects assumed to be broadly beneficial have too often created more losers than winners.

Among the areas where anthropologists have had a substantial impact on development thinking are river basin interventions, especially involving population resettlement upstream and downstream from large hydropower dams; pastoral production systems on semiarid rangelands; community environmental management and social forestry; the gender dimensions of development; ethno-medicine and the incorporation of indigenous practitioners within health delivery systems; and indigenous knowledge and biodiversity.