Cultural Ecology

The study of the interaction of people and environment is a fundamental focus of geography. In the Western geographical tradition concern with the linkages between physical environmental conditions and human patterns of settlement and land use goes back to the ancient Greeks. So too does the attempt to explore the possible relationships between physical environment and culture. Both of these themes also figured in the writings of the great Arab geographers more than a millennium later, and were later central to the development of both European and U.S. geography in the nineteenth century. The debate between environmental determinism and possibilism, the concept that while the environment may limit the range of human activity it does not determine it since people choose from among a number of different opportunities, was a vital issue in the early part of this century. The subsequent prominence of the Berkeley school of geography under the leadership of Carl Sauer (1925, 1956) and his successors highlighted the commitment of geographers to people-environment studies. Sauerian geography emphasized the fieldwork-based study of local land-use practices and stressed the understanding of their basis in local environmental knowledge as well as in cultural beliefs and values. Through the concept of the "cultural landscape" Sauer also stressed the study of the historical links between settlement and land-use patterns and environmental change (1925:53). Here he was concerned with the transformation through time of a "natural" landscape into a human one (C. Sauer, "Recent Developments in Cultural Geography," cited in James 1972:400), which reflects in its features the values and practices of the people who have lived in it and used it. The concept of cultural landscape has since been superseded by other approaches to examining environmental change and the processes which underlie it. But the study of settlement, land use, and the historical human transformation of the earth remains important in geography today.

Cultural ecology is the study of peoples and their ways of life as parts of ecosystems. The development since the 1960s of cultural ecology as a major geographical subdiscipline has thus focused more attention on subsistence land-use practices and environmental change and has also brought to geography (as to ecological anthropology) a stronger grounding in the principles of ecology and systems theory. The growth of the field in both geography and anthropology has also supported a proliferation of different conceptual, theoretical, and methodological approaches—a diversity which has also led to considerable contention over defining the most profitable theoretical grounds and methodologies for research and analysis.^[3] There have been major differences in the degree to which practi-

tioners have drawn, for example, from ecological science, political economy, and decision-making theory and major contrasts in the scale of analysis (household, community, class, ethnic group, microregion, country), the degree of cross-cultural comparison, temporal framework (synchronic, diachronic, or longitudinal), and emphasis on processual or neofunctional perspectives.

My own approach to cultural ecology centers on the dynamics of environmental perception, land-use decisions, resource management, and environmental change. I take an essentially geographic approach to cultural ecology rather than an anthropological one. Ever since Julian Steward's (1936) pioneering studies, much anthropological work has emphasized the study of the ways in which environmentally adapted subsistence systems may shape population and settlement density, social structure and institutions, belief systems, and other aspects of culture. I stress instead the study of the interaction of people and environment in specific places and, in particular, the detailed study of subsistence systems and resource-use practices, their basis in local environmental knowledge and belief, and their role in maintaining and transforming local ecosystems.^[4] Like much of the ecological anthropological work of the past twenty years, however, the orientation I adopt emphasizes the study of process (Orlove 1980)—an approach which the Australian geographer Harold Brookfield advocated as early as the 1960s (1964, 1973).^[5]

Much cultural ecology work has focused on adaptation to environment and has devoted little attention to the study of the processes by which societies transform the ecosystems within which and from which they live (Moran 1984; Netting 1984; Orlove 1980). The concept of homeostasis with the environment (Rappaport 1968) was once widely adopted. This has been much challenged, however, and it is now widely agreed on in cultural ecological circles that such a "dynamic balance" with the environment, much less a deeper, primordial "harmony with nature," cannot be assumed even for societies which are living "traditional" ways of life with little involvement in the global economy (Blaikie and Brookfield 1987), much less for indigenous peoples who have such links (Grossman 1984; Nietschmann 1973).

I take as a starting point the idea that the study of environmental adaptation must look to local environmental knowledge as the cultural pivot of adaptation, the point where a society's shared set of perceptions and beliefs about resources, risks, and opportunities provides a basis for individual and collective decisions which adjust land-use practice to environmental conditions. Individual and group decisions provide a basis for adaptation in that they make adjustment and change possible (Bennett 1976). But, to the extent that these decisions are adaptive to environment, they must be grounded first in individual

environmental perception and local environmental knowledge and, when widely shared across generations and communities, ultimately also in socially transmitted and culturally shared assumptions, knowledge, belief, and customs.

While I emphasize farmers' and other land users' and managers' efforts to attune land use to their perception of environmental conditions and risks, I am well aware that other processes and conditions also influence the decisions and practices of individuals, households, communities, and societies. These include cultural values and beliefs, social pressure, economic differentiation of wealth, political economy, and the policies and performance of government institutions. To consider any one of these factors in isolation invites distortions that may hinder understanding the dynamics of settlement, land use, and environmental change. Cultural ecology thus must not neglect to consider either the role of culture in settlement and land use or the role of social and economic factors. Shared local knowledge and belief, social organization of labor, management and distribution of resources, marriage and procreation customs, religious food prohibitions, lifestyle preferences, and other factors can significantly affect resource use. Peoples occupying highly similar environments may, as a result, differ enormously in land-use patterns (Barth 1956; Cole and Wolf 1974). Individual households within a given community, groups within societies, and regions may also vary greatly in their political economic circumstances; hence the importance also of microlevel and economic and political economic analysis. In this book I emphasize the commonalities of environmental and agronomic knowledge, land-use practices, and subsistence strategies among Khumbu Sherpas. But I also note the significance of differences of wealth and status in subsistence.

I address the study of Sherpa cultural ecology at several different scales. I begin with the perspective that the study of land use and environmental change must be rooted in understanding of individual land users' and land managers' perceptions and decisions and the factors that influence them. By land managers I mean all people and institutions who make decisions about land use, from individuals to households, communities, development agencies, and local, regional, national, and international governments and institutions (Blaikie and Brookfield 1987). Analysis must focus on the interplay of these decisions on land use and environment at the local level, within the context of household and community (and in some cases also ethnic, class, and kinship) resource-use patterns, and the relationship of these with the local ecosystems. But local decisions often reflect considerations that result from the linkages of the local economy and politics to broader regional networks, processes, and institutions. Cultural variation can also be significant between different groups

of a single people who inhabit different areas. Geographers have accordingly emphasized regional context beyond the study of single villages, from the study of a microregion of a valley, watershed, or local culturally defined territory (W. Clarke 1971; Brookfield 1964) to a larger regional (B. Bishop 1990; Zurick 1988), country, continental, and global scale.^[6] Understanding the way of life of Khumbu Sherpas, for example, requires learning about their role in far-reaching, multicultural trade networks that have historically integrated the economies of the peoples of the Dudh Kosi valley with those of the inhabitants of adjacent areas of Nepal, India, and Tibet. And analysis of the contemporary Khumbu economy cannot begin without acknowledgment of the role of tourism. It is dangerous to make generalizations about a society or a cultural group from a pattern identified in a particular community. There are significant differences, for example, among Khumbu villages in past and present patterns of land use and management which make it vital to discuss the region as a whole before venturing generalizations about "Khumbu Sherpa" cultural ecology, much less "Sherpa" cultural ecology. Beyond this there is considerable variation in many aspects of culture, including economic practices, between the Sherpas of Khumbu and the Sherpas in other parts of Nepal. Thus a somewhat larger regional perspective encompassing the entire span of Sherpa-inhabited northeastern Nepal is required before much can safely be said about the degree to which Khumbu Sherpa cultural ecology is or is not characteristically Sherpa. Indeed, it is valuable to expand the regional and cultural focus in this regard still further, for Sherpas are one of a number of Himalayan peoples inhabiting the higher mountain regions who have origins in Tibet and it is useful to consider contrasts and comparisons within this larger group.

This concern with context can be carried still further to compare the way of life of the Sherpas of the Mount Everest region more broadly with those of other peoples of highland Asia and mountain regions elsewhere in the world. This scale of spatial and cultural context has long been a characteristic of cultural ecology, where cross-cultural comparisons of the ways of life of different peoples inhabiting similar environments goes back to the early work of Julian Steward (1936). Mountain regions, like such other difficult-to-subsist-in or distinctive environments as deserts, the Arctic, rain forests, grasslands, and coasts have attracted a considerable amount of research (Moran 1979). They have also inspired an unusual amount of multiregional and multicultural comparison (Allan, Knapp, and Stadel 1988; Brush 1976, 1977; Guillet 1983; Orlove and Guillet 1985; Rhoades and Thompson 1975). These discussions of similarities in the cultural ecology of the peoples of the Himalaya, Andes, and Alps have highlighted comparable similarities in strategy and tactics used by indigenous peoples in high mountain regions to cope

with environmental difficulties and risks and to exploit seasonal and altitudinal land-use opportunities.

Scale is important in temporal as well as spatial dimensions. Cultural ecological analysis must be diachronic. History is vital to the understanding of both adaptation (Barth 1956; Cole and Wolf 1974; MacFarlane 1976; Netting 1981) and environmental transformation (Blaikie and Brookfield 1987; Sauer 1925, 1956). A focus solely on the observable present precludes any possibility of comprehending current patterns of land use as the creative achievements of local innovation, local response to shifting social, political, political-economic, and environmental conditions, or the historical impacts on local life of national, international, and global economies. This is especially so when historical perspective is reduced to merely mistakenly consigning the past to a supposedly static "traditional" period. Historical perspective is also critical to the understanding of environmental change, for often such changes only become apparent over the course of a considerable time span. A baseline in the past also provides a vital context for the interpretation of present environmental conditions.

Earlier portraits of Khumbu Sherpas' way of life and land use have lacked many of these cultural ecological perspectives. The first accounts of Khumbu agriculture, pastoralism, and forest use were general ethnographic sketches (Fürer-Haimendorf 1964, 1975). These provided a basic overview of subsistence practices and the organization of local resource-management institutions. Subsequent work, primarily by geographers and foresters, provided more detail on some facts of Khumbu land use, particularly on herding (Bjø>nness 1980a ; Brower 1987) and forests (Byers 1987b ; Hardie et al. 1987; Naylor 1970; Sherpa 1979).^[7] It also in some cases included observations of the environmental impacts of current resource-use practices. But there has been no prior attempt to examine the complexity of local crop growing and pastoral practices, the role of adaptation in land-use practices, the operation of local agropastoral and forest-management systems, or links between changes in land use and pre-1960 environmental change.