What is culture?

Material culture subsistence strategies and technologies developed by humans as they adapt to environmental conditions in their locality (J. Steward) Symbolic culture the information (cognitive, emotive, etc.) that one must know to act effectively in the environment (E. Hunn)

Julian Steward and cultural ecology The work of Julian Steward is one of the principal sources of methods and theory for EA, and especially in the development of the field of ethnoecology. Basic concept of Steward is the idea of the culture core. He defines the culture core as comprised of the basic features of social and economic life that are most closely related to subsistence in a given place; these features include the technological strategies and material practices that local cultures develop to adapt to the ecological conditions of their home place; technology is adapted to exploit the environmental conditions in place; thus, cultural diversity emerges from ecological diversity as is evident in the variety of technologies and material practices of subsistence among different cultures; mountain cultures develop different strategies and techniques of subsistence when compared to plains cultures, desert cultures, rainforest cultures, maritime cultures etc. Steward proposed the methods of cultural ecology to ascertain the technology and material practices of subsistence that define a given culture core; cultural ecology involves the study of the relationship of technology used in subsistence production to the environment in which it is used; then they relate other behavioral patterns, like kinship, customary law, childrearing practices, communal work, and religious ritual to the pattern of subsistence strategies.

Cultural ecology represented an effort to deal with two problems facing anthropological study of human cultural variety in ecological context: (1)the racist and colonialist legacy of an anthropology that had posited the idea of unilinear evolution in which human cultures were seen as evolving from simpler, more primitive, even savage, cultures to more complex, modern, even progressive cultures; (2)the reaction to this older, ethnocentric, form of anthropology was to adhere to the idea of cultural relativism every culture was to be accepted on its own terms as a product of its unique history, development, and location in a given environmental context; thus, one could not understand cultures in terms of universal truths; (3)Steward disagreed with both of these approaches; he rejected the racist and colonialist assumptions of the unilinear evolutionists and he also shunned the idea that there were no knowable universal patterns; he supported the view that cultural ecologists could uncover universal regularities and patterns across cultures through careful observation and comparison; (4)Steward proposed an alternative theory of multilinear evolution that basically argued that cultures everywhere had to produce subsistence but produced sequences of change that were not universal. He proposed that this could be explained because of the diversity in patterns of cultural adaptation. This idea is simply that culture adapts to its biophysical environment.