ECOLOGICAL PROCESSES OF ADAPTATION

A. Overview From the standpoint of cultural ecology, there is a direct relationship between the ways in which people adapt to the environment (their means of extracting energy from the environment) and the correspondent level of complexity in socio-political organization. The major broad categories of societal types are based on this relationship:

1. hunting & gathering (band level of socio-political organization);

2. horticultural & pastoral (village/tribal as well as chiefdom levels of socio-political organization);

3. peasant agricultural societies (historically, rural, supportive component of larger state level forms of socio-political organization);

4. industrial and post-industrial levels of socio-political organization with correspondent impact of global processes of socio-economic change on all societies today.

B. Key features of Systems Approach to Human Adaptation (from Wilson 1999:22-32)

1. Superstructure - Ideology (cognized environment, cosmology, Ultimate Sacred Postulates); Ritual & leadership/policy decisions

2. Structure - Domestic Economy (household, local settlement); Social Organization (rules, patterns, behavior related to kinship & marriage, gender relations etc. including structure of groups present); Political Economy (forms of exchange--reciprocity, redistribution, market exchange; territorial & boundary markers)

3. Infrastructure - Includes mode of production (form of subsistence--e.g., hunting and gathering); settlement pattern (number, density, permanence, size etc. of sites); and mode of reproduction (pop. size, sex ratio, fertility, mortality, pop. controls etc). Can also be described in terms of

        Eco-system (carrying capacity- population that can be sustained with a given technology), has three major components:

        a. resource base (within relevant environment)

        b. productive tools & techniques (level of technology)

        c. productive knowledge ('know-how' about environment etc.)

        Social Instrumentalities (consequences of ecosystem on social organization)

        a. the density and spatial distribution of the population;

        b. the structure and composition of work groups; and

        c. the rights to the means of production (who has them as well as what the "rights" encompass).