HUMAN

ECOLOGICAL
PERSPECTIVES
HUME 101: HUMAN ECOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES IN
DEVELOPMENT
 Environmental Determinism
1920s
➢ Humans were completely the product of their
environment
➢ Friedrich Ratzel, a German geographer, and his
American disciple Ellen Semple
 Environmental Possibilism
1930s-1940s
➢ Specific environmental factors placed limits on cultural
development, by either permitting or forbidding their
occurrence
➢ Development of civilizations could be explained in terms of
their responses to environmental challenges
➢ British historian Arnold Toynbee
 Cultural Ecology
mid 1950s
➢ Society and its culture evolved due to its adaptation to
ecological influences as well from the diffusion from its
neighbours
➢ Julian Steward American anthropology
 Ecosystem Model of Human
Ecology
1950s
➢ Relationship of specific human populations to specific
ecosystems; the ecosystem, rather than culture, is the
fundamental unit of analysis
➢ American anthropologists Andrew Vayda and Roy Rapaport
 Actor – Based Model of Human
Ecology
➢ Adaptation occurs at the level of the individual rather than
at the level of the groups, rather than of cultures or
populations (Orlove, 1980)
 Systems Model of Human Ecology
➢ ‘General systems theory’
➢ Concerned with the general properties of the
structures and functions of systems as such,
rather than with their specific contents