shows a complex picture, one that defies grand theories about “the poor.”
In this way, Smallholders, Householders does what many postcolonial critics have long urged: it abandons the creation of ethnographic accounts of the “other.” Explicitly eschewing ethnology, Netting lays out his project from the start: “what follows is not an attempt to interpret ‘culture,’ a project of eliciting and perhaps creating meaning so grand that only the artist or the literary critic would confidently attempt it. Rather it examines a limited set of social and economic factors that are regularly associated with a definable type of productive activity” (p. 2).
Netting died in 1995. I regret that I never met or spoke with him. But this self‐effacing passage seems to admirably capture his eminently practical voice.
Cultural ecology, in this way, opens the door to a range of productive questions, allowing a continuing exploration of the sophisticated adaptations of people who had historically been characterized as backward. Related work continues to show the immense adaptive capacity of people, from the indigenous people of pre‐Columbian North and South America to the producers of agro‐food systems in the present day (Turner and Brush 1987; Turner 1990; Butzer 1992; Barham and Coomes 1996; Berkes 1999; Doolittle 2000; Denevan 2001). By uniting highly specialized skills in agronomy, pedology, and hydrology with social and cultural exploration, cultural ecology has, moreover, created a model for integrative multidisciplinary research in anthropology and geography (Butzer 1989; Turner 1989).
The incipient critical politics of cultural ecology are also readily apparent. Farming, herding, and hunting groups around the world, who have been characterized as primitive, conservative, and inefficient, become the focus of sustained and focused study, revealing the veracity and sustainability of their ways of life. It is the modern development state, by implication, with its high‐input agricultural systems, its market orientation, and its urge to separate producers from resources, that appears primitive and inefficient. In the evolution of their work, cultural ecologists almost invariably, though perhaps not intentionally, have come to champion the most marginal and powerless groups, revealing the problems and limits of state and commercial power.
Even so, cultural ecology has been the subject of many criticisms over the years, in terms of both its concepts and its practices. Firstly, the excesses of the logic of adaptation, so central to cultural ecology, often lead to problematic reductionist conclusions, suffering from a fundamental teleological flaw: if people do it, it must be adaptive (Trimbur and Watts 1976; Bassett and Fogelman 2013). Indeed, the adaptation approach is focused specifically on assuming and demonstrating the ecological functionality of the most unusual cultural practices. The crude theories that developed from this approach propelled some truly bizarre and excessive claims. Aztec human sacrifice traditions, for example, the immensely complex socio‐religious institutions of Mexico in the pre‐Colombian period, were spuriously explained to be an adaptation to protein deficiencies for which human flesh was a crucial supplement (Winkelman 1998).
This “neofunctionalism” was further criticized for its crude use of the concept of “carrying capacity,” which uncritically assumed that there are given limits to human population density, despite extensive and growing evidence to the contrary (Sayre 2008, 2017). So too, neofunctional cultural materialism, as championed by anthropologists like Marvin Harris, has been overturned, often simply through rigorous research. Arguments that the cow became sacred in India because of the value of its protein and agricultural traction power (Harris 1966), notably, have been undermined by historic observation and reconstruction (Simoons 1979; Freed and Freed 1981). Adaptation researcher Alexander Alland (1975) once insisted the worst cultural ecology in this way represents little more than “just so stories” (p. 69).
Most problematic, the thrust of some cultural ecological argument explicitly naturalizes and, by implication, legitimizes what can be seen as contingent social behaviors and practices, recalling the socially and politically disturbing features of determinism. If the Native Americans of Bennett's Northern Plainsmen fill an “adaptive niche” by living at the edge of subsistence, scavenging at the periphery of the larger economic and ecological system, the implication is that such a status is natural, and not the result of land seizure, political marginalization, discrimination, and decades of exploitation (Bennett 1969).
The politics that both make up and constrain the daily life of such people, who are perpetually engaged in social and ecological conflicts over subsistence, are little in evidence in this work. This disinterest in resource politics, in the end, often makes it difficult for cultural ecologists to explain the outcomes they observe in the world.
Beyond land and water: the boundaries of cultural ecology
These limits are perhaps no more clearly seen than in Between Land and Water, Bernard Nietschmann's groundbreaking study of social and ecological change along the Miskito coast of Nicaragua. Nietschmann was a naturalist, but with a strong interest in the workings of culture and a commitment to the scientific study of development problems. In 1968, he departed for a small community of Miskito Indians in the village of Tasbapauni on the Pearl Lagoon on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. Equipped with all of the robust tools and theories of cultural ecology, having been trained at the University of Wisconsin by William Denevan, a senior researcher in the field, Nietschmann intended to study subsistence strategy and change along the coast. The study would be extensively quantitative and would involve careful measurement of crops and game, with an eye towards exploring energy inputs and outputs, especially in terms of the harvest of green turtles, which were crucial components of Miskito subsistence and livelihood: classic cultural ecology.
Nietschmann’s extensive and detailed quantitative conclusions are complex. His work concluded that the Miskito depend on hunting and fishing as key supplements to crop subsistence, since they provide dependable food security and consistently productive yields (Nietschmann 1972). Similarly, Nietschmann recorded the complex and sophisticated systems that governed sharing of meat catches, examined in terms of the cultural role of redistribution in the reproduction of the social order and availability of proteins (Nietschmann 1973). All of these bear the traditional marks of cultural ecology's questions and answers.
But things were not in homeostatic order, by any means. The monetization of the local economy had redirected flows of exchange and harvest of hunted wild animals. Specifically, the trading of sea turtle meat and other products, though a practice dating from at least the early seventeenth century, had radically accelerated in recent years. This brought with it a breakdown of social reciprocity, an acceleration of harvest, and decline of turtle resources. This decline fed a spiral of overexploitation and capitalization with serious social and environmental implications (Nietschmann 1973).
Ultimately, Nietschmann concluded, the fundamental problems of Miskito subsistence and the emerging livelihood crises along the coast were not related to the metabolism of the internal ecological system – the governing system imagined to be so important in systems approaches of cultural ecology – but the broader global market (Robbins 2015). As he explains in a compelling narrative account of his life in the field, Caribbean Edge:
These green turtles, caught by the Miskito Indian turtlemen off the eastern coast of Nicaragua, are destined for distant markets. Their butchered bodies will pass through many hands, local and foreign, eventually ending up in tins, bottles and freezers far away. Their meat, leather, shell, oil, and calipee – a gelatinous substance that is the base of turtle soup – will be used to produce goods for more affluent parts of the world.
(Nietschmann 1979, pp. 173–174)
Evidence of the relationship between social conflict, markets, and turtle population decline was clear, especially in terms of traditional systems of reciprocity:
Tension is growing in the villages. Kinship relations are strained because of what some villagers interpret
