ABSTRACT
Human beings and their activities have long been perceived as parts of complex interactive systems forming a cosmos, a single ecological whole. This chapter traces ideas about environmental and cultural systems from the time of the European Enlightenment and the first calls for the scientific study of humankind to the end of the nineteenth century. Ethnology, the science of culture, involves the comparison of ethnographic accounts in order to reach understandings of the nature of culture. With the systematic collection of ethnographic data concerning the environment and the human beings in it, ethnology began its course of development during the nineteenth century. In the 1780s, Johann Gottfried Herder, following Kant's somewhat different vision, demanded creation of a formal field of scientific investigation to be called anthropology. Herder saw the importance of a science of man and bewailed the absence of the data required to construct such a science.
