ABSTRACT
General ecology is hierarchically subordinate to evolutionary biology. The ecosystem concept is a leading tool of ecology, but it is understood in different ways by different authorities. One utility of the ecosystem concept in anthropology has been to extend the ecological approach first proposed by Julian Steward to cover aspects of human behavior as belonging to a more general class of biobehavioral phenomena and not to a presumably unique class of cultural phenomena. Hypothesis-testing—or what many anthropologists call “problem-oriented research”—has become dominant in contemporary academic anthropology. Ecological research is compatible with materialist and political economic paradigms in anthropology. The use of an ecosystem model, in biology or in anthropology, cannot substitute for theory that is coherent and that can yield testable hypotheses. The absence of conventions and criteria for establishing the comparability of two human groups is a reflection of the underdevelopment of anthropological theory.
