ABSTRACT
A series of celebratory sessions was held in his honour at a joint meeting of the Canadian Anthropological Society, American Ethnological Society and Society for Cultural Anthropology in Montreal in 2001. Silberbauer remained within the field but came to see ideology as more significant than others did, and Sugawara turned away from cultural ecology in its narrow sense towards the study of language and social interaction. Sugawara’s uniqueness derives from the addition of discourse as a focus and from his blend of ecological study, linguistic competence and the phenomenology of French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Whereas Lee and Tanaka developed conventional approaches to the study of subsistence ecology, albeit with different emphases, Silberbauer and especially Sugawara challenged the bounds of ecological anthropology. Silberbauer remained within the field but came to see ideology as more significant than others did, and Sugawara turned away from cultural ecology in its narrow sense towards the study of language and social interaction.
