ABSTRACT
Another outlook appears. At first it was only as an offhand remark, a critical argument. Now it informs some of the best work in American archaeology and ethnology: It is an idea of reciprocity, of a dialogue between cultures and their environments. The truism that cultures are ways of life, taken in a new light, is the ground premise-cultures are human adaptations. Cul ture, as a design for society’s continuity, stip ulates its environment. By its mode of produc tion, by the material requirements of its social structure, in its standardized perceptions, a cul ture assigns relevance to particular external conditions. Even its historic movement is move ment along the ecologic seam it is organized to exploit. Yet a culture is shaped by these, its own, commitments: it molds itself to significant external conditions to maximize the life chances. There is an interchange between culture and environment, perhaps continuous dialectic inter change, if in adapting the culture transforms its
From Sol Tax (Ed.), Horizons in Anthropology. Copyright © 1964 by Aldine Publishing Company. Reprinted by permission of the publisher and the author. Marshall D. Sahlins is Professor of Anthropology, University of Michigan.
