ABSTRACT
ecology; social ecology. The word ecology is sometimes used as interchangeable with geographic environment and, consequently, ecological studies are often limited to the study of the direct effect of environment on the material culture of peoples with simple technologies. But ecology is more than a study of man’s material adaptation to his physical environment. In botany, plant ecology is not only the study of plants in relation to soils and climate, but of plants in relation to plants and other living organisms in a particular environment. Social ecology is likewise concerned not only with the direct response to environment where technology is unsophisticated, but also with the distribution and composition of groups necessary for the exploitation of natural resources, the indirect relationships which spring from these groupings, and the general conceptualization of the cosmos associated with specific habitats. Conceived in these terms, ecological studies are extended to include modern urban societies: and such studies are concerned with the social relationship of people in relation to the constraints and permissiveness of urban habitat, and in relation to the environment of industry, its location, the limits it sets to domestic and local relationships, and the different types of social links associated with the various types of industrial technological processes. See E. E. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer, 1940; L. Febvre, A Geographical Introduction to History, 1925; C. D. Forde, Habitat, Economy and Society, 1934, and ‘The Integration of Social Anthropological Studies’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 78, 1948; E. L. Peters, ‘Aspects of Status and Rank among Muslims in a Lebanese Village’, in Mediterranean Countrymen, ed. J. Pitt-Rivers, 1963; and ‘Aspects of the Family among the Bedouin of Cyrenaica’, in Comparative Family Systems, ed. M. F. Nimkoff, 1965; A. Tansley, What is Ecology?, 1951.
