ABSTRACT
This chapter is the latest in my attempts over two decades and more, and that are still ongoing, to figure out what is meant by the environment of an animal. Coming from a background in ecological anthropology, which professes to study the relations between people and their environments, I cannot avoid the questions of what an environment is and, more particularly, what, if anything, is special about the environments of those animals we call human beings. Initially, my inquiries were prompted by a realisation that ecological anthropology appeared to have reached an impasse that was blocking further development in the subject. It lay in the contradictory imperatives, epitomised in the title of a celebrated book by Marshall Sahlins (1976), of culture and practical reason. Does all meaning and value lie in systems of significant symbols? If so, then the motives and finalities for human action on the environment must lie in what the mind brings to it: in the ideas, concepts and categories of a received cultural tradition. Yet does not culture with its artefacts and organisational arrangements, and the knowledge of how to apply them, provide human beings with the equipment to draw a livelihood from the world around them? Would they not, as Clifford Geertz once remarked (1973: 49-50), be crippled without it? If so, then whence come the ultimate requirements of human practice if not from the environment itself ? Precisely where are we to place culture in the nexus of human environmental relations? Does it dictate the terms of adaptation, or is it a means of adaptation on terms dictated by nature, or both at once?
