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This chapter considers the cultural ecology of composite animals. Paleolithic and Neolithic societies sometimes created durable images of composite beings, and the few surviving candidates have often been accorded great prominence in modern interpretations. Yet they remain strikingly isolated. If the popularity of minimally counterintuitive images is to be explained by their core cultural content and its appeal to universal cognitive biases, the question that arises is: Why did composite figures fail so spectacularly to “catch on” across the many millennia of innovation in visual culture that precede the onset of urban life? Much hinges here upon our conceptualization of the “counterintuitive” and its role in cultural transmission. To determine what kind of “cultural ecology” the composite animal belongs to, the chapter examines composites in early dynastic Egypt before discussing the relationship between the spread of urban civilization and the widespread transmission of images depicting composite beings.

The global scale of anthropogenic environmental change now challenges demography to rethink its methodologies and tacit values to assess the ways that human populations determine the population profiles and survival prospects for non‐human species and nature as a whole. Critically reviews the disciplinary basis for human‐centredness in the assessment of environmental change, and the ways this Malthusian intellectual legacy now constrains demography's ability to comment on pressing environmental issues. By demonstrating that social relationships do not stop at the boundaries of society but extend to the relationships people establish with non‐human nature, the chapter illustrates how more ecologically inclusive analytic categories can provide significant insight into environmental change in the Western Himalayas. Redefining the familiar demographic categories of ‘household’ and ‘community’ to more closely reflect local cultural understandings, the chapter links household composition to livestock ecology, and agricultural production to the history of environmental transformation in the Himalayan region. In suggesting less anthropocentric and Western culture‐centric demographic analysis, the chapter argues for models of human communities more precisely situated in their environmental contexts, and demonstrates a potentially powerful extension of demographic techniques in the explanation of landscape and environmental change.

Chapter 3 explores cultural evolution, cultural ecology, and the ways environments shape the cultures that exist within them. It discusses whether only humans have culture, Darwin and natural selection, and biological and cultural evolution, and provides examples of biological evolution. It also addresses cultural evolution, a comparison of biological and cultural evolution, how communities change, creative cultural inventions, globalization and diffusion, revolution, and intergroup contact. It explores cultural ecology, a case study in cultural ecology, how culture and environment interconnect, sickle cell anemia, diet, lactose intolerance, culture as an adaptive tool, and cultural variability. This chapter includes a case study, Culture Across Disciplines box, chapter summary, key terms, a What Do Other Disciplines Do? section, thought-provoking questions, and class and experiential activities.

Ecocultural theory characterizes the role of cultural ecology in psychosocial development, and has evolved in anthropology as a powerful tool for understanding and investigating the sources of human diversity. Through culture, humans largely create the conditions in which they live in material, social, and experiential terms. The resultant cultural ecology, in turn, strongly shapes the physical, behavioral, and mental attributes of the members of a culture. The question remains: just how are such linkages forged? Many answers to this question appear to lie in human development. This chapter traces anthropology’s ecological understanding of culture and its relationship to the dynamics of human development, and outlines the foundations, evolution, and application of ecocultural theory. The framework of ecocultural theory has come to inform other social and biological sciences, as well as policy and clinical applications.

Chapter 1 gives an overview of the music in “Merry Ghetto,” the Underground’s assembled cultural ecology, before moving on to discuss memory in post-socialist Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic. I continue by examining associations between music and social activity in context: namely revolutions, memory, and popular music in the former Eastern bloc. The chapter critiques and draws on insights from literature of popular music studies and sociology of music to construct an approach to studying music as a social activity that is grounded in events, peoples, places, and their relations. These are the mechanisms of how music takes on meaning and provides empowering affordances. I analyze these questions using perspectives developed in music sociology and music therapy in order to understand the interactive piece-by-piece assembly of groups, bodies, and consciousness—and thus social power and agency—showing what is possible, what can be accomplished through and with music.

This chapter discusses Julian H. Steward's cultural-ecological approach to the study of communities as well as complex societies as multilevel systemic structures. The Puerto Rico project exemplifies this approach to area studies. The research strategy that Steward brought to bear upon the study of Puerto Rico was that of cultural ecology, which provides answer an to the question of “whether the adjustments of human societies to their environments require particular modes of behavior or whether they permit latitude for a certain range of possible behavior patterns.” This method studies empirically the relationships between a culturally available technology and an environment. The four regions that are illustrated through inquiries into four representative Puerto Rican communities represent particular combinations of capital and labor at a particular moment in time. To explain their relative position with regard to one another requires a view vastly more dynamic than those offered either by cultural ecology or by the concept of levels of sociocultural integration.

This introductory chapter first sets out the purpose of the book, which is to chart the similarities and differences – even convergences – between the media in a period roughly bracketed by the end of World War II in Europe and the present day (where we begin to take cogniscence of at least the possibility of a post-cinema and post-TV world). It then discusses the so-called ‘political economy’ of the relationship of film and TV in Europe in the second half of the twentieth century, and the notion of ‘cultural ecology’.

I conclude by considering music’s situated power in cultural and social transformation. I argue that resistance concerns how one resists aesthetics and how this builds one’s immunity to those things that they perceive as unhealthy. As the Underground case suggests, an interdisciplinary approach to studying the social and the musical is essential. Indeed, how we come to define the social is called into question when we “reassemble” it to consider people, objects, and materials acting together. This chapter examines “togetherness,” that is not only about people being together; rather, it is about people, timbres, cassette tapes, backbeats, establishments, photographs, places, transmitters, long hair, legacies, regimes, police, poetry, histories that are ecologically assembled (or rejected) to (re)form a habitable, healthy space where one can live. The chapter reflects on the case of the Underground and how its lessons in building a counterculture via music are valuable for any situation of dis-ease.

Chinese nutritional therapy—the use of food as medicine, to treat illness and physical challenge—provides an ideal ground for studies of how people think about their place in the organic world. Unlike many folk systems of medicine, Chinese nutrition has a long written history. Doctors and food experts have devoted much effort to articulating and systematizing a vast amount of information. Much of the data comes from folk observation—the empirical experience of generations of farmers and workers. In Chinese medicine, humans as total persons confront a world of plants, animals, and minerals that have varied medical functions. The line between food and medicine does not exist; all foods have some medical significance, and many medicinal herbs are eaten in enough quantity to count as foodstuffs. Theoretically, there is an infinite number of possible ways of thinking about food and health. The Chinese have constructed a system that represents empirical experience well; fits with their cosmology (the cosmology we have already seen in the preceding chapter); and fits with their views on the individual and society. It is a system that classifies and arranges a great number of facts—statements that are true by the standards of Western laboratory science as well as Chinese experience. It incorporates these truths into a plausible and logical structure, and ties the whole thing to the network of emotions, personal values, and deeply held beliefs that sustain Chinese society. To put it a bit crudely, the system wouldn’t sell if it didn’t work. But, also, it wouldn’t sell if it didn’t fit with the rest of the Chinese system of thought and feeling. In this chapter, I provide a rather thorough account of the traditional Chinese construction of nutritional knowledge. I then show how and why it is logically compelling, given the assumptions of Chinese logic. Finally, I suggest some ways in which it seems to fit well with the Chinese experience of being a person in society. Cultural ecology concerns itself with all human relationships with the environment. Food is one of the field’s main concerns. Foodways provide good examples of demand-driven systems.

There exists an ecological issue in the livestock activities. Feed and fodder availability is vital. Nomadic herders are important in social as well as economic context. Livestock population is a part of the developing economy through its complementarity to crop cultivation. For example, India holds livestock resources of vast genetic diversity with 55 percent of the world buffalo population. Both drafting and dairying are important components within the primary sector. Cowdung, meat and residuals of fallen cattle also adds to the economy. Hence, a number of new areas of research have emerged. There exists identifiable culture related to livestock rearing. Emphasis is given to nutrition, animal diseases and veterinary services. Consequently, livestock is vital for rural development.