Environmental Limitation on the Development of Culture1

T HE relationship of culture to environment is one of the oldest problems in the science of anthropology and has provided a leading source of controversy. Early students, impressed with the ways in which cultures were adjusted to the unique features of their local environments, developed the concept of environmental determinism. As more field work was done by trained observers, the variability in culture patterns became more evident and the idea of determinism was rejected. Then, as individual cultures were grouped into culture areas and recognized as specific manifestations of a general pattern, the role of environment once again compelled attention. Wissler (1926:214) expressed the correspondence that exists between culture areas and "natural" areas in the form of a law: " . . . when two sections of a continent differ in climate, florae and faunae, or in their ecological complexes, the culture of the tribal groups in one section will differ from that in the other." In the last two decades this situation has been examined in broad-scale analyses (Forde 1934; Kroeber 1939) and detailed field studies (Steward 1938) and the relationship between environment and culture has been clarified to such an extent that Coon (1948:614) could phrase it recently in more causal terms than Wissler could use two decades before: "Differences in environment . . . are the chief if not the only reason why historical changes have proceeded at different rates in different places, and why more complicated systems have not diffused more rapidly from centers of development." There are few anthropologists today who would disagree with the general statement that environment is an important conditioner of culture. However, efforts to establish the relationship more specifically seem to give negative results. The potentialities of a particular habitat can be seen reflected in the subsistence pattern, the material culture, and by extension, in the social and religious aspects of the culture that is exploiting it, but when cultures of similar subsistence patterns or general features are compared they are not found to occupy similar environments. Hunting tribes, for example, may live in semideserts, swamps, forests, grasslands, or mountains, and in the arctic, the tropics or the temperate zone. Conversely, areas that seem similar geographically may differ greatly culturally. This has led to the conclusion expressed by Forde (1934:464):