Introduction

In: Anthropological journal of European cultures: AJEC, Band 19, Heft 2, S. 1-6

Abstract

Arguably, anthropologists have studied the relationship of 'culture' and 'nature' for a long time and from a broad range of perspectives. The close thematic connections between anthropology and ecology reach back well beyond Ernst Haeckel's postulate of ecology as a distinct science in the 1860s. Social historians (e.g. Brunner 1956) have noted how the 'old European economy' of 'the whole house', where 'culture' and 'nature' were regarded as closely intertwined, has been replaced in the course of industrialisation and modernisation by increasing perceptual separation and indeed juxtaposition of the two spheres. In a sense, the culmination of that movement may be seen, for example, in the progressive ousting of an integrative Heimatkunde – the holistic study of localities and regions – from the German school curriculum since the 1960s.