Suchergebnisse

Culture in Practice: Selected Essays. Marshall Sahlins. New York: Zone Books, 2000. 646 pp.

Contesting Art: Politics and Identity in the Modern World. Jeremy MacClancy. ed. New York: New York University Press, 1997.254 pp.

The subject of this paper is adaptation. I shall frame my discussion in terms of three topics which have nagged anthropology since its beginning. These topics are: 1. the role of biogenetic factors in cultural behavior; 2. the relation between behavioral systems and the external or natural environment; 3. the relation between mind, behavior, and ecological adaptation. I hope to show that these three topics reduce to a single theme when they are considered in terms of the central problem, adaptation. In addition, I hope to show that two of the major lines of development within anthropology, ecology and structuralism, can be reconciled and combined in a unified approach to human adaptation.