Ejercicio 3

CULTURAL ECOLOGY, ECOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY, AND ADAPTATION AS A FORM OF

THOUGHT

THE BERKELEY SCHOOL AND CULTURAL ECOLOGY

Excerpt from: an article by M.J.Watt in “The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology. 2015.

The Berkeley School of Cultural Geography is inextricably associated with the name of Carl Sauer, a
child of the Ozarks who trained in Geology and Geography at the University of Chicago (his PhD was
awarded in 1915) and who, after a seven-year sojourn at the University of Michigan, migrated west
to California where he presided over the Department of Geography at the University of California,
Berkeley for over three decades from 1923 to 1957. Much ink has been spilled over Sauer’s work,
his legacy, and his theoretical project (see Mitchell 2001; Mathewson 2009), and particularly over
the concept of culture as he deployed it. Between 1925, when he delivered his famous essay entitled
the Morphology of Landscape, and his 1940 address to the Association of American Geographers,
Foreword to Historical Geography, Sauer laid out a research program of how to think about human
agency in relation to the transformation of the earth. Sauer’s research program rested on four
pillars: culture, Anthropology, the longue durée of history (what he called genetic history), and
biophysical systems. Geography’s proper domain was “territorial localization” through the
comparative study of “modes of living”. The human landscape was seen as the product of human
agency and “practical experience”, of accumulated residues as he put it, quoting Vilfredo Pareto.
Fossils, ruins, and palimpsests were the forms Sauer pursued. Unreservedly anti-deterministic, anti-
evolutionary, and anti-positivist, Sauer was fully resistant to forms of universalist argument. One
might say he was resolutely materialist and historical (but certainly not a historical materialist).
Human geography had little to do in his account with individuals, “only with human institutions or
cultures” (Sauer 1941: 2). There is good reason to be critical of Sauer’s early ruminations on
geographic observation and fieldwork, on the manner in which he construed culture narrowly as
material form, and of a view of history understood as sequence. Perhaps most troublesome was the
degree to which human agency – the driving force in the transformation of the earth – was not
understood in social terms. Despite his cosmopolitan intellectualism and immersion in Franco-
German ideas (Eduard Hahn, Freidrich Ratzel, Vidal de la Blache, Alfred Hettner), there is little
evidence that he read or seriously thought about the work of Karl Marx, or Emile Durkheim or Max
Weber. When all is said and done, nevertheless, if one places Sauer’s work alongside the two other
giant intellects of 1950s Berkeley Geography – Clarence Glacken and Paul Wheatley7 – both of
whom Sauer hired, then one can identify a broad approach, a Berkeley School, that integrated
history, environment, culture, space, and economy into a distinctive and compelling research
program. Glacken, of course, charted a deep history of ideas and beliefs about nature and culture
in the Western tradition, while Wheatley, in his pursuit of pre-industrial urbanism, linked city and
symbol to the production of social surpluses and forms of market behavior derived from the work
of Karl Polanyi. Both exhibited close affinities with Sauer’s project. The enormously influential
conference held at Princeton in 1955, entitled Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, that
Sauer organized with urbanist Lewis Mumford and ecologist Marston Bates, represented in many
respects an intellectual road map of the questions and concerns dear to the Berkeley School. Two
contributions by Sauer and Glacken opened, and indeed anchored, the influential volume of the
same name that subsequently appeared in 1956.8 Any account of the origins of a Berkeley School
of Geography must acknowledge the sustained traffic in ideas between Geography and
Anthropology: anthropologists Alfred Kroeber Political ecology: now and then 23 and Robert Lowie
were colleagues of Carl Sauer at Berkeley and shared an interest in the relations between culture,
land, and environment.9 This cross-fertilization and inter-disciplinarity (similar exchanges were to
be found later at Columbia and Michigan) was integral to the emergence of one of the most
important legacies of Sauer and the Berkeley School, namely cultural ecology. Even though Sauer
never deployed the term, cultural ecology is one of the red threads running through the Berkeley
School’s corpus (the others would be cultural landscape and historical morphology). Berkeley
Geography had sister departments, institutions, and theoreticians of cultural ecology in the
discipline. A trio of Geography departments at the University of Chicago, the University of
Wisconsin, Madison, and the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, all of which had
connections to Sauer in some way, were key sites in the emerging network of cultural ecological
thought. //