Page "Political ecology" Paragraph 36

Conversely, Julian Steward and Roy Rappaport's theories of cultural ecology are sometimes credited with shifting the functionalist-oriented anthropology of the 1950s and 1960s toward a more scientific anthropology, incorporating ecology and environment into ethnographic study ( Perry 2003: 154-157 ).

Yet, these theories were later found to be lacking by many anthropologists as they were criticized for “ separat economic from other aspects of life, even in the process of showing the ways in which they interact with one another ” ( Perry 2003: 157 ).

In other words, cultural ecology was good at exploring function in the nature-culture dichotomy, but the conclusions drawn from that theoretical position tended to ignore the impact of environment on political and economic factors.