![]() ![]() Steward believed that the environment had the greatest influence on societies with less developed technology. Instead of armchair speculation and debate, Steward sought to subject the question of the relationship between culture and nature to direct empirical investigation through actual fieldwork on particular cultures in their habitat, although his own fieldwork mostly involved interviewing scattered elderly informants about their memory culture. Environmental possibilists countered that the environment presents many opportunities allowing a wide latitude for human responses in which culture is decisive. Environmental determinists argued that the natural environment strongly influences human behavior, society, culture, and history. He had avoided taking any side in the academic debate of his predecessors. Now, however, he was devoted to field research in archaeology and ethnography, and this was the formative period in the development of his cultural ecology, aspects of which can be found in many of his early publications. In the late 1920s to 1936, Steward returned several times to various areas of the high desert environment that had been such a profound attraction to him at Deep Springs School. Then Steward returned to Berkeley for graduate work in anthropology where he received a PhD in 1929. His BA degree was awarded in 1925 at Cornell. Local natural history was an integral part of school instruction and nature was part of his daily experience beyond the classroom.Īfter a freshman year at the University of California in Berkeley, Steward followed some of his fellow preparatory school students to Cornell University where he studied geology and zoology. In 1918, at the age of 16, he entered the college preparatory school in Deep Springs Valley north of Death Valley, in eastern California close to the border with Nevada and at the western edge of the Great Basin. 13 illus.Steward was born on January 31, 1902, in Washington, D.C. It charts new directions for research, demanding a more exacting study of environmental conditions, material adaptations, and organizational responses, as well as an appreciation of the ideological and humanistic dimensions of Basin Life. Julian Steward and the Great Basin also corrects long-standing misperceptions that originated with Steward about lifeways of the Indians living between the Great Plains and California. Each chapter explores a different aspect of his work ranging from early efforts at documenting trait distributions to his later role in the development of social transformation theory, area studies, and applied anthropology. In one sense, the phases of Steward's career epitomize the successive schools of anthropological theory and practice. He was also central in shaping basic anthropological constructs such as "hunter-gatherer" and "adaptation." But his fieldwork took place almost entirely in the Great Basin. Steward (1902-1972) was one of the foremost American exponents of cultural ecology, the idea that societies evolve in adaptation to their human and natural environments. ![]() Julian Steward and the Great Basin is a critical assessment of Steward's work, the factors that influenced him, and his deep effect on American anthropology. ![]()
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