THE YAKHA: CULTURE, ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT IN ...

that they are thwarted in exercising this awareness by pressure from
other sources. Blaikie (1986) portrays resource use as being based not
just on knowledge and physical factors but political (and presumab!~
economic) factors too, and there is certainly a need to allow for the
influence of "regional po!itical ecology" (Blaikie 1987) in
understanding people's relationship to their environment. However, is
'knowledge', as Blaikie suggests, the only cognitive factor operating in
the matrix, or can we (as anthropologists) allow 'culture' and 'society'
a wider influence on the scene?
I would argue that we can. I take as my starting point Barth's
dictum that "the 'environment' of any one ethnic group is not only
defined by natural conditions, but also by the presence and activities
of the other ethnic groups on which it depends" (1956: 1079). This is
important because it offers anthropologists a much broader definition of
'environment' with which to work than that characteristically allowed by
human ecologists. However, if one allows other ethnic groups a place in
the 'social environment', there is no reason why other members of one's
own ethnic group could not also be included. One can take such an
approach even further by arguing, as does Douglas (1972), that the
environment is in its totality a socially constructed entity which is
being constantly reworked in cultural terms.
This broadest conception of 'environment' in social anthropology
thus ultimately brings 'people' and 'environment' together, since they
do not have to be seen as mutually exclusive categories. Ethnic
identity is a product of interaction in the social environment. And the
social environment is part of the construction of the ethnic identity of
any groupa