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

Steward was predated by Meggers (1954), but Steward's approach is more
sophisticated than Meggers' invocation of possibilist 'limitations'.
Steward introduced the term "culture coren to describe those aspects
of culture most closely linked, at the functional level, to the natural
setting. These for him were the primary focus of study, Steward also
distinguished salient environmental features which have a bearing on
cultural patterns, such as the kinds of animals in the environments of
hunt i ng bands and the techniques used to hunt them, where this has
a direct effect on group size and social organisation. He admitted that
'secondary' features of culture might be determined to a great extent by
purely cultural-historical factors (thus allowing for the strength of
the Boasian/Kroeberian 'cultural ideology'), but saw a privileged place
for the study of subsistence and economic aspects in the development of
society. In this respect he was a more sophisticated (some would say
eclectic) thinker than Leslie White (19,59), who attributed a virtually
monocausal determining role in the unilinear evolution of culture to
levels of energy use.
Steward's work is a worthy attempt at refining the doctrine of
'possibilism' to make it more workable in research terms, It exhibits
shades of Marxism, perhaps, in its acceptance of a materialistic theory
of society, and more so in its analysis of an infrastructural culture
core and a superstructural cultural pattern. Because of this, Steward's
work may have appealed to more radical American intellectuals in an era
when overt Marxism in a1 1 its forms was regarded as beyond the pa!e of
normal social and academic discourse. It is similarly based on a theory
of social evolution rather than function, a point not a!ways
sufficiently taken into account by Steward's critics. However, while