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

value of an ecosystemic approach in purely biological studies, he
criticizes writers such as Barth (1956), Geertz (1963) and even
Rappaport (1968) for making use of what he sees as ecosystemic analogies
for intellectual novelty without having worked out the ecosystematics of
their studies in detail. In Bennett's view, "social systems are
organized differently than biological systems, and no amount of analogy
building will alter this fact or make social systems more like
biologicalM (Bennett 1976:193).
Rappaport's 'Pigs for the Ancestors' is perhaps the classic example
of the ecosystem concept used in an ethnographic account. Rappaport's
book can be epigrammatically described as a study of the ritual
regulation of the ecosystem and the ecosystemic regulation of ritual
amongst the Tsembaga of New Guinea. Such a reduction highlights the
tautology present in Rappaport's approach, branded by Friedman (1971) as
"the new functionalism", a form which "is fundamentally the same as the
old functionalism except that the field of application has changed, the
interest now being to show the rationality of institutions with respect
to their environments rather than to other elements in the society''
(1971: 457).
'Adaptation' is a core principle in this demonstration of
rationality or 'fit'. In Mazess' view, "perhaps no term in the
biological and social sciences has such varied, vague and equivocal
meanings as adaptation". In biology, adaptation is presumed to work at
the phylogenetic and physiological levels (because of natural selection
and temporal phenotypic flexibility, respectively). At the socio-
cultural level, i t is seen as operating in addition through learning and
cultural modification. Dubos observes that these !eve!s are frequently