Ethnoecology, Resource Use, Conservation And Development In A ...

a 'need' for meat even if their physiological requirements for protein are abundantly
satisfied (Johnson 1978; Carneiro 1982). This demonstrates that cultural factors
unrelated to physiology may affect the perceived dietary needs, and hence behaviour,
of people, which may have important implications for the nature of their adaptation
to their environment.
Cultural adaptations may also be manifest at different levels of organisation —
culture traits, however these may be defined, individuals, and social groups of various
sizes - and the form of adaptation at these different levels may be contradictory. A
case in point is Alvard's argument that the compatibility of the prey choice strategy
of Piro hunters with an optimal foraging model demonstrates the absence of any
strategy for conservation of game populations (Alvard 1993, 1995). In fact, in
several ethnographic accounts which evince culturally determined strategies for
natural resource conservation, they are manifest not at the level of individual
decision-making, but emergent at analytical levels corresponding to social groups
(Reichel-Dolmatoff 1971, 1976; Balée 1994; Descola 1994). This is what might be
expected: while game conservation might well be maladaptive from the perspective of
the individual hunter, it can be to the long-term advantage of the group as a whole.
Alvard’s failure to recognise the complexity of cultural adaptation leads to a
misconception on his part that conservation can not take place without explicit intent
on the part of the individual actor. In determining the ecological implications of human
behaviour, it is concrete actions and their effects rather than the ideas behind them
that are of ultimate importance (Vayda 1993: 64-66). To make a distinction between
‘true’ and ‘epiphenomenal’ conservation on the basis of intent, as Alvard suggests, is
thus somewhat misleading when the issue of most relevance is the ecological effects
of human activity. It may, however, be relevant to the question of the resilience of
cultural adaptations for conservation in the face of changing external circumstances,
which I consider in more detail in the next section.
The interaction between ideas, action and ecology was more competently
addressed by Ross [1978] in his consideration of the adaptive significance of food
taboos. Although this paper ultimately promised more than it delivered, it did indicate
a clear path towards a unification of structuralist and functionalist approaches to
cultural ecology. The ethnographies of Balée, Reichel-Dolmatoff and Descola cited
above develop this perspective somewhat, though the theoretical implications have
yet to be fully explored.
Bodies of work which investigate cultural ecology from a systems perspective
have perhaps provided more telling insights into its adaptive nature. Key early studies